Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem - Third chapter sneak peek · 10:31pm Dec 11th, 2018
To be honest, it's been helpful to put the page drafts of HPLPP up for comments as I go along, but I don't want to clutter anybody's feed, so let me drop a page break here and you can peek beyond if you're interested in following along.
Second honesty confession: These are *drafts* that are being revised as I go along, so you may see something posted in March that makes you go "That looks familiar, but different." Editing drafts takes equal use of a scalpel and a chainsaw, after all. And I still have to work Spike in here somewhere as he's munching on a gem he found on the floor (Aunt Petunia lost an earring). So take a look and let me know what you think so far as Harry gets dragged into this rapidly growing tiny problem.
Part 1 blog
Part 2 blog
Part 3 blog
- - Ω - -
Steaks were one of Harry’s secret joys in the Dursley household. They were nothing like the steaks served at Hogwarts, of course, and since Harry had quite enough of house elves in his house last year due to Dobby’s interference, he was willing to cut Vernon a little slack over his marinating and grilling technique. In addition, Petunia really did not like steaks, so when Harry took the dirty dishes into the kitchen, he could always tell who had which plate. Dudley and his friends tended to chew their steaks (double portions, of course) all the way down to the bone, Vernon cut his very precisely, and Petunia made a good effort at hers before smearing some mashed potatoes over it and dropping her napkin on top.
Those stolen bites of steak he received while washing dishes were more delicious than anything he ever had gotten in the Hogwarts main hall, because they were his, spirited out from under the noses of his cousin and any of his greedy friends. This time while he was quietly chewing, the victory seemed blunted by the thought of the little magical ponies upstairs. Were they eating out of Hedwig’s bag of owl pellets instead of grazing… or whatever tiny magical ponies did for food?
Since cleaning the grill took far longer than his normal after-dinner chores, Harry had a few minutes alone in the kitchen while the telly blasted away in the other room. That let him sneak a few vegetable peels, a bit of parsnip, and one wilted leaf of lettuce into his pocket, then make his escape upstairs to his room without being caught by Dudley or his friends, who liked a brisk round of Harry-hunting after dinner to allow their meal to settle.
“Twilight?” he whispered, once the door was closed and he had stuck a chair under the knob, just in case. “Applejack? I brought you some food. If you eat, that is.”
“Over here, Harry.”
Three small ponies and a smaller dragon were sitting on Dudley’s broken desk, only the permanent tilt to the tabletop had been fixed somehow, and quite possibly the sides had gained a coat of paint. His homework was stacked up in the center of the desk just as neat as if Hermione Granger had snuck into his house and taken some time to get everything just right, down to the precise red marks of corrections marching across the pages.
“I… see you got the ink spill out,” he managed to say to Twilight Sparkle’s bright, attentive expression of impending book-related topics. “Thank you.”
“Afore Twi gets started,” said Applejack, giving Harry’s pocket a penetrating look, “you mentioned something about grub?”
“Oh! Yes. It’s not much,” said Harry as he got out the vegetable peelings. It may not have been much to Harry, but all three ponies perked up and in minutes were eating out of his hand. Literally.
“I really wish we had some plates,” said Rarity through a mouthful of parsnip.
“Durned fine apple products,” said Applejack with most of a peel dangling out of her mouth. “A little dry to be just gettin’ the outsides, but all we’ve had today is a bunch of agapanthus blooms Twi done floated up through the window, so we sure as sugar can’t complain.”
Harry put the last leaf of wilted lettuce on the desk before peering out of the window at the flower bush below, which looked a little grazed even in the dim porchlight from the front door.
“I’m sorry if we harmed the bush,” said Twilight Sparkle, who was sharing Applejack’s apple peel. “We were going to get some food from the kitchen—”
“No, no,” said Harry rapidly. “That’s fine. My aunt can spare a few flowers. They’re a little droopy anyway, no matter how much fertilizing and weeding I do around them. I’ll see about trimming some tomorrow to even them out. And sneaking you some food from the kitchen so you don’t have to bother. It’s just…”
He turned around and regarded the ponies sitting on the desk, still happily eating the table scraps. It really needed to be said, because the longer they stayed in his aunt and uncle’s house, the more likely they were going to get caught, and that would end badly.
“You’re wantin’ to know when we’re going home, aren’t you?” asked Applejack. “Ah can understand. We must be one heck of a bother in your situation.”
“There’s just one teensy little thing,” said Rarity, with a shoulder nudge to her fellow unicorn. “Tell him, Twilight.”
Twilight Sparkle turned a darker shade of purple, more close to violet, and stammered, “I d-don’t know.”
“Excuse me?” With a cautionary glance at the closed bedroom door, Harry lowered his voice. The last thing he wanted was to raise the curiosity of the people downstairs. “You brought them here,” he indicated with the poke of one forefinger at the two other ponies. “Can’t you just send them back the same way?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” protested Twilight in an anguished voice that seemed to indicate oncoming tears. “I hoped that reviewing your spellbooks would give me a better understanding of your world’s magic and the way I got here. That’s why I summoned Spike, just to prove it could be done reliably, but pushing is totally different than pulling the magic here. It’s like there’s some sort of directional permeable barrier separating us from our home dimension, so I summoned Rarity and Applejack so I could get a better idea of how it functioned.”
“That sounds… reasonable,” said Harry. Summoning charms were Fifth Year, and although he and Ron had skimmed some of the textbooks in the hopes of being able to summon the occasional late night snack at Hogwarts, they had given up rather quickly when faced with their overwhelming complexity. “So why aren’t you researching now?”
“The poor dear needed a break,” said Rarity rather firmly. “And we are certainly not letting her go back to researching her horn off until she’s taken some time to relax.”
“And ain’t nothing that relaxes Twi like school,” declared Applejack, tapping one hoof against the stack of parchment on the desk. “She done went through and corrected all your studywork, so all you need to do is get on over here and recopy it.”
“And retake the quizzes and rewrite your essays to solve some really horrible logical fallacies,” said Twilight, who had obviously perked up at the sound of what seemed to be her favorite activity in the world. “Go ahead and sit down so we can get started. I’ll finish my research while you’re sleeping, and we should be gone by morning.”
— End Chapter 3
— Chapter 4
Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem
Six Not-Geese a Flying
“Wake up!” hissed a voice in Harry Potter’s ear. “Twilight said her warning spells detected your aunt moving around, so she’ll be here in a few minutes!”
“Wha?” Harry sat up and groped around on the bedstand table for his glasses, only to have a small yellow pony hand them to him. Or hoof them to him? It was confusing, and made only worse by the early hour. “What’s going on? I thought—”
When Harry got his glasses on and took a look at the pony hovering in front of his nose, he was quite tempted to take them back off again and clean off whatever colorful dirt had smeared on them. The tiny little pony appeared to be a pegasus, a quite exotic creature who was not native to the British area, although he had heard of a small herd being kept in France somewhere. The thing was that pegasi were large creatures, bigger than horses and with powerful appetites, while this creature was about the size of an adult bluebird and colorful enough to make Harry’s eyes hurt.
Just wait until Pinkie and Rainbow Dash get there. Someone's going to get caught, lol. After all I'm sure there has to be a "look we broke the interdimensional barrier again" party!
I'm very much enjoying this crossover. I don't know details of the Harry Potter universe but the mixture of magic from two different worlds is very intriguing and fun.
Really enjoying this, glad to see a Harry Potter x MLP fic that actually seems interested in telling a single focused and coherent narrative instead of constantly breaking off into unrelated subplots every chance it gets.
Granted we're still at the beginning of the story but based on your past stories I'm not worried.
Hmm. Semipermeable universal membranes. That is tricky. I'd suggest Vanishing Charms, but wizards never bothered to figure out where Vanished matter goes.
Flutterbirb
So now we're getting teasers of teasers?
Well, I'm not complaining.