Oddments and One-Shots

[RHJunior]

A random assortment of one-shots and one-offs, just to show that my muse is trying to kill me.
Some of these may become stories in their own right--- but don't hesitate to jump in and adopt one yourself!

This is fanfiction after all... combine! Create! Re-mix!

 

[RHJunior]

<You're a Horcrux, Harry.>

Harry's breath caught in his throat as the fateful sentence echoed in his mind. No… it couldn't be. Clue… the voice in his head, the not-so-imaginary friend of his childhood-- was Voldemort? No, was a piece of Voldemort, a chunk of the evil man's soul stuck inside Harry's skull, Oh Merlin, get it out get it out GET IT OUT--!

<STOP IT!> Clue yelled, his voice in Harry's head so loud Harry clapped his hands over his ears in reflex, nearly cracking himself in the skull with the pommel of Griffindor's sword. <Calm down Harry! Even if you could get me out, clawing the scalp off your own skull isn't the way to do it. So stop hurting yourself.> The stern voice waited for several moments while Harry got his breathing back under control. <Good. Now, before we go any further, let's get one thing straight: I AM NOT, NOR AM I A PART OR EXTENSION OF, LORD VOLDEMORT.>

"You're-- you're a piece of his soul, you told me yourself," Harry said.

<Yes.>Harry got the mental impression of someone resisting the urge to gag. <But I am absolutely, positively NOT HIM. I am NOT.> The revulsion was visceral. It gave Harry pause.

"But you're part of his soul--"

<Your finger is part of you. If you sever a finger and stick it in a jar, is it still alive? Is it still 'you'?>

"Well….no," said Harry, reluctantly.

<Of course not. I quit being even a part of Tom Riddle, or Voldemort, or whatever he's calling himself today, the moment he cut me loose. And I'd like to hope that after all these years I've shown I'm nothing like him.>

Harry swallowed and nodded. It was true. He was nothing like the cold, ruthless thing that Harry had confronted growing out of Quirrel's head, or the vicious and arrogant spectre that had inhabited the diary. The voice in his head he'd long ago dubbed "Clue" had been a constant companion, and had shown himself to be of good conscience and a loyal friend… if a bit obnoxious and snarky. Well, VERY obnoxious and snarky-- and rude. And opinionated…

<I can hear you thinking, kid,> Clue said sarcastically. <If you wanna insult me, turn down the volume.>

"Sorry." Harry mumbled. "But you really are different from, well, HIM." He shifted his stance. "...Why?"

Clue chuckled. <Because Voldemort didn't just make Horcruxes,> he said. <He refined the technique into a self-improvement method.>

Harry scowled in puzzlement. <Think about it, lad, think about it!> Clue said. his voice in Harry's head was high and urgent, the way it always sounded when he was imparting something extremely vital. <Put yourself in Riddle's shoes. You're an evil wizard. You're willing to do anything to make yourself more powerful, more indestructible. You've decided you're going to make yourself immortal by tearing out pieces of your soul. What parts of your soul are you going to want to tear out first?>

Realization stole over Harry. <Ah, the light dawns, does it?> Clue said, his dry tones returning to normal. <That's right. Since you're cutting out chunks of yourself anyway, you're going to want to get rid of any weaknesses. Or anything you see as weak. Things like-->

"Compassion," Harry said, his throat thick. "Mercy."

<...Honesty, decency, charity, temperance, so on and so forth,> Clue finished for him. <Oh, and things like doubt, fear, sadness...> at Harry's mental noise of query he clarified. <We have a word for people who don't feel any fear, never have any doubt, don't feel sadness, Harry. They're called sociopaths. The so-called 'negative' emotions, the ones everybody today runs around trying to never let themselves feel, those are as important to your mental health, to your moral conscience as the so-called 'positive' feelings. Never being afraid sounds good till you realize you're not afraid of anything, not even making the wrong decisions. Never feeling sad means never feeling sorry for your actions.>

"Never feeling angry?" Harry prompted.

<Means you're angry at nothing, not even injustice,> Clue said. <Though old Riddle-boy seemed fine with holding onto wrath. Indiscriminate rage is one of the more pleasurable vices.>

"So what you're saying is, you were his… his conscience?" Harry ventured.

<Something like that,> Clue said. <"Or maybe I was the part of him that made him able to have a conscience.>

It occurred to Harry to wonder what part of Riddle's conscience Voldemort would have wanted to tear out last. "So what part were you? His honesty? His compassion?"

<It's not that simple, kid,> the soul-scrap replied. <Morals and virtues aren't stuck in your head in tidy little boxes. They're all interconnected, mish-mashed together. You can't get one without getting little bits of the others.>He gave the equivalent of a mental shrug. <Whenever old Tommy boy decided to make a new Horcrux, he basically reached into his own head, felt around for whatever parts of himself gave him feelings he didn't like, and yanked out a fistful to stick in one of his geegaws.>

Harry winced at the mental imagery; it was anything but pleasant. "Wait… does that mean the other Horcruxes are--" he hesitated to say 'alive'-- "Like you too?"

<Doubtful,> Clue snorted. <In fact, let's say 'no way in hell.' They're just preserved, amputated bits. No more real life and awareness in them than a fingernail. They can seem lifelike, like a toy robot or a talking doll, but there's nothing really there. That diary of his would have been in for one hell of a disappointment, so to speak, if it had taken over the Weasley girl's body… a piece of a soul can't vivify a body properly any more than you could reanimate Frankenstein with just a couple of scoops of random brain. It would have ended up a particularly talkative Inferi, shambling around and mumbling nonsense and not doing much else.>

"So how are you different?" Harry challenged. "WHY are you different?"

There was a long silence. <I don't know,> Clue confessed. <I've spent a lot of time thinking about that-- I do mean A LOT of time-- and I only have guesses. I do know that I'm different. I can remember, I can learn, I can feel and think for myself, and cognito ergo sum, am I right? All I can guess is, from what little muddled memory I have of when I was created… Voldemort botched the job.>

<There he is, about to kill you and make his final get-out-of-Death-free charm. He reaches in, grabs that last little wriggling bit of his conscience with one hand, and hits you with the Avada Kedavra from the other… and it all blows up in his face. And that yanked-loose scrap of himself, instead of going into whatever talisman he'd picked out, goes and gets stuck in your head like a piece of Riddle-shrapnel… along with a lot of stuff he didn't intend. Like a lifetime's worth of memories and knowledge.>

<In one way I was like that Diary: when he made it, Voldemort included a full copy of his memories up to that age.>Another mental shrug. <It was his first try, after all. Maybe he wanted it as a backup for if he returned without his memory, who can say. Well, if you've done it once, it's easier to do twice… >

<So at least I THINK, what got put into you through that scar,> here there came an imaginary tap on Harry's forehead, <had little bits of everything. And back here in one corner in a little pocket, surrounded by a healthy, whole mind and soul, it… germinated. Till it healed and grew and became… me.>

<That's why you were nearly five years old before you heard from me,>Clue said. <Before that point there wasn't enough of a 'me' to speak up. I wasn't sure I even WAS a 'me.' > His dry, sarcastic voice in Harry's head got somber. <Figuring out what happened, sorting out what was really 'me' and was you and what were the garbled, mixed up pile of memories and information that came in with me--> Clue's voice was suddenly thick with loathing. <Separating myself out from the horror story that was Riddle's past, even as I was re-filing it and putting it all in proper order and locking it away--> Harry felt him shudder. <Oh, THAT was a load of fun.>

Harry remembered that inaugural day; the day a stubborn, sarcastic, authoritative voice had begun faintly speaking up in little Harry Potter's head, telling him how to pick the lock on his cupboard from the inside... "Is it… that bad in there?" Harry said.

<Like being the curator at a Holocaust museum,> Clue said. <Be thankful I've locked and filed those memories away inside myself, kid. If you'd been able to access them, to re-live them as if they were your own, you would have spent your first years of life screaming. Then it would have gotten worse.>

"Worse??"

<You would have stopped.>

Harry felt like ice water had been poured into his gut and through all his veins. A baby, growing up reliving the horror show that was Tom Marvolo Riddle's memories… the best result would have been a broken mind. The worst… a child with Voldemort's knowledge and all human feeling burned out of it. He hastily tried to move the topic of conversation along before he got the staring horrors.

"So you grew into a whole new soul," Harry ventured. Stuck in someone else's body, Harry thought. A helpless passenger unable to do anything unless Harry let him. What a horrible existence.
Clue gave a negatory grunt. <I… don't know. I don't know WHAT I am, for certain. Whether I qualify as a whole person or just a fragment of human decency or even just a really active figment of imagination. But whatever I am, I decided pretty much immediately that we were stuck in this mess together, so I might as well make the best of it. You were my responsibility-- and anyway I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I'd let some kid suffer...>he trailed off.

Harry felt a surge of warm affection for the voice in his head, the friend, mentor and adviser that had been looking out for him so long. "Maybe we can fix this," he said suddenly. "Riddle… Voldemort… He figured out how to stick pieces of a soul into things. Maybe we can find a way to put you into a body of your own. A magical portrait, maybe, or a magical suit of armor… Dumbledore could help--"

<NO! No, not him,> Clue shouted inside his head so loudly Harry winced. <Not him, not ever him, Harry. We can't trust him.>

Harry huffed. This was far from the first time the recalcitrant mental voice had expressed mistrust of the venerable Headmaster. At first Harry had just taken Clue at his word, but it was growing tiresome. "What? Why not?" Harry protested. "He's Dumbledore---"

<Yes, he's Dumbledore. And Dumbledore has an agenda for you. And I don't think it's for your good, either.>

That stopped Harry cold. Till now, Clue had been cryptic, almost as cryptic as Dumbledore himself, about what made him mistrust the man. "What do you mean?"

<Harry, pretty much every rotten bit of your life can be traced back to Dumbledore's interference,> Clue said. <Right from the moment he played Ding Dong Ditch with you as a baby. And some of old Tommy boy's memories tell me the old codger isn't as benevolent as he lets on.>

"Old Tommy Boy might not be the best judge of character," Harry growled, annoyed.

<Fine. Let's review the little adventure we just went through, then. Let's forget all the living portraits in the castle, and the ghosts, and the house elves, and the animated suits of armor, and all the OTHER pairs of eyes he's got in Hogwarts that this giant sixty foot snake somehow avoided. More important question: how likely is it that a hundred year old wizard-- the most powerful and knowledgeable wizard of the current age-- would fail to recognize the effects of a Basilisk attack? Something a schoolgirl found out in a library book?>

Harry's mouth opened and closed. <Uh huh. Here's some more to chew on. Why did he never evacuate the school? Not close it-- evacuate it. Call in the Unspeakables and scour the castle from top to bottom while the children are all someplace safe. The last time the Chamber opened, a girl DIED, Harry. Yet instead of leaving, he decided to act like a white chick in a cheap horror movie.>

<Let's make it more personal. Isn't it interesting that the "traps">--Harry could almost see the fingers etching quotation marks in the air-- <protecting the Stone last year weren't just weak enough for an eleven year old firstie to get past, but were all but tailor made for you, AND the ones in your circle of friends most likely to accompany you on a little misadventure? The Devils' Snare for Neville. The flying keys for you. The chessboard for Ron. The logic puzzle for Hermione...>

"The troll for all three of us," Harry murmured.

<--And the cerberus for anyone with a book knowledge of the legend of Orpheus,> Clue went on. <Hermione again… even if she wasn't a bookworm with a classical name like that she was a shoo in to know it... or for that matter, anyone who held a conversation with Hagrid for more than five minutes> Clue added snarkily...< And of course a way to play a little bit of music. Like, say, someone with a wooden flute they got for Christmas?>

The wooden flute was in the pocket of Harry's robe; he carried it with him everywhere, one of his favorite mementos. It suddenly seemed to weigh ten stone.

<And consider who he has working for him even now,> Clue added as an aside.

Harry seethed a bit at the reminder. Snape. Courtesy of Clue Harry had known for years that the poisonous potions master had once been a Death Eater, and had been the one most directly responsible for fingering his parents for death. He had spent the last year choking down that knowledge, chastised over and over again by Dumbledore's words on the matter. "Dumbledore said he'd reformed, that he'd turned against--"

Clue's snort was as loud as it was derisive. <By their fruits shall ye judge them,> he misquoted. <Spending every year since his 'reform' terrifying children? Tormenting the orphaned son of the woman he claimed to 'love?' Does that sound like a reformed man to you? No, Harry, Dumbledore doesn't keep Severus around because the greasy git has seen the Light, he keeps him around because he's useful. Just like he sees YOU as useful.>

<You're a Horcrux, Harry. A weapon to use against Lord Voldemort. The Old Coot's scared to death the bad tempered little animated fart will find a way to get a body and return to life. If he had an inkling of an idea that I was in here, talking to you, guiding you, 'influencing' you-- he'd think I was taking you over like the diary nearly took over Ginny and he'd kill me in an instant, and kill you to do it. And then cry big crocodile tears over our lifeless corpse about how tragic it was but that it was for the Greater Good...> the sarcasm in Clue's voice could have etched glass. It almost covered the fear.

That more than anything convinced Harry that Clue was telling the truth. "So what do we do?" He leaned against a nearby wall, the Sword of Griffindor still heavy in his hand.

<For now, we keep mum, like always,> Clue said seriously. <And we work on getting some allies. Preferably ones with skills… connections... and most importantly the sort neither the Old Coot nor Moldy Shorts would ever suspect.> His mental voice grew thoughtful, brooding.

"Like who?" Harry said irritably.

<Like a certain House Elf who's going to owe us one hell of a favor,> Clue said suddenly.<Look.> Harry looked up; Just ahead, where the hallway intersected another, he saw Lucius Malfoy striding imperiously through, a very familiar gnomish figure scurrying along at his heels. <Quick, pull off your sock and get that diary out. We're about to pull a fast one on old Luscious...>

 

[RHJunior]

"...So yeah, my life didn't quite go as somebody planned," the black-clad boy said as the train rattled along through the countryside. "course, things rarely do. Story of my life and everyone else's I guess. But I think you can relate, right?"

Harry's two compartment companions said nothing. They were too busy sitting as rigidly as they possibly could, their eyes fixed on the legendary Boy-Who-Lived. He didn't mind, well, not much. It was sort of understandable that they weren't meeting his eyes-- he was wearing tinted spectacles after all. The fact that they were staring at his fangs was a bit more bothersome.

"A vampire," the red-headed boy said faintly. "The Boy-Who-Lived is a vampire."

Harry's smile dropped (it seemed to help; they snapped out of their fugue once his fangs disappeared behind his frowning lips.) "Yeah, I think I already explained that," he said, miffed. "Like I said. Vampire, since I was little more than a year old. I'm going to give the long version for those in the nosebleed seats, aren't I."

The two had entered the car at the beginning of the trip, finding it occupied only by a lone trunk, a folded umbrella hanging in the corner, and a tow-headed, black haired boy dressed to the nines in a jet black suit and, strangely for the heavily overcast day, wearing dark glasses. They had sat down, introduced themselves, and found themselves captive of their own horrified fascination as the strange boy introduced himself and they realized who… and WHAT… he was.

"How could they let something like that happen?" the frizzy-haired girl said. She was actually sounding a bit distraught, as if something she had relied on her whole life had betrayed her. Somewhere, somehow, The Proper Authorities had failed in their duties.

She couldn't see it but he rolled his eyes at her. "Stupidity," he said. "I mean, what would you expect? An evil wizard murders my parents. Every magical in the British Isles is out boogying down like Belushi because this tosser's dead-- and not just wizards, either; this guy was a real jerk to everybody, "Light," "Dark," or "Other." ...Musta been something to see. Man, can those Worgen party..."

"Of course the Dark Tosser's flunkies are out there too. So some genius," he said with considerable scorn, "gets the idea to put me someplace "safe." By playing Ding Dong Ditch and dumping me on a doorstep. In the dead of night. On HALLOWEEN NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT. IN THE MIDDLE OF A MONSTER JAMBOREE." This was obviously a sore point; his voice had grown, somehow without shouting, to a volume that made the window shake, and there was a faint red glow briefly visible through his tinted spectacles. His two cabinmates shrank back against their seats.

His voice instantly dropped from the alarming timbre it had started to take back to normal. "And of course, one of Da's more troublesome ghouls--- a guy whose brain hadn't quite made the transition with the rest of him—it happens; the metamorphosis sometimes pickles their brains and they go psycho, what're you gonna do-- decides to slip his leash while he and Mama are out celebrating, and go looking for a snack. And looky looky, Baby in a Basket, his favorite." He smirked and ran his fingers through his hair, briefly revealing the jagged scar that ran from his brow and up under the hairline, where a white streak grew through his hairline. "Mom and Pop caught up with him just as he's sinking his choppers into my noggin.

"Someone up there must've been looking after me though, because when his teeth broke my scalp the Soul Curse the Dark Tosser infected me with burst out of my head and latched onto his face." He snickered, teeth gleaming. "Dad lets me replay the memory in his pensieve sometimes. Nearly peed myself laughing the first time I saw it." He pantomimed someone rolling on the ground clawing at his face. "Aaaaagh get it off get it off !!"

The redhead… Ron, that was his name, sort of huffed, as if he didn't know whether he wanted to laugh or scream. Harry decided to let it slide. "Aaanyway, scratch one rebel ghoul. Of course I was messed up pretty bad, so Mom and Pop did the only thing they could do to save me--" he shrugged and tapped one overlong canine.
"And now you're a vampire," Ron repeated.

"Vampire Prince, actually," Harold corrected him. "Prince Hadrian "call me Harry" Orlock-Potter of Old Wallachia." He grinned, his fangs gleaming. "Mom was a soft touch, and she had been pining for a baby…." he shrugged and smiled. "So it all worked out. They swept me away to the old country and adopted me.

"Then they did a little digging and found out who I was… and wasn't THAT a hair-pulling fiasco, my Dad always says. The Grand Mugwump of the Wizarding World was fit to be tied." He chuckled. "Of course Dad says MOM was fit to be tied when she found out who was responsible for dumping me on a doorstep...or fit to tie the one responsible in a knot, one or the other."

"Of course after all the Kung Fu fighting was done, the Ministry of Magic and my Dad had a compromise. My family keeps me, and we make a few trade concessions to amend for the 'international mishap'-- but I attend wizarding school here in Great Britain." Harry shrugged. "A bit petty of them, but better than a feud."

"SO, a Prince," Hermione said carefully. "Of what exactly?"

"Pretty much every so-called 'Dark' creature in Moldava, Wallachia and Transylvania," Harry said,waving his hand in a circle. "See, Old Wallachia is sort of like a sanctuary for 'Dark' or 'Undecided' magical races. The High Count-- that's my Dad-- is sort of like the Minister of Magic, except for werewolves, vampires, hags, that sort of thing…. Even some creatures in neither camp."

"Oh really?" Hermione sounded interested in spite of herself.

"Yeah, Old Wallachia's crawling with "Dark' or semi-Dark or Neutral or Dark-but-not-quite types…. but we prefer the term 'Nightside,' by the way. Remember that if you visit. It's only polite."

"And why's that?" said Hermione, making a mental note to tell her parents to never, never, never EVER arrange for one of their little junkets anywhere in, near, or approximate to "Old Wallachia."

Harry smiled cheerily and shifted in his seat to a more comfortable position, obviously happy to expound on the topic. "You see, most of the creatures and stuff that Wizards label 'Dark...' It really doesn't apply. Look, you got genuine Dark types like You-know-what-a-wanker-he-is. People and beings who are just evil and do horrible things because they like to and want to...or they have "dark urges" and don't even try to resist them.

"But wizards don't stop there. They call any being or creature Dark who's the least bit dangerous, or just happens to give one of their politicians the heebie-jeebies. They call vampires "Dark" or "borderline Dark" because we drink blood to live. But do they call a lion "Dark" because it eats meat? Or a mosquito, for that matter? Yeah, hinkypunks grab people by the leg and drown them. They're animals, ambush predators; they do that to anything that wades into their pools! Does that make a crocodile "Dark?" Or a hippo?"

"A hippo?" Ron interrupted, his voice full of derision. He'd seen one of those things at a Muggle zoo once on a family outing; the groundskeeper had fed it a watermelon. He couldn't imagine a less intimidating looking animal outside a flobberworm.

Harry gave him a wide, toothy grin. "Most dangerous animal in Africa," he said. "It kills more humans than any other… ten times the number of people are killed by hippos than by crocodiles. Stay clear of the hippos, man, they got it in for you."

"Bizarre," Ron said, eyebrows raised.

"Yeah, but any wizard who labeled the fat goofy looking things 'Dark' would be laughed out of the Wizengamot, wouldn't they?"

Ron chuckled. "Probably."

"Yeah, well, they labeled us vampires as 'Dark' because we drink blood and because of a few bad eggs." Harry's smile faded away. "Wizards and Muggles eat mutton and roast chicken, and that's just normal. I drink lamb's blood and chicken's blood fresh from the butcher, and I'm a monster. How's that fair?"

"And, you know, sometimes some 'Dark' creatures just sort of happen," he went on. "Like ghosts. Or zombies. Or ghasts… go to sleep someplace with a lot of magic boiling around, kakk it in the middle of the night and wake up as a specter. Or fall in a cursed pool, climb out as a swamp monster. Or end up like werewolves, who are just poor unlucky tossers with a disease. Those guys need someone to throw their weight behind 'em', so that's what the vampire clans do." He grinned again. "Wizards think they're all that, but a thousand-year-old vampire aristocracy isn't so easy to push around."

"When you say Dark, you should mean genuinely evil-- not just complicated or inconvenient.

"aAAaanyway, enough vampire politics. Guess I spend too much time listening to Count Dad rant about his job."

"What happened to the guy--"

"Ghoul."

"The ghoul that attacked you?" Ron couldn't help asking.

"Beheaded." His tone was blithe and his smile feral enough to give sharks nightmares. "Beheaded, burned and buried in salt. We gotta police ourselves hard if we want to keep living peacefully with all the Dayside types, so Pop pop doesn't put up with Nightside creatures going off the rails. And he's big on preventing recidivism." His face lit up. "Hey, you wanna see the Soul Curse that came outta my head?" He reached under his cloak and fished around under his shirt collar. "They gave it to me as a memento."

"Really?" Ron leaned forward, curious.

Hermione leaned in the opposite direction. She preferred her knowledge to come out of books, not come leaping out of the shadows at her in person. "No, that's not really--"

"Here, check it out!" Harry held up what looked like an unbreakable glass vial on a chain. Inside something black and liquid writhed around in a nauseating fashion. "Gen-u-wine chunk-o-Dark-Wizard. Patent pending. Watch what it does when you squeeze it." He clutched the bottle in his fist. The black thing inside thrashed wildly and let out a high, thin, ear-piercing scream.

"Screeeeeeeeee…."

Before either saucer-eyed child could express their appreciation of the vampire princes' choice in mementos, he looked over at the door, his ears perked up. "Oh, hey, the snack lady's coming! You guys want anything? My treat!"



Childish gluttony is a marvelous equalizer. Several minutes and more than a few galleons later, the three were all sitting in the midst of a pile of wrappers and feeling FAR more copacetic. Even Hermione, who had the shadow of two overweening dentist parents hanging over her, had finally been persuaded into indulging. "Really, Hermione," Harry said as she dithered over whether to try a cauldron cake or a chocolate frog. "You think wizards haven't figured out how to enchant candy to prevent tooth decay?"

"Really?" Hermione had asked skeptically.

"Cross my heart and hope to put a stake in it," Harry said. "Trust me, vampires are kind of big on dental hygiene." He tapped one fang by way of explanation.

"I thought vampires only drank blood," Ron said around a mouthful of licorice wand.

Harry shook his head. "Nah, we eat regular food too, Doesn't do much for us though… well, except for certain things with the right essence of vitality. Milk, orange juice, chocolate..." He popped a chocolate frog in his mouth. " Fact is, chocolate acts like a blood substitute for us. Cuts the cravings."

Hermione scowled. "Oh now you're just pulling our legs."

Harry nodded. "Why do you think the ancient Aztecs valued it so highly? They used it to buy off the vampires, that's what. And why do you think reports of vampire sightings dropped off so much after the eighteen hundreds?"

"Most of the books I read attribute it to the rise of photography," Hermione said cynically.

"More like the invention of milk chocolate," Harry said. "Milton Hershey is a national hero in Old Wallachia."

"But milk chocolate was invented by Daniel Peter and Henri Nestle'," Hermione said. It was an odd bit of trivia to know, but Hermione read everything. Even candy bar wrappers.

Harry actually shuddered. "Brr. Don't mention Nestle'," he said. "If you knew what that evil old goat and his company get up to, you'd never touch a Nestle' bar again. Lord knows I won't." Hermione gaped at him. Harry clarified. "Poisoned babies, water tables drained, third world slave labor… and that's just the muggle-side stuff. You really don't want to know what that warlock and his company get up to when the doors are locked and the werewolf guards chase the muggle employees out. It ain't just the chocolate in his factory that's Dark."

Hermione continued to stare at him. An evil chocolate factory? What?? "Oh, company," Harry said, derailing her already stalled-out train of thought. Harry waved his hand and the compartment door slid open on its own; outside stood a round-faced boy, his hand just raised to knock. "Yes? Can we help you?"

The boy paused, stammered, and started again. "Uh, hullo. I'm Neville… L-Longbottom. Have any of you seen a toad? Mine wandered off..." his voice faded out as he caught glimpse of Harry's smiling face for the first time. His eyes went round as he took in the fangs.

Ron shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not," Hermione said.

"Can't say I have, either," Harry said. "Wait- I just thought of something, hold on, let me ask--" there was a large umbrella hanging from the rail next to him; he leaned over and poked at it. "Hello, wake up! Got a question--"

It was a close bet as to which of the other three screamed the highest when the "umbrella" moved, squirmed, and opened up its webbed wings. A furred, foxlike head with enormous lamplike eyes made its appearance, its toothy maw gaping wide as it yawned. The three children screamed and all but climbed up the walls of the compartment; it looked like Neville wanted to bolt down the corridor but was too frozen in terror to leave the doorway. The creature squawked, discomfited by the sudden noise.

"What???" Harry looked up to see his classmates standing on their seats and doing their best to climb up the walls with their buttocks. "Oh, honestly, what's all this?"

"That's what I wanna know, mate," Ron said, pointing at what was now obviously an enormous bat hanging upside down from the luggage rack.

"I thought it was an umbrella," Hermione said weakly.

Harry snorted in amusement. "Sorry, I should've said something, I guess-- this is Lurch, my pet bat. A giant golden-crowned flying fox, to be precise." There was a touch of pride in his voice.

"I-it it's nearly as big as a real fox," Neville squeaked.

"Hence the term "giant"," Harry quipped. "Oh calm down you lot, Lurch is harmless."

"Do tell," Ron said dryly as he carefully lowered himself back down to his seat.

"He's a fruit bat, Ron," Harry snorted. "He's only a threat to you if you're a banana."

"I must say he's rather intimidating all the same," Hermione said with a nervous laugh as she carefully sat down. "But why on earth are you bringing him to school?"

"He's my pet," Harry said as if that explained everything. "Besides, I needed something to deliver my mail and owls aren't my thing. I'm used to using bats back home. Better night delivery rates." He grinned toothily at his own joke.

"But why a great brute like that?" Ron said. Lurch snorted and blew a raspberry.

"Any of the smaller bats and there was a danger one of your owls might mistake him for a snack," Harry said. He turned to Lurch. "So how about it? Seen any toads lately?" Lurch made a series of squeaking, chirping and grunting noises. "He sneaked in while I was at the loo?" Lurch nodded.

"You can talk to him?"

"And most other creepy crawlies," Harry said. "It's a vampire thing. Though I'm generally better with snakes for some reason… okay you said "Check my boot?" Lurch squeaked. "All right then…" Harry reached over and grabbed a pair of rubber wellingtons that had been on the floor next to the bat's head. First one, then the other, was tipped up over the floor; with a thump and a croak an enormous toad with a rather wall-eyed expression on what passed for its face made its appearance.

"Trevor!" Neville said happily. He scooped the toad up, his relief obvious.

Harry shrugged. "Sorry about that, Longbottom," he said with an apologetic smile. "It's a vampire thing. We kind of attract creepy crawlies for some reason-- toads, snakes, bats--" Lurch squeaked-- "bugs, rats… it's a good thing we can talk to 'em, tell 'em to bugger off when we don't want them scurrying around our feet."

Ron "hmmed" and poked at the scruffy rat sleeping in his pocket. "Doesn't seem to be working on Scabbers," he noted. "Probably too lazy to care."

Harry stared at the rat for a long moment, frowning. Then he shrugged and looked away with a shrugs. "Eh, rodents gonna rodent," he said dismissively. "Not like I'm trying to command him or anything."

"Heh. Too bad you can't command Trevor to stop wandering off," Neville said, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smile.

Harry sat up straight. "What? You doubt my power, mortal?" he said in mock outrage. "I am Hadrian Orlock-Potter, first childe of Count Orlock, and prince of Old Wallachia! All the creeping things of the earth are mine to command!"

"He's more of a hopping thing of the earth, though," Ron said, rubbing his chin in pretend skepticism.

"Hah! I'll show you all. Give me the toad!" Neville dropped Trevor into Harry's outstretched hands. Harry whipped off his tinted glasses; Hermione stifled a gasp as he revealed his eyes for the first time. The irises were a beautiful, almost gem-like green, but the sclera were a brilliant, bloody red. Harry held the toad up to eye level and glared into its eyes. Trevor stared back with all the sharpness of a stunned herring.

"Behold, I shall now exercise the arts of the mind, the powers of Occlumency and Legilimency, to make this creature into your obedient servant!" His eye-glow actually grew sharper and brighter. "Obey me, Trever the Toad, Obey me!"

Trevor looked, if anything, decidedly unimpressed.

Hermione smothered her giggles. "Is that really even going to work?" she asked.

"Of course," Harry said without breaking the gaze he had sort of locked with Trevor. "It is now a battle of wills between us. But in the end, the more powerful of our two minds shall overcome…." he trailed off into silence. The silence stretched for half a minute. Then a minute. Then a minute and a half…

"Harry?" Ron said worriedly.

Harry puffed out his cheeks. "Brrroooooarrrrrk," he said.

All three children folded up laughing. Even Harry was bent double, his facade cracking when Hermione slid out of her seat and hit the floor. "Sorry, Longbottom." he said, handing the toad back. "Looks like your frog is stuck on factory setting." He gave Trevor a mock kowtow. "All Hail Hypnotoad..."

Neville grinned. He WAS a vampire (and wasn't Gran going to have a tizzy about that!) and strange even without that, and Neville wasn't quite sure he understood some of the jokes he was making, but…. he hesitated, then stuck out his hand. "Call me Neville."

Harry shook it and gave him a glistening grin. "Harry." He waved at the compartment. "Come on in and take a seat. Have a chocolate frog… at least they won't hop too fast to catch."

"Hah, hah..."

"Want a candied fruit, Lurch?"



Idle chatter between the four filled the long train ride. Eventually though the chatter (and shocking surprises) settled down, and each found something to while away the hours while the conversation lulled) "So why did you name him Lurch?" Ron eventually asked as he flipped through the chocolate frog cards. None of the others collected, so he'd gotten quite the haul.

"It's from his favorite classic television show," Harry said idly, not looking up from the tiny flickering screen in his hands, his thumbs working the controls.
"You have television?" Hermione said, while the other two muttered "what's television?" and shrugged.

"Yup. Satellite TV. And cable. And broadband internet…" the tiny box in his hands booped and bleeped. "Vampires don't sleep much, and we sleep less the older we get. So we gotta fill up those hours with something. For Great-Grandpa? Lots and lots and looooooots of bad late nite movies. I thought he was going to rupture something the first time he saw 'Blackula.' "

"Made him mad, I suspect," Hermione said.

"Laughed his ass off," Harry corrected her, still without looking up. "It's his favorite VHS tape. Cheesy vampire movies, tapes of cartoons like Duckula, Count Chocula boxes, cheap halloween costumes… he collects all that stuff. Sort of a cross between a hobby and an in-joke, I guess." He shrugged. "Like I said, gotta do something with all that time. Dad would go nuts without his wide-screen and his Everquest account." His thumbs wiggled and the box in his hands went SQUACK. "I get by with my Gameboy though."

Hermione gave him a know-it-all look over the book she'd been reading. "Well I hope you can do without it," she said smugly. "Muggle technology doesn't work at Hogwarts. There's too much magic in the air in the Wizarding World for those things."

Harry looked up over his glasses at her and gave her a knowing smirk. "Oh really?" he said. "Sure of that, are we?"

Hermione frowned. She didn't like having her knowledge questioned. "It's a well known fact," she said.

"Then why isn't London in a perpetual blackout?" Harry pointed out, his smile widening. "it's got Diagon Alley running right through it, and the Ministry of Magic-- along with the Department of Mysteries itself-- smack dab in the middle of it, right underneath the streets! Even Hogwarts isn't THAT magical, yet Jolly old London Town is ticking along just fine."

"But..." Hermione's brow furrowed as she tried to reconcile the facts as they were, with the facts as they were printed in a book. "But it's true; my digital watch stopped working the moment I walked onto Platform 9 ¾."

"Well yeah, but things like digital watches and microchips are fidgety things anyway," Harry pointed out. "And you dragged it right through the middle of a powerful magical illusion. Small surprise it fritzed out something that could be fragged by getting too near a refrigerator magnet." Hermione huffed but didn't retort. "Most 'muggle technology' works just fine around magic. And for the stuff that doesn't… well, that's part of why the Ministry of Magic is willing to bend over backwards for Old Wallachia."

"What do you mean?" she said. Ron and Neville, their curiosities piqued, scooted around so they could see what Harry was doing with the tiny box in his hands. They were immediately entranced by whatever they saw on the screen.

"We have hundreds of Sons of Ether living in the Old Country," Harry said. "It's a fraternity of... well, think 'mad scientists...' like right off the telly, no lie. Dad has one on staff; he has a lab in the castle. It's really awesome: Lightning machines, plasma generators, ooghy things in giant glass vats, the whole nine yards. It's really cool.

Anyway, one of the things the Sons of Ether specialize in is making muggle technology and magic-- they call it "poly aetheric Morphic Resonance Manipulation" by the way--- work side by side and play nice with each other. Oh the old fuddy-duddies in the Ministry are throwing a fit and making up nonsense about 'misuse of Muggle' whatsis, but the smart ones are licking their chops at the thought of marketing upscale Muggle electronics to British wizards." He held up the box so Hermione could see it properly. "And of course, since they need field tested, I get to play with some of the shiny toys Dad is trying to trade."

"Is that a Game Boy?" She marveled. She'd recognized it immediately…. Though as for that she didn't recall any model of GameBoy having a wooden case, or brass fittings or glowing vacuum tubes or any of the other odd victorian-esque kibble stuck to it.

"Yup," Harry said smugly. "With a few post-production add-ons, of course, courtesy of the Doc." He held it out in his hand, screen turned towards her. She could see a backlit Mario running through his opening screen antics. "One of a kind, first-run prototype. It cost over five hundred galleons..."

"Five hundred galleons?" Ron yelped. "What does it do, grant wishes??"

"It plays games, Ron," Harry laughed. "Not just arcade games. Table Tennis, card games, puzzle games, chess..." Ron perked up at the mention of chess. "and it even has full color and an illuminated screen… even the muggles don't have that yet--"

Before he could finish extolling the virtues of his Mad Science electronic toy, the sliding door to the compartment was suddenly slammed open. It was the worst of luck; Harry was still holding the GameBoy out in one hand by his fingertips, and the doorhandle clipped one corner at just the right angle to send it flying out of his grip. It tumbled to the floor and struck with a resounding CRACK, and the little glowing screen went dark.

Everyone, including Harry, froze, staring at the crack across the device's darkened screen. Neville was stunned, Hermione was appalled, and Ron looked like he was having a heart attack. And Harry…. Well the air seemed to go unnaturally still around him.

In the doorway stood three boys. One was a thin, haughty looking boy with slicked-back blonde hair and a sharp, ferret-like face. The other two were large, lumpish, and sported dark burr cuts on their squarish heads. "Are you Harry Potter?" the blonde boy said without introduction. "I was told he was on this car of the train..."

Harry didn't look up from his deceased GameBoy. "That was a custom made, one of a kind, Five HUNDRED Galleon, GameBoy Deucalion," he said in a monotone. He let out a sigh and with great deliberation slid back in his seat, put one leg over the other, folded his hands on his knee, and gave the blonde boy the biggest smile he could manage. "So, what the HECK can I do for YOU?" he said jovially.

The other Hogwarts students-to-be in the carriage were now frozen for an entirely different reason. Every eye was riveted on the Heir of Wallachia.

Draco Malfoy hesitated. For the briefest of moments he imagined he'd committed a terrible-- something told him potentially fatal-- faux pas. But whatever the trinket was on the floor, the boy he was looking at seemed to have dismissed it from his thoughts. Draco gave a mental shrug; not his fault if whoever-they-were wasn't careful with their trinkets. He held out his hand. "My name is Draco Malfoy, scion of the House of Malfoy. This is Crabbe, and Goyle---"

"And I'm Carmen Sandiego. Guess where I am!" Harry beamed.

"...What?" Draco stared, hand still held out. The frizzy haired girl let out an explosive snort. She quickly smothered it when Draco glared at her. He shook it off. "I assume I'm speaking to Harry Potter, Hadrian Orlock-Potter of Old Wallachia?" He said with the slightest of bows.

"Suuup?" Harry flipped him a salute.

Draco suppressed a twitch. "I've heard many things about you, Potter," Draco said, smiling insincerely and slathering his voice with admiration like treacle. "I'm quite the admirer, actually. We've all heard your story.... The Boy Who Lived. The Prince of Wallachia. The Childe with one foot in the Light, one foot in the Dark--"

"Oh baby baby," Harry suddenly moaned, his face deadpan. "Oh yeah, work it--"

Draco gaped in shock. "Excuse you??"

Harry's eyebrows went up and he smiled brightly. "Oh, I'm sorry. I just figured you were trying so hard for it, I should at least try to fake it for you."

The boys in the cabin exploded into snickers, while the frizzy haired girl went round eyed and her mouth formed a perfect 'o', the picture of horrified glee. Harry--- or Hadrian-- himself continued sitting there with a toothy, fanged grin plastered across his face as if nothing was wrong.

Crabbe and Goyle, true to form, merely scowled like a pair of particularly confused rocks.

Draco pulled himself together. "Perhaps I should get to the point… As I'm sure you know, my father, Lucius Malfoy..."

"Your dad's name is Luscious?" Harry's grin only got wider and sharper. "Bet that goes over well at the pub."

Draco tamped down on his temper. "Lucius!...Ahem. My father has a seat on the Wizengamot," he said. "He also has many political connections, including the Minister of Magic himself… the sort of men your father would like an 'in' with?" He held out his hand again. "If we stick together, we could be a big help to both our families… I can help you out, too. Keep you from getting tangled up with the wrong sort."

"The wrong sort, is it?" Ron said. His voice was low and just a touch dangerous.

Draco looked at him, contemptuous. "Let's see, red hair, shabby robes, slightly vacant expression… a Weasley if I'm not mistaken. A family of blood traitors who dug themselves into a hole and never came back out." Ron's ears flamed red and opened his mouth, but Draco was already moving on. "And Neville Longbottom. The Longbottoms used to be something… till their heir ended up in the St. Mungo's loony bin and left nothing behind but a doddering old grandmother and their near Squib of a son." Neville had seemed to swell up at the insult, but had quickly shrunken back in on himself when the words "Squib of a son."

"And..." Draco's glance quickly swept over Hermione, her possessions and garb. "A Muggleborn, obviously," he said, his voice dripping with scorn bordering on disgust. He was confident of his guess; only a muggleborn would carry one of those pack-bag… back-pack?…. Things with them on the Hogwarts Express. Especially one covered with ridiculous Muggle stickers and labels…. And the uncomfortable look on her face clinched it. He turned away from them in obvious dismissal and back to Harry. "These sorts will only drag you down. I can help you with that, show you to the RIGHT kind of people--"

"The Nineteen Ninety Chudley cannons, HUZZAAAH!" Harry said, waving an imaginary pair of pom poms around. Immediately the other three children lost their discomfited expressions and exploded into snorts, smothered snickers and in Ron's case open laughter.

"I'm trying to have a serious conversation here," Draco seethed, glaring at the ones laughing and grinding his teeth.

"And so am I!" Harry said. Something in his voice snapped everyone's attention back to him. His face fell.

"And I'm failing.

"And I'm sorry for that.

"It's just that I'm so agitated right now." His smile, already toothsome, returned. Only morphed into something… carnivorous. "Because just a moment ago this blonde little shit and his two no-neck friends--" here he paused to slap Crabbe's hand away where he'd been rifling through the remains of their stash of candy--- "barged into my train compartment, insulted MY FRIENDS, destroyed my one-of-a-kind, FIVE HUNDRED GALLEON GameBoy, and is now trying to impress me and demand my attention like I'm his alcoholic father." Draco's eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets. Even Crabbe and Goyle went a little round-eyed.

"Oh pardon me-- his alcoholic, metrosexual, Voldemort butt-kissing Death Eater father. See, I know about your Daddy already. Met him already. Not impressed. Tell ol' Luscious no sale." He waved bye-bye with his fingertips.

That did it. Draco's expression went from gawping disbelief to sputtering rage. He whipped his wand out of the sleeve of his robe-- only to come up short as the tip of Harry's wand was now pressed against his forehead, right between his eyebrows. There had been no transition, no sign of motion; the vampire Childe had gone instantly from lounging casually in his seat to standing, his wand arm extended and the red, smoldering tip of his wand brushing the skin between's Draco's eyebrows. And Harry's fang-edged grin hadn't changed. "Be a sport and go grab Daddy another pumpkin juice off the cart, would you?" That said he planted his booted foot square in Draco's chest, and shoved, ramming the skinny blonde boy back into the chests of his flunkies. Draco and his two would-be muscle sailed out into the corridor and hit the opposite wall with a thump.

After several seconds of flailing about Draco got to his feet. "When my father hears about this--!"

"He'll what, cuddle his Voldemort body pillow and cry himself to sleep?" Harry said. He made a sweeping motion with his hand. Draco, Crabbe and Goyle's robes flipped up and wrapped around their heads and they were sent stumbling down the hallway. "BEAT it, doofus!" Harry's eyes glowed bright enough to be visible through his tinted glasses.

Draco decided that discretion was the better part of valor-- or at least, he didn't resist when his two lunkish bodyguards grabbed him by the elbows and dragged him off down the hall at a stumbling, blindfolded run.

Harry stood there for a moment, looking down the direction they'd run. "Bluh, bluh bluh BLUH," he muttered, flapping his arms. He turned around and went back into the compartment and slammed the door, latching it behind him…. Before sinking to the floor, howling with laughter.

The others stared at him, discombobulated, as he hooted, his fanged mouth a gaping hole. He composed himself for a moment, wiping tears from his eyes, and saw them staring. "Would you believe I've been waiting my whole life for an opportunity to use that speech?" he wheezed.

Ron looked at Hermione while their vampire friend cackled. "It's gonna be an interesting seven years," he said.

 

[RHJunior]

The great Harry Potter must listen," the tiny, wizened elf said, wringing his hands. "The great Harry Potter must go back to Hogwarts this year!"

Harry frantically shushed the strange creature, then hesitated in confusion as he parsed what Dobby had just said. "That is what I was planning to do anyway, Dobby," he said.

Dobby nodded and came in close. "Yes, yes," he said in a stage whisper. "Dobby knows. But Dobby also knows that many bad peoples is trying to stop you. Dobby will help, as much as he can. But that is not much." He shook his head in despair till his long ears flopped.

Harry decided to bite. "And why is it so much more important that I go back this year?" he asked.

Dobby moved in even closer, till his long nose was almost touching Harry's. "Many things is coming to Hogwarts," he whispered. "Strange and wonderful things. But bad wizards is planning terrible things, to happens to them. This must not be.

"The Great Harry Potter must save them from the bad wizards." He looked deep into Harry's eyes. "Because then, maybe, they is saving him, too."


They were just changing into their school robes when there was a tremendous bump that shook the entire train. Exclamations of surprise echoed from all up and down the car, but nothing seemed to come of it. A bit of track that needed repair, Harry wondered? The Hogwarts Express was enchanted to roll right over such things, he'd heard.

It was then that Ron began slapping at his shoulder with a nerveless hand. "Harry?"

"Give me a minute, Ron," he said. He was terrible at tying the knot in his tie.

"Harry?" Ron's voice sounded oddly high. "This can't wait."

"What, what?" Harry said impatiently, looking up. Ron just pointed at the window, his face so pale his freckles stood out like dots on an astronomy map. Harry looked.
The ground was missing.

Harry looked down. And further down. And further down still. There was nothing; the blue sky faded slowly into a starlight night, an endless void below. He could see the train tracks curving out ahead of the engine, floating suspended on nothing. Just for the sake of argument he looked up-- no, the ground wasn't hiding up there, either. Just endless blue sky.

"Ron! Harry!" he heard Hermione shriek. She came bombing back into the compartment a moment later, her tie askew and her hair frizzed out more than ever. "What is this? Where did the rest of the Earth go? Ron, what's going on??"

"Why are you asking me?" Ron exclaimed. "Do I look like somebody gave me a memo?" Hermione socked him in the arm in frustration. "OW!"

"You're the only one of us who was raised in the Wizarding World. You're supposed to be the-the-the street smart native guide of our adventuring party!"
"When did we vote on that?"

"Guys," Harry said suddenly, pointing. "Look." Coming out of the distance-haze far ahead was an enormous floating island, almost an upside-down mountain. Spilling off one side and down into the void was an enormous waterfall. For counterbalance another waterfall, seemingly out of nowhere, was tumbling down out of the sky and into the lake that fed it. A forest, sitting on a shallower, broader island of floating earth and attached by a narrow bridge of earth, hovered off to one side. And standing on a rise next to the lake…

"Hogwarts," Harry said with a smile and none too little relief. "It's Hogwarts. "

They all stared in awe. "That over there must be the Forbidden Forest," Hermione said, pointing at the dark wooded island.

"The twins will have a bit harder time sneaking out there this year, I think," Harry said, by way of a weak joke.

"Where is the water coming from?" Hermione wondered. "The lake should be running dry..."

Ron pointed up at the second waterfall. "I think it loops around, and comes back out up there," he said. "The squid better not swim to close or it's in for a heck of a ride."

"Where's Hogsmeade?" Ron said. "Anyone see it?"

"Down there and to the left, on that, er, island by itself," Harry said. "The only way back and forth must be by broom."

"Can't imagine they're too happy about that..." Ron said.

Hogwarts' floating island drew quickly closer. As they watched the day slowly turned to night… not with the sun rising and the moon setting, but all at once, with the blue sky swirling away like a melting snow cone, and a purpling sky speckled with impossibly huge stars taking its place. They pulled into the Hogwarts' station with a thump and a cloud of steam. All the students dismounted. Harry could hear Hagrid calling for the first years: a comforting note of familiarity, all things considered. It was a shockingly quiet group, for once. Harry realized with an inner laugh that for once the firsties and the muggleborns looked less gobsmacked than the older, native-born wizards. The muggleborns had no experience with the magical world other than through books and movies; riding a flying train to a castle on a floating island was probably nothing less than they had expected!

The carriage ride to the castle was quickly filled with chatter, though, as speculation ran wild as to what had happened, and what was going on. Hermione's theories in particular were rapidly spiraling out of control, till Harry put a hand on hers and stopped her. "Dumbledore is here," he reminded her. "If we just wait, I'm sure he will explain everything."



The headmaster stepped up to the podium, a smile on his face. "Welcome, everyone, to another year at Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches," he said. "I'm sure you've all noticed some changes since last year..."

"No foolin," someone in the Hall said. Several people shushed whoever it was. Dumbledore only looked amused.

"Allow me to proffer a brief explanation. During the previous summer, Some of our staff were conducting some minor experiments in their down time. There was… I can only refer to it as a fortuitous discovery that led to Hogwart's current condition and location."

"Magical accident," Ron murmured to Harry and Hermione. "A walloping huge one." They nodded. They hadn't missed that Snape was sitting at the head table, sneering as usual and nursing a number of bandages and burns.

"Those researching the matter have determined that this particular condition is both safe, and stable. Hence the resumption of the school year without interruption. It has, in fact, turned out to have many benefits which the Department of Mysteries of our own Ministry of Magic is looking into… possibly as an option for any and all magical locations and communities. There may come a day when all magical locations in our world are moved to safe, private pockets like the one we currently inhabit."
One of the Ravenclaws raised a hand. "But… where are we, exactly, sir?" she asked.

The headmaster paused as if searching for the right words. "I think the best description would be Between," he said. "We are in a place that is between our own world and the next one over. Or the next several ones over, actually. There is a portal connecting us to our own world; you passed through it while on the Hogwarts Express. And there is a portal to yet another world-- I shall not disclose its location, for your own safety--- that connects to us, here.

"What is more," he said, raising his voice above the buzz of voices this comment had stirred up, "We… that is, our Ministry… have made contact with the beings of this next world, and opened up diplomatic talks with them." There was a resounding thump as Hermione toppled to the floor. "Mister Potter, Mister Weasley, would you be so kind as to revive Miss Granger. She'll get a chill lying on the stone floor like that." A wave of the headmaster's hand summoned a towel and a pitcher of water to where the trio sat.

"As I was saying, we have opened diplomatic relations. And in the interests of those relations, we will be hosting several of their own people as exchange students, here in Hogwarts." There was a loud moan and Hermione passed out again. "Ahem.

"So without further ado, allow me to cede the floor to Princess Celestia, Sol Invictus, and Princess Luna, Nocturnis Immaculatus." He stepped aside with a bow. From the back of the room stepped two visions.

"Coo!" the entire student body said, and gasped hard enough to suck the air out of the room.

One was a white mare, tall and slender with a long spiral horn and snowy wings. A golden tiara rested on her brow, and she was adorned with golden shoes and a gem-studded peytral. Her mane and tail swirled around her in a cloud of soft pastels.

Next to her walked another, clearly her sister. Only she was the color of midnight, and adorned in onyx and silver. Her mane was a billowing cloud of night and stars.
The two paced regally from the back of the room up to the podium. The white one, clearly the elder, stepped forward and spread her wings. "Greetings, my little ones," she said with a smile."I am Princess Celestia of Equestria, and this is my sister, Princess Luna. I am pleased to meet you all at last, and hope that this is only the beginning of a wonderful friendship between our people.

"Both my sister and I wish that we could spend more time getting to know you ourselves, personally. Alas, though we do intend to look in on you all from time to time, our duties preclude us from spending too much time away from our thrones. So to foster better understanding between our two races, your Headmaster and we have come to an agreement: some of our little ponies-- personal proteges of our own-- will be attending here for the next seven years, as full students of Hogwarts Academy."

The midnight one spoke. "We hope that thou wilt make them feel welcome, and trust that they will be good and proper guests to thee."

"And now, regrettably, we must depart," Celestia concluded. "We wish you well and we shall speak again soon." The two began to shimmer, then dissolved into a cloud of sparkles that swirled away and disappeared.

"My, how precipitous," Dumbledore said. "Well. Let us commence with the Sorting, shall we?" From the back of the room, where they had been watching the proceedings in silence, came the firsties… and noone failed to note that mingled among them were a number of small, fourlegged participants. Professor McGonagall came forward with the stool and the Sorting Hat, which she set down with great ceremony. The hat straightened up, its folds and wrinkles forming a face. It opened its "mouth" and sang.

"This is your Sorting Song,
It isn't very long..."

Everyone hesitated. "Well?" McGonagall said to the hat.

'We're running a bit long this year, aren't we?" the hat replied snarkily. "That's all the song you get." Several students tittered. McGonagall huffed, but she let it slide. The hat was a bit right after all. She opened up the scroll of new names.

"Abercrombie!" She called out.

The students waited through the first few names on pins and needles. It was obvious that everyone present was waiting for only one thing: the sorting of the first Equestrian student. Finally though, it came.

"Rarity Belle!"

The one who trotted forward was a unicorn. She was pure, gleaming white, with an elegantly groomed mane and tail and a pattern of diamonds scattered on her flank… for all that she was the size of a unicorn foal and gifted with the childlike proportions of a plush toy, she was still the very picture of a magical symbol of pristine purity. She climbed up on the stool and sat demurely as McGonagall lowered the hat--

Only to raise a hoof and stop her. "Oh, just one moment, please," she said. Her horn glowed and blue-white sparkles shot from her horn into the hat.

"Heee! Stop, that tickles!" the hat protested squirming.

"My apologies, sir hat," she said sweetly. "No offense intended, but after all those heads, I think both of us would appreciate the use of a quick cleaning spell." Several students in the audience with unease started noticing a faint itching in their scalp.

The hat huffed. "I'll have you know I have permanent cleaning and sanitation charms--" it groused.

"Oh. My apologies," Rarity said, embarrassed. The grumbling hat was lowered onto the unicorn's head. Once again the audience said "coo" and held their breath. A long, slow minute passed.

Well, this is a conundrum.

Pardon?

Truthfully madame, you have plenty of ambition. And cunning I see here aplenty. More than enough for a dozen of the Slytherins running about today.

You do flatter, Mister Hat.

Heh. But that House, dear lady, has fallen far. They mistake avarice for ambition and cruelty for cunning. And there are many in it that favor the Dark, for it readily gratifies both vices. And there are evils in our world that regard that House and all in it theirs for the taking. The house of Slytherin is little loved by others. You would have a long and hard time of it there.

Those poor children? Rarity thought in disbelief of the crowd of first years. Her decision, her new ambition, firmed.

Then I will have to show them a better way.

You are well named the Element of Generosity, Miss Rarity Belle. So be it.

"SLYTHERIN!"

All across the room, jaws dropped. More than a few quickly strangled cries of disbelief sprang up here and there. The expressions around the room ranged from shock to outright horror. The expressions at the table of the snakes, however, were ones of unsuppressed glee. Once the hat was removed Rarity gave a curtsey to a stunned McGonagall and trotted off to the Slytherin table, the cravat she wore turning Slytherin silver and green.

"No way," Ron rasped. "No bloody way!"

"I don't think she really knows that house's reputation," Hermione said. "Cunning and Ambition don't sound all that bad on their own, after all. I think she's in for a rough ride."

Up on the stage, Applejack leaned over to Rainbow Dash. "What was all that about?"

Rainbow Dash smirked. "I don't think those Snakes know Rarity's reputation," she said. "I think those guys are in for a rough ride."

"Sweetie Belle!"

The next one up drew coos of adoration from half the witches in the room. She was a tiny unicorn filly with a soft curly pastel mane and adorable as the day was long. She got up on the stool-- with a little boost from McGonagall-- and donned the hat. Her entire head nearly disappeared under it down to the shoulders.

Ohohoho. You ARE a sly little thing, aren't you.

Am not. The filly blushed.

Ha. I know better. Even your own sister doesn't have a clue, and she's as sharp as a tack, that one.

I don't mean to be-- Sweetie thought.

Oh that is not a bad thing, not always. "Be ye harmless as doves, and cunning as serpents." Sometimes it is best that people underestimate you, especially the wicked. Remember that.

I will, sir.

Oh and good luck on your singing career. Perhaps next year we can sing a duet?

Sweetie giggled.

But first, let's put the cat among the pigeons-- or the sneaky little unicorn among the poor luckless Snakes---

"SLYTHERIN!"

If the silenced had been shocked for the first, the cries of dismay, for all they were quickly hushed, were piercing. Sweetie doffed the hat and stared out at the crowd in bafflement. "WHAAAaaaat?" she demanded. When nobody replied she rolled her eyes, climbed down off the stool, and joined the Slytherin table with her new silver and green cravat proudly displayed.

"I never would've thought of Sweetiebelle as cunning or ambitious," Scootaloo whispered to Applebloom..

"Those 're the kind y' gotta watch out for," Applebloom muttered back, amused. Their conversation was interrupted by McGonagall.

"Apple Bloom!"

Hmm. A good bright mind, you could do fairly well in Ravenclaw. Oh my, an aptitude for potions?

'swhat my cutie mark means, Applebloom thought, thinking of the apple in a klein bottle on her hip.

Oh I see. How fascinating. It's rather like you all have a sorting hat on your backsides, isn't it? The hat's amusement was rich.

Hy-larious, y'all are. Mister Hat?

Hmm?

Could you put me in Slytherin with my friend Sweetie Belle? And Scootaloo too?

And why would you want that?--Oh, I see. In a moment the Hat flitted through her memories of the Cutie Mark Crusaders: of a lifetime of adventures and laughter and friendship shared in a few short seasons. He chuckled.

My dear, who said that you had to stop being friends if you were in different Houses?

Well-- it's just--

Apple Bloom, sometimes friends have to be apart, so that each of them can thrive and grow in their own way. Sweetie Belle will thrive in Slytherin; but you would be utterly out of place in it. As out of place as if you tried to follow Scootaloo to flight camp. You would be miserable!

Apple bloom had a vision of herself taking her first flying lesson off the edge of Cloudsdale. Yeah—Briefly, she thought, her mental voice dry.

What?-- Oh. Oh! Ahaha. Good one! The hat actually chortled out loud, puzzling some of the onlookers. Well, you'll have plenty of time together even in separate houses. You'll have classes together, and meals together, and countless hours of down time you can spend together how you wish, and of course the holidays… you'll spend some time apart, grow into your own hooves, as it were, and your friendship will be the stronger for it.

Well, okay. You're the expert…

The hat chuckled again. Anyhow, you're no stranger to hard work, and you've got loyalty for miles, that much is clear. No better place for you than--

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

More than a few anxious students sighed in relief. For a moment it had looked like the whole herd of Equestrians was going to end up in a Slytherin stable. Apple Bloom trotted down to the Hufflepuff table in her new black and yellow cravat, hesitantly at first but soon with a happy gallop as welcoming smiles and applause greeted her.

"Rainbow Dash !"

The cocksure pegasus fluttered up from the back and landed with a thump on the stool. The hat went on.

Merlin!

Pardon you?

Heavens. I've never seen such a Gryffindor mind. Gryffindor to a FAULT. You, my dear young mare, are the most Gryffindorish Gryffindor I have seen in years!

Well then that makes the choice easy, I guess. Huh.

What, may I ask?

I woulda figured Hufflepuff. On account o' me being the Element of Loyalty, and they're the house of Loyalty…

Oh, they're more than just THAT. Just as you are. Take this chance to show other people that you are more than just one thing… and maybe to hone that "Gryffindor to a fault" into a proper virtue.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

Dash flew over the tables, did a backflip and dropped into an open Gryffindor seat. "Called it," Applejack chuckled, while a grousing Spike handed her a galleon.

"Apple Jack !"

"Ack!" the farm pony hustled to the stool. She took off her hat; McGonagall took it from her. "Uh, thank y' kindly." The hat dropped down.

My my, you and your sister are two peas in a pod, but for a few years. Pomona Sprout would never forgive me if I put you anywhere else.

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

"That was quick," Apple Bloom said as Applejack sat next to her.

"I suppose some things are obvious," Applejack replied.

Several more young wizards and witches were sorted, followed by:

"Scoota Loo!"

The orange pegasus filly buzz-hopped onto the stool. "It's one word, by the way."

"My apologies," McGonagall said primly, and placed the hat on her head.

My, so many obvious ones today.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

Every Hogwarts native stared and blinked when Pinkie Pie's turn came up. "I've never seen anything that shade of pink before," Ron said to Harry, who shook his head in agreement.

"And nothing that… frizzy," Hermione added. The other two stared at her. "Oh shut up!"

And then the hat began to laugh. It started as a deep chuckle and rolled into a full bone-shaking belly laugh. It laughed for a good solid minute, rocking back and forth on the giggling pink pony's head.

"HUFFLEPUFF!" It finally shouted between gales of laughter. "And good luck, Pomona!" It was still laughing as the pink pony pronked her way to the Hufflepuff table.
"Well, that wasn't ominous," Pomona said under her breath to Flitwick. For his part Flitwick made a silent bet with himself on who would crack open the Glenfiddich first this year-- McGonagall or Sprout.

"Flutter Shy !"

There was a loud squeak, then a long pause. "Flutter Shy!" McGonagall repeated. There was a rustle from the back of the crowd of first years', then a pegasus slowly made her appearance. She was soft yellow, with a long trailing mane and tail of pastel pink. She caught a glimpse of the crowd staring at her, let out a squeak of alarm and vanished behind the other first years again.

"Miss Shy!" McGonagall said sternly. "Come on out and be Sorted. You're holding things up!" Cringing nervously, her tail tucked beneath her, Fluttershy came back out and climbed up on the stool. There were a few unkind sniggers at how fearful she was. The other Gryffindors had to restrain a glaring Rainbow Dash from finding the mockers and making something of it.

The hat came down-- surprisingly gently this time; McGonagall wasn't totally heartless-- and the students waited.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

"Huh?" seemed to be the general consensus at this decision. Fluttershy hurriedly made her way over to the Gryffindor table and sat between Scootaloo and Dash with an obvious air of relief. A few snickers and unkind remarks at the Gryffindor House's expense wafted across the room, largely from the Slytherin table. This time Dash wasn't the only one to swell up and get to her feet. Several curt words and pointed glares from Heads of House soon had things settled down, though. Only barely.
Two more students were sorted into Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. Then McGonagall read the name that nearly upset the apple cart.

"Princess Twilight Sparkle!"

The commotion at this took several minutes, and finally a call from Dumbledore himself, to settle down. A princess! Whichever house got her, that was going to be a feather in their cap-- even more than two white unicorns like the Slytherins had.

Twilight stepped forward. At first she seemed like an ordinary unicorn, as much as a unicorn with a violet coat and a deep purple mane could be ordinary anyway. Then she spread her wings and fluttered up onto the stool. She perched there with her wings mantled for balance as the hat came down.

It certainly didn't take long.

My, you ponies don't do things by halves, do you. Try not to get yourselves lost in your books like you did in your LAST school, Princess. You'll miss out on a lot.
Er--

"RAVENCLAW!… as if the rest of you lot hadn't guessed," the hat said sarcastically. Several of the ponies snickered.

The applause from Ravenclaw table was thunderous as Twilight, bronze and blue cravat neatly tied, stepped over to join their table.

"Spike !"

Everyone peered curiously. One more? A moment later a short, scaly, purple and green figure stepped out of the firsties. Unlike the others he wore a proper robe and tie. Perched on the row of spikes on his head was a small, faintly glowing yellow bird. Webbed wings unfurled from his back and he flapped up onto the stool, his spade-tipped tail curling around the legs. "A dragon?" Neville yipped.

Fluttershy spoke up. "Oh that's Spike," she said. "Don't be afraid of him, he's a sweetie, and a perfect little gentleman."

"Your dragons are very different from ours, then," Neville said warily.

"Um, well..."

"Is that a baby phoenix perched on his head?" Hermione exclaimed.

"Yeah. Peewee. Spike raised him from an egg," Rainbow Dash said.

"But… Phoenixes don't grow up from chicks! They hatch, then have their first Burning Day and are completely full grown!" Hermione protested. "I read it in--"

"Hermione, If you say 'I read it in Hogwarts, a History,'" Ron said in an overly sweet voice, "I swear that the next time we ride the Hogwarts Express I'm chucking that ruddy book right out the window." She gaped at him in outrage. "And good luck finding it in that fathomless void that's out the window now," he added as an afterthought.

Harry laughed at her expression. "Hermione, don't you get it? They're from another world. Everything your books have to say about them is probably wrong. You're going to have to do more than just run to the library to learn everything about something this time, because books are going to be pretty much worthless." He turned back to watch the proceedings, while his best friend sat there and spiraled into an existential horror at the blasphemies he'd uttered.

McGonagall set the hat on Spike's head. "Oy!" the hat said. It hawked and spat, shooting an angrily chattering Peewee across the stage. "One customer at a time, you!" The students laughed as the tiny phoenix fluttered off to perch on a nearby sconce and sulk.

Ah, let's see…

Ravenclaw please.

Hm? Hold on now, lad, I'll be doing the sorting here.

Look, trust me. I'm Twilight Sparkle's number one assistant. I need to be there for her.

Now hold on, lad.. hmm. My word, you're certainly smart enough to fit in Ravenclaw fairly well. Scribe, Librarian, musician, chef, you have quite a multiplicity of talents and skills.

Comes from having to be Twilight's assistant. It's in the job description.

And quite a load of book knowledge, at least of your own world.

You don't hang around the smartest and most powerful unicorn in a generation without picking a few things up.

Unicorn?-- oh, I see, a rather recent promotion. Or metamorphosis rather?

Ehh. Little of column A…

Ah. But the point, you see, is that my job is to place you where it will benefit YOU the most. So YOU have a chance to flourish. It's in the job description.

Touche'. So where would I do best? Just for argument's sake.

Let's see then. Like I said, quite talented and smart, so Ravenclaw would be fairly good… hmmm, and a good bit of ambition. Mostly that draconic need to get a proper hoard going-- that would serve you well in Slytherin-- but also a certain amount of aspiration for a certain lady fair, no?

...Shuddup.

Heheheh. You're a hard worker, definitely loyal, and have more than your share of bravery. My word, you tackled three diamond dogs barehanded as a hatchling? And gave them a bit of a thrashing too, I see. Bravo. You could fit fairly well in any of the Houses.

In that case it'd better be Ravenclaw.

Got a one track mind, do you?

Dude. Did you or did you not see my memories of the Smarty Pants incident?

The Smarty Pants…? Oh dear.

Or the Gala Ticket fiasco?

My.

Or the Birthday party meltdown?

Good heavens.

Like I keep telling you-- Twilight's smart, and brave, and kind… but she needs someone to keep her on an even keel. And she isn't all that good at taking care of herself. Here, lemme show you the last time she cooked for herself--

No, no, I get the point. Eh, I did say you'd do well anywhere, and she does need a little help, it's obvious… but my boy, do try to take advantage of this time, and do a little growing for your OWN benefit.

I'll give it a try anyway.

"RAVENCLAW!!"

Spike proudly trotted over and joined his Housemates. Before McGonagall could call the next name, Peewee dove down from his perch and flew up inside the hat. He cheeped in a demanding fashion.

"Oh fine. RAVENCLAW for you too!" it spat the bird back out. Peewee flew over and perched on Spike's head, fluffing up proudly. The Ravenclaw students looked proud enough to burst. The Slytherin table, on the other hand, looked fit to be tied; their little coup early on had been flipped completely over.

A half dozen more Sortings, and the platform was clear. Dumbledore stepped up to the podium as the hat and stool were put away. "A most momentous sorting, I do say. But now, our welcoming feast has been put off long enough. Let's eat!" With that, the tables were suddenly laden with food. The by-now ravenous students cheered and tucked in; many taking great pleasure in pointing out various delicacies to their new equine classmates.



The door to the Gryffindor tower opened, and the Gryffindors piled in. Harry came through, A groaning Ron leaning against him with his arm over his shoulder. Right behind them came Hermionie, scolding and quibbling. Behind her came another pair of students bearing a groaning Rainbow Dash. Both victims were left to sprawl over the nearest sofa while the other students spread out around the common room or totter their way up to bed. "I can't believe you challenged a little pony to a pie eating contest," Hermione scolded Ron.

Harry smirked. "I can't believe she won."

"Totally worth it," Dash grunted. She lay on her back sprawled out, her belly pooching into the air.

"I think I have some of those fizzy tablets in my trunk if you want, Dash," Fluttershy said.

"Nah, I'll be good in an hour or two," Dash said. She looked up. "Hey, where's the squirt?"

"Already asleep. One of the firsties already carried her up to your room." It was true and it had been adorable. Colin Creevy had snapped a half-dozen shots of it, to go with the hundred or so he'd taken since getting on the Hogwarts express that morning.

"Yeah," one of the older students said. "Most of the first years are already out of it by now. But you guys can hang out down here with us for a little bit. Get to know each other better, sort of thing." He opened one of the end tables scattered around the room and pulled out a bottle of cherry fizz. (While Ravenclaws stashed books everywhere, the Griffs had long ago discovered the glories of the handy and easily concealed Mini Fridge.)

Several voices were raised in agreement, urging the two pegasi to stay up and chew the fat a bit. Dash was easy enough-- it was clear neither she nor Ron were moving till several plates of pie were digested-- but the sudden burst of attention, Fluttershy balked.

"Oh no, I don't think I should," she stammered, wings fluttering nervously. "It is a long day tomorrow and-- oh, I don't… um… goodnight--" the timid mare fled up the stairs to the girls' dormitory.

Seamus Finnegan shook his head. "I've no idea how a timid little thing got in Griffindor of all places," he said.
"People can surprise you," Neville said defensively.

"Oh, she's nice enough," Seamus hedged. "But in the house of the brave? I don't--"

"HA ha!" Rainbow Dash let out a raucus laugh. Everyone looked at her in surprise. "You REALLY don't know Fluttershy yet," she said, cackling.

"How so?" Harry said, curious.

"D'you know I once kicked a full grown dragon in the face?" Dash said incongruously.

"Oh, no way," someone scoffed.

"Yes way. In. The. Face." She smirked at the scoffers. "Big jerk was hibernating in a mountain over our town… his snoring was clogging the air with smoke. We all went up to get him to move out. He wouldn't get his lazy tail up, so I bucked him in the face. Whammo."

"You're joking," Ron said. He looked at her face. "You're not joking."

"Yep!" She rubbed her head with a hoof sheepishly. "Not one of my brighter moves..."

"So what's your point?" Someone threw in.

"I'm the one who kicked it in the face and made it mad," Dash said. She pointed up the stairs. "She's the one who made it BREAK DOWN AND CRY."

The Gryffindors stared at her. "And that was nuthin'," Dash went on. "Manticore? Pulled a thorn out of its paw and had it eating out of her hoof. Cerberus? Gave it a tummy rub. Cockatrice? Beat it in a STARING CONTEST. She keeps a full grown grizzly bear in her cottage as a PET, and she gives first aid to rattlesnakes and mountain lions. And she civilized an avatar of Chaos, and has tea with him every weekend! Sure she's shy and timid and meek and all that, but when she needs to be, Fluttershy can be a force of nature. And don't you ever forget it."

The Gryffindors stared at the little rainbow maned pony, speechless. There was no telling how many of them even believed half of what she said, but in the passing days it would certainly cross their minds.



The Hufflepuffs were gathered in their common room; Pomona Sprout, their Head of House, was presiding. She was a round cheeked woman who smelled of earth and green growing things, and had a natural gift for settling the nerves of young and jittery students away from home for the first time. "Welcome one and all to House Hufflepuff," she said. "Don't worry, we won't be long. I'm sure you all want to get to your beds." Several students and one yellow pony yawned in unspoken agreement. "But I do like to have a quick meeting to welcome everyone and get them situated their first night here. We'll have similar meetings every weekend, so we can air any problems and talk things out as a House.

"Now we have a busy year ahead of us, and we'll have many opportunities to shine both as individuals, and as a House."

"Fat chance of that," one of the older students muttered.

"I beg your pardon, Mister Macmillan?" Sprout demanded. Everyone in the room turned to look at the transgressor.

Macmillan waffled, but decided to double down. "Oh come on, Professor, look at this," he said, waving at the room. "Hufflepuff got the short end of the stick AGAIN."

"And just what do you mean by that, Mister Macmillan?" Sprout said sternly.

"I'm only being honest, Professor Sprout," he huffed. "Let's look at facts here. We have a Headmaster who plays favorites with Gryffindor. Remember the House Cup scoring last year?"

"Yes, I remember," Sprout said, huffily. "We had WORDS with the Headmaster over that, I assure you."

"And the Deputy Headmaster is the Head of House for Gryffindor. She plunked Potter onto her team as Seeker a year early, even bought him a brand new broom for it. Broke like three or four Hogwarts rules in the process, but nobody said a thing." He sneered a bit. "My, wasn't THAT impartial." Several students shifted uncomfortably. "And don't even get me started on Snape--"

"Professor Snape," Sprout corrected him sternly.

"Well Professor Snape hands out points to his own house-- and demerits and detentions to everyone else-- like they were penny candy," Macmillan went on.

"But even if half the staff wasn't running around playing favorites and making earning house points a joke…We're still a house of duffers, because that's how that Hat sorts us.

"And this year's sorting just takes the cake," he said. "Gryffindor gets three Pegasi. Slytherin gets two unicorns. Unicorns! And Ravenclaw gets a winged unicorn--"

"Alicorn," Applejack said drily.

"--An alicorn princess, a dragon and a Phoenix! And what does Hufflepuff get?" He waved at the three new pony classmates. "three plain as paint nothing ponies." His voice turned bitter with disappointment. "'And I will take the rest,' Hufflepuff said. Once again we get the leftovers that nobody wants."

"Nothing ponies?" Pinkie Pie said, sounding wounded. "Hey!" Applebloom exclaimed, hopping to her hooves and looking angry.

Voices raised in anger and protest. Professor Sprout grew livid. "MISTER Macmillan, you will apologize to your new Housemates this instant--!" But Applejack stepped forward and held up a hoof.

"Hold on, Ma'am," she said. She looked at Macmillan. "So that's what you think? That your House always gets second best… and that us earth ponies are just another bunch of second best. Is that it?" Her words were uncommonly kind.

He wouldn't look at her. "An' maybe after seein yore house come out second best so often, maybe you're wondering if YOU'RE second best, and that's why they put you here?" He voice was even gentler. He still didn't look at her, but he nodded. "Now," she said to the rest of the group, giving them a gimlet eye. "How many of you are feelin' the same way, but were just skeered to say it out loud?" Slowly, several hands rose in the crowd.

To their surprise, Applejack gave a short laugh. "I think I get how he's feelin', Professor," she said to Sprout. "Believe you me, this ain't the first time folks have thought that about us Earth ponies. Not by a long shot. Shoot, hunnerts of years ago they used to call us 'mud ponies,' said we weren't nuthin' cause we couldn't shoot magic out of horns on our head, or fly, or fiddle faddle with the weather. Even now a lot of ponies in the other two tribes underestimate us.

"But would it help y'all to know we're just as magical as the other two?" She got several skeptical looks. "Naaauw, I ain't joshin' you. It's just with us Earth ponies, it don't show on the surface so much. Here..." The room, true to Pomona's love of all things green and growing, was decorated with planters and flowerpots of all sorts. Applejack scooped some dirt out of one with a water cup. Then she pulled an apple out of her saddlebag, bit it in half with a single chomp, and spit the seeds into the cup.She balanced the cup on her hoof and squinted at it, straining. The dirt filled cup shook, and with a tiny fountain of dirt a seedling shot up out of the soil. In seconds she was holding a food high sapling in her hoof. "We got us a few things up our sleeve," she said over the exclamations from the other 'Puffs.

"My word," Professor Sprout exclaimed, delighted. She took the sapling from Applejack's hooves and looked it over. "I do believe you're going to do quite well in Herbology, Applejack."

"Heh. That ain't nuthing. Pinkie, show 'em that little trick from the rock farm."

One of the 'Puffs looked up from staring at the sapling. "You grow rocks on farms?"

"Wellll, certain kinds of rocks," Pinkie said. She pulled what looked like a bag of gravel out of her mane (earning herself a few stares), poured it in a pile on the floor, and stuck her hoof in. She grimaced wildly, her face contorting in ridiculous shapes as she pressed down, rolling the gravel under her foot. There was a creaking noise, like ice being pressed in a vise, and the loose pebbles began squeezing together, changing shape, becoming more sparkly and crystalline--

"Merlin, is that a sapphire?" One of the older students reached in and picked up a pebble. It was; it was an uncut sapphire about the size of the tip of her pinky. "And--" she picked up another. "I think this is a ruby!"

"Crystallized aluminum oxides," Pinkie said. "Not very good quality though; a rock farmer properly cultivates them over months to get the right purity and clarity. But it's a neat party trick."

"Earth pony magic works with plants, growing things, with minerals and ores and anything from the earth. Hence the name Earth Pony," Applejack said with a smirk. "We're also tougher 'n stronger than the next three unicorns or pegasus combined.

"We also tend to be crackin' good builders, inventors, potioneers--" she paused to give her little sister a noogie. " jewelers and blacksmiths. We grow and build and invent everything everypony else uses and depends on. We're not flashy, but we're the ones that keep the world workin'. We work hard, we play hard, we stick by our families and our friends. That's the earth pony way.

"An' I'm lookin' around at this Hufflepuff House an' I see the same thing. Hard work, good friends--"

"And fun!" Pinkie said, leaning over Applejack's back.

"Those are the things worth the effort. If other folk don't appreciate it, well tough luck. An' if you got made a Hufflepuff, maybe it ain't because you're second best." She gave Macmillan's arm a gentle pat. "It's just that you're somethin' most other folks hain't learned to appreciate yet."

Professor Sprout applauded solemnly. "Well said, Miss Applejack," she said. "Well said indeed."



Spike looked at Professor Flitwick and sighed in disgust. "You just had to show her the Ravenclaw tower private library," he said.

Once Flitwick had opened the door it was all downhill. Twilight had taken one look and had gone into full book mania. She had looted the shelves, piling books around her in multiple stacks and burying her nose in two or three at at time.

Flitwick for his part was looking a bit perturbed. He'd never seen such a manic reader; she made Hermione Granger look positively placid. Nothing he said or did could stir the pony princess and get her to go to bed. "I can't. I just can't! An entire library of knowledge from another world-- I just can't!" Was all she'd say to his requests, pleas, and even threats. He was reluctant to try anything more drastic…

Spike came toddling back in, pushing a tea trolley with, oddly enough for Great Britain, a pot of fresh coffee on it. "Don't worry, Professor," he muttered, "I've dealt with this before." He carefully poured out a mug of steaming brew, added three lumps of sugar and some cream, and set it beside the frantically reading pony.

"Oh thank you Spike," she said. Without looking she levitated the mug and downed it in one gulp. One second passed, then two. She sat up straight and glared in outrage at Spike. "Spike, Did you use those knockout drops in my coffee ag--"

SPLAT. Her head hit the tabletop without even time to blink. Seconds later she was snoring softly. Spike held up the bottle of "creamer" and waggled it softly. "From her Majesty Princess Celestia," he said. "To be used in cases of Twilight Sparkle only." He proceeded to drape the snoring pony over his shoulder. "ugh. When she wakes up rested in the morning she'll have calmed down enough to realize she can't read the whole library in one sitting." He struggled to lift her. "Bit of a hand?"

Flitwick chortled and waved his wand. Twilight floated out of the room silently, and up the stairs to the girls' dorms. "Thanks," Spike said. He yawned. "I think I'll head to bed myself."

Flitwick shook his head as the dragonling headed to the boy's dorms. "I get the feeling I'll be glad the Hat sorted you here," he said.



Snape glowered down at his new first years-- two legged and four legged. "It is late, and you are more than likely already too sleepy to pay much attention, so I will keep this brief. There are a very few important rules in this house. The most important is this: Outside these rooms, you present a united front. In here, you may have your squabbles, your disagreements, your dunderheaded childhood feuds. If you have a difference you wish arbitrated, you will come to me or to your Prefects. If you wish to settle matters in a duel, we have a room for that as well. But outside, you are only Slytherin. You will not carry your squabbles out where others may see them and you will not show any weakness or division in front of the other houses.

There are rules here in Hogwarts; they are listed in your handbooks and on the bulletin board in the common room. If you are caught you WILL be punished." Even the first years could hear the unstated in his voice: first, you had to be caught. "If you are caught and I believe you are insufficiently punished you will answer to me." Whether punished for the infraction, or punished for being so foolish as to get caught, was again left unsaid. "The Great Hall opens for breakfast at seven. Your first classes are at eight. Do not be tardy." He swept from the room in a swirl of his cloak.

Only then did the first years dare to breathe again. "Crikey," someone muttered.

"Well, that was… something," Rarity said. She approached one of the other students-- a girl with blonde hair and icy blue eyes… Greengrass, was it?--- "Excuse me, dear," she said. "Nopony clarified the sleeping arrangements… I was wondering..?"

Daphne looked down at the unicorn coolly and nodded. "Of course. We'll all be sharing a room together-- we three, and three others.

"Well, that's fine I'm sure. Come along, Sweetie."

Sweetie was standing on the couch by one of the vast picture windows. "Rarity, I think we're under the lake! Look--" she pointed at a fish swimming past, just in time for a webbed clawed hand to flash out of the dark and snatch it away. The rest of the mermaid appeared out of the dark of the water in the next instant. With their bulging eyes, wide mouths and needle-like teeth, even by the light of day, mer-folk are an unsettling sight. Three inches from your nose in the dead of night is an outright no-sell. The little unicorn yeeped and vaulted backwards so violently she somersaulted off the couch onto the floor.

"WELLthat'senoughsighsteeinglet'sgotobedAWAYFROMTHEWINDOWS--" she galloped past Rarity and Daphne for the girls' dorms.

When Daphne and Rarity arrived, Sweetie had found her bed by the trunk at its foot, and was up on the bed bouncing on the pillowy mattress. "This whole thing is mine?" she squeaked in delight.

"Where are the others?"

Daphne looked around. "Ah," she said, pointing to a closed door. "They're in the showers, getting ready for bed."

"Oh, excellent!" Rarity said. She pulled her towel and her nighttime beauty products from her trunk. "I do need to put my mane up. Be back in a few, Sweetie." She trotted into the bathroom, the door swinging shut behind her.

"Well that's the last we'll see of her for an hour or two," Sweetie said. She looked up at Daphne as she continued bouncing. "What's wrong?"

Daphne Greengrass was a pureblood daughter of a pureblood family, and raised to the fashion. She was poised, she was reserved, she was dignified and aloof in everything she said and did and she couldn't stand it anymore. She snatched the unicorn filly out of the air in mid leap and snuggled her for dear life. "EEEEEEEEeeee you are just too cute to STAND Oh I wish Astoria could see you now you are the sweetest thing EVER--"

In the next moment, with a desperate wrench of self control, she released the flabbergasted pony and dropped her back on the mattress. She pointed a threatening finger. "If you dare tell ANYONE that just happened… I'll… I'll deny it to the GRAVE." With that she turned her back and, cool disdainful mask back in place, went to open her own trunk and began getting ready for bed.

Sweetie Belle stared and rattled her head. "I have NO idea what the heck that was about," she muttered.

 

[RHJunior]

The boats glided out onto the lake with barely a ripple. Slowly, majestically, the torch-lit towers of Hogwarts came into view. Behind them, far in the distance, stormclouds rolled. They cut a light-spangled silhouette against the night sky. Oohs and Ahhs greeted the sight. Hagrid smiled broadly, his teeth gleaming in the midst of his beard, and gestured grandly. "There she is..." he said.

Harry stood up in his own boat and gestured equally as grandly. "Camelot!" he pronounced in tones pompous and reverent.

Several of the Muggleborns got the joke and snickered. Hermione couldn't resist. She stood and faced him, throwing her arms wide. "Camelot!" she replied.

"Camelot!" They said together, turning together to look at the castle.

"It's only a model," someone in the throng shouted. Harry gave the unseen speaker a thumbs up while the rest of the muggleborns burst into explosive giggles. Hagrid only looked befuddled, while many of the purebloods looked confused or disdainful as suited their temperament.

"Muggleborns are weird," Pansy Parkinson was heard muttering. Noone disagreed.




The view didn't last long; the distant stormclouds had quickly become not-so-distant even as they ascended the stairs from the docks. Lightning flickered, and thunder rumbled, still faint in the distance but closing fast.

"So how does your, um, family deal with vampire hunters?" Hermione had taken the moment to resume asking Harry questions about his vampire family, right up to the doors of the Great Hall.

Harry shrugged. "It's not really a problem in Wallachia. Anyway, we're rich, we live in a fortress full of servants and guards and ghasts and gaunts and werewolves and-- well, you get the idea. Anyone who comes sneaking in looking to cause trouble soon finds themselves running OUT." He thought for a moment. "If you mean regular middle-class vampires, though, I hear most use the Buddy System."

"The Buddy System?" Ron interjected.

"Yeah," Harry said cheerfully. "They'll share a house or a flat with a werewolf or two. The werewolves keep an eye out while the vampire is sleeping during the day, and the vampires keep an eye on the werewolves when the full moon is rising. It's a very mutually beneficial system, which is always good, Dad says." Harry shrugged again. "Of course it's not always werewolves. Sometimes they room with a poltergeist or a ghast or some hobgoblins or what have you. But it's usually werewolves. We have a sort of a werewolf refugee crisis these days… what with your laws here."

He gave them both a toothy grin. "Of course there's always my third Uncle twice removed. Real hermit. Lives in an underground dungeon, with like miles of tunnels under a mountain. He never had any trouble with vampire hunters though..."

Hermione took the bait. "Why not?"

"He floods the tunnels with carbon dioxide," Harry said. "Vampire hunters need to breathe. Vampires don't." He got a faraway look and snickered. "There was one time he replaced all the carbon dioxide canisters with helium… he said the look on that Van Helsing guy's face before he passed out was priceless." He pinched his nose and began reciting in a high squeaky voice. "Ach, foul vight, your vicked vays shall end mit-- vat? Vat in himmel? Vat is wrrrrrong mit my voice??--"

Hermione nearly doubled over laughing; Neville and Ron just laughed awkwardly like they weren't sure they got the joke. "We'll have to show you a trick with a muggle helium balloon some time," Harry told them.

Any further conversation was interrupted as Professor McGonnigal had appeared. She gave them all a brief lecture on the virtues of the various Houses, how they would be their home away from home, etc. Mention was made of a Sorting, and a test-- which promptly generated some small panic among the student body. The professor though was on a roll and ignored any of the questions the firsties blurted out. "DO take a moment to smarten yourselves up," McGonnagall said, eyeing a couple of the more disheveled students with stern eyes and pursed lips. "We will be letting you in shortly." She then vanished back through the door, shutting it behind her with a dull boom.

Hermione fretted aloud that it might be written; had she studied enough? More alarming was Ron's muttering something about having to wrestle a troll. They didn't have much time to worry about it though.

There were sudden loud shrieks. Two ghosts had just floated through the wall next to them! The two were arguing aloud about some matter or the other, and didn't seem to notice as they passed right through the students, throwing several of them into a terrible fright. One of the ghosts, a fat man in a monk's robe and cassock, seemed to notice them at last and looked down at them with a mellow smile. "Oh my, Firsties," he said. "Is it really Sorting time again…? I hadn't realized it was that time again."

Harry suddenly let out a loud snort, drawing several surprised glances. He gave no explanation though; simply staring at the ghosts through his smoked glasses with a raised eyebrow and a thin smirk on his face.

This seemed to throw the specter off his stride somehow. "Didn't mean to frighten you all," he said with increasingly false cheer. "Bit of a thing, all us ghosts roaming about, it happens from time to time--" he trailed off as Harry's eyebrow rose further. "Well, er, I… hope to see you in Hufflepuff… my old house… not all of you of course, but um, a good few… nothing wrong with the other--"

The other ghost, a courtly looking fellow with an enormously wide ruffled collar, coughed discreetly into his fist. "Perhaps we should be going," he said discreetly. "Don't want to be late..."

"Quite." With an air of relief the two ghosts fled-- back through the wall they had entered by. Harry stretched out his arms and proceeded to give the departed Departed a slow theatrical clap. "Bravo," he said dryly. "Nicely staged..."

Hermione gave him a confused and possibly offended look. "What..?"

Harry leaned over to her. "They were winding us up, Hermione," he said gently. "What? It's obvious that was a setup. 'Didn't know it was that time again,' my great-grandfather's false teeth. They've obviously been haunting this castle for hundreds of years; they probably know the schedule better than the teachers do. And they somehow missed the roomful of people on the other side of that door? … I can hear their heartbeats from here," he explained.

"Ghosts in magical homes and mansions are always doing that to new visitors," he informed the muggleborn girl. "They just wanted to see how many ickle firsties and muggleborns they could get a rise out of."

Several students relaxed a bit. Ron even rolled his eyes. "I can't believe I fell for that," he muttered. "Da warned me that ghosts are always doing that sort of thing..."

Harry snorted. "They thought that was clever," he said. "The little initiation ritual the ghosts at my Dad's castle put newbies through, they would've needed to bring out a mop and bucket and fresh undies for everyone."

McGonagall returned. "Come along, it's time to begin."She then led them into the Great Hall, between the rows of tables. Nearly everyone took a moment to gawk at the ceiling, which Hermione informed them was enchanted to look as if it were open to the sky and was now filled end to end with rumbling black clouds. They milled forward in a huddle…

All save for Harry, who strode slowly but confidently ahead of the others, his robes billowing around him in a manner that would be the envy of his future potions teacher, his fanged smile gleaming in the candlelight as faint flickers of lightning strobed in the windows and behind the clouds above. He looked like he belonged there, in a huge, drafty, candlelit castle or one like it; Hermione reflected that he looked every inch a Dark Lord marching up to take his iron throne-- or he would have, if he hadn't been only eleven years old and so short he'd have needed a step stool to keep his feet from dangling.

Then he and the crowd of firsties gathered up at the front of the room, and the moment was gone and he was just another pale-faced, black-robed Firstie among many.

McGonagall followed them up. She set a wooden stool upon the stage and upon the stool she set a battered old hat. The wrinkles on it creased and crumpled, folding into a face on the side that began to sing:

Oh you may not think I'm pretty,/But don't judge on what you see,/I'll eat myself if you can find/A smarter hat than me.

You can keep your bowlers black,/Your top hats sleek and tall,/For I'm the Hogwarts Sorting Hat/And I can cap them all….

The hat finished its solo number, everyone applauded politely (as one wit once said about a dancing bear, it wasn't so much that it danced well as that it danced at all) and the sorting began. Students were called, they marched (or crept, or sidled) forward, donned the hat and were sent off to join one of the four tables waiting for them, to cheers from their fellow housemates (and one or two catcalls from their rivals, from time to time.)

"Abbot, Hannah!" A young girl scurried to the stool and donned the hat.

"HUFFLEPUFF!" the hat roared.

Slowly the crowd of firsties thinned, and the tables filled. The stormclouds grew thicker and more turbulent, the lightning more frequent as the wind dashed against the invisible roof. As the sorting stretched on there was a sort of breathless air in the hall that seemed to get thicker by the moment. Everything seemed to be building to a crescendo.

"Orlock-Potter, Hadrian!" McGonagall said, stumbling a bit at the unexpected added syllables. "Er, POTTER, HARRY!"

Thunder BOOMED. Half the people in the room raised an inch out of their seats. When they came back down and caught their breaths, Harry was already seated and the Hat was slipping down over his ears.

Oooh my, said the Hat on (and in) Harry's head. Quite an… unexpected upbringing you've had, Mr. Orlock-Potter.

I know, right? Harry replied. And just go with Harry Potter. We're all friends here right?

Certainly, the Hat chuckled. Now let's see… hmm… oh my. My oh my. The Hat sounded… distinctly perturbed as it perused Harry's memories. My, that IS a lot of torches and pitchforks… how on earth did you fit THAT inside a ballroom?… werewolf rides??… the entire village got a restraining order?… that's not supposed to explode! It's not even supposed to be flammable!…

The Hat muttered to itself for an alarmingly long time. My word. My word indeed. Well you certainly are a challenge to sort… and thank Merlin once I've sorted you you're someone else's problem, it added in an ominous undertone.

So let's go over them. Ahem. Hufflepuff…

The Villagers-With-Torches-and-Pitchforks House, Harry contributed facetiously.

Hm, not what I would have said but I could see them doing that on a bad day, yes, the hat said wryly. Perhaps Ravenclaw…

Oooh, the Mad Scientist house, Harry said.

Indeed, they'd either all end up as your minions working down in the lab, or dissecting you to see what makes you tick, the Hat said. And Slytherin--- good heavens no--
'Heaven won't let me in but Hell is afraid I'd take over,' right? Harry thought with a carnivorous grin.

'The school has enough troubles with the House of Snakes without me letting a Mongoose loose inside it,' the Hat said witheringly. "They are a pitiful tribute to their forefathers. There are some few good ones among them but most count it 'ambition' to dream of being the biggest fish in a very small pond… you on the other hand would be a shark among guppies.

'So in review, you'd scare Hufflepuff into a perpetual state of panicked mob, Ravenclaw would give you a talent pool of unprincipled geniuses that I shudder to imagine what they'd get up to for you, And you're completely out of the most cunning Slytherin's league--- the only house even remotely capable of coping with your habitual state of unruly behavior, reckless risk-taking, complete disregard for law and order and your perpetual aura of imminent chaos with anything resembling aplomb would be--

"GRYFFINDOR!"

KRA-KA-KA-BADOOM! As the Hat made its pronouncement, a bolt of lightning split the stormy night sky overhead, throwing everything in blinding illumination. This time everyone DID jump in their seats. Many screamed. More than one or two even passed out.

Nice touch, the Hat said.

Thanks, Harry replied. People always seemed to forget that Vampires did have some influence over the weather... He got to his feet, removed the Hat and sketched a sweeping bow, first to the student body, then to McGonagall, then to the teachers seated at the high table behind the unsorted First-years. "It's an honor to be here," he said, letting his smoke-bespectacled eyes track meaningfully over the teachers and staff seated there. Some were looking shocked (and slightly deaf), others looked intrigued. The one in the purple turban looked positively sick; the hook-nosed, greasy haired one next to him looked positively livid, his face a barely held wooden mask over seething fury. The Headmaster on the other hand was leaning forward, his chin resting on folded hands, the benevolent, grandfatherly expression on his face not quite reaching his glittering eyes.

"I'm looking forward to working with you all," Harry finished, his spectacles locking onto the Headmaster's eyes. "Some of us have so much to catch up on."

Thunder cracked again, and something flickered in the Headmaster's eyes; something deeply apprehensive. Giving everyone a WIDE, toothy grin, Harry turned about and marched down to the Gryffindor table where two of his three friends from the train already waited.

The celebratory antics at the table were a bit… stilted.

"What was all that about?" Hermione stage-whispered to him as he took a seat.

"What?" Harry said blithely as he tucked his robes around himself. He didn't look at her.

"Oh ve haff so much to ketch up on," she said. "That!"

"Yeah, Harry," Neville mumbled under his breath. "For a second there it looked like you were trying to murder the teachers with your eyes. It was kind of creepy." The round faced boy looked unsettled.

"You do remember me telling you my story on the train, didn't you?" Harry said a bit testily. "Half the staff at least was in on that little crime. Dumbledore's the one who dumped me on a doorstep like a newspaper when I was a baby. And McGonagall and that big guy Hagrid helped him do it!"

Hermione and Neville's mouths formed "o"s of surprise. "How-- how do you know--" Neville asked.

"My parents hired Para Investigators Incorporated when they adopted me," Harry grunted. "They're a Private Investigators company.They got Aurors, Muggle detectives, werewolf trackers, a couple of gypsy seers-- the works. They are GOOD at what they do." His lip twitched. " They got the full story. Dumbledore had Hagrid beat the Aurors to the scene, and snatch me out of the rubble of my parents' house before their bodies even cooled. Then he and McGonagall--"

"Professor McGonagall," Hermione said automatically. She regretted it the moment she saw the look he gave her from the corner of his eye.

"And he and McGonagall," he repeated, "stick a note on me and dump me on my relative's doorstep in the middle of the night. Then they fly off and leave me there for a rogue ghoul with the munchies to find an hour later." He growled a little, pausing to applaud as someone else was Sorted. "Let's just say they're not my favorite people in the world."

"But.. but that breaks about a dozen laws!" Hermione protested, her whispering rising dangerously loud. "Kidnapping, child endangerment--"

"You better believe Dump-on-my-Door--"

"Harry!"

"--spent a pretty Knut or two keeping his bearded arse out of jail and the story out of the newspapers," Harry noted. "But the real kicker is this: he did everything in his power to keep Voldemort's people out of Azkaban, too."

"What??"

"Oh yeah. That bearded old goat spent a LOT of money and time in the Wizengamot, pleading for leniency for every Death Eater they caught-- and getting more than a few of them off." He nodded in the direction of the head table, not quite suppressing a sneer. "Kinda makes you wonder whose side he's really on, don't it. So, like I said. Not my favorite people in the world." His smile was pure malevolence. "I intend to make Headmaster Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore's next seven years as interesting as possible."

Ron was sorted, and all but ran to sit in the spot next to his friends. "So what were you all whispering about?" he asked. Hermione was looking… distraught for some reason.

"Dinner," Harry said, his mood changing suddenly. Up at the podium, the Headmaster gave the signal for the Welcoming Feast to begin. Instantly the tables were filled to groaning with food of every sort.

There were trays, platters, and bowls heaped high, with pitchers of pumpkin juice dispersed here and there in between-- save right in front of Harry's own place; there, a pitcher of something considerably thicker and darker colored waited for him. He filled a silver goblet that had materialized from somewhere and saluted his friends. "Dig in," he said. "We got big days ahead of us."




"Okay," Harry said as he set out the potion-making kit at their desk. "Before he gets here and gives us our first potion to do, we'd better sort this out. I'll handle the mixing and adding, you handle the cutting and measuring."

"Why do you get to do the mixing?" Ron protested, half joking.

"Because I'm the Vampire Prince, and it's my turn to be Doctor Frankenstein," Harry said. "And you know what that leaves you to be."

Ron grinned. They'd spent the weekend watching old black and white horror 'moo-vees' on one of Harry's electronic gadgets. "I dunno, but I've got a hunch."

Harry stared at him through his smoked glasses. "That was bad, and you should feel bad," he said.

"Aw, it was funny."

"It was terrible. I should bite you for that. I should have Lurch bite you for that. Lurch, where are you? Come over here and bite him."

"Good thing he's still up in the tower attic."

"Nuts, thwarted again." Harry snapped his fingers.

The door to the dungeon laboratory (Dungeon Lab.... Harry approved of the aesthetics, if not the practicality) boomed shut. Severus Snape, Potions master, glided across the room to stand behind his podium. He glowered at the class over his hook nose for several seconds as if waiting for silence (there was no need; you could have already heard a pin drop.) Once he was certain he'd set the dramatic mood firmly enough, he began to take attendance.

Eventually he arrived at Harry's name. It couldn't have been more obvious he had an axe to grind if he'd been projecting it to the back row in an operetta. He gave the vampire boy a gimlet stare. "Ah. Mister Potter. Our new… celebrity." He drawled the last word almost luxuriously. He scowled suddenly, as Harry hadn't ceased arranging the potion-making equipment on their table as he spoke. "Pay attention to me, boy!" he snapped. "Don't think your fame buys you any leniency with me!"

Harry's hands stilled. Ron felt his growing anger at Snape for tweaking his friend about his "fame" suddenly replaced by a vague nervousness. Harry was TOO still; unnaturally so. Ron was put in mind of an ambush predator about to strike. "Are you talking about that whole 'boy-who-lived' thing, Sir?" Harry said politely. "Because I'm pretty sure Wallachian Princes don't make the news much here."

Snape seethed. Snape was a small, mean and petty man. He had ruined his own life with his bigotries and hatreds, and had spent the last twelve years taking his bitterness out on everyone around him-- especially his luckless students. Every day of his misery he still blamed on everyone but himself, but especially his childhood nemesis, James Potter. He had been filled with bitter gall to learn that his old nemesis' spawn was going to attend Hogwarts'. His discovery that the son of James Potter was now some sort of foreign royalty had nearly thrown him into an apoplexy. His only comfort had been the knowledge that the pampered brat would be at his mercy as one of his students, and he fully intended to flay and eviscerate the boy with his tongue at every opportunity.

"Every inch your disreputable father's son, I see," he said. "Spoiled, disrespectful and arrogant from start to finish. A pity your mother had to suffer the indignity of knowing -- look at me when I'm speaking to you, boy!" he barked. "And-- take off those ridiculous tinted glasses this minute!"

"…As you wish, sir." A chill settled over the room that had nothing to do with the dungeon damp. It might have been a figment of imagination, but everyone who had been there agreed later that as Harry had looked up and removed his spectacles, every open candleflame and cauldron burner had dimmed and guttered, throwing the room into flickering shadow.

As for Snape, he found himself nearly swallowing his tongue as two burning emerald eyes limned in coal red latched onto his. The moment the spectacles had come off he had of course lashed out with his Legilimency at the boy-- it was a favorite trick of his when dealing with those he considered impertinent or disrespectful; peeling loose their surface thoughts and then dropping them in the ensuing conversation, flaying them alive with their own insecurities. This time though it was a different story. He did not break through the weak walls of a child's mind into a treasure vault of tumbled-together deeply private memories. No, it was as if his probe had fallen into an empty room-- or perhaps more aptly, a black and bottomless well. All the room around them faded to black and he could not look away from the boy's eyes.

"You stupid prick," the miniature version of James Potter-- and yet more, oh so much more-- chuckled at him, gloating. "You actually tried to use Legilimency on a VAMPIRE PRINCE?"

Snape made a gargling noise. "Oh, don't worry, Gargamel," the boy sneered, stepping out from behind his desk. "None of the other Smurfs will hear. This is all in your mind right now; noone else will hear or see a thing. … Then again, that's probably not too comforting right now is it? Seeing as you just insulted me AND my dead Mother and Father in one breath." Snape realized he was sitting behind his desk, the boy somehow looming impossibly huge over him, glowing red-green eyes riveting his soul in place.

"Let me make the immediate future real simple for you, Professor Snape. I know all about you and my mother. When my parents adopted me they employed a passel of private investigators; they wanted to know everything possible about the baby they'd just turned and adopted. So yeah, I know you and my mother were childhood friends. I know that you and my parents were classmates, and that you spent seven years pining away after her, even though she was a 'mudblood.' I know you were RIVALS with my father for her, long after it was clear you had no chance.

"Let me spell it out. SHE WAS NEVER GOING TO F$@# YOU."

Snape made noises of outrage at the profanity. How dare this brat sully the--- "No no no, get it straight," Harry said. "I'm a Vampire Prince and I'm in your MIND, dumbass. You're an open book to me. Hell, you're a wall mural. You weren't in love with her. You COVETED HER. You thought that because you found her first, before anyone else in the wizarding world did, you somehow had DIBS on her.

But she was NEVER going to do you. She was NEVER going to be yours. She was a muggleborn, you pot-stirring retard, and you joined the Death Eaters… a bunch of people who killed muggleborns for shits and giggles. You were a neonazi skinhead trying to get in the pants of a jew. What did you THINK was going to happen when a nicer guy came along?"

Snape tried to rise from his chair and found he couldn't. "Nicer Guy?? James Potter..was an arrogant.. bully..." Snape rasped, seething as he struggled.

"Why? Because he pulled pranks and picked on YOU and your Death Eater pals? What part of 'I Was a Teenage Magical Nazi' doesn't REGISTER with you??" Harry snarled back, literally eyes blazing. "I'm in your head, dumbass. And even before that my parents had investigators backtracking my life, and my parent's lives, and the lives of everyone tied to them... the Death Eaters, the Order of the Phoenix, everything. It pays to have paranoid royalty for parents. I knew your school records even before you tried to poke me in the brain.

"Yeah, they harassed and picked on you-- and your Death Eater Youth Club friends-- and you DESERVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT!"

His pale hand lashed out and sank into Snape's forehead. Snape could feel him digging through the bookshelves and filing cabinets of his mind, rifling through memories Snape had thought carefully hidden and locked away by his Occlumency. When Harry's hand reappeared, it was holding a fistful of manila folders. Harry waved them in his face, flipping through them at random.

"Terrorizing muggleborn firsties! Casting curses and hexes on half-bloods and 'blood traitors!' Hazing, extorting, blackmailing--—trying to get another student expelled for lycanthropy-- dabbling with Dark magic, even filling your textbook margins with dark curses to use on your enemies... And lookee here-- "he held up a page that looked like it had been torn from a potions textbook. "Your personal favorite spell. 'Sectumsempra.' You'd go to the infirmary with your skin turned green or your hair turned to a clown wig; my father and his friends went to the healer looking like you threw bags of razor blades at them. You really were a little piece of shit. And you wonder why you were James Potters' favorite target?" He threw the folders at Snape's chest.

"My birth father may have been a jerk jock, but he got better. You on the other hand ran off to join Voldemort before the ink was even dry on your diploma. Oh yeah, I knew you were a 'former' Death Eater before I even got on the Express. My parents weren't about to send me anywhere one of Voldemort's trained monkeys lived without a careful once-over ahead of time."

He planted his hands on the desk and leaned forward till he was almost nose-to-crooked-nose with Snape, and smiled like a shark at a baby leg buffet. "You were a Death Eater, one of Voldemort's favorites-- and yet here you are, WORKING FOR DUMBLEDORE. Who bent over backwards double to keep your greasy butt out of Azkaban. My Dad really wanted to know why-- it bugs him when people who tried to kill family members don't get prison time-- but all he got out of GeezerBeard the Great was 'Snape has my complete trust," over and over.

"You know what I think that means? I think that means that the reason Dumbledore knew down to the minute when to come fetch me from my dead parents was because YOU knew. And you did nothing to prevent it." His smile vanished. "Here, let me replay you one of MY memories," he said, waving his robes like a cloak in the air. The room filled with dark.

Then there were voices. A man, and a woman. A child crying. Then another voice; chilling and cruel.

"He's coming! Take Harry, I'll hold him off--"

"No, please! Take me, but please spare Harry--"

"Stand aside woman, I promised I would spare you--"

"No!"

Then a flash of green light, and silence.

The room reappeared; Harry glowering with naked hate at the potions professor. "Is that what he promised you?" he said, his voice getting louder and louder. "Is that what you asked of him? That he spare my mother? For YOU to claim?"

"I… tried.. to save her..." Snape choked, his own denial and self-deception gagging him.

"My FATHER tried to save her! And me! He stood between Voldemort and us and DIED FIGHTING. You didn't try to save her. You tried to save her for yourself."

Harry hissed. "You hid off in a corner and tried to manipulate other people into saving her for you. What did you think was going to happen, huh? That she was going to see you standing there, come running to you with her arms wide open, trip over me and my father's corpses and land on your dick?" Snape made a strangled, anguished sound. "Do you think she'd like you better NOW-- after you've spent TEN YEARS tormenting kids, and whining about how unfair it was that someone else got the piece of ass you were after in high school? When you just tried to DUMP on me for looking like my dead father?"

A taloned hand grabbed the man by his throat and lifted him into the air. "You were a DEATH EATER. You knew he was coming for my family. You knew when, and where, down to the MINUTE. And all you did was try and play both sides against the middle, and pitch Voldemort and Dumbledore at each other so you could pick up the pieces. You killed my mother the same as if you stuck your wand in her mouth and blew her brains out."

Snape made a sound like a dying animal. Here, in his own mind, he couldn't escape the truth-- the truth that had been echoing inside his own skull for over a decade. Harry pulled him in close. The whole world was filled with those burning red-green eyes.

"Here's the deal, Snape. You try and get up on your hind legs and act like a MAMMAL. You stop terrorizing the kids in your classes, or playing favorites with the Snakes while harassing the Lions. You manage to go seven years and don't try to bully my friends, or my House, or ME, and MAYBE, just MAYBE, I 'll leave in seven years and NOT gut you like a trout. Sound good? Yeah, I thought so."

"But just in case you think I'm bluffing..."

The blackness receded briefly. Snape slumped behind the desk in his mindscape, gasping for air, eyes round. Harry fished in his pocket and pulled something out, and set it on the desk between them. It was a rubber duck. A rubber duck with a widows peak, and a little black cape, and tiny little vampire fangs in its smiling bill.

Snape stared. "This is my friend Mister Quackers," Harry said. "He's a good friend of mine, ever since I was one year old and took my first bath. He's going to be staying with you now. If you act up-- if you start being mean to kids, or grading their work unfairly-- and you KNOW its unfair-- or you start docking points for petty reasons or anything like that… well, Mr. Quackers will be VERY UPSET WITH YOU."

Some of Snape's old attitude came back. He was an Occlumens and Legilimens; he wasn't about to be intimidated by some silly post-hypnotic suggestion. He could wipe such things from his mind as casually as a breeze. "You impertinent, arrogant, spoiled little son of a mudblood shit--"

Suddenly the fist-sized rubber duck was gone. In its place was a gigantic, two thousand pound ball of webbed feet, feathers and hate squatting on his desk, its entire mass heaving with every deep, rasping breath.

Snape tried to evaporate it with his Occlumency. He might as well have tried to move the Rock of Gibraltar by blowing on it through a straw. The Duck of Hell glared down over its fanged beak at him with beady, hellish eyes.

"Woopsie. You said the M word." the damned Potter boy sniggered. "That means the duck comes down."

The duck lunged. Snape screamed.




The students were gathered around Snape's desk. It had been a strange class indeed; in mid tirade the Professor had suddenly slumped over. A couple of quick-thinking Slytherins and Gryffindors had caught him and lowered him into his seat behind his desk, where he'd sat ever since, staring into space across his desk.
That had been about five minutes ago. The class forgotten, the students were now gathered around the desk. Some looked as if they were debating whether to fetch Madame Pomfrey, the healer; others looked as if they were debating whether to seize the day and draw something on Snape's slack face with their quills. Ron and Hermione, however, were looking as if they wanted to interrogate Harry, who was staring off into a corner and whistling innocently.

"What should we do?" Hermione said.

Harry looked at her. He looked at Snape. Wordlessly he reached into a pocket, pulled out of all things a rubber ducky and set it on the desk in front of the Professor.
Snape's rolling eyes drifted down and locked on the ducky. His shriek of horror nearly sent the class running for the far side of the room. "Professor Snape! Are you all right??" Draco Malfoy said.

Snape continue to stare at the duck, his back rigid and his hands clawing at the arms of his chair. "CLASS DISMISSED !!" he squealed in a high falsetto. Every student froze and stared at this pronouncement. "I SAID CLASS DISMISSED! NOW! GET OUT!!" Students hastily began cramming their things into their bookbags and fleeing for the door. "AND DEAR GOD TAKE THE DUCK WITH YOU!!" He shrilled at their fleeing backs. Crabbe and Goyle hastily grabbed for the tiny rubber toy and hustled out the door, clutching it between them in an awkward two-man carry.

The last student barely made it out the door before it slammed and locked behind them. Hermione, Ron and Neville all stared at Harry; their demand for an explanation was as plain as day on their faces.

So naturally Harry ignored it. "Well, that was an interesting first class," he said cheerfully. "Can't wait to see what happens next time, can you?"

"I think I could," Neville said weakly. He was still clutching his chest. His heart had nearly burst through it when Snape screamed.

"Lunch it is, then? Lunch sounds good," Ron proffered.

"Yes," Hermione said faintly. "Lunch."



The teachers poured in through the shattered bathroom door. The sight that greeted them was horrific. Quirrel slumped to the floor, clutching his chest; McGonagall got rather faint herself-- though she'd deny it. Sprawled amongst the shattered remains of the girl's lavatory was a mountain troll. It was very large, very foul and seeing as its skull was cracked with its own club and its throat had been ripped out clear to the spine, very, very dead. Blood was sprayed everywhere-- the walls, the floor, even here and there on the ceiling, over the shattered remains of several sinks and toilet stalls and over three students…

One of whom was slumped over a toilet, noisily emptying the contents of his stomach. The other two on the other hand seemed to be ARGUING, of all things, even as grue and gore dripped from them. "IS THIS HOW YOU GIRL GENIUSES HANDLE THINGS?" Harry was yelling. "Running off to the bathroom to howl all day like Moaning Myrtle? Were you hoping to end up like her, is that it?"

Hermione's face was tear and snot streaked, but she was giving as good as she got. "He didn't have to say those mean things about me--" she squalled.

"Oh yeah, in a PRIVATE CONVERSATION which you OVERHEARD," Harry snapped. "Eavesdroppers rarely hear anything they LIKE, Hermione. What'd you EXPECT him to say? You showed him up, then you lectured him like a little boy at the top of your voice in front of everyone like you were his MOTHER. You embarrassed him in front of the entire class! You're always doing that to Ron and Neville and me, nagging us, lecturing us, trying to boss us around, your nose stuck in the air about how much smarter you are than everyone else--"

Hermione made a sound that reminded McGonagall of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. "If you all don't want to be friends anymore you should have just SAID--"
Harry threw his arms wide, spattering the gawking teachers with a few drops of grue. "WHY WOULD WE BE HERE IF YOU WEREN'T OUR FRIEND?" he bellowed.

"Ron is always--"

"Ron is the one who sounded the charge when nobody knew where you were!" Harry said. "I was too busy trying to keep BumbleShmuck from sending half the school down to the basement where the TROLL WAS!-- Oh, hey, Professor McGonagall," he said, seemingly just now noticing her. He turned to her and gave her a beaming smile. It was not a comforting sight with all the blood covering his chest and chin. "You missed all the action."

"Minerva, what--" Professor Flitwick finally caught up, stumbling through the doorway and gaping up at the carnage. "Ye gods and little fishes, it's on the ceiling..."

"What..." McGonagall felt her gorge rise; the smell of troll was not improved by death. She forced it down and went on. "Harry-- what happened here??"

"Well." Harry took on the air of someone giving a presentation. "Hermione here embarrassed Ron in class earlier today-- you remember, Professor Flitwick.."

"Indeed I do," Flitwick said. He was half goblin; he wasn't therefore too distracted by the gore. He reflected with some mild disgruntlement that someone was going to have to take Miss Granger aside and explain to her exactly who should be lecturing whom in his class...

"Well she overheard Ron grousing about it and got all upset, came up here to do the girl thing and bawl about it in a bathroom stall." Harry paused and glared at Hermione. "For TWELVE HOURS." Hermione withered a little. "So when Professor Quirrel--" He waved to the DADA teacher still sitting on the floor, clutching his chest--"came in yelling about the Troll, We realized… well, Ron was the first to realize.. Hermione wasn't there. He was REAL wound up about it, blamed himself and insisted he had to do something…. So we sent Neville to tell you what was up, and went tearing off to try and find Hermione before the troll did." He looked around then held up a thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. "Missed it by thaaaaat much."

"Did… anything… happen to you?" McGonagall said faintly.

Harry scratched his head and looked around. "More like WE happened to IT," he said. "We got here just as it got through the bathroom door-- we tried chucking things at it to distract it, but Hermione kept screaming and it kept going for her, so Ron used a Leviosa on its club, smashed its skull in."

"Ah, see? Now I knew he could get it eventually," Flitwick beamed. "Ten points to Gryffindor, Mr. Weasley."

"Yurgh," said the bathroom stall.

"But it wasn't going down… I guess trolls are like cockroaches, they can keep going for ages without a brain?… so I climbed up its back and ripped its throat out with my teeth." He gave the teachers a rather bloody smile. They blanched.

Ron came staggering out of the stall, wiping his mouth. "thuh-that was awful," he said. He looked over at Hermione. "Mione, I'm sorry," he said. "Are you okay? You aren't hurt, are you? I-I couldn't live with myself if..."

Hermione, her face streaked with tears and snot and her clothes streaked with blood, looked over at Ron. Her eyes melted. "You mean that…?" she said feebly.

Harry held up a finger. "Not to be rude but I think you should all know," he said cheerfully, "That, speaking as a vampire, troll tastes even worse than it smells. Scuse me--" he lunged for one of the remaining stalls, nearly plunging headlong down the commode.

Snape and Dumbledore were the next to arrive. Snape for some reason was limping badly and looking thunderous. Dumbledore was looking grandfatherly. Both, however, now looked poleaxed.

"What in heaven's name..."Dumbledore said, staring in awe at the carnage.

"HHYYUARRRLLGGALLLLPPHHH!" Said Harry.

 

[RHJunior]

Rarity's shriek could be heard all the way to down town Ponyville. In alarm, the human and the other four ran around to the back of Fluttershy's cottage. They were all brought to a screeching halt, stunned immobile by the sight that greeted their eyes; Rarity, passed out in Fluttershy's begonias, all four hooves in the air...

And Fluttershy, covered in grue, dragging a disemboweled moose on a pallet behind her and as chipper as could be. She had an axe, saw, and machete strapped over her back, equally spattered in blood. "Oh, hello, everyone," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't have time to clean up yet--"

"Fluttershy??" Twilight exclaimed in horror. She waved a hoof at the grue-fest before her. "...What??"

Fluttershy looked back at the dead animal as if she'd just remembered it was there. "Oh. This." She looked sad for a moment. "I had to deliver last rites for Mister Moose."

"Last... Rites?" Applejack and Rainbow Dash said together.

Fluttershy nodded. "It's part of my job," she said, gently chiding. "I thought you knew?" At their speechless head-shake she went on. "Well, when an animal gets very old or sick or gets injured in a very bad way, they ask for me--- I go to them and... make their passing easier." She held out a paring knife. "A little nick to the carotid artery, and soon it's all over. It's a much more merciful way to go than being torn apart by a pack of timberwolves."

Twilight looked a little green. "But... why did you bring the body back here??"

"Oh, I normally don't... unless there's an animal I'm caring for who needs it," she said. "And our human friend here is an omnivore so I knew he'd be needing proper protein soon." Her cheerful giggle would disturb said human's dreams for months. "Oh, I could use a hoof doing the skinning and butchering, Mr. Human. That is, if you don't mind..."

"I wouldn't think of doing otherwise, Fluttershy," he said gratefully. "I still have my skinning knife-- it'd probably be better than that paring knife for severing the tendons..."

"Yurgh," Twilight responded.

"Of course I already left the entrails behind," Fluttershy said. "They don't keep very long, and my wild animal friends prefer those parts so--" Twilight turned a vivid shade of green and raced for a nearby trash barrel.

"Entrails?" Pinkie quavered.

"Yes, the lungs and stomach and all," Fluttershy said. She pointed to the carcass' belly. "It's very simple. You just slit the belly open, reach inside and--"

Pinkie proceeded to offer a heathen sacrifice to a nearby shrubbery.

"Fluttershy-- thank you so much. You are literally a life saver. Umm, did you keep the heart or liver?" the lone omnivore in the group asked. "Most of the nutrients I need are richest in the liver."

"Of course," Fluttershy reassured him. "Once I cut out all the offal I stuck the heart and liver back in the body cavity to keep them safe while I--" and that did it for Applejack and Rainbow Dash; they bolted for the tree line and began calling mightily on the great god O'Rourke.

The blood-spattered pegasus looked about at her friends and tsked. "Oh really, girls....what did you all think I fed all my little obligate carnivore animal friends?" She said. "Carrots?"

 

[RHJunior]

Summary:

The mane six have been imbued with the power of the Rainbow of Harmony. Celestia and Luna have come to them, informing them that their presence is requested: they need to make a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Order of Harmony, to be taught the deeper secrets of their new magic.
One catch: they must go as supplicants. Which means that they all have to shave off their manes and tails.
Rarity is not pleased, and she proceeds to take great pains to let them all know WHY.
An alternative take on the story Last Evening Together by Pen Stroke...

Click to shrink...

• Inspired by Last Evening Together by Pen Stroke.

"What?" Celestia said, taken aback.

"I said no," Rarity said, with an air of finality. "I am not going to cut my mane and tail off for some bucking monastery!"

It was an impasse. The mane six had made such incredible discoveries. The Box of Secrets had been opened; they had been imbued with the power of the Rainbow of Harmony, they had been given a new home in the form of the Castle of Friendship. Then Celestia and Luna had arrived, informing them that their training was almost complete... all that was left was a pilgrimage to a long hidden monastery-- the same monastery where Celestia and Luna had first learned of the Elements in their quest to defeat Discord. Here they would learn the final secrets of the Magic of Harmony from the monks and their ancient tomes. They would be gone for only a few days or weeks, but that was not the problem.

The problem was that to gain entry, all of them-- even Celestia and Luna themselves-- would go as supplicants. Which meant that they would be expected to shave off their manes and tails. Most of them were resigned to it.

There were two present who were not so happy about it. The lone male in the room was of a different opinion. "This is horrible!" Spike said, clutching his head. "Rarity? Shaved bald? It's-- it's a desecration!!" He stared in horror at Celestia. "Say you're joking!"

Rarity, predictably, was not happy either. "Indeed, tell us this is some sort of jest," she said.

"Rarity, this trip is essential," Twilight said. "We need to go to this monastery to learn more about the rainbow powers we now have, to gain more enlightenment in what they mean and how they are used..."

"And to do that," Rarity said, her ears folded back and her eyes wide, "It is necessary that we have our manes and tails shorn off? In what cosmology does that make any sense?"

"It is a symbolic gesture of humility," Luna said, frowning.

Rarity's eyebrows tabled. "A gesture," Rarity said scornfully, "Which I shall be left out. I am sorry, your Highnesses, but I shall not do this." She got up out of her seat. "Now that that is settled, I must return to the boutique. Good day, your Highnesses." With that, she left the throne room, her imperiled mane tossed haughtily as she passed out the door.

The rest of the mane six were shocked. The princesses were floored. Twilight was practically going into vapors that anypony would outright refuse a request by Celestia. Celestia, to say the least, was equally flabbergasted. She had never received an outright refusal from any of her little ponies for anything in multiple lifetimes. She was was so shocked she had no idea quite how to respond. Luna was equally stunned... but, still a bit at sea in this more lenient era, followed her sister's lead and let the fashionista depart.

The others watched her leave, stunned. Applejack was the first to speak up. "Well, shoulda figured she'd be the one who'd spit her bit," she snorted.

"Yeah, I sorta saw that one comin' too," Rainbow Dash said. "Sorry, Princesses, but the minute you said we hadda show up there 'with our manes and tails shorn,' I knew Rarity would freak."

"This is outrageous," Luna said angrily, stamping a hoof so hard that the crystal floor of the Friendship Palace chipped. "Are we to forego this vital path of enlightenment for the sake of one mare's petty vanity??"

"Well I'm with Rarity," Spike proclaimed defiantly. "Forcing her to shave off her beautiful mane and tail--"

"Spike, this is necessary..." Celestia said, exasperated.

"Says who?" Spike demanded. "Some old fart in a monastery?"

"SPIKE!"

Twilight danced on her hooftips anxiously. "I'll... I'll go talk with her," she said.

"And I with you," Celestia said. "I'm sure we can talk some sense into her between us."

"That goes double for the rest of us," Applejack said, setting her hat and following after. The others soon fell in behind. They made a beeline out of the castle. The group, led by Twilight and Celestia, marched through Ponyville to the Carousel Boutique-- and found the door barred by Rarity. The fashionista stood in the doorway, hoof held out.

"Oh no no no, no you don't," she said scathingly. "You are NOT going to mob me and try to bowl me over with sheer numbers. If you want to talk to me, you want to persuade me to submit to this, this DESECRATION, you'll speak to me one at a time like civilized ponies. One at a time. That's all you get. That goes for you three too, your Highnesses," she said to an astonished Celestia, Luna, and Twilight. "Decide amongst yourselves who will speak first, but I'm not going to be bowled over by numbers-- or tiaras. I will be waiting inside. Knock when you've decided." The door slammed in their faces.

Once again, the royal triarchy found it flabbergasted. "I cannot believe she would do this," Celestia said, miffed.

Twilight shook her head. "You really don't know how fanatically devoted she is to fashion, Princess," she said. "There was one time she read about this one Canterlot fad in a magazine, and she made us help her take this carved ginger root and.... and... made us swear not to tell anypony ever oops..." the purple mare blushed raspberry.

Celestia stared at her former pupil, her eyes round. "She didn't," Celestia said. Twilight and Fluttershy looked at each other. The proverbial cat was out of the bag. They nodded. "...Ouch," was all Celestia could muster.

"It was awful," Fluttershy said. "She didn't sit down right for a week." She was understating the matter. Ten seconds after the fateful ginger application, Rarity's boutique had looked like someone had taken Opalescence, grown her to manticore size, and sprayed her with a riot hose. Even once the ginger had been dislodged the only thing that had ended the tears and calamity had been planting her rump in a tub of ice cream. Rarity looked askance at raspberry ripple to this day.

"Could we please move on," Twilight pleaded, rubbing her forehead with a hoof. "The point is that yes, she will go to incredible lengths for the sake of fashion and beauty. And if she thinks her vanity is threatened, she could dig her heels in hard enough to put Tirek at a standstill."

"That's it, I'm going in," Rainbow Dash said. She shoved past the others and went inside. The others heard voices raised for a few moments. Then shouting. Then a minor fracas. The next moment Rainbow Dash, bound and gagged in a roll of dress fabric, came flying out the front door on a wave of magic. She managed to untangle herself and spit out the wad of tulle. "She, uh," the pegasus said. "She didn't take it well when I told her we'd make her go, if we had to."

"No," Celestia said firmly. "We are not making her do anything."

"Forsooth, why not?" Luna said, incensed.

"What good would it do?" Celestia said. "We ourselves had to go the first time of our own free will. You cannot coerce somepony into enlightenment, sister, and if we forced her to participate..."

"You mean you can lead a pony to wisdom but you can't make them think?" Pinkie Pie said.

There was a long, painful pause. "Er, I wouldn't put it that way," Celestia said, wincing. "Not if I could at all avoid it... No. This calls for a gentler touch. We shall do as she asks, and speak to her one at a time."

They all reluctantly agreed.

It took three days before the message finally got through.



Twilight was the first to approach Rarity.

She found Rarity in the kitchen in the back of her shop, setting out tea and biscuits. "Ah, hello, Twilight," Rarity said. "I suspected you would be the first. Have a seat."
Twilight pulled up a cushion and sat at the table. This was an entirely different Rarity from the one who'd been throwing histrionics over her hair just a couple of hours ago. "And why did you figure that?" she asked, taking a biscotti.

Rarity poured them both a cup and sat down with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. "You're the self-titled Princess of Friendship, darling," she said. "That was a big hint." She picked up her cup, "Besides, I know you. And in a way I figured you were the one who would understand the least." She sipped. "And when you don't understand something, you just simply cannot leave it be."

"Understood the least?" Twilight said.

"Twilight darling, of all the ponies in our little group, you are the one who understands beauty and fashion the absolute least," she said. "Oh, the others can be dreadful at 'getting it,' but.... well for you everything is utilitarian. Not to say you aren't lovely, dear, but...

"Well, consider your mane-do, darling." She reached over and flipped at Twilight's bangs. "Fluttershy's hair is meticulously cared for. Pinkie actively cultivates her perky, fizzy look. Applejack may not do much with her mane or tail but she does take care of them; She thinks it's a waste of time but she at least knows what style IS. Even Rainbow Dash's windblown, careless style is a style. Though she'd die before she admitted it, of course.

"Your mane and tail, on the other hand--" Rarity gestured to Twilight's mane. "Square cut, with bangs. Even as a princess, you give no thought to it beyond what is functional enough to keep your tail from under your hooves and your mane out of your eyes." She looked regretful, patting Twilight's cheeks. "And you have such a pretty face; if you would just try a different style, one that framed your face properly-- oh well." She sat back and looked Twilight in the eye. "My talk of fashion and beauty and glamor, it isn't just a different language to you, it's as if I was talking on a wavelength you can't even hear. I might as well be speaking in dog whistles."

Twilight flushed, it was hard to say whether at the compliment, or the implication she couldn't understand something set in front of her. "I'm not completely ignorant about that sort of thing, Rarity..."

Rarity shook her head. "No, not ignorant. It's just invisible to you. To you, that mane and tail are just, just thatches of hair stuck on your head and rump. You don't see what I see when I look at a mare's mane and tail."

"And what do you see?" Twilight said.

"Her crowning glory," Rarity said. She looked down, her cheeks red. "You all think I'm vain and foalish."

Twilight humphed. "Of course I do. Princess Celestia and Luna are asking you to do one small thing--"

Rarity couldn't help but sniff. "Twilight, I do believe you'd chop off your own head if Celestia asked it of you," she said, vexed. "But more accurately, darling, it's not Celestia or Luna who's asking this of us. Its those ponies at the monastery." She sat up and slapped a hoof on the table. "And they should damned well know better!"

"Rarity, Celestia herself is going to participate," she said. "She did it herself, the first time she and Luna went to the monastery to learn of the Tree of Harmony and the Elements. Weren't you listening?"

"Yes, and I heard things you didn't apparently," Rarity huffed. "They're demanding this of their Princesses. And they've done it once already! And they're doing it AGAIN! And to you! And to the rest of us! Why do you think I'm balking so hard? Because none of you have the nerve to! You can't tell me that even YOU aren't a little upset at having yourself sheared like a sheep?"

"Rarity, if this doesn't matter to the Princesses, why should it matter to you?" Twilight groaned.

"Because it doesn't matter to them, and it SHOULD," Rarity said. "Or it does, and they're hiding it so deep that it doesn't show. That ANY mare of their era, or of all the eras they have passed through, should be asked to do this--" she stopped, looking down at the cup gripped between her hooves. Rarity gently set down her teacup. "Twilight," she said. "How much do you remember about the Gryphon Wars?"

Puzzled at the random topic, Twilight nevertheless rattled off the facts from memory. "The most recent one took place in 908-910, Celestian era," she said. "The Seventh Emperor of Gryphonia staged incursions into Pony territory, seizing---"

"No, no, dear," Rarity said. "Not the dates and names and numbers. The real stories. The personal ones. What happened to the ponies involved." At Twilight's stumped look, she continued. "Ah yes, it's easy to remember the Ponypedia entry, but not the blood and tears, isn't it?

"Tell me, Twilight," she said. "What happened to the prisoners of war?"

Twilight's eyes darted to the side and she tapped the floor with one hoof, uncomfortable. "The gryphons committed a number of... of war crimes and--"

"I'll tell you, darling," Rarity said. Her voice was soft but her tone was unyielding as steel. "About the mares, in particular. Those that were captured... were turned over to the Gryphon soldiers for their.... amusement." Rarity's voice skipped but she went on. "As slaves. Pets. And I don't think I need to tell you how the population of hippogriffs in the region jumped eleven months after the war, or why." Twilight cringed.

Rarity locked eyes with Twilight. "Among the other indignities they suffered, the first was deliberate. They were dragged in chains to the public square of their ruined villages, held down, and their manes and tails shorn off. Those who resisted were flogged-- and then shorn anyway." She paused, stroking her mane with one hoof. "My grandmother's mane grew back long ago, of course-- but she could still show me the scars from the whip."

Twilight's eyes went wide with sympathy and horror. But Rarity was far from through. She got to her feet and began pacing. "Do you know why they resisted being shorn so hard?" she challenged. "Because after all, they had just seen their loved ones slaughtered and their villages burned-- what could a little hair matter, after all? Because having your mane shorn like that marked you as a whore, Twilight. As sexual livestock. A... thing, to be owned and used. It was an act of utter defilement."

"It's an old tradition, shaving those meant to be defiled; you can find it all throughout history, all over the world. Mare or Stallion, it is a mark of degradation...Post unification, in the Pegasus communities the easiest way to spot a prostitute was by her shorn mane and tail. In the pre-modern times it was the mark of a slave-- done immediately after they were chained, to strip them of any individuality from any of the other living meat traded on the block. In the Moonlight rebellion in the 550s, it was the fate of any mare accused of 'collaborating' with the Lunar rebels. It's also done by fanatical cults as part of their rituals, to strip the initiates of their esteem and identity." She tossed her head. "One doesn't learn fashion and style without learning a little history behind it. Oh, the cultural background and the symbolism changes, but in every era, in every land, a mare with her head and tail shorn was being shamed."

Twilight tried to rally. "I know in times past what it meant..."

"And you think those monks, in their millennia old monastery, don't?" Rarity said. "After their Order has passed through all those epochs? Do you think they've forgotten? They make you shear your mane as an act of abasement, to strip you of your dignity, your individuality, to disgrace you as a mare..."

"It doesn't MEAN that anymore, Rarity!" Twilight cried, angry and frustrated.

"It doesn't?? Since when?" Rarity exclaimed. "Tell that to my grandmother. Tell that to every prisoner or slave who has their mane and tail clipped before they're even fitted for their prison garb. Tell that to the Saddle Arabians, who still 'shame' their 'adulterous' mares by shaving them bald.

"And in the here and now? One of the cruelest acts I ever saw was when I was still in school. A spiteful bunch of fillies cornered another, held her down and chopped off her mane. Her self-esteem was shattered, her humiliation complete." She looked away. "I know you're naive and insulated, Twilight, but even you have common sense. You don't need to be told how awful it is for a mare to lose her hair. Nopony needs to be told what a violation that is."

"A mare's mane and tail are her crown of glory as a mare, one that no throne can give. They violated her in an unspeakable way... tearing away a part of who she was.
"Ask yourself, Twilight; what sort of 'holy order' demands that a mare do that to herself?"



The next day, Fluttershy found herself at the boutique. Once again the tea set was out. Once again, Rarity found herself sitting across the table from an antagonist. It was all the crueler because of who it was. Fluttershy could be merciless with her gentleness.

Not to say that Fluttershy was cruel, or even happy to be doing this. She was one of Rarity's oldest and closest friends; she could see things in Rarity the others couldn't. Like how strained Rarity's eyes looked, or the faint sleepless lines forming under them. She knew that asking Rarity to do this was a crueler cut than anything they had asked of her before. But the others had been so adamant about the importance of this pilgrimage. And they had been in the right. Hadn't they?

She did her best. "But Rarity," Fluttershy said. "You once cut off your tail to give to a sea serpent. How is this any different?"

Rarity regarded her old friend. "Tell me, Fluttershy," she said. "Why do you wear mane and tail extensions?"

The butter yellow pegasus blushed at the sudden turning of the tables. "You know why. I told you."

"Say it anyway," Rarity urged. "Say it out loud."

Fluttershy blurted out the secret. "I... I give my hair to Locks of Love every year," Fluttershy said. "Then I wear extensions till it grows out again. They use my mane to make wigs for ponies that have lost their own manes and tails to sickness..."

"Some would say that's a rather trivial thing," Rarity said, sipping her chamomile. "It'll all grow back when they recover, won't it? Why could that possibly be important to you?"

"But it is important!" Fluttershy protested, upset. "Think of those poor fillies who have... lost their manes and tails.. and..." she paused as it started to sink home.
"And their dignity?" Rarity said, smiling meaningfully over the rim of her cup. "Here's something to think about, darling; how many mares and fillies have had their dignity stripped away by this monastery the way those fillies have had it stripped away by sickness? How long has it been since somepony told them 'no?'

"That is precisely why I cut off my tail for that sea serpent's mustache-- to preserve his dignity, though the rest of you didn't seem to see it that way." The corner of her mouth quirked up."And that's why I'm putting my hoof down now. I won't let somepony else have their self-esteem stripped away... and I won't let somepony else strip away mine, no matter how precious or special or superior they think they are." She sipped at her tea.

"You know, this is part of the problem ponies have. They can't tell the difference between humbleness, and self-loathing. And they think that being generous means having to give away everything of yourself until there's nothing left. But there's a bit of wisdom even older than that monastery, a bit that most people don't remember:
"If your compassion does not extend to yourself, then it is incomplete."


"Doggone it, Rares," Applejack said. "I'm gonna lay it on the line. If saving Sweetiebelle's life depended on you giving some old fart your hair, would you hesitate?"

Rarity didn't even look up from her sewing machine. "If some old fart was withholding something that important for something so petty, would you take his side? And more importantly, why? We've gotten by so far without one lick of advice from these Sages of the Ages. And now you're going to claim their wisdom is a matter of life and death for us? That I am imperiling my friends and family? That was low, Applejack, and you know it."

Applejack's jaw flapped a couple of times, then shut with a click. She tried to say something, but gave up and left.

Rarity looked up from her sewing machine and caught her reflection in one of her dressing mirrors. That little confrontation had been the shortest, and most blunt thus far. She let out a pent up breath and unconsciously stroked her hair, looking at herself. Her, all alone, standing against the wills of her friends and the Princesses themselves. Invoking Sweetiebelle had been underhanded and cruel...

She was right, wasn't she? What if she was wrong? Was she holding them all back, because of foalish vanity? Maybe even endangering--- NO. She got to her feet and walked over to the mirror, staring herself in the eye from an inch away. "Resolve, Rarity," she said under her breath. "You know you're right. You know the reason you're doing this."


"It's just hair!" Rainbow Dash yelled, clutching at her own mane with her forehooves in frustration.

"And it's mine," Rarity said firmly, pushing a sandwich across the table to the scowling pegasus. She sighed. "Let me try to relate here.... Rainbow, what if I told you all you had to do to enter the Wonderbolts was kiss Discord's rump in town square?"

Rainbow Dash gaped, then glared. "No chance in Tartarus," Rainbow Dash snarled.

"You got it in one, sister," Rarity said. She picked up a cucumber sandwich and paused in mid bite. "You know, I've had to wonder from time to time: you can fly circles around any pony in the Wonderbolts. You can do things that none of them can even attempt. And in every crisis where you and they have both been there, you saved the day while they fell on their, ah, faces. Why aren't THEY seeking YOU out? Why do you have to go begging, hat in hoof, just for their attention?"

"Yeah, I gotta kinda ask that myself," Dash said, picking up her sandwich and taking an enormous bite. "But wash dat got to do wif anyfing?" she said with her mouth full.

"I occurs to me this 'monastery' is full of ponies (and donkies and gryphons and whatever else) that have dedicated their lives to studying the Elements of Harmony. But we ARE the Elements of Harmony. We're the ones who released the Rainbow. WE have gone further than any of those members of the Order have imagined they even could. Yet we are expected to go and prostrate ourselves before them?" Rarity gave a ladylike snort. "So why aren't they sending monks on pilgrimages to US?"

"It shouldn't take any thought to see that something is badly off in that balance of power and authority there. And these high lords of wisdom are NOT getting my hair." Her voice cracked a bit and she hastily bit into her sandwich.


"....Soooooo," Pinkie said slowly. "Why dontcha want your hair cut?"

Pinkie... Rarity wasn't sure what she had expected from the pink party pony. She had in fact been dreading Pinkie's visit a little bit; the filly was the life of a party, but she could be so wearying, even at the best of times. And Rarity was certainly not at her best right now.

To her surprise Pinkie was actually behaving herself... well, for her. Rather than bursting out of the closet or dresser drawer like a Jack-in-the-box or something else ridiculous, she had shown up early at the front door with a box of breakfast muffins and politely--- if way too boisterously for this hour of the morning--- asked to be let in. She was sitting at the kitchen table now, dangling her back hooves like a foal and nibbling at a muffin while she watched Rarity with curious eyes.

Rarity shuffled around the kitchen in her slippers and robe, pouring them both a cup of coffee. It said worlds about her state of mind that she still had her curlers in and no makeup, and actually didn't care at the moment. She passed Pinkie a mug and sat down while Pinkie proceeded to scoop half the sugar bowl into it. "I mean," Pinkie babbled as she shoveled sugar into her coffee. "You get mane cuts all the time. And there are lots of ponies who wear their manes really short like Thunderlane.... And like you said with your tail, it'll grow back later, right?"

Rarity chewed over what to say. Pinkie Pie really wasn't on the same level as most ponies. How to get this across to her? "Pinkie," she said. "Is it fun to be laughed at? Not for you, or with you, but AT you."

The response was immediate. Pinkie's smile drooped and her stirring spoon stopped. "Um, no," she said quietly. "It's not the same thing at all. I know that, Rarity."

"And cutting your own hair because you want to, and being made to cut your hair off, aren't the same thing at all either." Rarity eschewed the sugar and cream and took a sip of her bitter black brew straight. She needed the fortification.

"Well it doesn't bother ME getting my hair cut," Pinkie said.

"Pinkie, if someone cuts you and you don't feel it, are you still cut? They're 'putting you in your place', under their heel, whether you notice it at first or not. Like those foals who stick a 'kick me' sign on other ponies' tails where they can't see it." Rarity saw the light of comprehension go on in Pinkie's eyes. It was all a matter of knowing how to address your audience, Rarity supposed.

"I don't think the monkeys are going to laugh at you, Rarity," Pinkie said earnestly. "Monkeys aren't that mean. They're especially nice if you give them a banana--"

The wheels in Rarity's head spun for a minute. "That's MONKS, dear," she said. "Not monkeys."

"Oh, the little brown mousy things that stuff things in their cheeks, right?" Pinkie illustrated with two muffins, cramming one in each cheek so they ballooned out.

Rarity facehooved. "That's chipmunks, dear. Monks are.... ponies in robes who...never mind." she gave up and plowed onward while Pinkie washed her headful of muffins down with coffee sugar slurry. "No, I don't think they'd laugh at me. But what they're wanting to do to us is still just as cruel. And yes, it would grow back... but tell me, Pinkie-- if somepony does something cruel to you, does the hurt ever really go away?"

"Well yes! I mean-- usually-- eventually..." Pinkie deflated. Even her hair started to droop. She cast her eyes down and fiddled with her mug. ".... Not really." She looked up suddenly. "You were the little filly in school, weren't you. The one who got her hair cut off."

Rarity blinked. "Twilight told you all, did she," she said. It shouldn't have surprised her that Pinkie made the connection; Pinkie Pie's brain made so many lateral moves that Rarity sometimes suspected she was a chessboard knight in a previous incarnation. "And yes, I was." She took a deep breath. Even all these years later the memory still hurt. "A group of fillies at my school... They took a disliking to me. Resented me. I'd never done a thing to them, but they hated me. So one day they cornered me in the bathroom, pinned me to the floor and chopped my mane and tail off."

"Why would anypony do that?" Pinkie said, sympathetic.

"They were jealous, and thought I was 'uppity.'" Rarity said. "I wasn't trying to be; I was just new, and shy around other foals, and I didn't have much in common with them.... so I kept to myself. When the teacher asked why, all the ringleader would say was 'she thought she was better than us.' " Her voice was as bitter as her coffee.
" The hair grew back, of course. That's what bodies do. Bones knit, cuts close, bruises heal. But that doesn't make the hurt someone else did you go away."

Rarity paused. "You know why I didn't tell Twilight that little filly was me?" Pinkie shook her head. "Because she would have insisted that old hurt was making me 'biased.' " Rarity snorted into her coffee mug. "What foolishness. As if personally suffering the thing one is fighting made one LESS qualified to speak on it.
"Those bullying little girls cut my hair off, for the same reason these monks want me shaved," Rarity said. "To put me in my place. And isn't it interesting how one's 'place' is never on an equal plane with them, but somewhere underneath their hoof?

"Pompous asses. Let them bray all they want. I swore long ago that nopony was going to 'put me in my place' ever again. And that includes any bunch of self-anointed Wise Ponies sitting in a monastery on a mountain."

"Ponies hurt me once, Pinkie," Rarity said. "And I'm not going to let them hurt me--- or my friends--- like that ever again."



It was difficult for any pony to be less subtle than Pinkie Pie or Rainbow Dash. Princess Luna managed.

"Rarity, thou art failing thy duty to thy country with this... this bull-headedness!" Luna shouted. She always shouted. She'd been shouting for her entire visit.

Rarity managed to not grind the pins between her teeth to dust. The last two days had been grueling. She'd had little sleep; she'd spent the nights sitting in front of her mirror trying to bolster her confidence. She hadn't left the boutique in the entire time for fear of running into her friends and having it explode into a conflict right in the street. And now here was the Princess of the Night, flaunting every inch of Spooky, Scary and Intimidating in her arsenal, bellowing into her ear.... Rarity felt her self-control crumble.

She spat the pins out and stepped away from the ponniquin. She stalked forward till her nose was all but scrunched against the moon princess' own. "My duty? Don't talk to me about my duty to Equestria! If you'll recall, Your Highness, the only reason you're standing here and not on the Moon again is because I fulfilled my duty!
"I've stepped up every time Equestria has needed me. I've been dragged through mud and filth and dragon pits doing my duty to Equestria, and to your sister and to YOU. I've had my health, sanity, reputation and self-respect all but battered out of me by every Sealed Evil in a Can and Crisis of the Week you and Celestia have left lying around Equestria. And now, after you've demanded, and gotten, all that from me, you want to take my HAIR?" Rarity's face was cherry red and her eyes were practically aflame. "Well here's where I draw the line, your Highness! Not one inch more! Not one single LOCK of my hair is going to this!"

Luna actually drew back, stung. She looked down at the harried mare in front of her and actually felt a twist of guilt; truly, Equestria HAD asked so much of Rarity already. Too much, in fact; more than it had asked of countless others. Was this last indignity really.... no. Luna had to be strong. Authoritative. She pushed back, snarling. "The monastery of Harmony holds secrets that may save all of Equestria in the future!"

Rarity pushed back harder. "THEN WHY DON'T YOU GO GET THEM??" she shrieked. "Are you a princess or not? You should be at their front door demanding they bring their secret tomes out to you, not groveling in front of them like a shorn sheep!"

Nothing hurts quite like the truth. Luna's mouth dropped open and her eyes flared with outrage as the words lashed her pride. Her spectral mane billowed and her moon-white eyes flared. "How DARE you!"

Any other time, Rarity might have cowered before this display of anger. But she was too far wound up for that. She was literally quivering with rage. "How dare I? How dare THEY!" Rarity said. "Where were these marvelous sages with all their knowledge for Nightmare Moon, for Discord, for Chrysalis, for Tirek? Hiding in their monastery, hoarding knowledge that could have saved us, because we hadn't genuflected for it properly! You should be taking THEM to task!

"But no, here you are harassing me! Tell me, Princess Luna, is it because you're really concerned about what we have to learn from them, or because you don't think it's fair that WE might not have to go through the public mortification you did when you retrieved the Elements the first time?"

The facade did not so much crack as shatter. Luna stopped, shocked. She backed off and shook her head in anger. "Dost thou think I wish to do this to thee?" she cried, enraged and unhappy. "Or to do it at all? Dost thou think I look forward to being shorn again? To being dressed in sackcloth, and forced to march on a damnable pilgrimage like debased mules, that I could o'erfly in a day? To supplicate before their elders, yet again, for whatever secrets they yet hoard?" She turned her back on Rarity to hide her emotions.

Rarity's observational skills were as keen as ever. Her anger fizzled away in her surprise. She reached out a hoof and carefully put it on Luna's shoulder. "Oh... oh dear. Was it truly that bad?"

Luna stiffened at the touch. "Celestia hath had a thousand years more than I to forget," she said, in a surprisingly normal volume. "I have not. I still remember. Shorn like a common strumpet. Dressed in burlap rags. Forced to kneel and bow and genuflect to every jumped-up little officiate in their order. All for the sake of another tiny little bit of their 'wisdom.' " She seethed.

"We were not princesses then, and Discord had taken away our mastery of the Sun and Moon. We were nothing, and every member of the 'Holy Order' was bound and set to prove it to us, oer and oer again. We had no choice. And.. out of some imagined respect... respect they have never shown us... despite our crown and our centuries of age, we must endure this yet again. Holy order? They were an order of archivists," she said with blistering venom, " commissioned by Princess Platinum, who became convinced of their own holiness with the passing of centuries merely because they sat upon a pile of long-lost books."

"Luna, if you feel this way, then why aren't you supporting me?" Rarity said.

Luna sagged a bit. "Because my sister feels that it must be this way," Luna said. "Because the kingdom must come first. Because she is convinced that humility 'would do us all good.' Because it would be too disruptive to change their traditions. Too selfish to balk because we resent some... petty cruelty..."

The hoof on her shoulder didn't move."You mentioned being called 'mules.'" Rarity said. "Tell me, did you learn about the Mule Rights movement during your, um, recuperation?"

Luna flushed a bit. A lot of history had happened while she was gone; non-ponies and half-ponies had actually been treated fairly well in her own long-lost century, but there was still a bit of awkward adjustment on her part. Still, to hear of some of the outrageousness that had cropped up in her absence was rather shocking.

Rarity went on. "It was, well, a fairly poor period of history, really. Not too many decades ago, mules and other half-bloods weren't exactly treated well in a lot of Equestria. There was a lot of prejudice... Towns and cities had a lot of laws, the Half-Breed laws, that made them second-class citizens. They had to drink from separate wells and fountains. They had to step out of the walkway when a pureblood pony came up the path. They were forced to give up their seats to any pony who demanded it. For no better reason than who their parents were. It was all petty, and all cruel."

"Till one day a hinny by the name of Rose Garden took the Canterlot train home... and refused to give up her seat to a pony who boarded. She was tired and she wasn't going to stand for the entire trip home. They arrested her and threw her in jail. One thing led to another, and a petty little misdemeanor-- a two-bit fine-- turned into the trial of the century, and then into a sweeping civil movement that brought about the end of the Half-Breed laws.

"And that's where the saying 'Stubborn as a Mule' came from," she finished with a wry smile.

"Now think about it, your Highness; Rose Gardens was being asked to do a trivial thing, wasn't she? And wasn't it petty of her not to do this tiny, little thing, to give up her seat on the train?

"But would anything have changed, if she hadn't been stubborn about it?

"All cruelties and injustices are petty, your highness. That's precisely what makes them so horrible, and persist so long. Great perils and evils are like crushing boulders-- obvious, and easy to avoid. But petty injustices are like sand; they get in everything, everywhere, clogging and abrading and ruining...

"...until some petty, detail-obsessed, fussy mare or stallion comes along and sweeps them out. One grain at a time, if need be. That's precisely why I have to be an obstinate, stubborn nag about this petty, trivial little thing. Because nothing changes until you do."

Luna suddenly grew cold. She shook her head and shrugged off Rarity's comforting hoof. "Do not muddle the matter with meaningless words, or trying to appeal to our own... our own petty vanities and pride," she said stiffly. "Thou knowest our own anxieties and uncertainties, and seek to exploit them---" she twitched angrily. "Thou knowest the need, and thy duty. Yet thou refusest to yield like those who have gone before you. We have naught to say to thee till thou relinquish this foalishness." She spun about and marched out the boutique door, slamming it behind her.

Rarity's head sank down. She'd never felt so alone.



"Please, Rarity," Celestia said. "You should not be such a slave to your vanity."

Rarity looked over her cup rim. "They told you the ginger root story, didn't they," she deadpanned. Celestia half-grinned. "And what was the lesson?" Rarity asked, cocking an eyebrow. "I never did it again. Even though there are mares in Canterlot right now who still have corks of ginger up their--.. well." She set the cup down. "Which goes to show I'm not a complete slave to my vanity. I'm not a complete fool, as all of you think of me."

"It's only a haircut, Rarity," Celestia said. "It's only temporary. It's just your mane and tail. It's a trivial thing. "

Yet again the tea set was in play. It was probably the first time in history that Rarity's heirloom tea set had graced the lips of royalty. A pity, Rarity thought blearily, that she could not appreciate the moment. Rarity tried to summon up her carefully groomed etiquette and grace... but she was worn to a nub and there was none left. She went straight for the throat.

"Oh really, your Highness?" Rarity said tiredly. "Then why do they want it so badly?" Celestia started to speak. "No, don't try to answer that," Rarity said, holding up a hoof. "I'll answer it for you. EGO. THEIR Ego. An ego they've been stroking for nearly two thousand years, after forcing your sister and you to abase yourself before their order. Having their supplicants march before them, heads shorn, showing the world their mastery over those poor supplicant's wills.

"You know history, Celestia. You lived most of it, after all. Forcing a mare to shave herself bald isn't an act of humbleness, it's an act of humiliation. It's the act of a brute. An act of CONTROL. A way for those monks-- who sat in that little monastery doing nothing, I might add, while we all shed blood, sweat and tears saving Equestria from its enemies, who would sit in judgment of us, despite the fact that WE, not they, were selected by the Elements and by the Tree of Harmony--a way for them to debase the Bearers and the Princesses themselves, and not-so-subtly remind everyone who the Stallion of the house really is."

Her tone turned scornful. "I'll wager anything you like that they have the tresses you cut LAST time on display somewhere in their monastery. Like a frathouse colt with a garter hung over his bedpost... So they can point, and brag, and gloat how they made the alicorn of the Sun and Moon grovel to them. Just like they made every mare for two thousand years mortify themselves, mar their beauty, strip themselves of their crowning glory as mares-- all to appeal to their bloated egos!"

By the time she was finished she was panting for breath, chest heaving, eyes wide... and brimmed with tears. She regained control of herself slowly, and wiped her eyes on her foreleg. "I didn't have to be taught that my mane was my crowning glory as a mare," she said softly. "And I didn't have to be taught that somepony trying to take it away wasn't just cutting hair, they were defiling me. Why can't you see that?"

"Rarity," Celestia said. Rarity's shocking bluntness had set her aback. She was still stern, but trying to be compassionate. "This is your foolish pride speaking. It ill befits you as a Bearer."

"Not pride," Rarity said firmly. "Self Respect. But if it is 'foolish pride,' the Element of Generosity can bloody well pick another bearer. I am still not going to let anyone shear off my tail and mane." She looked Celestia square in the eye. "And if you were wiser, you'd refuse as well. For the sake of your dignity as the crown, and the sake of every mare who has been shamed like this. Where is YOUR pride as a ruler of Equestria, that you let this happen without dissent? What? Do you fear overturning their millennia old traditions? You're older than any traditions they might have!

"Change CAN be a good thing, Your Highness. Maybe it's time we had some."

Celestia said nothing. She got to her hooves and dipped her head. "Thank you for the tea, Rarity," she said, and left. Her tone could have meant anything. Rarity resisted the urge to weep. Would it have been too much to ask that one, just one of them had been in her corner? She dragged herself to her hooves and began cleaning up the tea set once again.


The princesses and the bearers were gathered once again in the Palace of Friendship. Over the past days they'd confronted Rarity, wheedled with her, argued with her, reasoned, begged, bribed. She still refused. They had all returned defeated; some angry and sulking, some brooding. More than one looking doubtful.
"Well this is a fine kettle of fish," Luna said. "Shall we then go without her?"

"It seems that we may have to," Celestia sighed. "It would do her no good to go to the monastery if we coerced her, anyway."

"But what good will it do for only PART of our group to go?" Rainbow said. To her thinking it would be like having one of the Wonderbolts sit out a training camp. Sure they could try and train with the others when they got back, but the loner would always be one step behind the others...

"Can't we just ask the monkeys--" Pinkie Pie started.

"Monks," Twilight corrected. She looked uncomfortable. "Celestia? I hate to say it. But I think she... kind of has a point. These monks are making us do something...something that seems degrading, just to go to speak to them."

"Oh Twilight, not you too--!" Celestia pleaded. She threw her hooves in the air. "All this over something as trivial as a haircut--!"

"Goin' bald as an onion ain't exactly trivial," Rainbow snarked. She pulled a lock of her rainbow mane down between her eyes and regarded it. "And like Rarity said-- if it's so trivial, why do they want us to do it so bad? Sounds kinda creepy, now that I think about it."

Luna growled. "You are too lenient with them, Tia," she said under her breath. Her temper was poor today; Rarity's words had gotten through to her. She wasn't happy in the least with being shaved bald... again... just to walk through the front door of a monastery she'd passed through over a score of centuries before. She was an avatar of a celestial body for pity's sake, she deserved a little dignity didn't she?

"Dang it," Applejack said, tugging her hat down. "Ah dunno anymore. It's... it's stupid, it'll grow back-- but--"

"Can't we just ask the monks if Rarity can keep her hair? Just this one time, pretty please?" Pinkie Pie gave her best endearing grin and held her hooves up together."Can't they just bend the rules just an eensy weensy bit..."

Celestia chuckled. "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way," she said.

"Why not?" Rainbow Dash said. "I mean what's the big deal? Just ask them to bend a little bit just this once."

Twilight gnawed her lip. "I don't want to sound contrary, Princess Celestia but really I mean--" she hesitated. "Could it really hurt to ask? Just for Rarity, at least? I mean she does have something of a practical reason too, It can't do her business any good to run around bald--"

"I'm with Twilight," Applejack said. "Just ask. And if those monks running that monastery get their jimmies rustled over it--- well, if they're that petty..." she shrugged. THAT little thought put a pall in the air; more than one filly found herself asking some pointed questions about the accreditation of these alleged sages.

Celestia looked doubtful. "Whether we agree or not with the monastery's practices, my little ponies," she said, " there is one thing I must agree with them. Approaching the powers of the Tree-- of Harmony and Friendship-- should be done ponies willing to humble themselves. And Rarity is clearly full of pride and vanity."

Applejack looked uncomfortable. "Ah gotta say yes.. an' no, Princess," she said soberly. "Yeah, she's fussy an' prissy an' obsessed with her looks-- so ayeah, she's vain an' prideful. But you know what popped in my head when you said that?" Celestia tipped her head inquisitively. "The memory of Rarity at the Sisterhooves Social, wallowing in the mud just to mend fences with her little sister." The farmpony's gaze riveted Celestia's own.

Slowly expressions in the room changed as certain memories surfaced. "Or her cutting off her own tail, just to mend that poor Sea Serpent's mustache," Fluttershy offered.

"Eating Sweetiebelle's cooking just to keep from hurting her feelings," Spike chuckled.

"Swallowing her jealousy and applauding Fluttershy at that awful fashion show-- because she thought it was what she wanted," Twilight said.

"Making those dresses we wanted for OUR fashion show, even though Hoity Toity was in the audience..." Pinkie Pie said.

"Dumping all her rep to stand up for us with those Canterlot snobs at the lawn party," Rainbow Dash said.

"Wallowin' up to her armpits in cherries," Applejack chuckled.

"Making that crazy dragon costume and dressing up in it, just to look out for me at the dragon migration," Spike said.

"Wading through the dust and filth of our old castle, just to save our tapestries from ruin," Luna added, to general surprise. It had apparently meant more to the moon princess than they had thought.

"Ah think what we're gettin' at, Princess," Applejack said, "Is even though Rarity's fussy an' vain an' silly a lot of times, an' she'll kick up a fuss about getting even a speck of dirt on her and she'll do the silliest durn things for fashion-- an' thanks for that story about the ginger by the way, Twi, I ain't never gonna get that outta my head-- but when it comes right down to it, she don't think a thing of sacrificing it all and getting right down in the mud to help lift somepony else out of it. That's REAL humbleness, you ask me. If that ain't the kind o' humbleness they're lookin' for, what is?"

Celestia chewed that over, heavily seasoned with what the vain little fashionista had said to her in their little tete-a-tete. Fie on it. Maybe it was time to push for a change. Just a small one. "Very well my little ponies," she said finally. "A slight delay won't hurt. I'll send a letter off to the monastery inquiring about the matter. Spike...?"

***
To the Abbot of the Monastery of Harmony;
Due to unforseen circumstances and particular issues, your request for the Bearers of the Elements to present themselves as supplicants has hit a minor snag. It seems that some of the traditional requirements will prove an untenable hardship for at least one of their number, and so we would humbly request that Rarity Belle, Bearer of the Element of Generosity, at the least be permitted to attend the pilgrimage without the traditional shearing of her mane and tail.
Sincerely,
Princess Celestia,
Sol Invictus
Co-regent of Equestria,
Ruler of the Sun

***
The scroll returned within the half hour. "Ah!" Celestia said as it appeared, catching it in midair and opening it. As she scanned it her smile fell. It was replaced with a rather disturbing scowl by the time she finished. Luna peeked over her shoulder and began reading as well; her eyes went round and her jaw dropped.
***

From the desk of the Abbot Costello,
Most High Cleric of the Order of the Sacred Harmony
To Princess Celestia, Sol Invictus, etc.
Words cannot express the impertinence inherent in this mare's request, or in the fact that a former supplicant such as yourself should attempt to breach protocol by relaying this sacrilegious proposal to her on her behalf. I must express disappointment that the leader of Equestria should be so lightly swayed to such womanly vanity.
As to the content of her request; The practice of the shearing of supplicants is to show their humility before the magic of Harmony, the Tree of Harmony , and the Elements thereof. If they cannot bring themselves to submit to this, then they are UNWORTHY of the content of the tomes or the teachings of our order. We do not allow such indulgences for anyone regardless of their rank outside these halls, and we certainly do not allow for any foalish indulgences to the sentimental weakness of mares.
No further discussion on the issue shall be brooked. She shall present herself at the doors of the monastery on the approved date along with the others, wearing the garb of a supplicant, and shorn of mane and tail in the manner appropriate to their gender.
Abbot Costello
Most High Cleric of the Order of the Sacred Harmony
***
"What's wrong, Celestia?" Twilight asked carefully.

"Stay here, my little ponies," Celestia said. Her voice was calm. Too calm. "I need to go have a word with the Abbot." She disappeared in a flash of light.

"Omigosh," Fluttershy said, putting her hooves to her mouth. "That did not look good."

"Okay, now what?" Rainbow Dash said.

"You all stay here," Luna said with a wry snort. She readied a teleportation spell.

"What, you're going too?" Twilight said.

"Absolutely," Luna said. "No bucking way am I missing this." She vanished with a pop and a burst of indigo light.


The Abbot's office was large, simply furnished, spacious and austere. It was also at the moment rather overcrowded with two full-grown alicorns, one with a neutral expression (which was as close to scowling as Celestia generally got), and one looking on in amused anticipation. "Abbot Costello," Celestia said. "We are a bit... displeased with the missive we received from you a short while ago. The tone was far less than respectful."

The Abbot, a brown earth pony with a considerable paunch, was surprisingly not looking very impressed or intimidated. He was in fact not even looking up from the scroll on his desk. The two friars behind him stood, stolid and impassive, adding nothing to the conversation but their silent support. "I may have been blunt, but I do not retract the sentiment," he said. "We do not alter our traditions. For anypony."

Celestia counted to three to rein in her temper. "We do understand," she said. "Your traditions are nearly as timeless as we are, and you must husband them carefully. However, this is not about some acolyte filly. These are the Bearers of the Elements; surely their affinity with the very Magic of Harmony which you revere would suggest some leniency--"

Abbot Costello snorted. "The monastery has been observing them since they first obtained the Elements," he said, flicking his quill over the scroll. "If anything I am less inclined towards leniency. Those fillies need a stern hoof to rein them in."

There was a sudden, chill, and what most ponies would have recognized as dangerous silence. "...Rein them in, you say?" Luna couldn't resist prodding the bear in the room with a stick.

"Yes," the Abbot snorted again. "Learning in this revered place is reserved for those who show proper reverence and humility before the principles of Harmony," he said officiously. The words were pious, measured, and rang as hollow as a matryoshka doll. Celestia didn't miss it. "And these mares? Irresponsible, reckless, morally lax... a glory-hogging athlete with unfeminine tendencies... that mannish one running a farm that properly should be under the authority of the stallion of the house... that wanton yellow pegasus who flaunted her body about as a fashion model..."

Celestia stared at him as if he were a strange lifeform she'd found under a Martian rock. "Wanton" and "Flaunting" were two words nopony from this local galactic cluster would associate with Fluttershy.

"That frivolous pink hedonist... and really, that bookish one-- she reflects poorly on you, Celestia..."

Celestia's eyelid twitched. She'd expected some resistance. She'd expected to have to deal with sleepy, obstinate old leaders who were set in their ways, and to have to wheedle and chivvy with them until they finally admitted the headshaving rule was silly and outdated and let it slide. She hadn't had the foggiest notion that she would be dealing with an organization run by an arrogant, sexist, hidebound zealot who was a raging parody of himself. Truth be told it was bringing back a great number of memories. Unpleasant, two thousand year old memories. This raging jackass was every bit as obnoxious, arrogant, and misogynist as the prats who had run the place two millennia ago.

But who else but a raging zealot jackass would have the audacity to demand that his own Princesses shave their heads?

She cast her eyes upward so as not to be looking directly at the source of her ire-- who kept right on talking-- and her eyes fell on the wall behind and above the Abbot's desk. Mounted on the wall were two long shimmering streamers of hair. One pale pink, with faded hints of pastel stripes; the other a pale blue, that almost seemed to sparkle from time to time. Both tresses were waving in an unfelt breeze. Below them was a plaque engraved in old Equuish: "HUMILITY BEFORE THE POWERS."

It was not lost on her that the word "powers" also translated, in modern parlance, to 'rightful authorities.'

The words rang in her head like the tone of a bell in Tartarus. Mounted on the wall like a trophy of war... like a frathouse colt with a garter belt on his bedpost....

"---will do all of them a world of good to be brought here and properly humbled, shorn of their vainglorious attitudes...." Costello went on.

Remember where we said it took three days for the light to dawn on somepony?

"So there is nothing I can say to persuade you?" Celestia asked calmly. Too calmly. Luna grinned and barely resisted rubbing her forehooves together.

The abbot turned red. "Did I stutter?" he burst out. "Confound it, Celestia! I am giving no special consideration to them, period. If this batch of libertine strumpets wants to access the tomes of the Tree of Harmony, then they'll come here and learn their proper place fir-- agk." He didn't finish his sentence; he was too busy dangling by his neck three feet off the floor. His eyes bugged out.

"First of all, Abbot Costello," Celestia said, glaring at him eye to eye. "The proper form of address for your rulers is 'Your Highness' or, less formally, 'Princess Celestia' or 'Princess Luna.' Or in your personal case 'Your Highness please oh please don't launch me to the Moon agk agk agk.' Understood?"

He nodded. The golden aura around his neck eased up. He choked and spluttered. "What was that?" Celestia said sweetly.

"Yes, your Highness," he hacked.

"Good." Celestia's smile returned. It wasn't a very warm one. "Second, if you open your mouth to defame my pupil and her friends because of their careers, pastimes, or especially their gender ever again, I'll squeeze until your bucking head pops off." The Abbot squeaked.

"Third, there are going to be some changes around here. Particularly to your traditional treatments of supplicants and acolytes, but we'll progress from there."

One of the monks standing behind the abbot (who had all VERY wisely started backing up when the Abbot failed to shut up in a timely manner) spoke up. "Y-you can't do that! You're--"

"An acolyte of this order, a ruler of this kingdom, a former bearer of the Elements themselves and the motherbucking Princess of the motherbucking SUN," Celestia said. "I can send a solar flare that could toast this entire monastery like a marshmallow. Or my sister and I could work together, cast it in a permanent eclipse, wait until it froze into a block of ice, and then come back and chip out whatever we wanted.

"OR, I could simply have you all hauled away in chains for concealing information essential to the safety of Equestria." Those who hadn't blanched already proceeded to do so. "As I was reminded recently, we have been attacked by four world-shattering threats in less than a decade, while you sat on your hoard of knowledge about the most essential part of our national defense and did absolutely nothing.

"Now, you can make up for that TERRIBLE OVERSIGHT right now, and start bringing out your tomes of knowledge... or I can proceed to have the Equestrian army march up here and do it for you." The co-abbots gulped. "Well, what are you waiting for? Start bringing out the Tomes into the main vestibule. All of them." the co-abbots scattered, galloping off down hallways.

"And do not think thou shalt hide them in secret vaults from us," Luna called out merrily after them. "We have the magic of ages, and all the time in Creation to winnow thee out..."

"And now on to more personal matters." The golden glow vanished and Abbot Costello dropped down into his chair with a thump. "First off, congratulations, you just became a lending library. Every last tome is going to be taken to Canterlot, transcribed into multiple copies, and distributed throughout Equestria before being returned here. From here on out, your archives are PUBLIC ACCESS."

"You can't do that!" the abbot whimpered. "For countless centuries we've kept the knowledge of those tomes safe from those that would destroy it--"

Celestia rolled her eyes. "The surest way to keep knowledge safe, you obnoxious dunce, is REDUNDANCY. And the key to that is to make as many copies as possible, and put it in as many HEADS as possible. And as to your traditions for how supplicants and acolytes are treated--"

"You can't dictate how our order is run!" Abbot Costello wheezed, turning purple.

Celestia leaned in over the desk. "Yes I can, as a matter of fact," she said. "It dawned on me a few minutes ago, so I can't blame you for not figuring it out earlier either; I'm an acolyte of this order. As is my sister. Or at least we were TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO."

"Y-you can't mean--"

Celestia nodded, and gave him a smile that made him feel faint. "The leadership of the Order is decided, as I recall, by seniority. We outrank you by CENTURIES. On top of that, we're former bearers of the Elements which makes us, oh, a few light years ahead of any monk who just sat around studying them from a distance." Costello gabbled in shock. "Now mind, you can still go off on your own and start up your own little order, you misogynistic runt-- but the Tomes stored here are now, and always have been, government property, clear back to PreModern times. You were entrusted with them by Starswirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever, but ownership remained with the unicorn royalty, which is now the Equestrian crown. That means if you want to keep guarding and caretaking and studying the original manuscripts and archives, you'll bloody well run things the way I tell you."

"You're overthrowing millennia of tradition..." Abbot Costello pleaded.

"Am I? Need I remind you that the original Order was staffed entirely by castrata?" A VERY large pair of scissors materialized in midair and thunked, point down, into the hardwood desk top. "Shall we proceed to get REALLY old school, Abbot? Or shall we roll with the times and implement some changes?"

"Change is good," the abbot squeaked, his bulging eyes never leaving the shears.

"Good, let's start with the basics. No more forced fasts, no more days-long punitive "meditation" sessions, no more forcing supplicants to climb stairs on their knees-- let's make it simple, no self-mortification of any sort. The monastery, its teachers and all its contents are to be perpetually open to myself, my sister, the Bearers of the Elements (whomever they may be in that generation) and whomever the Crown sends in its name. No more ritualistic nonsense to get at what should have been given to them on day one." She levitated his quill to him. "Write it all down so you don't forget, now." He began scribbling fervently.

"Oh, and in case you didn't figure it out," she said coldly. "NO MORE SHAVING THE MARE'S MANES AND TAILS.

"That, I believe, does it for now," Celestia said. She looked out into the vestibule; the monks and acolytes had stacked a good dozen volumes, enormous ones in heavy, gold-embossed covers. "We will return the original volumes once they've been transcribed. And have a summary of your Order's practices and policies on my desk at the end of next week." She turned to go.

"You have violated everything the Order stands for," the Abbot said weakly.

She paused at the door and turned back. "Have I?" she said. "This institution was created to preserve, protect, and teach, not to debase, degrade and shame. It was to pass on the knowledge and wisdom of the Elements of Harmony and the Magic of Friendship. What does this Order's practices even have to do with those things?

"When my sister and I came here, two lost souls in the midst of Discord's realm of madness, we..." she bit her lip and corrected herself in shame, "no, not we, I-- I convinced myself that the humiliations we endured were for a greater good and for our own betterment. And I spent the last twenty centuries forgetting just how conceited, misogynist, and PETTY it all was. The world was ending and your predecessor thought like you: that it was more important to "put the mares and lessers in their place" than to impart knowledge that would save us all. And to my eternal lamentation and shame, after twenty centuries under my watch, nothing has changed.
"It took one vain little mare digging in and refusing to cut her hair to get me off my plot and change that. Treasure the little things, Abbot. They make the world go round."

Celestia left the room, followed her sister, who seemed obscenely cheerful for some reason. A moment later Luna came running back in. She jumped up on the Abbot's desk, yanked the two tresses on the wall off their mounts, and all but pronked back out the door, the preserved manes rippling like banners in the wind behind her.



They reassembled at the Castle of Friendship again. This time it was a touch more informal. They were all present, Rarity included, and they were in one of the cozier bedroom suites rather than the throne room. The air was far more festive than it had been in a long while... it might be said to resemble a sleepover. But of course Proper Pony Princesses don't do such things.

Not officially anyway.

They were relaxing, lounging about, enjoying Pinkie Pie's ever-present array of party snacks and yes, of course-- doing one another's hair. It was to be expected; their manes and tails had all barely escaped a terrible fate and they all felt the urge to pamper their tresses a bit in celebration. The relief in the air was almost palpable. Even Rainbow Dash was yielding to having her rainbow mane groomed and shampooed.

Rarity was proving to be the center of attention. She was surprisingly humble about it, chuckling and blushing as the others congratulated her on a successful one-mare campaign. "I am so sorry I was such an obstinate nag with you all," she said for what had to be the fourth time. "It's just... a mare just has to have lines that she just won't cross."

"It was for the best, Rarity," Twilight said. "Sometimes you have to take a stand. Even when nopony else thinks it's important." She looked reflective. "Maybe especially when nopony else thinks it's important...."

"Well said, my faithful student," Celestia said. She sighed and shifted comfortably on the cushions laid out for her. "In retrospect, I feel foolish that I was so surprised that the Abbot was such an ass," she said-- eliciting a squeak of shock from Fluttershy and Twilight at her language. ""My own fault truthfully. It'd been 2,000 years since I'd dealt with them personally; more than enough time to forget what jackasses they could be-- or to think their manners might have improved.

"And well, really... they spent two thousand years hoarding knowledge vital to saving the world, and had the audacity to demand that the very embodiments of the elements they revere-- not to mention the rulers of the Moon and Sun-- shave their heads before they'll allow access to it." They she lay her head down on her forehooves so Fluttershy could continue braiding her pastel mane with more ease. "In the end, they valued their rituals and traditions more than the principles--- Honesty, Generosity, Kindness-- they supposedly revered." She looked sad.

"Strewth," Luna said. She regarded her reflection in a mirror. Thus far she'd only emboldened enough to pull her mane back in a hairband-- a 'scrunchy?'-- but she thought she liked the look. What an odd name for a hairstyle, a 'ponytail.' There was a jest in there somewhere. "And let me add, sister..."

"Yes?"

Luna buried her face in her forelegs. "I am so, so, so happy that we do not have to go through with shaving our manes and tails again," she moaned. Everypony laughed.

"Don't think anyone was actually happy with it, Yer Highness," Applejack said. She was lying on her back, her golden mane soaking in a bowl of water as the coloring took hold, her tail soaking in another. "We may have given you grief, girl, but y' did the right thing."

"Hold still Twilight," Pinkie complained. "These glitter highlights are hard to get right." The party pony was sitting up behind Twilight. Her own pink fluffy bouffant had been done up in two enormous head-buns. It looked both cute and alarmingly silly at the same time; in short it suited her perfectly.

"And think of all the changes that have happened because of it," Fluttershy said. She had taken out all her hair extensions; her pink mane and tail were half their normal length. Angel Bunny was grooming them with a comb and brush for her. "I'm sure that the fillies in the Order are much happier now that they don't have to shave their heads..."

"Hey, don't discount the stallions," Spike said. He was trundling in with an enormous tray of nachos. "Us guys don't show it as much but we care about that stuff too."
"Uh, sugarcube," Applejack said, lifting her head slightly out of the color rinse to look at the dragonling. "Ain't y'all naturally bald?"

Spike shrugged. "Well yeah, sure," he said. "But that doesn't mean I don't get it." He set the tray down.

"Give him credit," Celestia said in amusement to Rarity. "He's been ceaselessly championing your cause since he found out you'd have to go under the shears."

"Oh?"

"Well... more like nagging. Nagging, snarking, making sarcastic little asides..." Celestia rolled her eyes.

"Why, what a little champion I had, and never knew it!" Rarity said, amused.

Spike muttered something and dug his toe into the floor. "Can I get you ladies anything?...Rarity?" he looked over to the object of his affection with a goofy smile. "Um, something to drink? Anything?"

"No, darling, but that's very sweet of you." Rarity was lovingly grooming her own mane. She looked over at the dragonling; he was watching every stroke of the brush with dazzled eyes. She grinned impishly. On a whim, she pulled out a single lock of her hair and snipped it off. "For you, my Spikey Wikey." She levitated it over to him. "A memento for my little champion... a lock of the mane and tail he helped save from ruin."

His expression as he clutched the lock in his claws was indescribable. "D'awwws" went up around the room.

"Gnerfh," he said. He blushed like a rose and fled. Affectionate laughter chased him out.

"So what happens now, Celestia?" Twilight asked.

"Well, once things have settled down at the monastery-- say in a month or two-- we will be making that little pilgrimage," Celestia said. "But we will be going not as supplicants, but as honored guests. As it should be, frankly." She shifted on her cushion. "The monks will have some little bit to teach us themselves, after all. But when we return, it will be with a complete transcribed set of the tomes, one for each of us. Back when bookmaking was so laborious, it made some sense to keep the volumes in secrecy, but now it foolishly imperils our future to have all our eggs in one basket. Even back then, knowledge was best preserved by sharing and spreading it-- not by hoarding it."

She frowned. "And certainly not by putting it in the hooves of those who use it to bloat their own egos, at the expense of others' self-esteem. Any 'spiritual' order that demands you mortify yourself to obtain their enlightenment, doesn't have any enlightenment worth having." She looked over at Rarity. "You've done Equestria a service by reminding me of that, Rarity."

Rarity reached a hoof over and ran it through Celestia's mane. She cooed. "Even if for nothing else than this," she said. "It would have been a crime against fabulosity itself had this glorious mane been cut!" She looked over and noticed Twilight pondering a fashion magazine lying between her hooves. "Twilight darling, what are you thinking?" she asked.

Twilight looked at the magazine. A lot of what Rarity had told her in their little discussion had stuck with her. About how pretty she was, and if only she would try something new with it. About how Rarity's grandmother had fought like a wildcat to protect it, despite what it cost. What Rarity said it was to every mare, even to Twilight.

Her crowning glory.

"I'm thinking... maybe a Prance braid?"

 

[RHJunior]

Summary:

There's some negative consequences with mucking about with Time, and Starlight Glimmer's gone and stepped right in them. But fortunately Twilight has a workaround...

Click to shrink...

An Alt timeline version of Step Right In and Start Again by shortskirtsandexplosions. All content with permission by shortskirtsandexplosions.

Click to shrink...

_____

"They're ready for you," the purple baby dragon says. He holds the door open for me solemnly.

I trot through the doorway on heavy hooves, entering the throne room with my head hung low. "I know there's no excuse for what I did. But I want you all to know that I'm ready for whatever punishment you think is fair."

It is from that point on that everything goes wrong.

No. Not wrong-- worse than I'd feared. I look up, and it is not only the Princess of Friendship and her friends... but Princess Celestia and Luna themselves. Rulers of the Sun and Moon. The very princesses I had once conspired to overthrow... They regard me with expressions I cannot read. My insides turn to jelly and I fall to my knees in terror. I am doomed, doomed beyond doomed...

"At ease, my little pony," Celestia's voice says, coming closer. I feel a gold-plated hoof lift my chin gently. "Let me take a good look at you... Starlight Glimmer, was it?"

"Y-y-yes.." I whimper.

"Be at ease," she says....kindly? "Everything is going to be alright." She passes her glowing horn over me.

I flinch, but no harm comes. A wave of golden energy passing over me, nothing more. As this goes on, I hear Luna's voice in the background: "And you say she remembers nothing of the previous twenty-four hours?"

"Not one bit," Twilight says. "She's a normal, calm, responsive pony for eighteen hours—"

"And then she vanishes."

"Precisely."

A small eternity passes. The glow fades. "Do you know what's wrong, Prin-- ahem, Celestia?" I hear Twilight say worriedly.

"Indeed I do," Celestia says solemnly. "Even if I do not know the inner workings of such magic, I know the side effects of abusing temporal magic when I sense them."

Twilight's eyes flit back and forth as something comes together behind them. "Oh no..." Twilight says. "The scroll..."

"You must have suspected as much yourself, my student," Celestia says sadly. "Tearing open the timeline, again and again... the consequences are often unpredictable, but that there will be consequences is inevitable. Her place, her role in the flow of time has been permanently altered."

Twilight suddenly gives a hiccup of alarm. She pats herself over with her hooves. "But-- what about me? Has it affected me too and I've not noticed it--"

The glow passes over her as well, briefly. "No," is the verdict. "I suspect you are untouched because you were not the instigator of the paradox, so you did not suffer the side effects.

"Pl-please, your Highnesses," I stammer, getting to my feet. "What's wrong with me?"

"There is no easy way to say it, I fear," Celestia says. "My little pony, you are, for lack of a better way to describe it, trapped in a time loop. You go forward normally for eighteen hours and then... disappear. Then, six hours after that, you return here, to this exact time and place. As if you were reset to exactly as you were before..." She lowers her head. "And I do not know how to undo it. And I sincerely doubt that anypony can."

"What??" Too late, bits and pieces of old lectures and tomes I had studied in learning Starswirl's magic fall into place.

"You damaged time itself," Luna says flatly. "The fabric of time, of the Universe, is hardy stuff, thankfully. But when it... sutured itself together, you became snared within the stitches. You are fated to repeat this loop-- forever."

"What??" I feel dizzy. "But---why-- why don't I remember??"

"Because you start each loop over 'reset,' Twilight said. Her eyes were pitying. "The rest of the universe goes on. But for you, everything you did the day before, it's as if it never happened." She swallowed. " You appear in this doorway, say your apology, we spend the day with you... and eighteen hours later you vanish. Then you reappear here and it starts all over again. We've already gone through this with you every day for almost a week, with no change whatsoever.

"Why--" I start to hyperventilate. "No. This can't be real. I can't live like that! I'd rather die!!"

"And were you to die," Princess Luna says somberly, "You would still reappear here, one day hence, thy memories gone as if they never were. And every day from now until the end of time. Never aging, never changing. Learning anew each day what has befallen you."

The horror of what has happened to me-- of what I've done to myself-- sinks in. I sink to the floor, sobbing.

It is then that Spike speaks up. "Maybe if she kept a journal?" he suggests. "Or a scrapbook. Write down all her memories of the day, put in photos and stuff---so Future Her can read it the next morning?"

"A clever idea, Spike darling," Rarity says, consoling. "But in a few days it would be so full of her memories that it would take her all day just to read it." Spike frowns and scratches his chin, stumped.

"Memory..." Twilight says suddenly. "Memory. Of course!" She steps forward. "Princesses, we can't fix the time loop...but I think I have a workaround. To make things easier for her."

"A... work-around?" Luna says, one eyebrow arching up.

Twilight nods. "The problem isn't the time loop. Not... well not really. If she were having to repeat, I don't know, Groundhog Day over and over again that would be a mess. But she's still going forward through time. The problem isn't the time travel, it's carrying her MEMORY forward. And I think I have a fix for that." She looks at me. "If you'll let me try?"

Desperate to cling to any straw, I nod.

"Okay, hold still Starlight." Her horn lights up with what I recognize as a memory transferring spell. "I'll get your own memories from you next time, but mine should fill the gap for now..." her horn flashes white--

---

It is time.

I gulp... hard. A sullen sigh escapes my lips, and I trot through the doorway on heavy hooves, entering the throne room with my head hung low. A bright table looms in the center of the place. I don't bother looking up. I can't.

"I know there's no excuse for what I did," I speak in as soft a voice as I can manage. "But I want you all to know--"

I get no further as something plunks down on my head. A coronet?--- what---

And then the jewel lights up and the memories flood in. "Better?" Twilight says.

"Better," I sigh with relief. Being brought up to speed instantly is very nice. How do you describe instantly going from knowing you're guilty and awaiting punishment, to knowing you're forgiven for your transgressions? It's like waking up in a panic thinking you're late for your final exams-- only to realize an instant later that it's Saturday, you already took the finals a week ago, aced them, and this is the first day of Summer vacation. I should find a way to bottle this sensation and sell it. Eu de Relief. I wonder if the Flim Flam brothers would like to collaborate.

"Speaking personally," Twilight says, "the Memory Crown is a vast improvement over me using the memory charm on you every day. Lots fewer headaches for both of us." She thumped her noggin and chuckled. "Ready to start the day?"

I smile and nod. Another day of my... I suppose you'd call it parole.... working with the Princess of Friendship. After all, no matter how far I can travel in eighteen hours-- and we've tested it-- I end up right back here. It makes it rather hard to keep me in a Canterlot dungeon, obviously, so I might as well be serving my sentence here.

I'm usually either helping Spike sort the library... again, honestly Twilight?.... or collaborating with her on her magic research. Kind of unavoidable really; until we figure out a way to break me out of this time loop thing, no matter how far I go I'm going to keep reappearing right at this doorway every twenty-four hours. The fact that Twilight can't figure out the conundrum only makes her more obsessive about it. Some days I'm tempted to reinvent the spell and use it just twice more: once give myself a kick in the plot, and once to give a kick in the plot to Starswirl. Crazy old coot, leaving half-finished spells lying around all over the place.... "Will the girls be coming over today?"

"Sometime this afternoon. Pinkie had a rush order and Applejack has to buck the South fields, but they wanted to go on a picnic later, so I figure we can take a break then..."

---

"I know there's no excuse for what I did," I speak in as soft a voice as I can manage. "But I want you all to know--"

A crown with glowing jewels lands on my head. Before I can even adjust a frantic Twilight is in my face. "Starlight I've been called to Canterlot for a very important diplomatic meeting and I can't for the LIFE of me find my Zebrican-Equestrian dictionary anywhere--"

"Shelf seventeen, third from the top, fourth in," I blurt.

"Oh thank heaven." She bolts off. Spike waddles by, nearly tripping over the scroll he's reading.

"You wouldn't happen to know where volume 5 of the Encyclopedia Equestria got to, would ya?" he mutters.

"Aisle eighteen, row seven, third in," I respond without thinking. "You left it there last night."

"....And the newest volume of 'Practical Potions for Practically Everything?" he says, his voice odd.

"Aisle three, bottom row, last on the shelf," and I rattle off the dewhoof decimal number. Wait. What?

"Aaaand what page is the formula for Poison Joke antidote?" he quizzes.

"Page 421..." I say. I blink at him. He blinks at me.

And that's how I learn that using the crown gives me eiditic memory.

---

"I know there's no excuse for what I did," I speak in as soft a voice as I can manage. "But I want you all to know--"

And then my hooves, all four of them, hit the banana peels. I skid wildly out of control across the floor, ending with a tremendous splat in a kiddy pool full of something white, foamy and gooey. I shake off my croggled state and taste. Yes, marshmallow creme. "What? What? What--"

And then the crown teleports to my head. "PINKIE! RAINBOW DAAAASH!!" I roar. The two are there all right; Dash is howling and clutching her sides as she staggers through the air, and Pinkie is rolling on the floor.

It doesn't take long after my-- temporally disadvantaged condition, I suppose one would call it-- becomes obvious that I learn one of the penalties I was going to have to pay: practical jokes. Rainbow Dash has a bit of a mean streak and a tendency to hold grudges. Her way of "getting over" a grudge is to pull practical jokes on the object of her animosity. Pinkie Pie, for her it's all in good fun...

And here I am; a deserving target who appeared in the exact same place at the exact same time doing the exact same thing in the exact same way, right down to the last hoofstep, every single day-- and who NEVER remembered (at least for the first minute) what had happened before, no matter WHAT happened the day before... what prankster worth her whoopie cushion could pass that up? I've eaten more pie to the face than a platoon of clowns and sat on more whoopie cushions than every disliked teacher in the Equestrian school system.

They finally reined it in after one particularly egregious prank with a bucket of ink made me burst into tears; scoldings and apologies all around had ensued, with promises to 'lay off.' But they didn't quite get the message till Twilight and I turned the tables on them. We used a "frozen sleep" spell, a couple of penguins from Fluttershy (don't ask) and about a ton of ice and snow swiped from the weather factory (no, really, don't ask) to convince them that they had slept through an Ice Age... they sincerely apologized then, and stopped the pranking.

But every now and then...

I sit there in my marshmallow kiddy pool and glower at them as they giggle like lunatics. "I hope you're satisfied," I grumble.

"I know I am," Rainbow Dash says. "I've been saving that idea for months."

"ohh.. shut up and get me a spoon." The pool suddenly gets chilly. I turn around and Pinkie Pie is dumping buckets of ice cream in with me. "Pinkie! What--"

"Oh come on, all that marshmallow topping and no ice cream?" She gigglesnorts. She throws in a few mare-aschino cherries on top, picks up three wooden spoons and jumps in with me. "Come on in Dashie, the Sundae's fine!"

"Hah, no thanks, it'd take all day to get the marshmallow out of my primaries and-- hey!" I smirk and magically yank her headfirst into the ice cream.

---

"I know there's no excuse for what I did," I speak in as soft a voice as I can manage. "But I want you all to know--"

I stop, bewildered. Soldiers are running every which way, shouting orders. Pegasi are flying in and out of open windows. Twilight--- a somewhat taller Twilight--- seems to be conducting affairs. There is a sound of explosions outside. Then the crown teleports itself to my head, and I get the rundown: we're at war. It seems Chrysalis has decided her usual level of subtlety was too much and has switched to open invasion. I swear, she is the WORST example of a Changeling I could possibly imagine. It's like the idea of stealth and subterfuge are wasted on her.

I'd be more contemptuous if her open warfare hadn't gotten her half the territory of Equestria. "No! The Changelings have gotten to Ponyville??"
Rainbow Dash lands in front of me. "Chrysalis herself, no less," she sneered. "Old roach face plans on making Friendship Castle her new Capitol. We're evacuating now..." That obviously sticks in the pegasus' craw.

Massive purple claws pick me up. Spike sets me on his back. "Try not to throw up on me this time, okay?" he says as he spreads his wings. "I-- I don't know what good it'll do," he said as he goes aloft. "You'll be right back here in 24 hours-- I promise, we'll rescue you as often as it takes, no way we'll leave a friend in Chrysalis' clutches--- what, what's so funny?"

I've started cackling like a Serial Studios villain as an idea blooms in my head. "Don't worry, Spike, I have a plan...don't tell Twilight..."

---

"I know there's no excuse for what I did," I speak in as soft a voice as I can manage. "But I want you all to know--"

I stop, bewildered. Instead of the Mane Six, a gaunt, half-insectoid Changeling mare sits at the Table. She is cackling over the Map, watching her forces march to and fro. "Do they think they can hide from ME, with THIS tool in my power? I---" she looks up. " Who the blazes are you??"

Then the crown teleports to my head and I get the rundown. Chrysalis, invasion, Castle of Friendship, Table of Gratuitous Strategic Vulnerability in her clutches, okay, got it. Time to execute Plan A, also known as Plan What the Hell Are You Thinking Starlight Glimmer.

In my next breath I magically shut the doors and windows and melt them shut, sealing her minions outside. I give her my best smirk and paw the ground with one hoof. Right now Spike and the Mane Six are leading a massive counterattack on the outskirts of Ponyville City, drawing off Chrysalis' forces, and with them a considerable portion of her magical power. I've got maybe a hooffull of minutes before the remaining changeling hordes batter the doors down, so I'd better take her down fast.

Then again, I should manage. Temporally Challenged or not, I'm Starlight Glimmer. I'm a unicorn mage on par with Twilight Sparkle, Sunset Shimmer or even Starswirl the Bearded, I've trapped the Changeling Queen in her own throne room all alone with me.... and thanks to the Crown, I have 4,052 different spells to make a Changeling scream "Mommy" right at my horntip.

Game on.

----

The Mane Six stand at the doorway to the battered throne room, aghast at the damage. They're even more aghast when they see Chrysalis lying on the floor in a fetal position sucking her hoof and making mewling noises. "What...?" is all Twilight gets out.

I limp over, nursing my various burns, cuts, bruises, and possibly a cracked rib, pick my battered crown up off the floor and plop it on my head with a painful smirk. "Plan A sort of turned into plan B. Caught her by surprise, managed to about hold my own with her, but.... I couldn't drop her fast enough. She had me dead to rights.

"But somewhere in the middle of the fight," I said, coughing briefly, "She got it in her head that my crown was the source of all my power. The first chance she had she took it from me, put it on, and---" I gesture at the Queen of Drool. "Guess nopony ever told her it's a bad idea to try and cram other ponies' memories into your own head."

"Looks like it wasn't too good for all the minions psychically linked to her, either," Rainbow Dash says, stepping over one of the semi-conscious guards piled at the door. She gives him a kick in the head as she does.

"Is she still a threat?" Rarity asks nervously.

Twilight looks up from examining the brain-stunned queen. "No, and never will be again," she says. "Her mind is just... gone. She's been reduced to the intellect of a newborn infant. Larva. Whatever."

There was a long pause as the mane six soak in the sight of Equestria's worst enemy mewling like an infant. "I'M not babysitting," Pinkie Pie finally says.

---

It's a lovely day. Five elderly mares, one immortal alicorn, and a time-looped unicorn (myself) are sharing tea and cakes while the Princess pores over the documentation of my little alchemy project. "This," Twilight is stunned. "This is incredible. An elixir of perpetual youth! This...." She looked puzzled for a moment. "But how did you conduct this first series of preliminary tests?"

"Well... on myself," I admitted. "I was the safest pony to test."

"What??" Twilight said, shocked. "That is highly irresponsible! It's dangerous in the extreme! Why if something had gone wrong, you would... have... um..." she trailed off as she realized. "Oh. Right."

I nodded and winked. "Safest pony, like I said. If anything went wrong--- and the first few trials did..." I shuddered deeply. "Well, I 'looped' the next morning and all was well. I used a standard researchers' speed-it-up field for the long-term results.... a hundred and fifty years of aging in a few hours. Extremely disorienting, let me tell you-- but it gave me the data I needed. The elixir works."

"Awesome. I'm in," Dash says, predictably. Her memory charm glitters in the sunlight. It was a smaller, more compact version of the Crown of Memory I wore. She had been one of the first of the six to adopt the device after Twilight introduced it to the world as a way for the elderly to retain their clarity of mind in old age. Senility was a thing of the past, now that memories could be safely preserved. Rainbow Dash, as body proud as she was, hated the idea of slowly crumbling to old age with a passion. I could count on her support easily.

"But Dash, what about the consequences?" Fluttershy frets. "It could cause all sorts of problems..." Fluttershy is of course the opposite. It's her nature to fret about every possibility, regardless of whether it's likely or not. If I told her the elixir had a one in fifty thousand chance of causing it to rain elephants, she'd be the first to insist everyone bought elephant-proof umbrellas.

"I don't know... the benefits are obvious, but...." Rarity, of course, is obviously torn. I feel kind of cheap for that; the idea of smoothing away her wrinkles and grey hairs would be irresistible to the vain unicorn. I can see it in her eyes... though she can't bring herself to say it out loud.

"Benefits, boy howdy," Applejack says, pausing to grunt and crack a joint in her back. Applejack is likewise torn. So traditionalist. But with her aging bones starting to hurt from the work on the farm, she's too practical minded to be resistant to the idea. "I'm not so sure, but y' cain't be sure about everything. You got my vote."

"Ooh my. Imagine all the birthdays....." Pinkie Pie... is Pinkie Pie. A magically enhanced IQ is insufficient for understanding her, much less guessing at her motivations.

But Twilight shakes her head. "I have to agree," she says. "The disruption it could cause to society---" she shakes her head again. "I can't agree to this. I'm sorry." Once again, she falls to her own obsessive compulsive traits and to the precautionary principle.

It's about what I expected. I prepared accordingly. I'm afraid I'm still that stubborn pony who could not take no for an answer.

I take a sip of my tea and set the cup down. "Then I have a confession to make," I said. I swallowed.

They all freeze. Rarity is the first to guess it. "No...." Rarity says. "You went ahead and made the elixir?"

"Made it?" I laugh. "My dear Rarity, I spiked everyone's tea with it." They all glance down at their cups in shock. "Yes, even you, Twilight. Alicorns MIGHT be immortal or they MIGHT just be really long lived, I didn't feel like taking the chance. Spike too; his barrel of apple cider this morning had a little extra oomph in it." I pause. "In addition, Flim and Flam have been selling it across Equestria for me for about a week now as a rejuvinative elixir.... which, technically, it is. And I've sent the recipe to several laboratories and hospitals. I wasn't about to start this discussion without the cat being thoroughly out of the bag."

"Really, I'm surprised none of you noticed the effects it's having right now." It was true; wrinkles were fading, eyes were clearing, streaks of grey were disappearing from manes and tails. The gasps of astonishment were gratifying.

Twilight stands up, enraged. "Starlight Glimmer! Of all the foolish--- reckless---"

"Selfish?" I reply. "Because that's what it is, Twilight. SELFISH. I'll admit it, and happily! You said it yourself, years ago: I'm trapped in this time loop until the end of time itself. And there's no escape for me. I've "died" dozens of times, only to come right back here. Do you know what that means I have to look forward to? I will still be here millennia after all of you, even YOU, Twilight, are dust and ash. I will be here after our world is a lifeless ball of rock; I will get to sit here and watch the stars snuff out one by one. ALONE. In a lifeless void, for all eternity."

I stand up. I am not feeling particularly... stable at the moment. "Well, I am not going to spend all of eternity as the only living thing in the universe, just because YOU don't like the idea of how eternal youth might rock the boat momentarily in one tiny corner of it! I don't care if it's selfish, I'm not going to... sit by your graves... alone...forever..." I start hucking and choking.

"I know... you're... furious with me... and you will be... for a long time..."

The room is silent for a long, long time. "I think EXASPERATED is the word," Twilight sighs. "Starlight, you-- ARRRrgh! What am I supposed to say to somepony who gave ponies eternal youth against their will?"

"Don't worry," a sarcastic voice says from a window. "You'll think of something." Spike's scaly head pokes in through a window. "Hey y'all. Yeah, I overheard. You guys keep forgetting I'm out here, don't you. I thought my cider tasted funny this morning..." he gives me a look that speaks volumes, then looks at the others. "Look, I'm afraid I'm on her side, here."

"Spike?" Twilight says, confused.

"C'mon, Twilight. Dragons live for thousands of years. Did any of you ever ask yourselves what I was gonna have to go through, watching you all die while I went on living? I know what she's thinking, what she's feeling. And if you were honest for a second, miss Immortal Alicorn Princess, so do you." Twilight looks uncomfortable at that. "Shoot, If I had found some immortality potion, I'd have spiked your morning coffee with it just like that." He snapped his massive claws for emphasis. "Cause I figure no matter how mad you got, at least you'd be there to BE mad... and you'd eventually live long enough to forgive me for it."

"But taking the choice out of other ponies' hooves..." Rarity objected weakly.

"You do that all the time," Spike said bluntly. "When a pony is doing something dangerous, or stupid, or suicidal. I think refusing to accept a cure for DEATH is pretty much the definition of suicidal." The others sat around and chewed on that.

"Well, what's done is done," Applejack say firmly. "I'm thinkin' we best catch up with the Flim Flam brothers--"

"It's a little late to stop them, Applejack." I start to say.

"--An' make sure they're not gettin' clever and mixin' your potion up with any fillers or additives, if you know what I mean," she finishes, giving me the eye. "You could give those two fools the original golden goose and they'd go broke trying to make omelets." I snicker in spite of the tension.

"Can you forgive me?" I start to say. In answer, wings and hooves enfold me. I cry a few tears of relief. My friends are still my friends. More importantly, my friends will live.

Twilight sighs. "Faust only knows what Celestia and Luna are going to have to say about you unleashing immortality on the unsuspecting populace," she says drily.

--- Not much, as it turns out. Celestia is more miffed that I had left her out of the loop than anything; She'd rather wanted to be the one to spring eternal youth on the pony race. Luna's only verdict is to slug back a dose and remark that she liked the hint of lemon.

---

The crown appears and settles on my brow.

There are now a few dozen tiny memory gems at my brow, bright as stars. Progress, like time, marches on; for not the first time I thank heaven that Twilight continually improves the memory gems. Were I to use the simple century stones of the first crown to store my memories today, I would be bedecked in memory-storing jewels from my nose to my hooves till I couldn't move.

I look around the chamber. The crystal palace is long gone--- or rather, what it has becomes bears no resemblance to the castle of all those millennia ago, any more than the shining spires of Canterlot bore a resemblance to the crude lean-to the first stoneworkers set up on the worksite where it would arise. From the outside it appears as an enormous bauble, almost like an old-fashioned hearthwarming tree star. The Palace of Memory hangs suspended in air thousands of feet up. It is accessible by a single stone bridge, a thread-thin spire of rock jutting out at an angle from the flank of a vast, impossibly tall mountain. What was once a rather gaudy little castle in a tree is now a vast crystalline cathedral, filled with thousands of vast rooms and bestowed with every possible creature comfort.... all of it built around the kernel of this singular room and my own little time-looped "catwalk." All with the singular goal of keeping me, and my tiny little corner of the universe, protected from the ravages of time.

My friends have taken good care of me.

The map chamber is now a globe of viewing windows that look out on our ancient world; a world now as lifeless and barren as the surface of its moon. The Map too has evolved; it now projects a glowing three-dimensional model of the galaxy above itself, pinpricked with colored lights representing the countless inhabited worlds out there.

Vast stretches of time have had their toll on the world of Equestria: the terrain resembles nothing from our youth. Countless millennia ago the fires of our world's small sun banked, dimmed, and faded away, leaving its sole illumination the magical light of Luna's moon. I stood here over the aeons and watched the oceans freeze, the last wisps of the atmosphere sublimate away....It's a stark and pristine sort of beauty now under that pale light; even now it elicits shudders from the Moon Princess when she visits. She says it reminds her too much of her own brief prison, and how close she came to plunging our world into this cold and lifeless state. Still, she visits as often as she can, with the many worlds she must travel and supervise. Celestia on the other hand rarely visits; seeing her first star hanging in the sky, cold and dim and long abandoned, puts her in a sulky mood. Her consort Discord at least can restore her to a cheerful mood...

The races of Equestria long ago evacuated, of course. They struck out for the stars, led by the Alicorns... With virtual immortality, universal ascendancy became an inevitability; every member of the pony race, even the thestrals and seaponies, eventually obtained alicornhood.The races and species of Equestria are now scattered across the galaxy. I am literally the last unicorn in the universe.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Mother of Memory?" A golden-maned alicorn filly steps up to me shyly. It is my current maid of honor; I'm barely half her size, yet the dear child treats me with shy reverence and respect as if I towered over her.

"No thank you, Comet Tail," I say. "Though I will have my usual breakfast in the blue garden room."

"Of course." She nods respectfully and leaves. The Palace of Memory does have staff, of course. Servants, housekeepers, guards, scholars and students-- especially students. The Palace is an archive of our race's history, from its ancient past on this very world to its blooming and ever-growing legend throughout the galaxy. Copies of every tome ever written by pony hoof, wing or horn are stored here, preserved in tiny pin-prick sized memory stones, a glittering starscape of knowledge. It is part museum as well, with relics of fathomless ages in every nook and corner. Some of them to my annoyance my own personal possessions; it's rather exasperating to come across some eager young alicorn student perusing the contents of your coffee table or medicine cabinet as if he had discovered the lost tomb of King Rutentuten. I once spent five minutes explaining to one perplexed thousand-year-old academic what a "toothbrush" was.

I have to include myself among those 'relics.' Mother of Memory, they call me. The last unicorn in existence, in all of our thousands of worlds. It is amusing; they treat me with the same reverence I would have treated any alicorn princess all those aeons ago... and as I still would treat them, were I to neglect putting on my memory crown one morning. From time to time I instruct my hoofservant to withhold my crown for a short while, for the edification of some of the students. It is very sobering for them to realize how far they have come.

All that most of them know of my past is little more than a fairy tale: In the dawn of creation, I committed a terrible crime against our people and against Time Itself, and that my punishment was to be imprisoned on this tiny planet to watch the turning of the eternal ages till Time Itself came to an end. A rather poetic and dramatic rendering for such a petty, foolish and terrible sin, isn't it? But I think I can be forgiven for letting a little veneer of myth and mystery form to cover my sins.

Rarity and Spike will be visiting some time this week. They've been on a junket around the galaxy on their nth honeymoon, reliving some of the glory days and sparking old romance. Another awkward reminder of my sins; it seems that dragons never cease growing, and in his natural form Spike now towers taller than one of the primordial Ursa Majors. They have to make extensive use of size and form-altering spells for when they wish to be more intimate, and certain topics about the past can be rather... delicate. Still, they are wonderful company, and their stories from their travels are refreshing.

Spike, at the least, is better behaved than Fluttershy's irascible rabbit. She would go and give the little demon a dose of the immortality serum....

---

I step into the chamber. The crown settles on my head.

There is no actual chamber anymore, so much as a singular pocket embedded in the fabric of space itself, a chamber as vast as a gas giant. The planet is long gone, the sun and the moon long gone, the distant stars-- so many of them brightened by alicorn made worldrings at one time, or dimmed by dyson spheres, oh all those aeons ago!--- down to nothing but a few dim sparks clustered together in one corner of an endless sky. The crown on my head is no longer made of enchanted gems but of some transcendant stuff, somewhere between matter and energy and the cosmic fabric itself. It glitters on my brow; thousands of diamond-bright intangible threads stretching out from it in every direction to the walls and ceiling and floor around me. I now live in a literal Palace of Memory, the last flesh and blood eye in a universe slowly winking out.

My friends are there; the thousands I've made in my long pseudo-lifetime, and the six dearest to me, who saved me from myself so long ago. They long ago transcended from material existence; they are beings of thought and energy, like alicorns made of living iridescent flame. How primitive, how barbaric I must look to those all around me! "What brings you all here?" I say, confused.

"Oh my." Fluttershy, ever unchanging, a squirming bundle of rabbit-shaped energy in her forehooves. "Don't... don't you remember?"

For a moment I feel something I haven't in millennia: a chill of fear. "No, I don't!--- Is... is there something wrong with the Crown??"

Twilight laughs and drifts closer. "It's all right Starlight Glimmer. We knew your memory retrieval might get a little spotty here, near the end. Everything's okay though..."

"End of what?"

"Why, the end of the universe, of course," she says matter-of-factly.

"Oooga booga," a pink alicorn cloud says.

"Pinkie---!" Rarity scolds.

"You remember our old Astronomy lessons, right?" Twilight prompts. A brief struggle fishes the memories up and I nod. "The Big Bang, remember? Well, say hello to the Big Crunch."

"Big Crunch," a vast, all encompassing thought-voice. "I still say it sounds like a name for a Troll." I look up and outside the Palace in alarm. Curled up around my gas-giant sized thought-construct like a cat around a ball of yarn is a dragon vast beyond imagining. He is silhouetted in purple and filled with starlike globes of light. He waves a hand the size of a dozen planets at me and smiles. Twilight sticks her tongue out at him.

"Ignore Spike," she says. "He's going to be sheltering us, to protect us during the transition."

Of course. I look to the black sky, to where the few stars are clustered. Is it my imagination or are they moving closer together? "You're getting a little forgetful here because, well, time's going a little wonky here as the Universe collapses. But really, everything's okay."

"The universe is ending," I repeat dryly, "But everything's okay..." A few thousand nearby cosmic entities get a cheap laugh at Twilight's expense.

She sighs and rolls her illusionary eyes at me. "Well this is the transition point. It's not the end of the Universe, so much as... a jump-start for the next. Time, space, everything." She grinned like a filly on Hearthwarming. "A whole new universe. It's going to be amazing! But that's not the point I'm making, I mean--"

"Don't you remember what your little problem is?" A rainbow-colored alicorn being teases.

"Forever trapped until the end of time..." I murmur, understanding blooming. The stars outside move faster; the light grows brighter.

"And here we are, at the place where time is about to end," Twilight clops her spectral hooves together. "And in just a few seconds, er, relativistically speaking for you, we'll be able to pop you free!"

"Yes," says another voice. Celestia and Luna, it could be no others, one white and golden, one indigo, drift in. "Time-- what there is of it-- grows short indeed. We'd best prepare her then."

Outside, time and space swirl together towards one end of the sky, faster and faster. Wings of white and indigo flame enclose me...
The transcendence is... eruptive. Even as timespace unravels, I explode from my mortal form to my immortal one, and from that last material form to one of pure energy and consciousness, like a caterpillar becoming a cocoon and thence a butterfly in a singular rush. Time and Space press down on my Palace from outside, slipping past, pulling away-- I can feel/see/sense the loop of time around me, the pestiferous thing like a gryphon's rabbit snare around my leg, holding me captive all these aeons; at long last the snare bends and the knot loosens. Helping hooves pull the loop open, and I slip free. I laugh to think how desperately we all struggled against such a simple thing. My soul exults and my ethereal wings spread wide as I am finally free.

The memories, all the memories, fall together on me like starfall. I become truly one with my own past for the first time, my memories truly merged into me at last. And I share them, joyfully, with all those within the palace, as they share with me. As we rush towards the Singularity, barriers I had never been aware of begin to break down. The wall between Life and Afterlife gives way; countless billions we had thought lost forever flock to join us, transcendant beings of light and thought like ourselves, trillions of souls hurtling together towards the ultimate threshold---

The stars rush together ahead of us, into a single mass like a film of a firework running backwards, growing brighter and brighter--- Spike wraps
himself around our tiny shelter and braces himself. The last thing heard in our old universe is a single word from Pinkie Pie

Wheeeeee--

There is an all-encompassing flash of white--

And we hurtle IN and THROUGH and OUT again, riding the wave as the cosmos explodes, celebrating its own rebirth.

We all gaze in wonder around us as a new Universe cools and forms around us...

New endings, new beginnings. Step right in and start again...

 

[RHJunior]

McGonagall tried to remain calm and patient as she questioned the two students standing in her office door. It wasn't easy. Weasley and Granger both looked disheveled, dusty, rumpled and were radiating an extreme amount of URGENCY as they stood there. "So let me get this straight," she said, her Scottish brogue peeking out from behind her clipped collegiate accent like a threatening thunderstorm on the horizon. "You two, and Mr. Potter, in spite of all the warnings, went up and explored the third floor corridor as you were expressly forbidden to?"



You could tell much about a child by how they responded to an accusation Hermione, as to be expected, wilted a bit; Ron on the other hand went red at the ears and seemed to puff up a bit. "It weren't our fault," he said, a trifle belligerent. "The moving staircases pulled a fast one on us, dumped us on the wrong floor--"



"He's telling the truth, Professor," Hermione chipped in. McGonagall motioned her to silence.



"...And then?" she bade the youngest Weasley continue.



The boy seemed to deflate a bit. "And, um, we were standing there trying to figure out whether to wait for the stair to come back around or what, and then we saw Mrs. Norris and heard Filch coming, and we sort of… um… panicked," he finished with mumble.



McGonagall blinked. A vision of the sly grinning visage of young Lord Hadrian Orlock-Potter, Vampire Princeling of Wallachia, crossed her mind. "I somehow have trouble picturing that," she said.



"More like, um, we panicked," Hermione clarified, pointing to herself and Ron.



"At what Harry might do if Filch got… erm… Filch-y with him," Ron said.



The cat took one look at Harry, made a yowlping sound as if she'd swallowed her own hairball, and bolted back the way she came. Harry just smirked after the fleeing cat as if he were sizing her up for a loaf pan and some potatoes and onions. "Ah well, maybe next time," he said.



"Har-reee!" Hermione cuffed his arm, upset. She was a known cat lover. Harry relented, making conciliatory gestures with his hands at the girl, while Ron sniggered up his own sleeve.



Further conversation was interrupted by a raspy, grizzled voice wafting down the hallway. "What is it, precious? Some naughty schoolchildren--" here the voice sounded as if it wanted to spit-- "going out of bounds? Oh, it's punishment time..."



"Filch," Ron said. It almost sounded like a swear.



Hermione felt herself starting to panic at the thought of the almost-certain detention at Filch's hands. Then she caught a glimpse of Harry's face and REALLY started panicking. The vampire princeling had many expressions, almost all of them smiles or smirks of one kind or the other; this one was a slow, creeping grin of anticipation… like a cat watching the door to a mouse's cage open.



She'd best distract him before he decided to do something "fun" with the school custodian. She swatted Harry with one of her rolled up homework scrolls ("I was lucky I wasn't concussed." "Oh very funny.") and pointed to a door behind them. "Quick, through here! Alohomora!" A quick unlocking spell and they were inside. They shut the door behind them, just avoiding Filch--



---Turned around, and found themselves facing three gigantic, drooling, growling heads, each big enough to bite a man in half. Said heads were mounted on a rottweiler the size of a bus.



"Good heavens," McGonagall said. A simple unlocking spell had opened that door?? She was going to bend Dumbledore's ear something fierce over that. "And seeing as you're unharmed, I assume you bolted right back out the way you came in--"



The two looked at each other. "Not exactly," Hermione said, cringing.



The impossible dog let out an earshattering bark and lunged.



Harry lunged forward as well. He whipped off his smoked glasses and pointed at the floor, his eyes blazing blood red.

"SIT!!!" He roared, his fangs gleaming.



The cerberus hit the ground with all three chins, whimpering. It did its best to flatten itself into the floor, never taking its six red eyes off Harry's two.



McGonagall ran her hands down her face. "And of course, our Vampire Princeling immediately subjugates the Cerberus…." Could Dumbledore possibly pick worse protections for the Philosopher's Stone? A sudden chill ran down her back as she put those two sentences together in her head, and realized just who of the Grimdark Trio was missing from this little discussion. "...Where is Mr. Potter?" she said sharply. "Don't tell me he went on and sent you back--!"



Ron and Hermione looked at one another. Went on to what? "Not exactly, ma'am," Ron said. "See, he was rather sort of upset about the um, conditions Fluffy was living in..."



McGonagall's hands dropped an inch and her eyes bored into Ron's like augers. "What?"



"--That was the name on the tag...And he was right, Professor," Hermione said. "It was far too small. A dog that size in that chamber-- it would be like you or me living in a pickle barrel. No room to run, no toys to play with… Harry was quite livid."



"That's why we ran to get you, Professor," Ron said. "He decided to--"



"GR-GR-GROWF!!"



A deafening triple bark echoed through the castle. Something huge, hairy, doggy-ish, and sporting three heads galumphed past the open classroom doors. McGonagall caught a brief glimpse of someone in Gryffindor robes astride the thing's middle neck as it bounded by.



"YeeeeHAWWW! Come on, Fluffy! Yeeeeehaaa!"



"--He decided to take him for walkies," Ron finished feebly. McGonagall stood frozen, gawking in disbelief as barks, screams of alarm, and the crash of a toppled suit of armor echoed through the halls outside. Hermione whipped out her wand and began casting a spell at one of the desks. "What are you doing?" Ron asked her.



"Trying to transfigure a giant rubber chew-bone," Hermione said.



"Hey, Malfoy! Look, Fluffy, a Slytherin! FETCH!"



"Potter, what are you—AAAAAH!"

 

[RHJunior]

"Dragons," Harry said to noone in particular as he wandered down the Hogwarts corridor. "It had to be dragons."

Harry Potter's fourth year at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had gone straight to hell. Oh, it had been fairly decent at first; Even if it had been announced that Quidditch had basically been cancelled for a year, that just meant he had a little more time to himself. He had looked forward to having a nice, quiet, uneventful year at Hogwarts.

Then the reason for the cancellation had cropped up. The Tri-Wizard tournament was taking place at Hogwarts. It was a dangerous and challenging magical contest between the champions of three different Magical schools-- Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, and of course Hogwarts. Students of all three schools would be crammed under Hogwarts' high-peaked roof for the year, as three seventh-year students were selected as champions and faced the three challenges of the Tournament in front of Hogwarts and the world.

Even then, that hadn't been so bad. The school might be crowded with all the extra Bulgarian and French students everywhere, but for once all the attention would be somewhere else other than on Harry.

Then the Goblet of Fire had come out, the candidates' names had gone in… and, contradictory to all the rules of both the contest and of magic, FOUR names had come out.

One of them his.

From there on it was all downhill. Nobody believed him when he said that he hadn't entered. The entire school body had turned against him, calling him a cheat who had "stolen the glory" from the "real" Hogwarts champion, Cedric Diggory. His own best friend Ron didn't believe him, and refused to speak to him out of jealousy.

And now, now he had discovered that the first challenge was going to be against dragons.

He had spent days since, digging through the school library, picking the brains of his teachers and upperclassmen-- those who would still talk to him-- for anything and everything about how to fight such a monster.

He needed a tool, a gimmick, a weapon. SOMETHING.

In another timeline he would have shortly run into Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody, who would have given him a broad hint that led him to using his broom-riding skills against the dragon.

In eighty-three percent of the timelines following that, it would have ended with him crispy-fried and eaten by something WAY more adept at flying than he was.

This time, however, he found himself walking down the hallway next to an absentminded Ravenclaw whose nose was in a book, absentmindedly mumbling an old tune.



"Portabello Road,

Portabello Road,

Where are the treasures

of earth are all stowed,

Anything and everything

A chap could unload

Is sold o'er the barrel

down at Portabello Road..."



In spite of his mood Harry smiled wistfully. He recognized the song; it was from an old movie he'd managed to sneak a watch of on the Dursley's telly ages ago… "Bedknobs and Broomsticks." From a scene where the protagonists were scouring the booths and shoppes of that famous market road for a missing magic book…

Harry began to get an inkling of an idea. The more he dwelled on it, the more the idea sank its hooks into him. He went from walking to jogging, then to running. Minutes later he was at McGonagall's office, rapping determinedly on the door.

The door swung open and the stalwart professor peered out at him. "Yes, Mr. Potter?" She asked. "Is there something I can do for you?"

Yes," Harry said, firming his resolve. "I need to go shopping."





Appealing to one's role as a Tri-Wizard Champion certainly opened doors. Not an hour later Harry was standing at the entrance to Diagon Alley next to his Head of House. He was wearing a set of robes borrowed from Neville (the formerly stocky boy had shot up like a weed that year), had changed his hair to a dull brown with a color-changing spell and had hidden his scar under a dollop of makeup, courtesy of Hermione. It wasn't a perfect disguise by far, but it would keep people from recognizing him clear down the street, at least.

"Are you certain you do not wish me to accompany you, Mr. Potter?" McGonagall said, her brow creased in concern.

"If you're with me, it just means people are more likely to recognize me," Harry said politely but firmly. "It's better I do this alone. Plus I'm not one hundred percent certain of what I'm looking for--"

"Then why come here?" she demanded to know.

"Because I've done everything at Hogwarts but turn the castle upside down and shake it, looking for a solution," he said. "If there's any answer to my little dragon problem, it's going to be in there, somewhere." He pointed at the brick wall. "I just have to go hunting for it."

McGonagall set her mouth in a line. "Very well," she said. She raised her wand and tapped the bricks in the secret pattern; the wall folded back and slid aside. "You have until curfew to do your… shopping. Do you have your Portkey?" Harry held up a ten pence coin with a hole drilled through it. "Good. Say 'Home again, home again, jiggity jig' when you are ready to return."

"jiggity jig?" Harry repeated, grinning.

She huffed. "It had to be something you wouldn't say by accident, now didn't it?" She sighed and set her shoulders. "...Good luck, Mr. Potter." With that, she apparated.

Harry took a deep breath, and entered the Alley.

The first hour or so of the search were not very fruitful. He scoured Flourish and Blotts for any books on dragons, but found only more recent copies of the same books he'd searched in the Hogwarts library. Slug and Jiggers Apothecary failed to yield any potentially useful potions (Harry had felt a spark of hope upon spotting some bottles of Fireproofing potion, but his mood had crashed upon reading the warning label: "Not rated for Fiendfyre, Unseelie Faerie Fire, or Dragonfire.") He'd even spoken briefly with the wizards and witches at Magical Menagerie-- they'd laughed at the notion they'd even carry anything for dealing with dragons.

Perhaps one of the junk stores had some weapons-- an old forgotten magic sword, or…

He paused in mid stride and looked down the mouth of Knockturn Alley. He shuddered at the very notion of searching through the shops and artifacts of that place--

It was then that he noticed something peculiar. A new shop, one he had never noticed before, was sitting right at the very intersection of the two alleys. Its front door sat on the very corner of the two streets, squeezed between a junk shop on the Diagon side and a disreputable looking potions shop on the Knockturn side. It looked fairly old, as if it had been there for years… yet Harry would swear blue in the face that he'd never seen it before then, not on all his trips to the Alley…

He read the hanging sign over the doorway out loud. "The Lost Workshoppe," he said.

Even if he'd not been on a desperate quest, he would have been intrigued. He pulled the faceted glass door open and stepped inside.

The door jingled as it closed behind him. He stood there for a moment, staring at everything.

If there'd been any doubt that this was a magic shop, it was easily dispelled. The space beyond the door was far broader and deeper than the tiny buildings on either side could accommodate. Shelves and stands and plinths crammed the floorspace; stairs wound up to an open second story filled with even more stuff. Objects of every imaginable shape-- preserved skeletons of fantastic beasts, model planes and airships, strange kites big enough to sailplane on, and more. Clockwork trinkets buzzed and clicked and clanked about freely on the shelves next to strange glowing and buzzing devices that looked like they came off the dashboard of a starship. Alarmingly, more than one weapons rack graced the walls-- some held swords and axes, others held guns… or things that looked like guns, if one ignored the odd brass fittings and valves. Books, scrolls, things in jars and bottles and boxes...

Harry slowly realized that many of the things just in his line of sight he'd never seen in either the muggle or the wizarding world…

And at the counter in the back of the store was a bear.

In a hat.

The bear.. no, panda, Harry corrected himself. A panda dressed in a what looked like black silk pajamas, and wearing a conical straw hat… the panda looked up at him. "Welcome," he said, giving a bow. "Welcome to the Lost Workshop. I am Shen. How may I be of service?"

Harry's mouth opened and closed a few times while he struggled to think of what to say. This was a little beyond the pale, even for the magical world. "I… my name's Harry Potter," he said. He grimaced, immediately wanting to kick himself for giving his name away…! But for some reason the words kept tumbling out. "I have a problem."

The panda nodded and removed his hat. "Everyone who comes through that door does," he said, setting the coolie hat atop an antique cash register.

"Really?" Harry said.

"That's what shopping is," Shen said with a shrug. "People looking for a solution to a problem. Even if that problem is just 'what will I have for dinner?'" He chuckled. "Speaking of which… care to join me?" He gestured to the counter. Harry realized the panda was fussing with a tray in front of him with little porcelain bowls and pots and plates on it.

"Errr, Tea?" Harry asked.

"Pork ramen," The panda said. He picked up the tray and brought it over to a low table nearby. He sat down on a cushion and beckoned Harry over. "Come, come. I made more than enough for two." When Harry held back he said, "You might as well. I'm taking my lunch break, so you'll have to wait anyway."

Hesitantly, Harry sat down on the cushion opposite the panda as he served everything out. He looked down in the bowl in front of him; a broth-like soup with curly thin noodles, with mushrooms, slices of pork and a sliced boiled egg artfully arranged on top. "Noodle soup from Japan, sweet iced tea from America," Shen said as he poured them each a glass from a pitcher. "I'm definitely not a traditionalist." He handed Harry some chopsticks. "Itadikimasu, as the Japanese say," he said, picking up his bowl. "Or, as you say here-- 'Up the Irish.'"

Harry picked up his own bowl, copying him. The soup did smell heavenly, and it'd been a long time since breakfast. He scooped some noodles into his mouth like his dinner partner. Delicious.

After they'd both slurped up the last of the broth, Shen picked up his glass of iced tea and sat back. "So," he said. "Tell me about this problem you are having that brings you here."

Harry sucked at the straw in his tea. It was cold and almost too sweet…. The strangest tea he'd ever had, but not bad, he supposed. "Well," he said after he swallowed, "There's this thing going on right now called the Tri-wizard tournament..."

Bit by bit, the story slowly spilled out of him. The Goblet of Fire, the Tournament, all his classmates turning on him, even Ron, Rita Skeeter, the Dragons…

Shen listened quietly, nodding from time to time. When he spoke, to Harry's surprise he didn't speak of the biggest problem (the dragons). "This Ron fellow," he said. "You've known him a long time?"

"Since the first day on the Hogwarts Express," Harry said. The brief twinge of sadness at that thought was washed away by his ire. "I dunno what's got into the berk. Why won't he believe me when I said I didn't enter my name? He knows me!"

Shen nodded and mm-hmmed. "So he knows you're the sort of person who would never break or bend the rules like that," he said.

"Of course! I--" Harry stammered to a halt. "I mean, I've. We've. Bent the rules from time to time..." he finished lamely.

"Like when?" Shen said, taking a long sip of his tea.

"Well, first year there was that thing with flight class… I took off after Malfoy when he stole Neville's Remembrall. Thought I was expelled for sure-- but I ended up on the school Quidditch team." He chuckled, remembering that. "And then there was Hagrid's dragon hatchling… and running into Fluffy-- Hagrid's Cerberus," he explained at Shen's quizzical look. "And answering Malfoy's stupid challenge to a duel…"

"You've had quite an adventurous four years," Shen noted.

"Oh, uh, actually all that was just in our first year."

Shen looked surprised, then laughed. "And let me guess, every year since has been a lot like the first, am I right?" He laughed longer at Harry's sheepish nod. "I'm guessing you spent more time in detention than you did in class!"

Harry turned red and scratched his neck sheepishly. "Actually… most of the time we got lucky and got off scot free," he confessed. "One of those mishaps won us the House Cup..."

Shen nodded, grinning. He got a peculiar gleam in his eye. "So this Ron knows you quite well," he said. "As someone who is constantly breaking the rules-- and getting off scot free. Or even being rewarded." His smile turned rather wry. "Where does he get off, thinking that you've done it yet again this year-- like every other year before? Who does he think he is, believing what every other person in your school believes, even the Professors?"

The words stung. Harry felt his meal congeal into a ball in his stomach. Epiphanies did not go well with a full stomach. His tea suddenly tasted sour. He set the glass down a bit hard, enough that a few drops splashed out on the table. "That's not good enough," he said angrily. "I told him the truth! Why does he think I'm lying to him?"

"Maybe because you have a habit of lying to everyone? Even yourself?" Shen topped off the tea glasses and added a bit more ice. "Maybe I'm judging too soon, Harry Potter, but you seem the sort of person who will say "I'm fine" even when all four of your limbs are broken." Harry winced at the accusation. It echoed one of Hermione's regular complaints far too closely. "Why do you think your friend Ron is acting this way?"

"Hermione says he's jealous," Harry began.

"Hermione?"

"My other friend," Harry said with a half smile. "Smartest of our bunch. Smartest witch in the whole school, really."

Shen got a very knowing look in his eyes. "And very opinionated too, I suspect." he sighed loudly and got to his feet, picking up the tray. "Well, I suspect your friend Hermione is both right… and wrong." At Harry's frown he continued. "She misuses the word. She thinks your friend is so sour because he covets what you have. But that is not jealousy. That is envy." He took the tray and put it behind the counter someplace. "Jealousy is when you fear you are about to lose what you already have."

He gave Harry a look. "Oh, I'm sure your friend Ron is quite envious of you, yes. Who wouldn't be? Rich, famous, and apparently quite lucky, at least when it comes to getting out of trouble. Yet tell me,,, has he ever obsessed about how rich and famous you are till now? Complained about it? Said you didn't deserve it, or words to that effect?" Mute, Harry shook his head. "Hmm. I thought not. Envious, I'm sure he is. But what he is most is jealous-- afraid that he's going to lose what he little he already has.

"Think about it. You've been partners in crime, through thick and thin, ever since your first ride on the Hogwarts train. You've gotten in trouble together, faced danger together, even shared victories together… And then you go off and pull another caper, and leave him behind."

"I'm not leaving him behind--!" Harry protested.

"Aren't you? You're the rich and famous one. Your Hermione is the smart one. What is he?"

That made Harry pause. For the first time he started recalling how, whenever events turned against him, Ron had stuck by his side even when it cost him… Whenever the Golden Trio had accomplished something, everyone raved about the Boy Who Lived and they forgot Ron even existed.

Then he recalled how Ron sacrificed himself on the giant chess board so he and Hermione could go on ahead. How he'd risked his parents' wrath to rescue Harry from imprisonment in the Dursley's house. How he'd stood between Harry and a deranged Sirius on a broken leg and dared what he thought was an escaped killer to go through him first. How he always regarded himself as expendable, compared to Harry and Hermione.

He's the youngest son of the Weasley family-- not even the baby anymore since Ginny came along. He's spent his whole life watching his brothers outdo him at everything, leaving him behind… and now he thinks his best friend's leaving him behind too...because he thinks he'll never be anything more.

Well that's not true. "He's the loyal one," Harry said. "He fought a troll with me, he crawled into a basilisk's lair with me, he--" Harry laughed ruefully. "He walked into an acromantula's lair with me. And he's scared to death of spiders. Even tiny ones!

He looked Shen in the eye. "He's my best friend. And I'm not going to lose him just because a bunch of adult idiots told him I cheated to get in a stupid Tournament."

"Good to know," Shen said. He picked up his coolie had and put it back on. "I'm glad you still want to reconcile with your friend," he said. "And now, I think the first step towards that might be finding some way for you to survive the challenge you face. Come with me." He ambled off between the rows of shelves.

With those words, Harry's mood came crashing down again. Good advice and a friendly ear were all well and good, but really, what was the likelihood that some odds and ends shop, even an exotic one sitting in Diagon Alley, would have the solution to his calamity just sitting on its shelves?

Shen looked over his shoulder at Harry and saw the look on his face. "Don't give up just yet," he advised. "The Lost Workshop is not an ordinary store. Even for Diagon Alley." He started browsing, picking up various items, sometimes turning them over in his massive paws and scrutinizing them, then Harry, then putting them down again. Harry was reminded in the strangest way of Mr. Ollivander…

A short, broad dagger with a pale blue glow about its blade was picked up and discarded. ("We're too close to Gringott's; the thing never stops glowing.") Several swords, axes and hammers hanging at the wall were barely glanced at. The panda picked up and considered an amulet shaped like a winged unicorn with a red gemstone at its center, shook his head and put it back ("More trouble than it's worth.") He lingered a considerable time over something that looked rather like a chrome flashlight, before dropping it back in the bin from which he'd plucked it. ("Possibly… no. Way too much cockeyed philosophical baggage.") An odd guitar with two sets of strings was next. Harry found himself squinting at where the sets of strings intersected; it just didn't quite look right. "Any musical talent?" Harry shook his head; he couldn't carry a tune if it had handles. "Ah well." The instrument returned to its pegboard.

In the course of the search they had wandered to the back corner of the store and into a second room. This one was filled with, at first glance, looked like camping gear: backpacks and haversacks in all sizes, from simple shoulder bags to military kit, packed full and ready to go on the spot. They were strung with utility belts and bandoliers, Some had tools strapped to them. Others had vials and bottles peeking out of their many pockets. Some even had what looked like travel-size books hanging from them by carabiners. "Our Adventuring Pre-Packed Kits," Shen said to Harry's unasked question. "They vary by type but they all have the basics-- right down to the fifty foot rope and the standard ten foot pole. Very popular with the survivalist crowd." Harry nodded, not quite sure he followed.

The bags were piled neatly below a few bookshelves. There were small booklets and oversized, ominous looking grimoires, some with padlocks holding them closed, others with brightly illustrated covers. He saw one with a tan cover and the legend "Military Survival Manual," right next to what looked like a Boy Scout handbook. At the end of the shelves, holding a place of prominence in the side room, was a plinth, holding up three books. They looked to be bound in scaly dragonhide, and trimmed and locked with brass, and identical save for their colors-- metallic blue, red, and green. They were artfully arranged upright in a wire rack, covers on display. For some reason they caught Harry's eye and wouldn't let it go. "What are these?" Harry said, pointing-- but careful not to touch.

"Ahh. A collection of writings by Khadgar of Azeroth," Shen said nodding. He coughed into his fist. "You.. wouldn't have heard of him. But he's quite famous where he's from-- a very powerful and knowledgeable mage." He pointed at the books. "These are his in depth studies of what is known in Azeroth as the three primary schools of magecraft: Fire, Ice, and Arcana."

Harry's face screwed up at that. "That's it?" he said. "just… hot, cold, and-- and "other?"

Shen shrugged. "That's how their scholars divide them up," he said. "...Are you interested in them?"

Harry hadn't looked away from the three books. "This is it," he said, not knowing even why he said it. "This is what I'm looking for." Somehow he was convinced that one of those three books of magic-- any of them-- would give him what he was looking for, would give him the power to come out of this alive. "How much are they?"

"Seven galleons," Shen said. Harry grinned; it was a sign. That was exactly what he'd paid for his wand! He dug out his mokeskin pouch, counted out twenty one galleons and eagerly handed them over to Shen. He started to walk over to the books when Shen held up a paw, stopping him. "I'm afraid… you can only choose one," he said.

"What?" Harry protested. "But..." he frowned. "That makes no sense. They're part of a set!" Internally he was imagining the fit Hermione would have thrown at being forbidden access to 2/3 of a set of books, any books. "That's like only buying one book of an encyclopedia set!"

Shen shook his head. "Those are the rules," he said. "They are like three paths; you can only go down one. Those are the rules Khadgar set down for anyone who would use his tomes."

Harry turned and faced the display, biting his lip. Better one than none, he thought. He stepped toward the plinth. As he got closer, he realized he couldn't see any writing on the covers. Unsurprising; his eyes were acting up again and he was having trouble focusing. He pushed up his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. It almost looked as if the books were drifting, overlapping…

Startled, he squinted harder… then stopped himself. He forced himself not to squint, and let his eyes go unfocused. The image of the covers blurred and drifted… and a fourth, brass-locked volume, one whose cover shimmered like a film of oil with all the colors of the rainbow, appeared in the middle of the three. "This one," he said, reaching out and grasping at the ghostly book. He felt the heft of it settle in his hand; his vision cleared and he was holding a book with a silvery cover in his hand.

Shen applauded softly. "Well chosen," he said. He handed Harry back fourteen of the galleons. "Come with me to the register, I will get you the key."

He got to the register, rang up 'sale' and popped the drawer open. After a moment's fishing about, he held up a tiny diary key between his fuzzy fingers. "Congratulations on your purchase," he said. "You chose one path: the one few others see." His smile faded. "But you should know that this one comes with… an added cost. One not in coin."

Harry felt an uncomfortable chill, even as the cover of the grimoire tingled under his fingertips. "What extra cost?" He said apprehensively. The lights and shadows of the store seemed to deepen for some reason.

"Two things," Shen said somberly. He held up a finger. "Your current wand." He touched the finger to Harry's forehead. "Your scar."

"My scar? How... but.. and my wand?" Harry stuttered.

The look in Shen's eye was deadly serious. "You came into the Lost Workshop, looking to change your Fate," he said, and Harry could hear the capital letter. "But you cannot do that, so long as you are bound to the Fate you already have. These two things bind you to your Fate, in ways that you do not yet understand." He folded his hands across his stomach. "So what shall it be?"

Unconsciously, Harry let his wand slip down out of his sleeve where he'd hidden it. He could feel the grip rolling between his fingertips. His wand? His first wand, that had changed his whole life?

But it wouldn't be the first time a wizard's wand got replaced, the voice in his head argued. And what good would it do him to have his very first wand with him if the Tournament killed him? Would it give them something to bury with him? He gave a mental snort. He drew the wand and, after a brief internal struggle, slapped it down in Shen's open palm. Looks like Ollivander will be getting some repeat business from me after all, Harry thought with a pang.

Shen dropped the wand into the cash register and slid the drawer closed. "Very good," he said. "And now for the scar." he held up what looked like a pair of jade chopsticks. He clicked the tips a couple of times. "These should do," he said. "We use these in Pandaria to clean out wounds left by the Sha." He raised the tips up to Harry's forehead. Harry's eyes crossed. The chopsticks drew closer and closer till Harry could make out the tiny oriental dragons carved in the grips. "Now hold very still," Shen said. "This may sting a bit." The chopsticks snapped shut.

Harry's back went rigid. A searing, burning pain held him frozen, starting at his scar and running over the top of his head and down his spine. Shen pulled the chopsticks back; to Harry's horror, they began pulling something long and thin and black and squirming out of his scar. A long, stringy mass of wet black tendrils, wriggling and thrashing and fighting the entire way, slowly came out of Harry's forehead.

Just as Harry started to wonder if the threads would ever stop coming there was a wet pop and the ends of the thing came out. They thrashed and writhed, wrapping around the chopsticks like some angry, venomous miniature octopus. "Ah, there we go," Shen said. He deftly scraped the black mass off the chopsticks into a glass jar and sealed it with a wax cork. "Came out clean, too. Excellent."

Harry stared at him woozily. A single drop of blood, bright red and clean, dripped from his scar and landed on brass lock holding the book in his hands shut. There was a click and the book sprang open. Surprised, Harry looked down at the open page. There was a whirling, rushing sound like a tornado or a rushing tidal wave, and Harry felt himself falling forward. "Well, looks like you didn't need the key after all--" he heard Shen say. Then the shop, and the whole world with it, were gone.



Harry looked around. He was in… a study of some sort. The furniture floated on seeming nothingness; the books flew past in flocks like birds. He could see starry space in the gaps where the walls didn't quite come together.

An enormous head inside a clear bubble floated in front of him. The head inside was of a man; his hair was white and his face was lined with age, but his jaw was firm and his eyes were clear and of the most piercing blue Harry had ever seen. It looked at him. "Welcome!" the man said. "I am Khadgar of Azeroth, and it appears that you are among the first pupils of my comprehensive arcane correspondence course! Congratulations, and welcome."

"Correspondence course? What?" Harry said.

Khadgar continued in the same tone of voice. "Please note that while this course is as interactive as possible, all responses are pre-recorded and may therefore run into unforeseen limitations." The tone was of someone reading from a script.

A recording, Harry realized. Probably not even as sophisticated as the wizard paintings in Hogwarts, from the look of it. "What's going on?" he said, hoping the talking head would have a sufficient answer to pull up.

"At the moment, the grimoire you picked up is… what's this word?… backloading the knowledge-- my knowledge-- of the arcane into your subconscious, all fifty some-odd years of it. While this is taking place, you will be going through this dream tutorial, studying--"

Dream. So he hadn't been swept off to some other dimension.

"--emulating my own apprenticeship...Without some of the more regrettable incidences from my own youth, that is," Khadgar amended.

"Why…?" Harry couldn't think of how to ask. "I can't afford to spend years asleep taking some-- correspondence course! how--"

"...Do not worry," Khadgar said. "Only a few short hours will pass in the waking world."

"Well that's nice but I still don't like the idea of spending fifty years inside my own head!"

"Again, do not worry," Khadgar reassured him. "Understand, the mages who developed this grimoire along with me had learned that simply loading knowledge all at once into a human mind was dangerous; all that knowledge simply appearing without any experience to explain it would throw the student's brain into shock. Likewise, having someone re-living however many years of education while trapped inside their own minds would traumatize them.

"This… splits the difference. The book is pouring the raw information into your subconscious mind, but your awareness is living through the experience. Even as you go through the book's tutelage, laying down the actual experience of learning. Your studies here will pass swiftly… as if in a dream."



"Really?" Harry said skeptically.

Khadgar smiled knowingly. "Think not? Tell me, pupil-- how long have you been in here already?" Harry's mouth opened and closed. "There, you see? You have nothing to fear. Time will simply fly by."

Charts and diagrams began drawing themselves in glowing lines in the air. "So… shall we begin?"







"...The schism between the schools of fire, ice, and timespace/void or as it's known "arcane," is at root an arbitrary and artificial one. (Though I have to pause and note that the same could be said of most any system of categorization.) It takes little mental exercise to realize that fire and ice are opposite sides of the coin of thermodynamics, which itself is a fundamental aspect of timespace/void, and interrelated with entropy…."

"...Pursuit of one or the other schools of magic is generally a matter of personal inclination. Some prefer "ice" as it is the most easily controlled; others follow their study of the arcane into "fire" because while more temperamental it is also the swiftest and most energetic, and those who pursue "arcane" do so with the presumption that they are trying to study magic at its most fundamental..."



"...The Elemental planes would be more accurately called 'sub-planes' of the Prime Material plane… they are in essence a harmonic sub-frequency, much like the varied colors of the spectra are sub components of pure white light.

"And, much like the different wavelengths of light, the Elements and Elementals, particularly the four Prime Planes--- while they are otherwise fundamentally identical, even in power-- express that power differently. Just as a beam of radio waves can have as much energy behind it as a beam of X-ray light, yet both affect the material world differently. If one were to place the Elementals on a "spectrum," the Fire Elementals would be ultraviolet, being the most dynamic and most aggressive, Air Elementals would be in the blues, Water Elementals would be red, and the Earth Elementals in the infrared.

This is the reason that most mages limit themselves to controlling Water Elementals; because while all four are equally powerful and equally capable of being dangerous, of the four prime Elements water functions at the closest level to that of life, and has the most affinity with it, and therefore its Elementals are easier to manage. Earth comes in a close second, but can still be unpredictable and dangerous. Much as the stable earth can suddenly lash out in an earthquake…







"… Wands? The difference between Terran and Azeroth wands is actually rather mino, although their level of importance is quite different. While one is used as a conduit, the other is used as a container. Think of Terran wands as a funnel, used to direct the caster's magic, while an Azeroth wand is more of a bottle.. Azeroth mages, on the other hand, have found other ways to channel magic-- and rather than channeling their own magic out, have focused more on channeling ambient magic--- albeit sometimes with the help of rings, pendants, staves-- into and through themselves... While no mage would be caught dead without at least two or three channeling artifacts, no Azeroth mage would be caught unable to summon and control mana bare-handed either..."







Harry's eyes slowly opened. He was lying on the floor. He looked up into Shen's grinning face.



"I'll be needing to make a few extra purchases..." he croaked.





Ron huddled on the bleachers. He thought he was going to puke.

When all this had started, everything had seemed so blatantly obvious. Of course Harry would have found a way over the age line to submit his name to the cup. Of course he'd go for it, too. This was Harry, after all. He'd gone after Draco when he'd bullied Neville during the flying class, hadn't he? He'd gone after Flamel's stone hadn't he? Wasn't Harry the guy who'd marched into the Forbidden Forest to meet Aragog? And dived down the opening of a Basilisk's lair? Harry had never backed down from a challenge. Why would he have backed down from this one?

Ron had his answer now. Because this one was stupid.

He watched as Krum ran around the battleground below like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching--- no, his ass really WAS catching; the Chinese Fireball had gotten a little too close with that last blast of flame. This was insane! Four kids barely older than Ron himself were risking their lives, taking turns trying to steal an egg from a dragon. All for what? For a giant gilded cup and a bag of galleons that some of them could have shrugged off as pocket money?

With his heart in his gullet, Ron was finally remembering that all those times Harry had broken the rules and beaten the odds, he'd been doing it for someone else's sake. To stop Quirrel. To rescue Ginny. To save Sirius. He'd done it for a purpose, for a cause. This?

This was just mental.

He barely even felt Hermione clutching at his arm, or screaming in spite of herself every time one of the Champions had a close shave. Soon it was going to be Harry's turn, and he was going to go out there alone…

Thinking-- no, knowing that his best mate had turned his back on him.

Victor retreated from the arena, golden egg safely in his clutches. The dragon wranglers came out, subdued the Fireball, cleaned up the poor beast's shattered eggs, and brought out her replacement. He felt Hermione's grip on his arm turn vicelike, even as his own heart jumped into his throat. "That's not a dragon," he heard her yelp. "That's a cuisinart with feet! Look at those, those barbs and spines!"

Ron said nothing. He just stared at the rows of sharp spines down the monster's back and tail and swallowed.

Ludo Bagman's amplified voice echoed over the stadium. "AND NOW OUR FINAL CHAMPION…. HARRY POTTER!!"

The crowd stilled. A few seconds passed. Then a few more. People began to murmur.

"HARRY POTTER!!" Bagman repeated. "POTTER..?"

Just as it looked like someone was about to raise a ruckus, the curtains at the entryway parted. A small figure with tousled hair came running out onto the field, school robes flapping in the breeze. "AND THERE HE IS, HARRY POTTER!" Bagman said, clearly relieved.

The Hungarian Horntail growled at the sight of the human. "He looks so small," Hermione whimpered.

Ron didn't disagree. He frowned. What happened to Harry's hair? It was still an uncombed, tousled mop as always… but now there was an off-center white streak running through it, from just over where his scar was to the back of his head.

The crowd was still as death. The only sound to be heard was the growling and snarling of the seething dragon. The tiny robed figure raised his hands and made several passes in the air. Ron felt his heart skip in panic; where was Harry's wand??

He nearly choked on his own tongue when Harry's waving hands began to glow.

"Accio Haversack!"

Everyone held their breath. Something small, brown and swift came zipping through the air over the stadium, stopping on a dime to hover in front of the teenage wizard. It looked like… "A travel bag?" Hermione said out loud.

Harry snatched the slim leather bag out of the air and threw the strap over his shoulder, letting the bag rest on his right hip. He flipped the top flap open, and stood straight with his arms out and his feet apart.

"Induendum!"

There was a rushing noise as a whirlwind of air and octarine light erupted from the bag. It swirled around Harry like a cyclone, tearing at his robe. He disappeared from sight in a swirling cloud of glowing indigo smoke.

The smoke parted and whipped away into nothing. The audience let up a cry of surprise. The fourth-year student was transformed. Gone were the black school robes and the red and yellow scarf; Harry was now decked out in resplendent robes of deep red, dark blue and trimmed in gold. Heavy armored pauldrons rested on his shoulders and a varicolored cape flowed behind him. A metal band with a gem at the brow held his mop of hair out of his eyes. Clutched in one hand was a staff, topped with a jewel nearly as big as a man's fist around which other smaller gems orbited.

There was a strangled squawk of derision from Draco Malfoy's general direction. From where he was sitting Ron could see the blonde ponce leaning over and saying something in mock outrage to one of his sycophants-- probably something about Harry trying to out-garish Dumbledore with his robes… Ron gritted his teeth and forced himself to turn his attention back to the field.

Which was fortunate because that was precisely when the Hungarian Horntail blasted Harry with a pillar of flame.

The dragon, agitated beyond description by having her nest dragged out of its nice safe cave and unceremoniously dumped in a wide open stadium ringed with screaming and shouting wizards, had not taken well to the eruption of magic not a hundred paces away. She lashed out with her flame, reaching far further than the wizards in charge of the mess had calculated, and turned the area where Harry Potter had stood into a roiling inferno.

Hermione screamed. She wasn't the only one. Ron, his mouth dry, pulled her in close, turning her head towards his chest so she wouldn't see. The torrent of flame went on forever--

The flames parted. Standing there, surrounded on all sides by roiling fire, his staff outstretched to point into the torrent of flame, was Harry Potter. Unburnt, not even singed, he held the flames off with a whirling wall of white. He had to have been imagining it, but Ron thought he could see frost covering the end of the staff, dusting his friend's garish robes and even his hair…

The rush of flame petered out. Harry still stood, surrounded by a bubble of air where snowflakes and frost crystals danced. Everything beyond a meter from him burned and smoldered.

Later Ron would state that it truly was a learning experience; never in his wildest imaginings had he thought he'd ever see a dragon look surprised. The reptile rallied quickly enough; it lunged at Harry, hitting the ends of its chains with a jerk. It hung there roaring and snarling like a dog at the end of its leash.

With his free hand-- his other still holding the staff pointed at the Horntail-- Harry gestured to the flames still dancing and guttering across the rocks and dirt around him. Like living things they came together, some crawling, some leaping, and began to form a shape. Ludo Bagman began shouting something high-pitched in his amplified voice… something something fiendfyre something… but noone paid any heed. Slowly the flames formed a sphere, then swelled, forming into a crude, legless yet humanoid figure with broad shoulders and long arms. Gilded bracers formed around its wrists.

It floated there a foot or so off the ground, patiently waiting. Harry pointed to the dragon and shouted something at the fire creature-- noone could make out what over the roar of the dragon and the roar of the flames-- and the fire creature turned and raced straight at the dragon, swelling in size till it matched the beast. The Horntail roared and bellowed as the fire elemental flew straight into its face, lashing out with its flaming arms. The dragon reared up as it found itself tangling with a monster made of its very own fire.

Once the dragon was good and distracted, Harry reached into his haversack and pulled out-- a waterskin? Harry worried the cork out with his teeth and swung the skin around him, spraying water out in an arc into the air. "Wha-- is-- is he trying to put out the fire around where he's standing?" Hermione stammered.

Apparently not. The water did not fall to the ground. Instead the droplets gathered in the air, seeming to pull more water out of the air with them. They took shape, forming into another hulking, floating homunculous like the first, only this time formed out of water. Harry pointed again; this time Ron could read his lips: "Bring me the golden egg, don't hurt any of the others!" The water elemental nodded and raced off, swooping low to the ground and circling around the battling dragon and fire elemental in a wide arc. It reached the nest, plucked the golden egg out of the nest and flew back, the egg submerged inside its watery chest.

Bloody brilliant, Ron thought. He distracted the dragon with one and fetched the egg with the other!

The dragon was distracted, but it wasn't distracted enough. Battling the fire-creature attacking it had proved pointless-- it couldn't burn her, and her teeth and claws and spines went through its intangible body without leaving a mark. As frustrating as this was, it didn't keep her from spotting the fleeing watery egg thief from the corner of her eye. Raging, she twisted her neck about and cut loose.

A gout of flame engulfed the water elemental. With a shrieking hiss it exploded into a cloud of steam that blotted that corner of the arena from sight. Several witches and wizards in the closest seats felt the wet heat blow across their faces. The steam clouds blew away a moment later, and there lay the golden egg, shining and unblemished and rocking slightly where it lay on the rocky ground.

The sight of what she thought one of her eggs, lying exposed and vulnerable on the ground, drove the dragon mad. Ignoring the flailing fire elemental completely, she turned and threw herself to the end of her chain with all her might. There was a loud SPANG of shattering iron and the chain holding her in place by her back leg snapped.

The screams from before held nothing on the screams of terror that rose from the stadium seats now. All around, aurors stepped forward, casting shielding spell after shielding spell even as many of the people watching began rising from their seats and fleeing for the exits. The judges of the competition fled their booth-- which they all seemed to realize suddenly was far too close to the action-- and bolted, to a man. Ron didn't even hesitate. He pulled Hermione to her feet and started to pull her to the exit. "WAIT, LOOK!" she shouted.

Ron looked back. Dumbledore, alone of all the judges, was still in the booth. His wand was up and he was casting an enormous shield wall around the circumference of the arena. His spell was melding with the other shields being cast, forming them all into a gigantic shimmering wall hundreds of feet high. "Too right," Ron said, relieved.

Then the dragon reared up and spread her wings. One flap, and the fire elemental dogging her was dispersed into nothing like its twin. Ron's throat constricted; The shieldwall was high, but even Dumbledore couldn't form a dome over the entire stadium. If the dragon flew straight up, it would be free to go anywhere. It could burn down Hogwarts… all of Hogsmeade…

Suddenly the creature's back right foot was encased in a gigantic block of ice. Then its back left. Harry wasn't sitting idle, either. As the dragon fell forward, both her front feet were frozen to the ground as well. She bellowed, struggling mightily to free herself; in a moment of intelligence, she began breathing fire on her frozen legs.

Then something small and swift and vividly colored zipped past her. Startled, she twisted her neck around, trying to see what had buzzed her. It came whipping around from behind her as Ron and Hermione watched. It was Harry--- but rather than astride his legendary Firebolt, he was standing, legs spread like a surfboarder, on what looked like a vividly patterned tapestry. It swooped and swerved through the air like a living thing, dodging the dragon's claws and tail with inches to spare.

"A flying carpet?" Hermione gasped. "But those are ILLEGAL!"

"I don't think anybody cares right now, Hermione," Ron said through his teeth in a sing-song voice. They both stood half-in, half-out of the row of seats and watched. Harry buzzed around the dragon like a gadfly, zapping it over and over again with bolts of… Ron wasn't sure, it looked like streaks of ice or sleet but flames trailed from it. It was having about as much effect as a stinging hex.

But only at first. As Harry rained frostfire down on the dragon, the beast began to slow, its movements becoming sluggish and lethargic. "That's brilliant. Her skin can resist the magic, but not the cold. He's chilling her down, dropping her body temperature so she'll go into a torpor!" Hermione babbled, her face lit up. What was it with her and narrating everything, Ron wondered hysterically. "She's falling asleep-- like a lizard or a snake that's gotten too cold..."

Her smile faded. "But… dragons aren't cold-blooded..."

The meaning of those words made it self evident a moment later. The Hungarian Horntail planted all four taloned feet, inhaled deeply-- and held it. Slowly, her belly and throat began to glow with heat. The spots of ice and frost on her skin melted away in puffs of steam. "Like she's got a ruddy built-in hot water bottle," Ron heard himself say.

In moments her sluggishness was completely gone. Harry flew a little too close on the next pass. With a snarl the dragon whipped her tail around, slapping the daredevil young wizard out of the air. He and the carpet went tumbling through the air in different directions.

Before he hit the ground, a shimmering purple bubble formed around him. He bounced and rolled across the broken ground till he fetched up against the bottom of the stadium wall right below Hermione and Ron. The dragon was on him like a cat on a rubber mouse. She slashed at him, batting him around and seizing him in her claws to bite at him. Harry was looking shaken senseless, but the Horntail's claws didn't even dent the surface. In frustration the dragon slammed him once, twice, thrice against the stadium wall, making the whole structure shake.

The stadium was typical of Wizard architecture; that is to say it relied frighteningly on magic and gave only a passing nod to things like engineering, materials, and gravity. The stadium, being a terrible rush job for the Triwizard Tournament, was an especially rickety example of this. Bits of scaffolding started coming loose and outright falling off. Without a thought Ron pulled Hermione close and cast a Protego over their heads, just as a handful of timbers broke loose from the awning overhead. They rained down and bounced off his shield, into the arena below. A handful of wands rose, casting Reparos like mad. It didn't seal the hole but it kept everything else stuck in place. Ron looked up at the open sky where the weather roof had been. "Close one," he gulped.

Down in the arena, the dragon had finally slapped Harry away. He bounced twice before his bubble-shield gave out and left him tumbling across the scorched stones. But he was a Quidditch player; he'd "plowed the field" more than once in games and practices. He kipped to his feet just in time for his flying carpet to swoop past and whisk him out of reach of another blast of dragonfire.

As he veered back and forth, gliding backwards and keeping out of the dragon's sights, Harry whirled his staff and launched another spell. The glittering gold beam struck the dragon square in the chest. Ron saw a stylized clock face form over the dragon's head. The dragon's movements slowed to a crawl. A time spell? What had happened to his friend? When had he gotten so powerful?

The carpet rose up until Harry was looking down on the dragon from above, out of reach of its claws and teeth. Harry aimed his staff once more. His voice echoed eerily in the middle of all the chaos.

"Incarcerous!"

Ghostly chains rose from the ground, formed of links as thick as Ron's own arms. With a quick whipping motion the chains wrapped around the dragon, snaring its legs, pinning its wings to its torso, clamping its jaws shut, even anchoring its tail to the rocky ground. With a yank the chains went taut, pulling the dragon's head flat to the ground… quickly followed by the rest of it. In an instant, the dragon had gone from rampaging monster to hog-tied livestock.

The dragon handlers came running from wherever they were hiding. Dozens of specially amplified stunning spells struck the beast, and it finally went limp-- unconscious.

Harry held his pose until it was absolutely, positively certain that the Hungarian Horntail was asleep. Convinced at last, he brought the carpet to land on the ground. He planted the end of his staff and leaned on it, sagging in relief. The crowd fell still. After several long seconds Harry straightened, walked slowly across the arena, and picked up his golden egg.

The roar of the crowd was deafening.







It didn't take long after the dragon was subdued for the stadium to look like an overturned anthill. Even as the dragon wranglers were hauling their charge and her (miraculouslyunharmed) eggs away, the school staff, the Triwizard judges, the representatives of the Press and no small number of aurors began closing in on Harry's position. Harry had been wafted back into the champion's tent on a wave of shouting, gesticulating people-- Dumbledore at the lead.

He was seated on Madame Pomphrey's examining table, staff still in hand and the golden egg in his lap, when he was hit amidships by a frizzy-haired guided missile. "HARRY!" Hermione babbled. "We were so worried, I've never been so scared in my life---" Harry just grinned and patted her on the back.

Madame Pomphrey though had been the next to get to him. She fussed over him, checking him over by eye and with her wand, looking for any sign of injury. "Mad, the lot of you!" she snapped over her shoulder at the wizards and witches crowding the tent. "Pitting children against a dragon, and nesting mothers at that! If there were any justice the lot of you would be slathered in brown sauce and staked out for the dragon's dinner!" She continued on in that vein, lambasting the assembled crowd even as she poked and prodded her patient. Some of her barbs caught; Several of those present looked seriously chagrined. Ludo Bagman in particular looked like a naughty child who'd been caught stealing from the cookie jar. Harry had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

Karkaroff was of course fuming."He cheated, you all saw it!" he shouted as he strode into the tent, pointing. "The rules forbid anything other than his own wand--"

Cornelius Fudge hadn't missed the opportunity to be present where the news reporters were flocking. "Now now," he wheedled as he fiddled with his lime bowler derby, "let's give the boy a chance to explain--"

"Actually," MacGonagall said dryly, "the rules only say he has to enter the arena with nothing but his wand. There's nothing in them that says he cannot summon anything he needs afterward." She gave Karkaroff the tiniest of smiles. Karkaroff's sallow face turned puce.

Dumbledore finally stepped forward. His expression was filled with concern and confusion-- and more than a glimmering of insatiable curiosity. "My boy," he said. "My boy… what is all… this?" he waved one hand, indicating all of Harry.

Harry looked down at himself. He casually cast a scourgify, cleaning the dirt and stains off his new robes, then a reparo for good measure. When he saw the stunned expressions around him he realized he'd done it wordlessly, and without a wand. Whups. "I seems I found what I was looking for when I went to Diagon Alley, Headmaster," he said with an almost apologetic smile. "I'm an archmage now."

Dumbledore's eyebrows rose. "A what?"

Karkaroff spluttered. "The boy is no arch-anything! He defeated the dragon with a bagful of overpowered artifacts pilfered from some other wizard's vaults. He's a little boy playing dress-up in another wizard's clothes!"

Harry glowered at the man. Wordlessly, he tossed his staff to Karkaroff. Startled, the Durmstrang headmaster snatched the staff out of the air. He stood there for a moment staring at the artifact in his hands…. Then bonelessly dropped to the floor. Madame Pomphrey let out a cry of surprise and moved to administer first aid. Harry held out his hand and the staff flew back into it. "Guess he couldn't resist trying to use it," he said. "Not very smart if you don't know how to properly channel your mana. It probably drained him completely. Don't worry, Madame Pomphrey, he'll recover in a minute-- with a bad headache over his whole body, but he'll be fine."

That was the cue for Mr. Crouch to step forward. His sallow face was set in a scowl and he had two aurors, wands drawn, behind him. "That brings us to the issue of the contraband Potter brought in," he said. "We'll be confiscating that staff, first of all--"

"What? But staves aren't contraband!" Hermione protested. "They're just not commonly used anymore--"

Mr. Crouch's scowl deepened. "It's an artifact of unknown origin and power," he said. "And as for that flying carpet, which is QUITE illegal--!"

Harry shook his head. "Not a carpet." He reached behind him and picked up the carpet, which was rolled up neatly. "It's actually registered with the DMLE as an Azerothian tapestry." He flipped up one corner; true enough there was a cloth patch with a DMLE seal and tiny print naming the product it was sewed to as an "Artistic Tapestry, foreign." Harry smirked. "One of the privileges of being a pureblood is that they can register any 'family artifacts' they have by Owl mail," he smirked. "Which I did, yesterday."

Crouch's scowl all but turned into a snarl. "Enough tomfoolery, boy," he said. "Turn over the staff, the rug, and any other 'exotic' artifacts you're carrying. Now."

Hermione stepped away from Harry and towards Crouch, fire in her eyes.

"Oh don't mind him, Hermione," Harry interrupted coolly. "It's not like Mr. Crouch has ever let the law get in his way too much. Just ask my godfather." He opened his hand and the staff disappeared. Those watching exclaimed in surprise, but before anyone could move Harry picked up the flying carpet. A flip of the wrist and it disappeared as well, like a handkerchief up a stage magician's sleeve. "What artifacts?"

Mr. Crouch's eyes went round with anger; he looked like he was going to explode. "Aurors, arrest this brat immediately! Shacklebolt, do your duty!"

One of them cleared his throat. He was a large bald black man with a tiny gold earring. "On what charge, sir?" he said, his voice calm. "As the young lady pointed out, he's well within the law and his rights to have such things. Especially as heirlooms of a pureblood wizarding family like the Potters."

Harry conveniently failed to correct him that the magical items he was carrying were not, in fact, Potter family heirlooms.

Dumbledore spoke up. "Indeed," he said. "I can only imagine how angry Fleamont Potter would have been if the Ministry presumptuously confiscated these treasured inheritances from his grandson--- or how much trouble Fleamont's still-living friends in the Wizengamot would cause anyone who took them." There was a sly smile on his face though as his eye met Harry's. It was clear to Harry that Dumbledore knew quite well that these were not passed down to him from the Potter estate.

Crouch seemed to deflate a bit, and he nodded grudgingly, backing down. Karkaroff on the other hand was red in the face and steaming like a teapot boiling over.

"All this fuss aside, Harry," Dumbledore continued. "We are rather curious and concerned as to how this..." he waved a hand at Harry. "Transformation occurred. Spells none of us have ever seen before… wandless, nonverbal casting..."

Harry smiled enigmatically. "An exceptional correspondence course."

Dumbledore looked blank. "Correspondence course?"

"Speaking of which, is it possible to take the O.W.L.s early?" Harry went on, looking from Dumbledore to McGonagall and back again.

"I… yes, it is possible Mr. Potter," his head of house said. "With approval from your head of house and at least one of your teachers is willing to let you test out of his class, as is policy."

"Oh, good." Then to a considerable number of people's astonishment he turned to Snape, who was lurking behind Dumbledore like a leashed vampire bat, and said "Professor Snape, I'd like to test out of Potions class as soon as possible."

For a brief moment an expression of absolute flabbergasted disbelief crossed the potionmaster's face. It disappeared behind his patented sneer a moment later. "Are you taking the piss, Potter?" he said.

"Nope." Harry reached out, took Snape's hand by the wrist, turned it palm up and dropped something into it. It was a small, red, crystalline stone, no bigger than his thumb. Snape's eyes went round when it landed in his palm. Four years ago Snape had briefly held such a stone in his hand; the arcane properties it held meant that no magical-- especially not a potions master of his level-- could fail to recognize it by touch alone. "Is this…?"

"Philosopher's stone," Harry said. "Or rather a more specialized version, a Peerless Alchemist Stone. Turns out that transmutation of metals and cure-all potions aren't all that grand of an achievement in Azeroth Alchemy. I'd have created a Spirited and an Ascended stone, but I only had enough time to brew one variety after I got back from Diagon Alley. Is Nicholas Flamel still alive?" he suddenly asked Dumbledore.

Dumbledore nodded carefully. "He and his wife still tarry among us," he said, his eyes never leaving the stone.

"Well you can have him test the stone if you don't believe me," Harry said. "In fact tell him to keep it. I still feel bad about him losing his first one." he paused, thinking. "Actually, the elixir from this one will do him worlds better. If he's been using the stuff from a first tier philosopher's stone for six hundred years he's probably as fragile as peanut brittle by now. Don't worry, this one will fix him right up."

"Preposterous," Snape said over the general hubbub that rose. "You claim to have made a better Philosopher's Stone? What do you take me for, Potter--"

"A bullying, spiteful, greasy git," Harry answered him testily. "What, you think I found this one in the gravel in my front driveway? Test it or don't, I don't care anymore, either way I'm not coming back into your classroom."

Then the general clamor began in earnest. The expressions on everyone's faces was priceless. Hermione's eyes were round as saucers. Karkaroff and Madame Maxime both looked outraged that the "leetle boy" was grandstanding, stealing the spotlight from their own champions. A couple of reporters who manged to squeeze in behind the rest were shouting questions and popping flashbulbs, while a stammering Cornelius Fudge tried to get a word in edgewise. Mad Eye Moody, for his part, never took his eyes off the stone in Snape's still-open palm. He probably expected it to explode, Harry thought. Or attack everyone with poison gas or something.

Harry stood. His staff reappeared in his hand. "That's enough," he said. The tumult continued. "I SAID THAT'S ENOUGH!" He slammed the butt of his staff into the ground. There was a sound like a hammer banging against a piano wire, and a translucent shockwave of pale blue light sprang out from him in every direction, passing through the crowd and knocking them back on their heels. Everyone fell silent; every witch and wizard it passed through could feel the restrained power behind the wave as it passed through them. "Let me make it clear," he said loudly in the sudden silence. "I'm not going anywhere with anyone. I'm not turning over my possessions, and I'm not going to sit around in some cell someplace answering questions from some Unspeakable until I die of old age. You want to find out where I got my tools, my knowledge, my power-- go down to the intersection of Knockturn and Diagon Alley and find out for yourselves!

"I'm here only as long as the Tournament is running. Once it's finished and that damn cup lets us all go, I'm taking my leave of Hogwarts and the lot of you." He tucked the golden egg under his arm and started out of the tent. By the time the tent flap closed behind him everyone present was yelling again, this time at each other.

Dumbledore, of course, managed to catch up with him and stand in his way. "Harry, my boy," he said pleading. "Don't do anything precipitous. You can't leave Hogwarts."

Harry felt a spark of anger kindle towards the old man. "Why? Is there another prophecy about me preventing it?"

Dumbledore's face went slack with shock. "Who told you there was a prophecy?" he whispered, grasping Harry's arm.

Harry pulled away. "You did, just now," he said, not without some amusement. Dumbledore frowned at him. Dumbledore actually huffed into his beard at that. "Oh, come on, Headmaster!" Harry went on. "It's the oldest plot device in history! Man hears prophecy about a Promised Child, man tries to kill promised child, Attempt turns around and bites the man in the bum-- half of the heroes of ancient Greece had that one."

"I took some time to think while I was being tutored… and I had a LOT of time to think ," he added, his jade-green eyes suddenly looking generations too old. "Tom Riddle went to ridiculous lengths just to kill me as a baby. He slaughtered his way through my family just to get to me. And then he uses an Avada Kedavra on me-- on a BABY. He could have smothered me with a pillow just as easily. Instead he uses the most overpowered deadly curse known to wizardkind? That's like pulling a double barreled shotgun on a mouse.

"The only reason he could have for going to those lengths to kill a baby was if it was a deadly threat to him. And the only way he could know that was a prophecy." He waited. "Well?"

He needn't have asked; the truth was painted on Dumbledore's face. "Then you understand why you cannot leave Hogwarts," he said. "Voldemort and his followers would destroy you given an inkling of a chance. You have to remain safe… protected..."

Harry's eyebrow went up. "Safe?" he said in derision. "With trolls in the toilet? Acromantulas the size of dogs not a mile into the woods? Death traps and three-headed killer dogs in the halls? A 60 foot basilisk in the dungeons? This TOURNAMENT?

"Forget the fact that you dumped me as a toddler on the doorstep of people who HATED me, and who have starved, hit, abused and neglected me like I was Malfoy house elf, you dropped a baby old enough to walk on a doorstep in the dead of a freezing November night. I could have woken up, climbed out of the basket and toddled into traffic… assuming I didn't just FREEZE to death right there. Oh, you've done a bang-up job keeping me SAFE, Dumbledore." Dumbledore's eyes closed at the torrent of words, pain drawing lines on his face. In moments he looked decades older.

Harry reined himself in. He continued in a calmer voice. "Whatever prophecy there is, proclaiming my Fate-- I refuse to tie myself to it. I reject that Fate and make my own."

Hundreds of miles away, deep underground in a chamber only a handful ever saw or entered, a crystal sphere cracked in half, then shattered into dust.

"And what of your home? Your remaining family?"

Harry scowled, his knuckles whitening on his staff. The gem flashed. "The Dursleys may be related, but they were never my family. And that place was never my home."

Far off in Little Whinging, something intangible and tenuous and long strained to the breaking point, finally broke. The invisible threads that bound and encircled one of the tidy little homes frayed and fell apart, fading away to nothing.

"Harry," Dumbledore said, almost pleading. "Where will you go?"

Harry stopped and thought it over. "I don't know," he said. He gave Dumbledore a half-smile. "But I've got magic, I've got a vault full of gold, and I've got the whole world to choose from. Maybe even more than one..." he shrugged. "At the very least I'm going to go to Gringotts and to the Ministry, and see what other bits and pieces of inheritance I've got from my parents. I know I have at least one house in Godric's Hollow that's rightfully mine. I'll stick around for the rest of the Tournament, and for the O.W.L.s at the end of the year… but other than that, I'm my own man now."

"You're hardly a man yet," Dumbledore huffed. "How, pray tell, do you intend to get around the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Magic?"

Harry grinned. "You missed something," he said, a twinkle in his eye. "Didn't the rules-- the ones enforced by the Goblet of Fire-- say only those of age could participate?"

"Well, yes--"

"And yet both the Goblet and the Ministry are forcing me to participate." Harry almost gleefully pointed out. "That means that both of them, in a magically binding contract, acknowledged me--"

"--As a legal adult," Dumbledore sighed. "Really, Harry--"

"Yes, really," Harry smirked. "And if the Ministry tries to enforce that law on me… breaking their own word… well that would mean they were declaring my status as a Champion defunct after the fact, contrary to what the Goblet decided. And there's every possibility that the Goblet will take it poorly, isn't there?"

Dumbledore's face went through a number of expressions as he contemplated the possible ramifications. "Oh, you might want to pass that thought on to Fudge before he decides he needs to be "seen doing something."" Harry's smile grew thin as he made the reference to Hagrid's own unlawful incarceration two years before. "The consequences might be unpleasant."

"Quite," Dumbledore said.

The silence stretched out for a long second between them. There was a gulf between them now, one that would not close again. Dumbledore nodded. "If you will excuse me, I must return to the brouhaha you left behind," he said, "And see if I can't throw oil on the troubled waters… good day, Harry."

"Good day, Headmaster," Harry said. Dumbledore turned and headed back to the Champion's tent. Once he was gone Harry opened up his leather bag and, with a snap of his fingers, he was back in his Hogwarts robe and scarf. His white wizard's stripe disappeared as well. No sense in drawing attention, now that everyone would be running around like beheaded chickens looking for a stripe-haired boy in vividly colored robes.

"Are you really, seriously thinking of leaving Hogwarts??"

Harry nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn't realized that Hermione had followed them out of the tent. The frizzy haired bibliophile was right up on his elbow. Harry had to snicker at himself; dodge a dragon, get caught flatfooted by a witch… "Yes, for the umpteenth time," he said. He started walking, heading back for the castle. He hoped it was dinner soon; if not he would stop by the kitchen and wheedle something to eat out of the house elves. He was starving.

"But what about your education?" she said in dismay, keeping pace along beside him.

Harry stopped in his tracks and faced her. This was getting tiresome. "Education?" he half laughed. "Hermione, one of our teachers is an insufferable bully whose idea of educating is to write a recipe on a chalkboard and then swoop about glaring at us and insulting us, one's a fortune-telling dingbat who's drunk on sherry half the time, one of them is DEAD, and don't even get me started on the DADA teachers. When it comes to education Hogwarts is a little overrated.

"And I'm pretty sure the other two schools here aren't much better," he said, resuming his walk. "One Headmaster is a former Death Eater, the other doesn't have the sense to tell her students to wear winter clothes in Scotland.

"And frankly, the course I took-- I've outstripped them."

Hermione grabbed his arm, pulling him to a halt. "Harry… what kind of correspondence course could do all this in just two days??"

Harry smiled, but didn't answer. He looked around. "Where's Ron?" he said. "There's… some things we have to talk about."

Hermione looked discomfited. "He was with me… but… when we got to the tent and saw you, he… I don't know, he just mumbled something about not being able to do this, and he left. I've no idea where he went." She looked at him. "He's.. I think the moment we saw the first dragon, he realized what danger you were really in and-- I think he's feeling too guilty to face you."

Harry stopped and looked up at the castle. Hermione felt bad for thinking it but she was glad to see concern crossing Harry's face. "I've got to speak to him," he said. "But.. Hermione, where does Ron go when he's really in a funk?" He looked at her, curious.

Hermione was taken aback for a second. Why was Harry asking her? She couldn't help smirking a little bit. "Where do you think he goes?" A smile slowly spread over both their faces. Harry opened his hip-bag and pulled out the flying "tapestry," throwing it out in front of him. It unrolled itself and hovered, rippling slightly, just a foot off the grass.

Harry stepped aboard. "No sense in walking all that way," he said, holding out his hand. "Not when I've got a ride. Come on." Gingerly Hermione took his hand and stepped up onto the carpet. The moment her feet were planted he waved a finger towards the castle. "Home, Jeeves!" They glided off at a brisk pace.

"Not so high, not so high!"

"We're barely three feet off the ground, Hermione."

"But we're going fast enough that doesn't matter," she quibbled.

"A jogger could outrun us, Hermione. You really are too scared of heights."





They found Ron where they expected: down in the kitchen. He was sitting in a corner out of the way of the busy house elves and was scarfing his way through a tray of sandwiches, a miserable look on his face. They stood in the doorway behind the painting of the pear and watched him vacuum down two. Hermione give an exasperated "tsk". "Why does he have to eat like a starving wolf? He's such a slob," she whispered in Harry's ear.

Harry gave her an amused look over his shoulder. "Hermione, he has five brothers and a sister," he whispered back. "Two of whom think it's funny to pour untested potions in his food when he's not looking. Of course he eats like a starving wolf; it's the only way he can keep from being starved or poisoned!" He didn't mention that Ron's table manners were a lot like his own when he was living with the Dursleys. As a little boy he'd learned to eat whatever food he could get right fast or it'd be taken away, usually by Dudley. One hungry dog recognizes another.

"Give us a minute," Harry said to Hermione. She nodded reluctantly. He stepped inside and pulled an empty hogshead over to sit across from Ron. "Hey," he said. "Long time no see."

Ron looked up at him and slowly put the sandwich he was mauling down. He seemed to struggle to swallow the mouthful he already had. "Hey, Harry," he said unenthusiastically. "...Saw your turn at the task. It was bloody amazing." He rolled his eyes. "Terrifying, suicidal, bloody insane… but amazing."

Harry snickered. "I'll agree with you on that."

Ron wouldn't meet his eye. He leaned back in his stool, eyes downcast. "I'm sorry, Harry," he said. "I've been a complete git--"

"A little," Harry admitted.

"I… I won't blame you if you don't want me around anymore," Ron went on. "I'll talk to McGonagall about, I dunno, maybe moving into another room or--"

"Hey, there's no need for that," Harry objected. "You're still my best mate, right?"

Ron seemed to sag at those words. "I dunno why you'd want a bloke like me as a friend," he said. He got to his feet and turned away from both of them, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched. "I stabbed you in the back--"

"You had an argument with me," Harry snorted. "You didn't sell my firstborn to the Gypsies!"

"Why would you need someone like me as a friend?" Ron huffed. "Hermione, she's brilliant, and clever--- me, I'm just the hanger-on, I'm useless--"

"I don't pick my friends based on how useful they are, Ron," Harry said angrily. "And you're not useless."

"Oh come on--" Ron said, letting his head roll back.

"You're NOT useless, Ron!" Hermione burst out. Surprised, Ron turned to face her. She was still in the entryway, wringing her hands and looking distraught. "You're NOT, don't SAY that! Nobody's useless. So what if you're not perfect, you're brave and funny and-- and you've always had our backs when it counted. You matter to us... even when you're being THICK and fighting with your best friend for no reason." She crossed her arms and stood there.

Ron smiled shakily at her. "You really mean that, Hermione?" he said in a small voice.

She wouldn't quite meet his eyes. "You saved me from a troll in first year," she said. "That kind of thing impresses a girl, you know?"

Ron's eyebrows climbed up his forehead. Was she hinting something--

"Come on, then," Harry said, holding out his hand. "Are we still friends or not?" Ron looked embarrassed, but finally broke down and shook his hand. Harry pulled him into a clinch and slapped him on the back.

"Boys," Hermione said in exasperation and relief. She dove in and embraced the two.

"Come on," Harry said. "They're probably throwing a huge victory party up in the Gryffindor common room. Wouldn't want to miss that..."

"I'll give any snacks my brothers brought a pass," Ron said. He gave Harry a sober look. "There really is someone trying to kill you out there, isn't there?" he said.

"So in other words, nothing's changed since I was one year old," Harry said dryly. He held out one hand; octarine sparks danced around his fingers, glinting off the rings there. His smile turned grim. "Then again they might find it a little harder than they thought now."

The trio exited the kitchens and headed for Gryffindor tower. "So where did you get all this stuff?" Hermione demanded. "The robes, the staff, the carpet, the bottomless bag--"

"Would you believe in an odds and ends shop on Diagon Alley?" Harry said. "Seriously. A little place called 'the Lost Workshop', right on the corner of Diagon and Knockturn. The shopkeep is very friendly and helpful, even if he is a little fuzzy..."

"Wait, what?"

"You might want to pass that on to Dumbledore," Ron said. "I thought he was going to ask you who your tailor was..."

Unseen and unnoticed, the Unspeakable slipped out from behind the suit of armor he'd been hiding behind. The Lost Workshop, eh? Well, it was time for the Unspeakables to get to the root of this mystery-- and clutch it root and stem in their grasp.

However the strike team of hit wizards who arrived on Diagon Alley found nothing. There was no store on the exact corner of Knockturn and Diagon. All that stood there was a single leaflet taped to the lammpost at that corner:

"MOVED TO NEW LOCATION."





The party was, in fact, pretty great. It didn't wind down till late at night; Mcgonagall had given them permission to ignore the lights out "for this occasion only." Eventually though even the hardiest partiers in Gryffindor wandered off to bed, leaving only a few students snoozing on various overstuffed chairs, and the Golden Trio.

They had commandeered the couch in front of the fireplace and had spent the time shooting the breeze, with Hermione in particular trying to wheedle more information out of Harry. To her vexation the more he told her, the less he seemed to say, leaving her with more questions to ask than she started with.

The clock struck one in the morning. All three of them yawned and stretched. "Oh, before I forget," Harry said. He pulled his haversack around and opened it. "Presents!"

"Presents?" Hermione said, leaning forward to try and peek in the bag.

"Yes. I saw these in the store and… well they just said 'Ron and Hermione' to me for some reason. Call it early Christmas gifts." Harry pulled out a small rectangular package and handed it to her. Hermione took it and began meticulously picking open the tissue paper.

"Now what could this be..." she murmured.

"It's a new car." Harry said soberly.

"Very funny."

"Oh, a BOOK. Never would've seen Hermione go for that..." Ron chuckled

"And you're just hysterical, Ron," Hermione said. It was a good sized tome, bound in dark embossed leather with brass fittings. She set the paper aside and read the cover. "A beginner's guide to Libriomancy," she murmured, frowning. "I've never heard of that. I mean, I know Bibliomancy is the art of trying to find secret messages in random passages from various holy writings, but… hm..." Without another word she opened it and was soon lost in the first chapter.

"And something for you, Ron." This package was a bit more unwieldy coming out of the bag. Ron accepted it and tore the wrapping off. He was left holding--- "A lute?" he said, confused. It wasn't a lute on second glance; it was a bit smaller, and flatter, closer to a mandolin with a dark wood finish. It had two sets of strings that intersected at the center of the sounding board, in a way that made the eye dance around it. Ron laughed as he turned it over in his hands. "I've never seen anything-- why'd you think--?"

Harry shrugged. "You're always saying you want to stand out from your brothers, last I checked none of them's a musician. Here, it came with this..." He pulled something else out of the haversack. To Ron's eyes it looked like a pair of metal earmuffs, attached by a cord to a metal and plastic box. "What's this?" Ron said.

"Oh, it's a CD player," Hermione said. "I've been wanting one for ages… It's like a gramophone for just one person," she explained to Ron. "But electronics won't work at Hogwarts, because of all the magic."

"And you believe that?" Harry said, amused. "Think about it, Hermione. London has the Ministry of Magic, Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley, and who knows what the Unspeakables have-- why isn't London having constant blackouts?" Hermione's mouth opened and closed silently. "Exactly. That rubbish is just something older pureblood students tell the younger ones to keep them from cluttering up the place with Muggle stuff." He turned the CD player over, showing them the runes scratched into the plastic. "Besides, it's been magic-proofed, just in case.

"Anyway-- it's for the CD." Harry held up a square envelope. He pulled the disk out and showed Ron how to put it in the player. "you listen, follow along, play along with the music and it teaches you how to play."

Ron picked up the envelope and read the label. "Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Becoming a Bard. By the Wizards of the Coast players." Huh." He shrugged. "Couldn't hurt worse than plowing face down in Quidditch." Watching carefully, he followed Harry's instructions to put the CD in, snapped the case shut and hit 'play.' Soon he was bobbing his head along with the music. The musician on the disk had a high, clear voice, easy to listen to; his backup players were definitely skilled.



"Jack of all trades,

Master of none,

But far better off

Than the master of one..."



"Thanks, Harry. This is really great." Ron sat down on a nearby overstuffed chair, slung the strap of the manduarlin over his shoulder, and listened to the CD, his fingers idly plucking the strings.

Harry saw that his friends were immersed in their gifts. He smiled to himself and got to his feet. "Well I'm getting to bed," he said out loud, stretching theatrically. "I'll see you two in the morning." He headed up the stairs to the boy's dorms.

Hermione nodded and waved one hand bye-bye over her shoulder, never lifting her eyes from the book. She was riveted. Ever since she was a little girl, she'd believed that books were magic… that they could open up entire worlds. She'd never realized till now just how literal that was.

Soon, she'd learn it was more literal than she even imagined now.

Ron's CD played on. He'd never listened to a bard before. For that matter he'd never known that bard was. If he had he might have known that bards, along with their numerous skills in diplomacy, swordplay, lockpicking, stagecraft and acting, jesting, languages, and more -- at least those where his new CD was recorded-- cast spells by singing.

There were, far beyond any muggle manufacturer's capabilities, over a hundred tracks cut into this one CD. Each one cut by a group of Bards, working together.

The music played on. Slowly, Ron's idle picking began to take form of a melody.

 

[LostArchivist]

Well, here's a vaguely review-like comment in response to all those wonderful snippets. I wish I could express how much I liked those, and how insightful some of it was, but I'll have to settle for reactions to some of my favorite lines.

Spoiler: Typos

For that matter he'd never known that bard was.

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what a bard was

In seconds she was holding a food high sapling in her hoof.

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foot-high

Even though there are mares in Canterlot right now who still have corks of ginger up their--.. well.

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Your ellipsis is missing a period.

The difference between Terran and Azeroth wands is actually rather mino, although their level of importance is quite different.

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minor

hauling their charge and her (miraculouslyunharmed) eggs away,

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miraculously unharmed

"Would you believe I've been waiting my whole life for an opportunity to use that speech?"

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This is going to be a fun time indeed. I hope you have the time to write a bit more of this in the future. Or that if someone else writes an extension they let me know.
I don't know who else would manage to pull off your particular style, but if anyone can I'd want to read that too.

Seriously, how do you combine stunning social insight, biting snark, and heartlifting comedy all in the same story, much less sometimes the same paragraph?

"This is your Sorting Song,
It isn't very long..."

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Well, I can't quite say I've heard that one before...

"I don't think she really knows that house's reputation," Hermione said. "Cunning and Ambition don't sound all that bad on their own, after all. I think she's in for a rough ride."

Up on the stage, Applejack leaned over to Rainbow Dash. "What was all that about?"

Rainbow Dash smirked. "I don't think those Snakes know Rarity's reputation," she said. "I think those guys are in for a rough ride."

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I would pay to see this.
I have a strange feeling that Slytherin is going to become known as the House of Courteous Gentlemen, and no one is going to have the slightest clue what just happened.

"I never would've thought of Sweetiebelle as cunning or ambitious," Scootaloo whispered to Applebloom..

"Those 're the kind y' gotta watch out for," Applebloom muttered back, amused.

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Exactly!
Also, this may be even more amusing...

"HUFFLEPUFF!" It finally shouted between gales of laughter. "And good luck, Pomona!" It was still laughing as the pink pony pronked her way to the Hufflepuff table.

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Oh dear. I'm not sure this is quite far enough away...

"And nothing that… frizzy," Hermione added. The other two stared at her. "Oh shut up!"

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Snicker. This is cute.

Harry laughed at her expression. "Hermione, don't you get it? They're from another world. Everything your books have to say about them is probably wrong. You're going to have to do more than just run to the library to learn everything about something this time, because books are going to be pretty much worthless." He turned back to watch the proceedings, while his best friend sat there and spiraled into an existential horror at the blasphemies he'd uttered.

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This really shouldn't amuse me as much as it does. But it does.

The Gryffindors stared at her. "And that was nuthin'," Dash went on. "Manticore? Pulled a thorn out of its paw and had it eating out of her hoof. Cerberus? Gave it a tummy rub. Cockatrice? Beat it in a STARING CONTEST. She keeps a full grown grizzly bear in her cottage as a PET, and she gives first aid to rattlesnakes and mountain lions. And she civilized an avatar of Chaos, and has tea with him every weekend! Sure she's shy and timid and meek and all that, but when she needs to be, Fluttershy can be a force of nature. And don't you ever forget it."

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And people wonder why other people find ponies awesome.
...Although I'm less sure after hearing about the new show...

Spike held up the bottle of "creamer" and waggled it softly. "From her Majesty Princess Celestia," he said. "To be used in cases of Twilight Sparkle only."

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I suspect that if you ever wrote a crossover with the webcomic Girl Genius, the laughter would probably kill me.
But I'd read it anyway.

He pinched his nose and began reciting in a high squeaky voice. "Ach, foul vight, your vicked vays shall end mit-- vat? Vat in himmel? Vat is wrrrrrong mit my voice??--"

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That characterization was pinpoint perfect. Beautiful. I can actually hear the poor guy complaining.

My, that IS a lot of torches and pitchforks… how on earth did you fit THAT inside a ballroom?… werewolf rides??… the entire village got a restraining order?… that's not supposed to explode! It's not even supposed to be flammable!…

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I feel myself becoming more concerned as that list continues. And wishing I had a video camera, a blast shelter, and was actually there...

And Slytherin--- good heavens no--
'Heaven won't let me in but Hell is afraid I'd take over,' right? Harry thought with a carnivorous grin.

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That gag is quite old, but there's a good reason it's famous.
We really do need more Slytherin Harry Potters, though.

I did try reading Methods of Rationality, but my sanity didn't quite survive. A shame, because that's supposed to be really good.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

KRA-KA-KA-BADOOM!

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It might be something he's doing intentionally, but it's still an omen. Heck, most of the school didn't survive, and that was in canon!

"And you know what that leaves you to be."

Ron grinned. They'd spent the weekend watching old black and white horror 'moo-vees' on one of Harry's electronic gadgets. "I dunno, but I've got a hunch."

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...Argh.

"You actually tried to use Legilimency on a VAMPIRE PRINCE?"

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And here's your brand new Darwin Award!
We thank you for cleaning scum out of the gene pool.

"Let me spell it out. SHE WAS NEVER GOING TO F$@# YOU."

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I'm outright cackling at that line. It is a work of pure beauty not fit for this mortal world.
The fact that he never swears or yells just makes it more potent. It's really great when an author properly executes one of those.

"You hid off in a corner and tried to manipulate other people into saving her for you. What did you think was going to happen, huh? That she was going to see you standing there, come running to you with her arms wide open, trip over me and my father's corpses and land on your dick?" Snape made a strangled, anguished sound.

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I'm not sure what goes beyond an "armor-piercing question" but I think you found one.

The duck lunged. Snape screamed.

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Unusual? Yes.
Cruel? It's Snape. Who cares?

Definitely imaginative, though!

Harry looked at her. He looked at Snape. Wordlessly he reached into a pocket, pulled out of all things a rubber ducky and set it on the desk in front of the Professor.
Snape's rolling eyes drifted down and locked on the ducky. His shriek of horror nearly sent the class running for the far side of the room.

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I'm reminded of that stuffed Shoggoth in the story Taylor Varga now...

"Minerva, what--" Professor Flitwick finally caught up, stumbling through the doorway and gaping up at the carnage. "Ye gods and little fishes, it's on the ceiling..."

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That is a phrase you really never want to hear, regardless of the context. Here? They might need to demolish that poor bathroom.

He looked around then held up a thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. "Missed it by thaaaaat much."

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Nice.

"There was one time she read about this one Canterlot fad in a magazine, and she made us help her take this carved ginger root and.... and... made us swear not to tell anypony ever oops..." the purple mare blushed raspberry.

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Oh wow. I've actually heard about that one. I don't think I've ever seen anyone extrapolate that custom before, and now I can't get it out of my head. Of course it would be a fashion decision, because people do do equally stupid things in the name of beauty...

"You mean you can lead a pony to wisdom but you can't make them think?" Pinkie Pie said.

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I may have to remember that one. It's wonderfully biting.

Or in your personal case 'Your Highness please oh please don't launch me to the Moon agk agk agk.' Understood?

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You'd really think he'd have had more self-preservation, but given that they went along with that bushel of stupidity the first time it might be understood. Not forgiven, or explained, but understood...

"Am I? Need I remind you that the original Order was staffed entirely by castrata?" A VERY large pair of scissors materialized in midair and thunked, point down, into the hardwood desk top.

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Fabricati Diem, as the Guards would say.

"Starlight, you-- ARRRrgh! What am I supposed to say to somepony who gave ponies eternal youth against their will?"

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"Thank You?"

Spike, at the least, is better behaved than Fluttershy's irascible rabbit. She would go and give the little demon a dose of the immortality serum....

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I always figured he was one of those bunnies from Caerbannog myself...
It explains so much if Flutters found him deep in the woods, at the mouth of a cave littered with assorted bones and stained with blood, and she went and rescued the "cute little bunny"...
He was probably too shocked at first to actually attack, and ever since then he's secretly guarded her against dangers of the forest. Not that, as mentioned earlier, she really needs the assistance...

There is an all-encompassing flash of white--

And we hurtle IN and THROUGH and OUT again, riding the wave as the cosmos explodes, celebrating its own rebirth.

We all gaze in wonder around us as a new Universe cools and forms around us...

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Dammit, now I'm trying to remember what that short SF story was. I know that part sounds vaguely familar.
I love the fact that you managed to make that idea awesome and uplifting rather than vaguely horrifying and sad.

"YeeeeHAWWW! Come on, Fluffy! Yeeeeehaaa!"

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I personally figured he would go through the trapdoor, accidentally grab the Stone, and then we'd get to see what happens when an undead vampire holds the Stone of Life Eternal. Would that cancel out, or would he get even more OP?
...Just so long as he doesn't sparkle.

"Hey, Malfoy! Look, Fluffy, a Slytherin! FETCH!"


"Potter, what are you—AAAAAH!"

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And in a few years, everyone's Patronus looks like Fluffy. Much to the consternation of the teachers.

("We're too close to Gringott's; the thing never stops glowing.")

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Bwahaha!
It's not a story without an evil lawyer (or banker, I guess) joke somewhere!

Harry's face screwed up at that. "That's it?" he said. "just… hot, cold, and-- and "other?"

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Is that seriously the system?! That's just... bizarre...
Also, how do the quotes match up on that? I feel like there's a missing closing quote, since the sentence's quote never ends, just the emphasis on "other"...

He pushed up his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. It almost looked as if the books were drifting, overlapping…

Startled, he squinted harder… then stopped himself. He forced himself not to squint, and let his eyes go unfocused. The image of the covers blurred and drifted… and a fourth, brass-locked volume, one whose cover shimmered like a film of oil with all the colors of the rainbow, appeared in the middle of the three. "This one," he said, reaching out and grasping at the ghostly book. He felt the heft of it settle in his hand; his vision cleared and he was holding a book with a silvery cover in his hand.

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That's a feature, not a bug. I wonder if anyone can do that if they think outside the box (I get the feeling that it's basically a requirement to visit that store) or if it's something special for chosen ones?

"That's not a dragon," he heard her yelp. "That's a cuisinart with feet! Look at those, those barbs and spines!"

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Amusing image.

"Accio Haversack!"

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Farewell Sanity, we hardly knew ye...

"A flying carpet?" Hermione gasped. "But those are ILLEGAL!"

"I don't think anybody cares right now, Hermione," Ron said through his teeth in a sing-song voice.

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Well, he does have a point.

On another note, aside from Hogwarts possibly being exempt from the regular wizarding laws, isn't the Tournament pretty much no holds barred? I can't recall if it's actually canon, but I'm fairly sure that even the illegal curses are permitted in it. He might be triply exempt, if you stack pureblood bias on top.

Harry aimed his staff once more. His voice echoed eerily in the middle of all the chaos.

"Incarcerous!"

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Oh my. A wand spell cast with the staff of an archmage. I'm surprised that the entire arena wasn't filled up with cold iron chain...

"Not a carpet." He reached behind him and picked up the carpet, which was rolled up neatly. "It's actually registered with the DMLE as an Azerothian tapestry."

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Ha! Yeah, good luck getting THAT away from him now.

"It can't be a flying carpet, because it's a decorative wall hanging. By definition, not a carpet. Also, I got it registered anyway. Neener Neener."

"It's not like Mr. Crouch has ever let the law get in his way too much. Just ask my godfather."

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Nice. That was the ClF3​ of burns.

"Philosopher's stone," Harry said. "Or rather a more specialized version, a Peerless Alchemist Stone. Turns out that transmutation of metals and cure-all potions aren't all that grand of an achievement in Azeroth Alchemy. I'd have created a Spirited and an Ascended stone, but I only had enough time to brew one variety after I got back from Diagon Alley. Is Nicholas Flamel still alive?" he suddenly asked Dumbledore.

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Again, beautiful. I love how when your characters go to show superiority, they take a mile and then shove a foot in just for good measure.

Dumbledore's face went slack with shock. "Who told you there was a prophecy?" he whispered, grasping Harry's arm.

Harry pulled away. "You did, just now," he said, not without some amusement.

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Oldest trick in the book. Still works, too.

"Whatever prophecy there is, proclaiming my Fate-- I refuse to tie myself to it. I reject that Fate and make my own."

Hundreds of miles away, deep underground in a chamber only a handful ever saw or entered, a crystal sphere cracked in half, then shattered into dust.

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Again, I've never seen that happen. Normally that only works to renounce the blood wards, not the prophecy itself. Also, don't think I missed that reference.

Harry scowled, his knuckles whitening on his staff. The gem flashed. "The Dursleys may be related, but they were never my family. And that place was never my home."

Far off in Little Whinging, something intangible and tenuous and long strained to the breaking point, finally broke. The invisible threads that bound and encircled one of the tidy little homes frayed and fell apart, fading away to nothing.

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...Much like that, actually. Both is good too.

Harry grinned. "You missed something," he said, a twinkle in his eye. "Didn't the rules-- the ones enforced by the Goblet of Fire-- say only those of age could participate?"

"Well, yes--"

"And yet both the Goblet and the Ministry are forcing me to participate." Harry almost gleefully pointed out. "That means that both of them, in a magically binding contract, acknowledged me--"

"--As a legal adult," Dumbledore sighed. "Really, Harry--"

"Yes, really," Harry smirked. "And if the Ministry tries to enforce that law on me… breaking their own word… well that would mean they were declaring my status as a Champion defunct after the fact, contrary to what the Goblet decided. And there's every possibility that the Goblet will take it poorly, isn't there?"

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Again, I've never seen the second part of that chain of logic before. It might be funnier if he didn't actually pass on that information, though... At least until that something unfortunate happened.

"Not so high, not so high!"

"We're barely three feet off the ground, Hermione."

"But we're going fast enough that doesn't matter," she quibbled.

"A jogger could outrun us, Hermione. You really are too scared of heights."

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I'm grinning again. Not that I ever really stopped...

Unseen and unnoticed, the Unspeakable slipped out from behind the suit of armor he'd been hiding behind. The Lost Workshop, eh? Well, it was time for the Unspeakables to get to the root of this mystery-- and clutch it root and stem in their grasp.

However the strike team of hit wizards who arrived on Diagon Alley found nothing. There was no store on the exact corner of Knockturn and Diagon. All that stood there was a single leaflet taped to the lammpost at that corner:

"MOVED TO NEW LOCATION."

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Ah yes. The reason we can't have nice things.

"A beginner's guide to Libriomancy,"

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I find this quite terrifying. The bookworm and hoarder of knowledge with a field of magic that lets her pull literally anything out of a book so long as it's described within? And an eidetic memory to know where said item is described?
Although I suppose they do need a bit of a buff to match Harry's skills now. Still, I imagine the remaining Death Eaters may be more scared of her soon...

Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Becoming a Bard.

Click to shrink...

Hmmm. You know, there's a story out there that has an interesting interpretation of how to misuse bard abilities for fun and profit. On top of all the other, obvious benefits...
Given that the whole theme of the Lost Workshop is in doing exactly that, I wonder if that would happen too?
The ability in question is to invert a buff, and then point it at the opponent. Nothing like a nice, uplifting tune of UnHOly TeRroR to brighten up your day...

 

[RHJunior]

actually, the glowing blade was due to the fact that in Middle Earth, Elven blades glowed whenever an orc, troll or goblin was nearby...

 

[RHJunior]

"Well it's about time you got here," the skinny, labcoated figure hustling across the laboratory floor, pushing a trolley, said testily. "Now maybe we can finally get all this nonsense out of the way. Dr. Drago, was it?"


Dr. Drago stepped forward, and paused. He'd been addressed many ways over the years by many people--- in stentorian tones by heroes, defiantly by a few brave souls, fearfully by most, but he was fairly confident he'd never been spoken to testily before. Certainly not by someone who looked like a low-ranking lab assistant. The man in question was a gangly figure with a curly mop of ginger hair, raw boned features and an ill-fitting lab coat that flapped around his limbs as he galumphed authoritatively along, weaving through the massive laboratory equipment decorating the enormous hangar, pushing a trolley. Dr. Drago found himself discomfited by the fact that the trolley was stacked with the unconscious bodies of three or four of his minions.


Recovering his aplomb he started his prepared speech. "Professor Prometheus, I am Dr. Drago." (he grimaced to himself behind his steel dragon mask; the alliteration sounded rather silly) "And you will now serve…."


"And now I will serve you, you are my master, et cetera? That about the gist of it?" Professor Prometheus said dryly. He looked about. "Eh, here will do." he unceremoniously dumped the three unconscious dragoneers on the concrete floor next to a pillar. "One or two of them always get in ahead of the rest," he muttered. "You'd think they'd never heard of knockout gas or stun rays..." He leaned on the push-arm of the trolley and looked up at Dr. Drago. "So, which is it?" he asked. "Make you invincible, Invincible Army, Evil Team of Evil? Or maybe a giant stompy monster?"


Dr. Drago stared at him. "What?"


Professor Prometheus ticked them off on his fingers. "It's always the same four things you villains want," he said. "You either want me to give you incredible super powers, you want me to give you an army of super-soldiers with, oh, invulnerable skin and laser eyes, a super-powered TEAM to call you leader, orrr you just want a giant death-ray breathing monster to hold the world in terror." He held up his hand and smirked humorlessly. "Did I miss any?"


"I…." this was not at all going like Dr. Drago expected. His half-draconic temper flared. "I do not care to be addressed so trivially, Professor," he said, letting a spit of flame curl out from under his mask.


"Well I am the foremost expert on the science of metahuman abilities," Prometheus shrugged. "I didn't figure you came to me looking for my oatmeal cookie recipe."


"More to the point you are the greatest scientist of our age," Dr. drago said. "You have mastered the means to grant superhuman powers--- safely, predictably, flawlessly. I will have that knowledge for myself, and the mind that crafted it in my service."

"No, you won't." Prometheus said simply.


Dr. Drago's scaled cloak flared, filling the room as flames flickered among its folds. "YOU DARE TO SPEAK TO ME THIS WAY?" he roared. "You will serve me , little man, or-"


"No, I won't," Prometheus said. For all the world as if he were discussing whether he'd have broccoli for dinner. "And even if I would--- can't."


""Can't?"" Drago said in disbelief. "You are responsible for the super powers of half the heroes still battling… and losing to... my minions outside." As if in punctuation there was a muffled explosion from outside, and a streamer of smoke trailed across the sky outside one of the oversized windows.


Professor Prometheus sighed and ran his bony fingers through his curly mop. "Why does nobody read my thesis," he muttered to noone. "Take a seat, would you?"


Dr. Drago paused, ego warring with his curiosity. The remnants of the scientist he'd once been won; one of the minions flanking him fetched a nearby office chair, which he took to like it was his throne. "Speak."


Prometheus paced back and forth for a moment in front of a nearby whiteboard. He shot Drago a look. "Tell me," he asked. "What do you know about HOW I became the world's greatest metahuman scientist?"


"Through study and application of your doubtlessly endless natural talents, I'm sure," Dr. Drago drawled. "What of it?"


Prometheus grinned. "Not… quite. It's common wisdom that while I have given countless people super-powers, I never gave any to myself…. Again, not quite." He waved his hand around the room. "Ten years ago I was an intern working in a lab much like this one. Unfortunately the lead scientist had garnered the attention of… I have no idea who, some nefarious types with more guns and men than brains… who attempted to steal his work from him--- some sort of interdimensional communicator, or some such. In the fracas the thing exploded, and guess who got caught in the energy field." He grinned and stuck his thumb in his chest. "This guy.


"It wasn't until the next day that I discovered anything had happened to me. There I was, six a.m., standing in front of the coffee machine, desperately straining to remember how to operate the thing, when I felt this enormous mental surge… and suddenly the information flooded my head. Not just how to run the coffee maker, mind, but everything about it; how to make it work better, how to maintenance it, what brand of instant coffee worked best. Everything.


"I start the coffee, baffled at my wish being granted, and as I was drinking my first cup I had a surge of regret that I hadn't wished to know how to make the coffee taste better. There was another surge, and suddenly I knew precisely how to do so…. I knew how to make everything from french roast to cappuchino to double espresso… as sure as if I'd been doing it my whole life.


"It took me a bit to figure out what had happened, but--"

"Parallel dimensions," Drago said, the light dawning. "Alternate timelines. The machine put you in contact mentally with your alternate selves, and let you download any knowledge you might request from their minds to yours. And since there are feasibly millions, or even billions, of alternate timelines…" incredible, he thought. The applications… the implications…


"Bingo," Prometheus said with a grin. "Every day I build up two or three 'charges,' as I think of them, that I can spend on any subject or topic. One charge gives me the basics. By the time I've spent four charges, I'm a PhD in that field." His eyes gleamed behind his overlarge spectacles. "I've got more degrees than a thermometer, Dr. Drago. And I'm accumulating more even as we speak."


Dr Drago's eyes burned. If he could get the secret of that power… or better yet get the Professor himself under his thumb….


"And that's where the trouble started," Professor Prometheus stood and began pacing. "For a while I was 'the boy with the computer brain,' and every government spook, corrupt corporate shark, banana republic dictator or plain old cackling megalomaniac wanted my power, or me.


"So I stopped goofing around learning useless things like origami and medieval brewery, and started looking to download some real powers.

"But you can see the catch. My power was strictly knowledge. I could write you a really detailed book about Jeet Kun Do, but I couldn't punch my way out of a paper sack. "Magic"--" he made quote marks with his fingers in the air "like Dr. Strange mucks about with requires some innate talent I don't have. And you can't learn to be bulletproof from a book.

"But while I was hiding out in some caped crusader's cave as a safe-house, I finally had the epiphany. If you summed it up, what I really wanted to learn was how to make super powers. So I created a new knowledge category:


KNOWLEDGE BASE: CREATION OF STABLE SUPER POWERS.


"And I dumped a week's worth of charges into it all in one go."

"...And learned the secret of metahuman powers," Dr. Drago said.


"I learned ALL THE SECRETS," Professor Prometheus exclaimed. "My dear Dr. Drago, there isn't any one formula, any one path or unified field theory to superhuman powers, there are hundreds! Some of them self-contradictory, some of them mutually exclusive, and I learned ALL of 'em! I could make any of 'em work…. Once I woke up from the week-long coma, that is. You can't begin to imagine the dozens of esoteric related fields you have to learn just to make, say, Dr. Pym's pym particles work right. Or the Hulk's gamma radiation based powers. OR the amount of in-depth study it takes to make two radically different power evolution paths work together….


"But I did it." Prometheus' eyes gleamed with triumph. "It took a billion minds from a billion universes, but they collated together enough knowledge, exotic and mundane, to give me the knowledge I have. I faked my death--- after the coma it was fairly easy--- got a false identity from Batman as a favor, and became…. me. Professor Prometheus, the scientist of super powers."


"And yet you fritter away your power," Drago said scornfully. "You could be ruling the world, and yet here you sit, fiddling about, making a super-soldier here, a team of 'teenagers with attitude' there, maybe bump things forward with a medicine derived from a super-healer's abilities…. When you could rule the world wholesale, MAKE ir peaceful and prosperous under your guiding hand, and you on a throne to conquer the stars!"


"Oh really?" Professor Prometheus' tone was so deadpan it brought Dr. Drago up short. "Tell me, Dr. Drago, am I the first person to actually create super powers?"


"Of course not," Drago scoffed. "There are hundreds of people out there who have done so-- both deliberately and by accident."


"And yet, almost noone has attempted to recreate or mass produce the effect that created their various supermen," Professor Prometheus said. He leaned in, his voice deceptively soft. "And nearly all the attempts to do so have been failures or worse, horrendous backfires. Doesn't that make your scientist brain itch, Doctor? Doesn't it make you curious?"


The would-be overlord was forgotten; it was the Doctor at the fore, now. "Of course. But granted that most 'superhuman origins' are freak accidents, flukes..."


"And that should make any difference to the progress of science?" Prometheus countered. He began pacing again. "We live in a world where there are literally thousands of known formulas for creating superhumans, so much so that you should be able to do so with ingredients off a grocery store shelf--- yet the "recipe" ceases to work predictably or at all after the first or second time!


In a reasonable universe, the discovery that Gingold fruit granted the Elongated Man his powers would have been greeted with corporations and governments conducting field tests on tens of thousands of volunteers, and hundreds of rubber men running around. In a sensible world, the disccovery of ONE man capable of absorbing gamma radiation and turning into a Hulk should have been followed by hundreds, thousands of people demonstrating the same attributes, just out of the base population… there should have been dozens of Hulks that walked out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl. Captain America's super-serum should have been child's play to recreate. Forget project X, they should have isolated the healing factor from Wolverine's blood, started mass producing it and be selling it in pharmacies by now!


"Instead, superhumans are all sports, freaks, irreproducible one-offs.. not even the Mutants "breed true," you're just as likely to get a child with gills if a pair of telepaths mate…..or on rare occasion they're members of distant far-flung races whose "natural" abilities are exotic not just by earth's standards, but by the standards of the lifeforms on their home planet. After all, don't you find it odd that the Martian Manhunter is a shape-shifting telepath… yet none of the other species on Mars demonstrate those particular talents?


"No, Doctor. My greatest triumph was not figuring out how superhumans are made. My accomplishment lay in discovering why they DON'T happen." He snatched up a marker, walked over to the transparent marker board, and began writing. "Doctor Drago, I assume you've heard of the notorious Anti-Life Equation? Or the Speed Formula?


"Well I discovered… or was informed, depending on how you look at it… that there is what could be turned a Superhuman Equation.


"Human DNA, the genetic code, can be broken down into a representative mathematical formula." The numbers and symbols, tiny and cramped, soon spread across and down the board. "That formula becomes… a code… that, when aligned with certain universal constants, and processed alongside another equation of my devising for enumerating each type of superpower, dictates the frequency with which that particular powerset can appear in full in the base population of the species, in this case the human species." He finished a final row of numbers, letters and geometric shapes, then threw the marker aside with a flourish.


"In short, you can't get a spider-man in every neighborhood because the math simply won't allow it."


Even masked, it was clear that Dr. Drago was flabbergasted. "Are you saying that…. The universe… basically destroyed Krypton because there could be only one Superman?" he said, grasping at straws.


Prometheus snorted. "No, the Kryptonians met their fate because they became a bunch of xenophobic isolationist idiots who didn't even have enough spaceships left to evacuate their planet when it exploded," he said, sneering in disdain. "The Metahuman Constant for their genome is miles higher than the one for humanity, or rather it bunches differently on a chart…" He tapped his chin thoughtfully, brooding. "How do I explain….?"


"Think of what I do as mining for Bitcoin," he said finally. "Except for each power set… and each species… the mathematical sequence and the spacing between the "prime numbers"…. The working superpower formulas…. Are slightly different. Kryptonians had a Metahuman Constant that was highly tolerant--- to the point the entire species could have abilities both quantifiable as metanormal and virtually identical power-wise. The Human race, on the other hand, has a slightly different numeric sequence and key, which means the "prime numbers" we're looking for are scattered more broadly up and down the line. That's why you get so many variations, so many exotic one-shots, and why each successive effort to create a duplicate is less effective. Unlike the Martians or the Kryptonians, we are a species of sports and one-shots. It's more than in our genes… it's in our math.


"I could try to make you a bunch of superpowered minions," he said. "But the results would be unpredictable, and each successive effort would be less viable. If I tried to make you an army, they would be a dismal disappointment in some way and almost certainly suffer from some tactically fatal shortcoming." He shrugged. "It's… just not in the numbers."


Dr. Drago rose to his feet. One could almost see the fury rolling off him. "I come to you offering you a chance to rule the world with me, and you try to s…. With this hackneyed homebrewed version of NUMEROLOGY?" Seething, he flicked a finger at the mooks standing around him. "Cuff this fool, drag him back to the ship. When we get back to base we'll see if the interrogators can wring anything sensible out of him--" The troopers raised their blaster rifles and moved in.


Professor Prometheus smiled, not moving a step from where he stood. "You know that's another mistake everyone makes about me," he said in a conversational tone. His eyes flared white.


With a deep, boneshaking THOOM a ring of light blasted forth from his forehead. It blew the irascible Doctor and his men into the air, sending them sailing fifty feet away. They landed with a crash in a pile of shattered lab equipment, broken weaponry and more than a few broken bones.


Dr. Prometheus strode over to the groaning men. With a sweep of his hand the remains of their weapons and gear went flying. He picked Dr. Drago up by his belt as effortlessly as if he were hefting a basket of fruit, and used his free hand to wind a length of pipe from the wreckage around his wrists and ankles. After he had similarly bound his men, he left them in a pile on the floor and sat in his favorite chair to wait for the Heroes to finish up outside and come find him.


"….They never think the Mad Scientist would give HIMSELF a few super powers," he said idly.