//------------------------------// // 1. One Little Unicorn // Story: Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem // by Georg //------------------------------// Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem One Little Unicorn - - ⚡ - - Most wizarding students spend their summers divided between doing holiday homework and doing very little at all. In most regards, Harry Potter was most certainly not any ordinary wizarding student, and this summer certainly proved it. For starters, since Uncle Vernon’s sister Aunt Marge had made plans to visit the Dursley residence for several days, the spare bedroom needed to be brought up to her exacting standards. That meant all of the things in it that might disturb, disorient, or otherwise bother the bothersome old woman needed to be moved somewhere out of the way. And that meant into Harry’s new room, which was crowded enough already with Dudley’s discarded rubbish. In Harry’s opinion, which bore no weight, of course. To make matters worse, the woodwork in the spare bedroom needed a good scrubbing, and Harry was designated as the scrubber. Several summer days of wearing oversized rubber gloves and applying a watery brown liquid to anything that looked wooden left Harry barely enough strength to crawl into bed at the end of the day, and his nose constantly ran. Then there was wallpaper for the inside of the house, and paint for the outside, and cleaning the windows between inside and outside until they almost looked as if there was no glass in them at all. None of it was what a young boy who had just reached thirteen years of age would like to spend his daytime hours doing, which left his teenage activities at night even more inexplicable. He was studying. Barely a week after returning from Hogwarts for the summer, Harry had opened his first packet of holiday assignments. It seemed that the instructors had been worried that their students would be at a loss for useful activities to keep them active during the peaceful summer months, and as a show of support, they sent along no end of essays, problems, quizzes, and assignments to help fill those lonely teenage leisure hours. So by day, Harry hung wallpaper or struggled with carpet, while at night he stayed bent over his cousin Dudley’s old broken desk, despite the way it tilted to one side. It only left a few hours to sleep before Aunt Petunia would wake him up and send him to make breakfast again, in a tight daily cycle of drudgery. He could imagine his friends from school flying broomsticks in the Weasley’s back yard or staying up all hours playing Exploding Snap or Gobstones, but he had little time for even imagining. Harry supposed he could blame Hermione for most of his scholastic woes. She had constantly lectured to anyone within earshot that homework had to be completed as soon as possible, because waiting until the last minute inevitably led to ‘just a few changes’ being requested by a professor. Turning it in first before the changes came out confused the professors, or so it seemed. Plus, the date of his return to Hogwarts was creeping closer, and the last thing Harry wanted to distract him from that blessed day of freedom was to fill the days just before it filling pages with frantic scribbling. Thankfully, Fred and George Weasley had provided him with a going-away present at the end of last school year. At first, Harry did not believe it was a serious gift instead of something out of Zonko’s Joke Shop. Ron Weasley was his best friend and would never pull a prank like sending him ink that would explode or turn into worms or some other humourous transformation. His two brothers, however… After overcoming his perfectly rational reluctance to opening it, he found a dozen bottles of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes Muggle-Repellent No-Blotch No-Snoop Spell Ink, guaranteed to leave wizarding homework totally unreadable by Muggles. Supposedly, any non-wizard who spotted any writing done with the lavender ink would regard them as some sort of humorless governmental speeches, while drawings were taken as childish cartoons. Harry did not particularly believe the label. Ron’s brothers had come up with some of the most twisted practical jokes. Then again, it was ink, and he had a lot of homework to do. Then came the evening after he had completed a two page essay on Dragon Bloodslugs, a particularly nasty parasite that liked to burrow under scales and could cause dragon colonies to suddenly collapse if not controlled. The next morning, his Aunt Petunia came across the roll of parchment while jabbing Harry awake with one long sharp finger. When he saw the essay clutched in her hands, Harry was expecting the worst. His aunt and uncle had kept Harry under their thumbs as much as possible over the years as if they could squish the magic out of him. It seemed inevitable that Petunia’s next action would be to shriek at him until he was securely locked in his cupboard under the stairs again, which had not been large enough for him before his latest growing spurt. To his surprise, she merely scowled at the precious essay for entirely too long, then tossed it into the rubbish bin with a lecture to Harry about keeping his room clean. Since nearly all of the clutter was Dudley’s broken toys or outgrown possessions, and he would have gotten into far more trouble for throwing any of it away, Harry merely took his lumps silently while making breakfast. His situation was a mixed blessing. Obviously, the possibility of Harry becoming some sort of Muggle politician speechwriter had not crossed their minds, because after all it had not ever crossed Harry’s mind either. And also obviously, the ink worked just as Ron’s mischievous brothers had advertised. Without his aunt and uncle bothering him about ‘that blasted wizard nonsense’ in the evenings, he had the opportunity to get his wizarding homework done. The problem was that his pile of homework seemed to be growing whenever Harry turned his back. He would no sooner send Hedwig out at night with three or four scrolls tied to her leg than there would be a pecking at the window from one of the school owls, bringing five assignments to him. Detailed potions setups with all of the ingredients and instructions laid out in sequential steps, including estimated times. Seventeen paragraphs on the use of Shrivelfig Extract in the treatment of magical maladies. Star charts for the next and last five years needing all of the planetary movements plotted out, along with a monthly paragraph on each one detailing the influence their phases would have on the weather. A seven scroll of parchment assignment requesting a prediction of what would have happened in the Goblin Revolutions if Gorflog the Gross had not choked on a piece of dumpling and fallen down a set of stairs, stabbing himself twelve times in the process. The weeks and days seemed to hang in place, differentiated only by the scratching of a quill at night or scraping of sandpaper during the day. Hedwig noticed his distress also and refused to carry more than two assignments a night back to school, which left a pile of parchments heaped up behind the desk, with his legibility growing more and more scribbled with every frantic evening of study that he fell behind. Until… The latest assignment was to draw wand movements for every spell Harry had learned in his first two years at Hogwarts, which was actually a bit of a break compared to his normal workload. Since students were forbidden to use their magic outside of Hogwarts, he had left his wand in the desk and checked his work by waving a yellow pencil. He did not speak the words that went with the spells, because he did not want to attract his aunt and uncle’s attention. However, one thing he did not consider was that a wand was merely a focus for a wizard’s magic, and that a new pencil could under some circumstances be considered a pointed cedar wand with a graphite core, seven and a half inches long. And more important for reasons that would become obvious later, a writing implement. To be fair, the accident was really Hermione's fault. And Malfoy, too. They could share the blame in a few weeks when Harry went back to school. Maybe a little of the blame should fall on Fred and George too. And certainly the teachers who had assigned him the wand-working homework really deserved some of it. He had been waving the pencil rather thoughtfully while trying to remember just exactly how Malfoy had used his own wand to summon a snake during their duel last year, when the pencil hit the inkwell. It was not a hard impact, just enough to make the glass bottle skid down the tilted desk and slosh upside-down over the back in a spray of liquid purple. The mess of dripping ink would have been bad enough except it mostly poured onto the hidden pile of backlogged homework that Hedwig had not delivered to the school yet. Harry said a word. It was not by nature a magical word. However, rough experience had taught him that uttering the word in the Dursley household always caused his aunt to appear moments later as if by magic. Perhaps Petunia shared a few tiny family traits with Harry’s witch mother, but whatever it was made Harry dive for his bed and yank the paperclip chain on his makeshift lamp. In a matter of moments, he was beneath the covers and feigning slumber, and a bare second after that, his bedroom door opened. There were several sharp footsteps that echoed around the room, slightly erratic as Petunia had to make her way through the narrow path between Dudley’s discards and the piles of guest bedroom furnishings. She made a brief stop at the desk to sweep all of Harry’s recent work into the dustbin with a sniff, then paused at the side of his bed. The unseen inspection seemed to take his aunt a very long time, but after another disapproving sniff, she tugged one corner of his sheets up over an exposed elbow, then picked her way back out of the bedroom and closed the door. Harry held himself very still to ensure Petunia was not still watching before taking a brief peek out from under the edge of the sheets, thankful that the cluttered bedroom had no sign of his aunt. “That was close,” he whispered, easing himself out of bed and over to the desk, where he stopped cold. Harry’s wand was secured inside the desk, but a proper wizard only needs a wand to cast spells. Even a young wizarding student like Harry could recognize the effects of a spell in the process of casting itself. Dripping and dribbling bits of lilac ink carried brilliant sparks around the back of his desk, and Harry managed to hit his head when he ducked underneath it to do… whatever one does when ones pile of homework was in the process of unmaking itself. If Harry had been a much more experienced wizard, he might have been able to identify and stop whatever was fizzing to completion before it exploded and brought his aunt and uncle storming into the room. Then there was a small popping noise, no louder than a soap bubble, and the sparking lights inside the rumpled pile of paper abruptly went out. It was far from what Harry expected. Most spell failures in school involved whizzing pieces of the experiment and flying fellow students all over the room, then a quick trip to Madame Pomfrey’s hospital wing to assess the damage and point loss. Tonight, the consequences were far worse than just losing House points. At any second, he expected a letter from the Ministry of Magic, also whizzing in the window by way of an overstressed owl. There was no whizzing this time, only some rustling deep inside the pile of papers. Harry scrambled for the desk drawer, but did not actually grab his wand because his previous experience with the Ministry of Magic rules forbidding underaged wizards the use of magic outside of the school. Also, whatever was making the noise was small, about the size of a rat or an Eeeping Whimbugger, both of which were relatively harmless. He picked up his pencil instead, and used it to move aside sheets of dripping parchment until he found the source of the noise. It was a tiny little purple unicorn, small enough it could have sat on his hand. At first, he hoped it was some sort of stuffed toy, perhaps something left by Aunt Marge’s dog on her last trip. Then the tiny unicorn looked up at him with big eyes, smiled, and spoke in a pleasant, high-pitched voice. “Hello. My name is Twilight Sparkle. Who are you?”