"Pooh, when I'm -you know - when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," said Pooh.
"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."
Pooh thought for a little.
"How old shall I be then?"
"Ninety-nine."
Pooh nodded.
"I promise," he said.
Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's Paw.
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I - if I'm not quite -" he stopped and tried again - "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"
"Understand what?"
"Oh, nothing. He laughed and jumped to his feet. "How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard?"
So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
Hermione put down her book, "The House at Pooh Corner", by A.A. Milne. She was once again thankful for her almost-photographic memory, as it made it much easier to keep herself entertained. She had realized quite some time ago (although she was unsure if it was days, weeks, months or years) that the key to keeping herself sane was structure. She started her day off with building things. It was much easier than building something in real life; she simply thought it, and it was. The difficult part was the permanency. At the corners of her thoughts, she often saw flickers of grand structures, wisps of faces, hints of things she had seen before, but trying to hold onto them was like trying to grab smoke. It was only through conscious volition that she could commit the structures to memory, and with enough practice and detail, create something reproducible.
She used the metaphor of the physical act of creation to aid her in this process, like a complex mnemonic device. It forced her to focus on the reality of the objects she was working with, how they fit together with each other. Of course, she skipped over the mundane, because things just worked. When she had laid down the polished wooden flooring of her library earlier that day, the beams just fit into place and stayed there. She didn't need to concern herself with every single minute detail of construction, only the ones necessary to complete the abstraction. As she laid each beam in place, she forced herself to focus on that beam's spatial relationship with the rest of the room, committing it to memory as best as possible.
What had begun as a single featureless room had expanded into a house, which had grown into a palace. Many of the rooms were empty shells, placeholders with no permanency beyond the size and shape of their boundaries, and even then, those were mutable. She had initially dedicated a rather large section of the first floor to a grand ballroom, and it occurred to her shortly thereafter that she was not expecting guests anytime soon.
Once she was done with her building for the day, she would begin studying. Her subjects were unfortunately limited: the social sciences were purely worthless, and the physical sciences were of little use beyond purely theoretical applications. She was not accomplished enough of a physicist, chemist, or biologist to recreate reality with even the remotest degree of fidelity. So she mostly focused on maths and logic, two things that did not require the laws of physics as a prerequisite. She worked with the information she had learned from her studies in the non-Magical educational system, and although that wasn't best-in-the-world level by any stretch, she still counted herself as lucky. After all, she was handed on a silver platter mathematical equations, theories, principles and concepts that it had taken her forebears decades if not centuries or millennia to derive.
Even still, there was much that she was not taught and was forced to reverse engineer, a process that was at times painstaking. She remembered quite clearly the feeling of giddy excitement when she discovered that rate of change of the function "y=x^2" was equal to "2x", and that she could apply a similar transformation to find the areas of even higher-order exponentials. She was not, of course, arrogant enough to believe that she was alone in this discovery, especially given how quickly she was able to come to it. But she was also not well-studied enough to know that this was nothing more than basic Calculus 101.
When she tired of studying, she would then move to more creative pursuits. She found that she quite enjoyed painting. She painted places she knew, places she had read about, places she imagined. She was a master of light and shadow, of form and space, crafting photorealistic dreamscapes of otherworldly beauty. She conveyed the beauty and emotion of life through the rich violence of detail. Even in her abstract works, there was violence; her thoughts flung paint across the canvas of her mind in angry splotches, a silent rebellion against the chains that held her. She lovingly hung each work in its proper place in the gallery that she had constructed and often visited for inspiration.
Finally, at the end of her day, she would re-read her journal, write of the day's events, and then retire to her impossibly comfy chair to read a few chapters of whatever book had come to mind. She was not quite sure why she had chosen Winnie the Pooh, but chose it she had, and had finished the entire book before it was time to sleep.
Hermione dreamed, which in and of itself was not odd. One's mind, regardless of physical instantiation, could not keep going at a dead run forever. It needed time to catch up with itself, to process what it had experienced. The first time this occurred, she had not even noticed the encroachment of her subconscious; she simply found it increasingly difficult to force her volition upon the world. She became easily distracted by the sights and sounds that crawled out of the corners of her mind, watching in wonderment as they moved about seemingly with minds of their own.
The process of beginning to dream was much more seamless than when she was alive and constantly inundated by a stream of outside input. She simply stopped trying to consciously direct the action and instead observed what her subconscious had to offer. Oftentimes it provided inspiration for her conscious mind, synthesizing new ideas from unique permutations of existing concepts. Other times it unlocked doors that she had forgotten existed, doors she was able to then enter and explore. But most of the time, it was simply soothing mental white noise that relaxed her until she decided she was ready to begin her routine anew.
What was odd about today was that she was dreaming someone else's dream. She first noticed the peace. It was all wrong. She knew her own mind intimately. It was a constant vortex of activity, conscious or no. A swirling miasma of thoughts, a Pollock in conceptual form. But this was calm. Measured. Thick, bold lines, serene swaths of uniform color, pleasant to behold, but not at all a reflection of the life or reality she knew. It was childlike, innocent, serene. The voices that floated from in between the pools of color and sharp dividing lines were not echoing fugues, voices layered upon voices in endlessly rising canons. They were words, simple, pure words, and that was so quite unlike her.
The disorientation was so profound that she had difficulty following; she was not used to experiencing input in this fashion. She stared into a mirror, a golden, inviolate oval, observing the twisted reflection of her thoughts. As she searched for herself in the reflection, she saw dark, roiling shadows coalescing. Almost pure black, just like her own form, but with a subtle undercurrent of a deep twilight violet. She knew beyond any doubt that what was staring at her from within the mirror was not her own reflection. For the first time since she had arrived here, she was truly frightened, because whatever it was that stood within the mirror stared back at her, and spoke.
"Who... who are you?"
June 5, 1992
Harry had been lurking outside the kitchens for quite some time, ignoring the suspicious glances of students and professors as they walked by. He was waiting for someone who could answer his question. He had tried asking a few professors where "Madame Maxime" had taken up residence but had received nothing more than blank shrugs. Hogwarts was a large place, with far more rooms and quarters than seemed strictly necessary for its current size. It wasn't until somewhere around lunchtime that the doors opened and a diminutive house elf wearing a faded pastel toga emerged from the door carrying a platter of steamed vegetables.
"Um, excuse me. Pardon me, sir? May I ask you a question?"
The house elf froze and stared at Harry, wide-eyed. It looked up at him, and Harry could see its eyes trace slowly upwards from his face to the top of his hairline. Harry braced for the inevitable, and the elf's wide bulbous eyes began to fill with tears.
"You wouldn't be... Harry Potter?" It asked in a high-pitched croak.
"Yes, I would. Would you mind answering a quick question I have?"
The elf began to blubber loudly. "'Sir'! The great and honorable Harry Potter has called Posey 'sir'! I have heard tales of your generosity and kindness but never before has Posey been called 'sir' by a wizard!" It fell to its knees, the platter clattering to the floor. At the noise, a handful of other house elves appeared and began to clean up the mess, regarding Harry with a mixture of curiosity and fear. The elf turned to one of its companions, "That is the wise and sage-like Harry Potter! And he... he called Posey 'sir'!" and promptly began wailing again.
One of the other house elves whispered to Harry, "But Master Potter, Posey is not a 'sir', she is a 'ma'am.'", and Harry quickly rectified his mistake.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Posey, would you mind answering a question or two?"
Posey began sobbing with renewed gusto, barely managing words between the gasping wails. "The benevolence! The kindness! Never before in Posey's life could I imagine to be called 'Sir' or 'Ma'am'!" She ran forward and gave Harry a gangly hug, before noticing Harry's wide eyes. Worried that she may have been overstepping her bounds, she quickly separated herself, falling to her knees and kissing the hems of Harry's robes. "Sorry, Master Potter. A thousand apologies, please forgive Posey's familiar manner. I did not mean to offend such a noble and honorable wizard!"
"No, no, Posey, it's okay. Jeez, wizards must not treat you with very much respect..." He muttered. Fat tears again began to fall from her eyes as she shook her head weakly. "No, please, don't start crying again. Posey, I just had a few questions for you."
"Anything for you, King Potter, the One Who Lived And Shall Rule The Stars in Both Heaven And Earth!"
Harry felt that was a bit dramatic, but ignored it. "Do you happen to know where Madame Maxime, the visiting Headmistress of Beauxbatons is residing?"
Posey looked excited. "Yes, yes sir, I do. On the seventh floor corridor, do you know the place?"
Harry frowned. "Not well, but I can find it. Where on the seventh floor?"
"There is a portrait of Barnabas the Barmy, training trolls for the ballet. Across the hall from that portrait is the door, but..." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Please make sure you are looking for Madame Maxime and nothing else!"
"Thank you, Posey. May I ask another question or two of you?"
"Of course, Kindly One."
"House elves... What kind of magic can you do? For example, can you transfigure yourself into a different form, make yourself look like something different?"
Posey considered the question, unsure how best to answer. "Not since before the days of Merlin could the fae perform glamours, sir."
"What do you mean?"
"When the wise, the powerful Merlin locked away the darkest secrets of Magic, he also locked away many of our powers as well. Not that Posey is complaining, sir. Posey rather likes how she looks."
Harry thought back to the Dungeons and Dragons manuals he used to read as a child. "These glamours... Could your ancestors turn themselves into anything they wanted?"
"Oh, no sir. We're elves, not wizards. We could change our appearance, but no more. We could not grow, nor shrink."
"Were your ancestors taller? Like, taller than me? As tall, as, say, Madame Maxime?"
"No, sir. As big as Posey, they were."
Hm, well there went that theory. "Okay, well, thank you very much, Posey. You've been very helpful."
Posey swept into a low bow, her nose almost touching the floor. "Yes, Master Potter. Anything for the One With The Power to Defeat the Dark Lord!" Posey's bow was interrupted by the steadily increasing stream of house elves flowing from the kitchen, one of whom had handed her a replacement tray for the one she had dropped. "Pardon me, sir, but Posey must be going now, it is lunchtime. But I would be glad to help you further, simply ask for me within the castle."
"Yes, I will. Thank you again."
Harry made his way across the castle up to the seventh floor, his mind distracted by other thoughts as he idly scanned the portraits until he found the one he sought. The wall across from it was empty, so Harry walked up and down the corridor again, peeking into doors and finding nothing but empty classrooms and supply closets. Frustrated by the inaccurate directions, he went back to the portrait to confirm he was looking at the right one. There really could be no mistaking it: eight trolls wearing garish pink tutus arranged around a single wizard, who looked terribly frightened. He furrowed his brow in concentration, remembering Posey's instructions.
They were fairly straightforward, and yet, here he was with nothing to show. He considered calling her again but was surprised as he turned around to see a door across from him that he must have overlooked during his first walkthrough. The door was cracked open slightly, and he could sound, from inside. He peered into the crack, and saw Discord in his original form, laying down on a rug in front of a fire. He was playing with a pair of dolls, having them dance with each other while humming and singing a little tune.
"Doo do dee doo, jumping on, the train that goes to the Kingdom, de do dum de do de do dum, be doo be doo imagination..."
Harry knocked tentatively upon the door, and Discord jumped up, tossing the dolls into the fire and feigning embarrassment. "Why, you snooping little so-and-so!"
"Hello, Discord."
"To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?"
"Well, we never really got a chance to talk after we first met. I had some questions for you. Well, a lot, actually."
Discord folded its mismatched arms behind its head and stretched back into a chair that did not seem to be there moments before. "I figured you might. What did you want to know, you curious little kitten? You know what they say about curiosity though..."
"For starters, what ARE you?"
Discord grinned. "You really swing for the fences, don't you? I'm the original General Chaos, the primordial embodiment of randomness. I was here before the beginning and I'll be here after the end. It's really quite lonely, you know. I have my brothers and sisters of course, but they're always busy. And of course, Destruction decided to go off and retire a few hundred years ago..."
Harry's initial reaction was disbelief, but he quickly checked himself. He didn't want to be one of those daft protagonists in a fish-out-of-water fantasy story that sees a thousand and one magical phenomena but then decides to be doggedly skeptical about one particular subset of observations, causing all sorts of contrived problems along the way. After all, was this really that much more unbelievable than the creation of pure mass-energy out of nothingness? Or the violation of every possible law of thermodynamics Harry could conceive of? "Okay, so we'll say your some kind of God. What kinds of powers do you have?"
"Here? Not much. See, look. Catch!" Discord detached one of his claws and tossed it at Harry without warning. Surprised, Harry held up his hands to receive it, but the claw passed right through him and clattered to the ground. "I can't really do a thing here. Your world is far too orderly for that, you've practically disproved my entire existence. In a decade or two, I bet I won't even be able to come here at all."
Harry considered this. "So you're one of those, 'the more you believe in me, the more power I have' type deities?"
"Oh no, nothing so simplistic. I'm more of a... hmm." Discord stroked his chin thoughtfully. "A shared hallucination, you might say."
"But you transformed my wand into a fish! And you changed those girls' clothes into those Beauxbatons uniforms!"
Discord held his hands together in mock innocence, and a glowing halo appeared above his head. "Me? I did nothing of the sort! You only thought your wand was a fish. And they were wearing those uniforms all along."
Harry stared at him. "No, they weren't."
Discord chuckled. "Prove it!" Harry stammered, trying to come up with an explanation for the type of fallacy that Discord was currently engaging in, but Discord continued before Harry could reply. "Your minds are so delightfully malleable. It's like shooting wands in a barrel."
"So, I guess that answers my next question," Harry replied, disappointed. He waited for Discord to ask what the question was, but it never came.
After a brief beat of silence, Discord finally spoke. "Oh, you were waiting for me to play my role. One moment, please!" Discord twirled around, and when he completed the revolution, he was wearing an all-black outfit, comprised of pants, a turtleneck, and a beret. He was holding a human skull in his hand, and spoke to it, dramatically. "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well... Oh, wait, wrong play. Let me try again." He threw the skull aside and asked Harry with all the false earnestness he could muster. "Whatever could your question have been, o' disappointed one?"
Harry rolled his eyes. "I suppose you can't bring people back from wherever they go when they die, can you?"
"Of course I can!"
Silence.
Crackle.
Fizz.
Pop.
Harry's next words were measured, because although sometimes things were this easy, usually they weren't. "So, what's the catch?"
"Catch? Me? You act like I'm some kind of trickster God and I've just given you a magical monkey's paw that grants you wishes that will inevitably backfire despite following the exact wording of your wish! Although..." Discord pondered briefly and produced a desiccated paw out of nothingness. "That does sound like the sort of thing I would do. Here!" He tossed the paw to Harry, who didn't bother to try to catch it, and it passed through him. "Oh, yes, sorry. I forgot. Well, who would you like me to resurrect?"
"Yeah, it definitely sounds like there's a catch, here."
Discord folded his arms. "You were the one who asked! Besides, now you've got me excited. I want to show off my talents. I'm nothing if not an incorrigible showboat."
"Um, fine. How about, I don't know..." He thought of the first dead positive role model that came to mind. "Nelson Mandela?"
"Hm... Mandela... Mandela..." Discord produced a large book and oversized pencil and began leafing through the pages. "K... K... L... L... Madras... Madrigal... Manetti... Ah, here we are. Mandela, Nelson. South Africa. Died in prison a year or two ago, no?"
Harry nodded. "That's the one."
Discord flipped the pencil on its end, erased something from the book, and scribbled something in its place, and then showed the book to Harry.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, born 18 July 1918, was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader, and philanthropist, who-
The next words were the ones that had been erased, and were replaced with sloppy handwriting that read:
-most certainly did not die in prison in 1990 and is still living a happy, healthy life."
"See?" Discord spoke. "Not dead!"
Harry sighed. "Great. Really helpful."
"No, really. It says so right here in this encyclopedia." Discord shoved the book closer, and Harry looked at the top of the page: Discordpedia, the free* encyclopedia.
"Let me see that." Harry reached for the book, but his hands passed through it. Despite this, the book turned its pages of its own accord to the section that Harry was going to try to find: an entry labelled "Potter, Harry James".
Harry James Potter (b. 31 July 1980) is a half-blood wizard, one of the most famous wizards of modern times. He is the only child and son of James and Lily Potter (née Evans), both members of the original Order of the Phoenix. He was raised by his Muggle aunt Petunia Dursley and her husband Vernon-
As he read, a large obtrusive page suddenly unfolded itself over the contents of the entry, containing a black-and-white glamour shot of Discord looking pensive. Bold, blue font implored: Please read: a personal appeal from Discordpedia founder, Discord.
"Hey! I was reading that!" Harry shouted, and reached for the book, but again, his hands could find no purchase. "Petunia Dursley? That's not her name-"
"You little peeping Tom, you! This is my private book! Besides, you have nothing to worry about, that's just some awful fan fiction written by some lonely woman on a train."
Dursley... Dursley... That name seemed so familiar.
Discord quickly shut the encyclopedia. "Anyway. I would try to bring back your friend Hermione Granger the same way, but I think you might not like the results. All sorts of time-space complications, you see. You and she would probably become friends with some dolt like Ronald Weasley who she'd end up marrying and having a whole brood of children with in order to escape the reality of her loveless marriage. Complicated stuff, messing with Time. I really hope I didn't break any continuity just now."
Discord reopened the encyclopedia and flipped through a few pages, scanning them carefully, and whispering to himself. "Q... R... S... Sandman... Sbarro's... Skip... 682." He paused, read the entry, and let out a relieved sigh. "Ah, phew." Satisfied, he tucked it back away from where it came. Meanwhile, Harry shuddered at the thought of "Hermione Jean Weasley".
"So, what are you here for, really?"
"I'm just here to watch the fireworks. I hear that you're supposed to have some climactic battle with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. It sounds titillating!"
Harry thought for a moment on how best to broach this subject. "Yeah, I kind of have my doubts about that. I have a pretty strong feeling that he's out of the picture. Besides, you can call him Voldemort."
Discord folded his hands together, thoughtfully. "You're right. I never liked 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named'. It's not a very credible threat, is it? Voldemort, Voldemort, Voldemort! See! Nothing wrong! You know, where I'm from, we have a real 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named'. A really wicked character, he created this awful basilisk that went around gobbling people up a little while back."
Harry cocked his eyebrow. "...are you sure we're not talking about the same person? Did this 'really wicked character' hide this monster in a hidden room? Perhaps, a 'chamber of secrets'?"
Discord burst out laughing. "My goodness, no. No, no, no. This isn't some silly snake-cum-book-of-living-knowledge. This was a real, honest-to-goodness memetic hazard. Even thinking about it would get you devoured. No one can say his name, otherwise, they'll get smitten from the face of the planet."
"Um, if that monster really works like you described, then that actually seems like a reasonable policy." But Harry paid attention to nagging note of confusion in the back of his mind. "But, then again, how are you thinking about it? I don't see you getting devoured."
"Because you silly goose. I am that monster!"
Harry took a step back. "What?!"
Discord looked very serious for a brief moment and then began laughing again, oversized tears pouring out of his eyes. "You should have seen your face! Ohhhh! I slay myself. Hoooo." He slapped his knee in an exaggerated manner. "Sorry. Couldn't help it. But seriously now. Do you really think such a thing could exist? How would that even work?"
"I, uh, don't think that's a-"
Discord then quickly thought better of himself and held a finger up to Harry's lips. "Shhhh. Now that I think about it, it's better you don't even try."
"That's exactly what I was going to say."
Discord nodded. "Good. Now let's change the subject before your mind inevitably wanders back and you end up accidentally creating a multiverse-ending destructive force."
Harry focused fixedly ahead on the crackling fire, willing himself not to think on the subject. "Okay, so what are your friends doing here?"
"You see, my old friends and your new friends are in a very similar predicament to you. If you just used that big ol' rational brain of yours, you could probably figure it out." Discord waited a few moments, while Harry stared blankly. "No? Nothing? Gee, do I have to explain everything?" He spoke with exaggerated slowness. "Your friend. Eaten by a troll. Their friend. Eaten by a morally ambiguous wizard. You like your friend. They like their friend. Get the picture?"
"...so Professor Quirrell killed one of their friends."
"It would appear so, wouldn't it? And he seemed like such a good guy, didn't he? Boy, I bet you feel like an idiot!"
Harry was immediately defensive. "He didn't know, obviously. I mean, I didn't know when I fed the purple-haired girl poison sugar cubes."
"No, no, of course not. At least you tried. After all, tapping 1,2,3 on the ground, a fool-proof test to see if a creature is intelligent."
Harry threw his arms out. "Yeah, yeah! I know! I've already vowed to be more cautious in the future."
Discord was nodding emphatically, "Oh I quite believe you. I'm sure your monomaniacal quest to end Death forever will result in no further unintended consequences. I mean, what could possibly go wrong now that you've vowed to be more cautious in the future?"
As Discord spoke, paper clips began flying out of the fire and pelting Harry in the head. Harry tried swatting them away, but after a few moments, they began gushing out in a torrent of tiny metal bits. "Can you stop?"
Discord snapped his claws, and the paper clips melted into a puddle of grey goo, which slowly filled the room to an inch deep in sludge. Harry noticed the fireplace belching out streams of the sludge, causing the level of liquid in the room to rise progressively faster. Discord noticed as well, "Hm, you probably should leave before this little problem gets out of hand."
Harry, however, was not ready to leave. "But what was the plan? You don't just barge into another world and... wait, how did you even get here in the first place?"
Discord looked down at the rising goo, which now was halfway up Harry's calves. "You really should make up your mind as to what questions you're asking. We came here through a portal, same way anyone travels through worlds. Honestly, I would have thought that much was obvious."
Harry tried to focus on what information he needed in the immediate short-term. "Fine. The plan. What was your plan."
"That's a better question. They planned to reunite the Elements of Harmony and use its world-bending magic to... do something? I'm not really sure, myself. Probably cross their fingers and hope that somehow its magic would do precisely what they needed it to do at that very moment. My guess is that it would make their eyes go all glowy and then their friend and yours would emerge in a glowing pool of light or something like that."
Harry's attention was slightly diverted to the disturbingly warm, tingly feeling of the goop, which had now risen up to his knees. "The Elements of Harmony? One, I've never heard of those, but that doesn't say much since I'm new to all of this. Two, what do they do? Three, what do you mean, you're not really sure what their plan is?"
Discord chuckled. "One, two and three: it doesn't matter because those silly old things are the king of all MacGuffins. I highly doubt that they function, much less are capable of resurrection, in this world. It saddens me to say that they're on a fool's errand." Discord didn't look sad at all.
Harry was getting exasperated. "So they're just... here? That doesn't make any sense!" He was practically shouting.
"No, they're not 'just here'" Discord spat, mockingly. "They're following the prophecies."
"The WHAT?"
"If you wanted to know about them, you should have asked sooner, silly! Now I'm afraid we don't have nearly enough time to go into all that detail." Despite being twice Harry's height, Discord was almost chest deep in the liquid. He held a drenched claw up to his chin and twirled his goatee as he looked up into the air. "Although I suppose you don't need to ask ME... After all, anyone about whom a prophecy is made can freely listen to it. They're all on record at the Ministry of Magic."
Harry was standing on his tip-toes now to keep his neck out of the sludge and was moving back towards the door. "And, what if the prophecy isn't made about you?"
"Oh, why, you'd need to Words of Power and Madness to unlock them! Too bad they were lost-"
"Seven centuries ago."
"That's right. Right around the time that the Philosopher's Stone was made. Coincidental, isn't it?"
Harry didn't understand in the slightest what the connection between the two-
Oh wait.
Who was it that was friends with Nicholas Flamel, the creator of the Philosopher's Stone and was likely hiding the Philosopher's Stone here at Hogwarts?
Who was it that made a joke at Harry's expense about the "Words of Power and Madness"?
Who was it that behaved exceptionally oddly at times, taking actions that make little sense in context and yet somehow seem to be to his advantage?
"Dumbledore," Harry said.
Discord's eyes lit up with glee, but then he quickly drew his claws across his mouth, which turned into a large zipper, through which he mumbled, "I've said too much!"
The goo was now up to Harry's neck, and he found himself checking the hinges on the door to double check whether the door opened inwards or outward. He was relieved to see that it was the latter. He cast Discord an annoyed glare. "Can you please just make this go away?"
"Sorry, wish I could. I really wouldn't stick around to see what happens if the room fills up if I were you." Discord said as he waded casually through the muck.
"Wait, but you said before that you wanted to stop Death, too. Well, Heat Death, at least. How do you plan to do that?"
"Oh, I've got a few plans. None of which I can tell you, of course. But don't worry, you and I are on the same side." He playfully splashed Harry with the viscous liquid, which throbbed disturbingly on Harry's face. "At least I hope so! Now go on, before you get gobbled up."
Harry, who had already backed up against the door by this point, sighed and opened it, expecting a torrent of liquid to rush out. None did, instead it just sort of stayed in place, like a gelatinous blob. As he made his exit and closed the door, he heard Discord yell, "Toodle doo!"
When the door was closed, Harry looked down and saw that all traces of the goo had disappeared. He heaved an exasperated sigh and spoke into the empty hall.
"Posey?" Harry announced to no one in particular, hoping that this what was she had meant when she had instructed him to call for her anywhere within the castle.
After a few moments, Posey appeared with a dull POP nearby. "Yes, Master Potter?"
"Does Hogwarts keep any Muggle newspapers? I know I've seen archives of the Daily Prophet."
Posey grinned widely, glad to be able to provide a helpful answer. "Oh, yes sir. Yes, sir. Headmaster Dumbledore does so love his daily crossword. And 'waste not, want not' he always says. Never throws away an issue."
"Would you be able to get those for me? Or would I be able to get them for myself?"
"Do not trouble yourself, Grand and Glorious Savior! The newspapers are in the library, Posey would be honored to fetch them for you!"
"I would be infinitely grateful. Could you bring me them to the Ravenclaw common room? Just the front pages, though, I don't want you to have to carry the entire paper."
Posey looked momentarily crestfallen. "Sir... there are over 10,000 issues... You want... all of them?"
Harry blinked. "Oh. No, um... How about just from 19... Let's see." He did some quick recollection. "Let's say 1988 until today?"
Posey's eyes brightened and she nodded vigorously. "It would be an honor, sir!" And with that, she disappeared.
Later
With the help of Roger Davies, an older Ravenclaw who seemed amused and intrigued by his search, Harry had arranged the newspapers along the walls of the Ravenclaw common rooms. They cast a mass shrinking charm, reducing them to about a quarter of their original size; large enough to still be legible, but small enough to where they could all fit on the three walls of the area that Harry had occupied. They hung in midair as Harry painstakingly reviewed the headlines of each, hoping for some snippet of information. He was frowning severely in concentration and was visibly annoyed when his concentration was broken by a high pitched voice.
"Cookie?"
He glanced over at the source of the voice; it was Pinky, or "Alecto" as she was called within the school. She thrust a large cookie roughly the size of a small child's head in his direction. "No thanks," he muttered, to which she shrugged and stuffed a portion of it into her mouth.
"Cake?" she asked, through chunks of cookie. She was now holding a square slice of elaborately decorated cake, which was of course, pink in color.
"I'm ok, thanks." This time, Harry didn't even look at her.
"Cupcake?" she asked again, waving a cupcake in front of him decorated in the same style as the cake that she was just holding not a moment earlier.
Harry's curiosity was briefly piqued, wondering where she kept producing these baked goods from, but it was quickly drowned out by annoyance. "I'm kind of busy right now."
"Ohhh." She leaned forward, staring at the newspapers. "You look sad and frowny. Why are you sad?"
He didn't respond.
"Is it because you ran out of cookies?"
"I'm not sad."
"Is it because you ran out of cakes?"
He shook his head.
"Is it because you ran out of cupcakes?"
"No!"
"Hm, is it because your friend got her legs chewed off by some horrible monster and now she's dead and you've transformed her body into something tiny like a ring or rock and are carrying it around with you and your only hope of saving her lies with a crazy and possibly dangerous person and you've got to rely on that crazy dangerous person to reach across the very abyss of oblivion to pluck her back from the great beyond and if that crazy person doesn't pull through then you'll just have to do it yourself because if magic doesn't make sense in every single other way then why can't it not make sense in a way that's convenient for this too?!" She was panting maniacally by this point, hunched over with heaving breaths, and yet she was still smiling widely as she looked up at him.
Harry stared at her, briefly silenced. "Why... What makes you say that?"
"Just a hunch." Pinky shrugged.
"No. No one's 'hunches' are that good. Why did you say that?"
Pinky looked up, thoughtfully. "You know, no one ever asks me that." She spent another moment in thought. "Well, Disco- I mean, um... Mrs. Maxim? When Mrs. Maxim said he was here because our friend got in over her head and needed help, you thought he was talking to you. And you said you were hunting the thing that was eating unicorns, and that thing probably ate my friend so I figured he probably ate your friend, too. And afterwards, you looked down at your foot a bunch of times and I thought, 'Hm, that seems like a strange place to keep looking', but then I realized that if someone was really, really hurt, you wouldn't want to just shove her in the ground or burn her up or whatever you people do here, you'd want to keep her safe, and I've already seen people transform things into smaller things here.
"Obviously you haven't figured out how to help her yourself, otherwise you wouldn't be walking around here looking like Mr. Frowny Man, which means you need help, but if it was just something anyone could help with you'd already be getting help, so that must mean you'd have to be crazy to think that what you're trying to do is even possible. Which makes sense because it sounds incredibly dangerous, you know? But you're not going to stop just because Mr. Crazy and Dangerous can't help you, are you?"
Although she spoke very quickly and was panting from speaking for such a long period of time without drawing a breath, Harry still followed her. Her chain of logic was riddled with questionable assumptions, and yet she had still gotten most of it right. "That was... impressive."
"Thanks!" She smiled, having caught her breath again. "So what are you doing? Wallpaper? I love wallpaper designs." She stared up at the wall of newspapers.
"No. You wouldn't by any chance know who Nelson Mandela is, would you?" Harry asked, not really expecting an affirmative answer.
"You mean the 73-year old deputy president of the African National Congress?" she asked, curiously.
"Wait, what? You have a Nelson Mandela where you're from?"
"No, silly! I read about him." She laughed.
"Where?"
She pointed at one of the newspapers, dated February 1, 1991. "Right there!" She began to read the article, "...plans for a march on Parliament by thousands of opponents of apartheid suffered a setback when Nelson Mandela, the Congress's deputy president, canceled a planned appearance and speech. Congress officials attributed the 72-year-old leader's withdrawal..."
Harry felt a cold wave of dread wash over him. He could have sworn that Nelson Mandela had died in prison. He remembered seeing the funeral march on television and hearing about a few riots that broke out in the days that followed. And yet, this was clearly not the case. Unless Discord has somehow tampered with the newspapers, which didn't seem consistent with the limitations he was bound by. Of course, he could have been lying about those limitations.
At that moment, another very pressing question popped into Harry's mind. "How did you find that article so quickly? You were only standing here for a minute or two, and I've been looking through these for the better part of an hour now. Did you seriously read them all that quickly?"
"No, of course not. I just looked at them."
"What do you mean, you 'just looked at them'?"
"I looked at them, and then filed them away in the big filing cabinet in my head. Then when you asked about Nelson Mandela, I went into the filing cabinet, looked for the 'N's, flipped through until I found the article, and there you go! Doesn't everyone have a big filing cabinet in their head?"
"Um, no." Harry thought that must have just made a lucky guess and was lying, and yet she seemed so earnest.
"That must make it hard to remember things. How do YOU do it?"
"Sometimes I use mnemonic devices, and I guess I've tried to make a memory palace before. It sounds like you've just done a really good job of it. But, if I'm being honest, I'm still not entirely convinced." He narrowed his eyes somewhat playfully. "Prove it."
She bounced up and squealed, "OOOO! A quiz! This will be fun!"
Pinky turned around, and when she had turned back, she was holding a large easel with a canvas mounted on it in one hand, and a blindfold and charcoal stick in the other. She wrapped the blindfold around her eyes and said, "Okay, don't move!"
Confused, Harry shrugged. "Okay."
Before he even finished speaking, Pinky's hand was darting across the canvas in a blur of motion. She initially spanned large swathes of canvas with back-and-forth strokes, and when she had finished covering the entire thing, her hand moved around in erratic patterns, varying the pressure and speed as she bit her lip thoughtfully. When all was said and done, the whole process took maybe thirty seconds, at which point she tore off the blindfold, considered the final work, and beamed.
"Ta-da!" She spun the easel around to face Harry.
Harry stared, open-mouthed, at the nearly photo-realistic drawing of him standing in front of a wall of newspapers. It was an almost perfect recreation of the scene, except for the fact that Harry was wearing a polka-dotted party hat, and there was a large table of various cakes, cupcakes, and cookies behind him.
"That... is really, really good. Like, unbelievably good. Like, I don't really even understand how you did that."
"Thanks!" she beamed.
"Okay, but now I have another question. Where do you GET all this stuff? Do you have a bag of holding, too?"
Pinky reached into her pocket and held out her hand. "You mean this?" In her outstretched palm was a small brown lump, no bigger than a ladybug.
"What is that?"
"It's my Party Bag! Top of the line!" She reached her other hand into it, at which point it expanded into a frumpy sack the size of her fist. Harry could make out sticking on the outside that read: Hammerspace Industries Bag 'o Fun, Model DWIM. "It's top of the line!"
Harry suddenly felt very jealous. "So, what all do you keep in there?"
"Oh, a little bit of everything. Baking supplies, baked goods, flour, sugar, powdered sugar, brown sugar, superfine sugar... Rubber chickens, whoopee cushions, fake noses..." As she spoke, she was pulling things out of the bag and tossing them on the floor. "Pens, pencils, snacks, tinsel, streamers, creepy latex skin masks modeled after people I've met, sausage links, a trumpet, a tuba-"
Harry picked up one of the masks off the ground that had clearly been modeled after Luna Lovegood. It was realistic enough that the effect was thoroughly disturbing, and Harry was uncomfortably reminded of the story of Yermy Wibble.
"Do you like it? Look!" Pinky had put on the Harry Potter-shaped skin mask and lowered her voice and spoke with an exaggerated accent. "Look at me! I'm Harry Potter! I'm always sad and frowny! Mmmrrrggg mrrrrggg mrrrggg," she stomped around a bit, mocking his slump-shouldered gait.
"It's... creepy. Do you have anything actually useful in there?"
"Everything is useful at the right time!"
"Fine. But what about things that are... useful in the general sense, not just in ultra-specific edge cases? First-aid, maybe?"
"Oh, like doctor things?"
"Sure. Doctor things."
Pinky began pulling all manner of medical supplies from her bag, including a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a roll of bandages, a crate of syringes that was clearly labelled 'Morphine', a set of scalpels, and several jars of various creams with generic names that Harry didn't recognize. The bag quickly grew to several times its size to accommodate a full-sized defibrillator, which Pinky struggled to set on the ground.
Harry was duly impressed. "That is, wow. What else do you have in there? Do you have things that you can use for protection?"
Pinky looked puzzled. "Protection? From what?"
"Well, my friend was eaten by a troll. And your friend was-"
"A TROLL? But they're so friendly where I come from. And people usually eat them, not the other way around..." She paused for a moment. "And they're so small. That must have taken a long time."
Harry's eyes grew hard, momentarily. "Well, where I come from, they're big. And not friendly."
"Usually things stop being mad when I give them cake. And if that doesn't work, I can always throw cake at them. Or distract them with cake. Or make them slip on cake. Come to think of it, I solve a lot of problems with cake. Cake is great, don't you think?"
"Trolls don't like cake."
Pinky looked disappointed. "Oh. Well, I guess in that case, maybe I would use one of these."
She began removed a pocketknife from her bag, and then noticing Harry's distinctly unimpressed expression, began removing several more weapons, starting with small knives in various shapes, progressing up to a couple of larger hunting knives and machetes. Students began to look up at the clattering noise of metal against metal as Pinky continued to toss more things onto the ground, including a rapier, a longsword, and an executioner's axe.
She paused for a moment. "But if close combat doesn't seem realistic, we could always go with... hm..." She pulled out a small handgun and held it up in front of Harry, whose eyes went wide as she tossed it onto the ground carelessly. She removed two additional pistols, along with a large chrome-plated pistol that was bigger than Harry's head, and threw them aside with careless disregard. She reached her arm deeper into the bag and removed a pair of assault rifles, one with a matte-black finish and the other with a wood-grain stock.
"But if we're looking for general destruction and mayhem, we might want to use some of these." As Pinky spoke, the other students began to slowly pack their things up from the common room and move towards the exits, not wanting to attract unwanted attention. Pinky removed a bandolier filled with hand grenades, a claymore mine, and with some effort, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Harry started waving his hands and hissed at her in a whisper, "STOP! Put those away! You can't have those here!"
Pinky was thoroughly confused as she stared down at the small arsenal that had accumulated between them. "Sheesh. You were the one who asked!"
"Well. That is impressive, even by my standards. You've got my seal of preparedness-approval." Harry smiled, despite himself. There was a bit of silence between them as she packed the weapons back into her bag, and Harry thought for a moment. "So... I'm going to ask you a weird question."
"I love weird questions! Wait, let me try to guess the answer. Garmonbozia!"
"Uh, no. Let's say you didn't have your Hammerspace bag with you. Could you give me ten unaccustomed uses of objects in this room for combat?"
Pinky looked around. "Well, sure. You could break the legs off of the chairs and use them as clubs. Same with the tables. Or the candle-holders. In fact, you could pretty much use anything in the room as a club."
Harry nodded. "Okay, let's just count 'bludgeons' as one use."
"You could give someone a fatal paper cut with the pages of your books, or you could crumple the pages into a very tight, very pointy shape and stab someone. You could stab someone with the corners of a book too, or stab them with the broken leg of the chair that we were using as a club."
"Stabbing and slicing, check."
"I'm sure if you looked around hard enough, you could find something that was poisonous. In fact, I bet anything is bad for you if you eat enough of it. You could make someone drink enough ink to where they filled up and popped like a balloon. Or you could make them eat a rug, I bet that wouldn't feel very good. Oh! You could wrap them up in a rug and stuff them in a closet and never let them eat."
"Alright, we've covered suffocation and poison. Now let's say that it was just you, me, and an enemy in the room with no decorations or furniture. What then?"
Pinky twirled one of her fingers through the curls in her hair while she thought. "Well... if I wasn't worried about hurting you, I could do all sorts of things. I could cut your hair off and use it as a rope to strangle someone. Or use your clothes to strangle someone. Or use your limbs as a club. I bet your bones would make a good club, too. You could even sharpen them to make something stabby!"
Harry was staring off distantly at this point, and Pinky had noticed that he didn't seem to be paying attention. After a time, Harry looked back at her. "What's your real name?"
"Pinkamena Diane Pie! But my friends just call me Pinkie Pie. So you can call me Pinkie Pie, too! Or just Pinkie."
Harry smiled at the word 'friend'. "Okay, Pinkie. Can I ask you something else?"
"Sure thing!"
"Do people think you're... dark?"
"No, I don't think so. I smile too much for that. See?" She flashed him a beaming grin.
"How? How do you do it? You're obviously smart. Like, really smart. You may even be smarter than me, at least in terms of raw abilities. Maybe smarter than Hermione too. So how do you stop your mind from thinking about all the bad things?"
"That's easy, I just think about all the good things, instead."
"But those good things won't stay good forever. Things fall apart, they wear out, people grow old. Friends and family... they die." Harry was getting a little choked up.
"They don't have to. But you know that." Pinkie Pie put her hand on Harry's shoulder. "People get sad, sure. That's why I try to make them smile. Things can break, but you just fix them. If you're smart enough to think about how something might be bad, you have to be smart enough to think of how it might not be bad. Know what I mean?"
Harry shook his head. "But some things can't be reversed. I don't mean that it's too hard or that we don't know how yet, I mean, fundamentally, the-laws-of-the-universe-say-so, can't be reversed. My friend is dead. Gone. Forever. And most likely, your friend is gone, too."
Pinkie shrugged. "Mmm, I don't think so."
Harry's voice was hot. "I know so. I was there, holding Hermione in my arms when she died. I literally felt the life leave her."
"Dead means that someone is gone forever, right?"
Harry was nonplussed by this seeming non-sequitur. "Yes..."
Pinkie clapped her hands together. "There! So, what's the problem?"
"What?!"
"You don't actually think she's gone forever. You're trying to find her. That means you think there's a possibility, and if there's a possibility then it means that you aren't 100% sure she's gone. And you won't stop until you're sure one way or the other. But if you're being really, really, truly, pinky-promise-with-yourself kind of honest, you think you're going to do it. You think you're going to bring her back."
"Yes. I do." Harry nodded, grimly.
"So you don't have to be sad! She's not gone forever, you're just playing hide and seek. She's hiding, and she's only gone until you find her again. Easy as that." As if to punctuate her point, Pinkie plopped into one of the nearby chairs.
Harry was still standing. "But no one else is playing the same game I'm playing. If I fail, that's it. It's done. She's done. Every moment I spend not trying to find her is a moment wasted. And what if at the end of it all, I'm thirty minutes away but I only have five minutes left and all I can think is, 'Why, why did I spend that twenty-five minutes in the common room with Pinkie Pie when I could have been researching!"
"Now you're just being silly. You don't have to do it on your own. You just need to find more people to play with!"
"Have you met the people here? They're idiots. They don't want to 'play the game'. They're okay with people dying. They've convinced themselves it's a good thing."
Pinkie rolled her eyes at him. "That's because you're not very good at making friends." She then leaned over and said in a sidebar to no one in particular, "I can see why."
Harry leaned back, defensively. "That's not true! I've been trying to teach people ever since I got here. But most people don't want to listen, they don't want to change!"
"I didn't say anything about teaching people, I said you weren't very good at making friends."
Harry held out his hands, exasperated. "What good are friends going to do me if they can't help?!"
Pinkie's eyes widened as she let out a dramatic gasp. "What good are friends? WHAT GOOD ARE FRIENDS?" She stood up, leaning over him and looking down into his eyes, jabbing a finger into his chest as she spoke in a soft, menacing tone. "I'll tell you what good friends are!"
The juxtaposition of her anger against her normally bubbly demeanor was disquieting. Harry took a step back, suddenly aware of the fact that she was a good head taller than him. Although she was apparently something of a genius, as she had demonstrated earlier, she was also clearly just a tiny bit unhinged.
Not unlike yourself... his inner Hufflepuff chimed in.
Pinkie continued, "Your friend is lost, and you're never going to rest or be completely happy until you find her again. Why? Because she's your friend, right?"
"Yes," Harry said quickly, but then decided to correct himself for fear of being dishonest. "Well, That's one of the reasons, at least. The main reason, I think. But there are other reasons."
Pinkie had ignored his addendum. "And she would do the same for you, right?"
Harry paused.
Would she, though? his Slytherin voice asked.
Yes, replied the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor in unison.
Hm... if she lived long enough, yes, I think she would, Ravenclaw replied after a few moments of thinking.
Fair enough, that's two and a half against one. Majority rules, Slytherin acquiesced.
"Yes, I think so."
Pinkie nodded and smiled, satisfied. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its hard edge. "You're my friend. Am I your friend?"
Harry was taken off-guard by the question and had to think again before he answered. He glanced at the small pile of bladed objects that still remained on the floor that had not yet been put away into her Bag of Holding +3. "Yeah. I'd call you a friend, now. Maybe not before we talked today. But it seems like you and I would get along."
At this, she clapped her hands together and squealed a bit. "If YOU were ever lost and couldn't find your way back, I would go looking for you and wouldn't be satisfied until I helped you find your way back. Because you're my friend! Would you do the same for me?"
Harry wasn't comfortable with the idea of outright lying to her, due in no small part to his worry at what kind of unstable reaction it might elicit. "I don't know. This hypothetical situation with has a lot of factors that you're just leaving out. How did you die, what kind of difficulties are involved, what are my own personal circumstances, things like that. I can't really answer the question honestly."
"Oh come onnnn. Are you really trying to tell me that if you magically unlocked the secret to making people not dead, and your friend was dead and you made her not dead anymore but you knew that I was dead, you would just let me stay dead?"
"Well... okay, obviously when you put it like that, no. I wouldn't. But I don't really see-"
Pinkie cut him off. "So there you go! Problem solved!"
"Yeah, I'm not really following you here."
"You're her friend, and you won't stop until you find her. If you were lost, I wouldn't stop until I found you. If I were lost, my friends wouldn't stop until they found me. If they were lost, their friends wouldn't stop until they found them. If their friends were lost, they wouldn't stop either."
She turned around, looking out at the window into the night sky. Her voice took on an air of wonder. "Where I'm from, we have people who look at the stars. And they say they the stars are far away. Really, really, really far away. And long ago, too. They say that some of the stars we see, they're from as far back as the beginning of time. I think that's pretty neat, don't you?"
She turned back to him. He nodded and smiled at their unexpected common interest, and she continued. "There's a lot of darkness between us and them. But even if there was only one star in the entire universe, even if it were impossibly far away, we'd still see its light.
"You might not believe it, but my friends and I have fought a lot of enemies where we come from. And we'll probably have to fight a lot more. You too, I bet... Everyone does, I think. But really, the last enemy to be destroyed is-"
"Death." Harry finished her sentence for her. Memories flooded into him, and with them came tears that formed at the corners of his eyes.
"That's what I was going to say!" She smiled at him. "It doesn't have to be you. And it doesn't have to be now, or today, or tomorrow, or this year or next year or the next thousand years. All it takes is one star shining in the darkness to cast the entire universe in light, from now until the end of time.
"So you see, it doesn't matter if you fail, even if you're the only one working to fix things right now. It's not just you who would have to fail. It's your friends. And their friends. And their friends. And all of their friends, too, now, and going on into forever. Life itself would have to fail. Friendship would have to fail. And... I just don't think that's going to happen. Do you?"
Harry stared at her through watery eyes, noting that she seemed serenely oblivious to the effects her words were having on him. Without really knowing what compelled him to do so, he wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug and whispered,
"No. No, I don't."
Godric's Hollow
Alone in a graveyard, a tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle, glowed brightly silver, clearly visible beneath the clear night sky to anyone who cared enough to look.