//------------------------------// // 2. And Then There Were Two // Story: Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem // by Georg //------------------------------// Harry Potter and the Little Pony Problem And Then There Were Two - - ⚡ - - Harry stared at the tiny magical creature for a time, then looked over at the bedroom door. He was almost certain that his aunt or uncle would take this particular time to step inside his room and shout at him. Still, the night remained silent, and the unicorn doll looking up at him did not say anything either. “That can’t be a real unicorn,” he whispered to himself. “I think I’m a unicorn,” she replied, although she was looking around at the cluttered room with a growing degree of bafflement. “I’m not quite sure myself, now. I could be a projection, or a hippounculus, or—” She poked herself on the leg with one hoof. “Okay, I have sensory feedback, so that narrows the field substantially, and also proves I’m not sleeping. I have all my memories up to last night, my original body, if smaller than I would expect, and all of my teeth,” she added a little muffled as if she were poking around the inside of her mouth with her tongue. “I’ll have to set up a series of experiments using thaumic constants to determine if my present diminutive size is different than standard, or if I’ve changed species somehow. Oh, no! I don’t have my library or any of my tools! Do you have a laboratory I can borrow? Please?” Thankfully, Harry had recently received a package from Hagrid that could probably shed some light on the complicated and wordy subject at hand, if one small problem could be overcome. He dug The Monster Book of Monsters out from the loose floorboard of his room and considered the thick strap he had tied around the middle. It was a reasonable precaution, both considering the source of the gift and the fact that he had found his textbooks for potions and magical history class looking slightly gnawed one morning. He had barely gotten the book out into the open before Twilight gave a far-too-loud cry of joy and launched herself off the floor in a flying tackle. Her impact knocked the book out of his hands, and when it hit the floor, she cuddled up to it and rubbed her face against the cover. “Oh, book, book, book,” she cooed. “My only comfort in times of stress, I’ve missed you so. And reference, too. My favorite kind.” Harry took a long look at the bedroom door, partially in the expectation of seeing his aunt storming back in, but mostly to give the ecstatic unicorn a few moments of privacy. The way she had been hugging the book was more than a little unsettling, and he could have even sworn Twilight had been snogging the book before he got his back turned. He had never understood girls in the first place, and to find one that was more interested in books than Hermione was a greater shock than having a small magical unicorn in his room. “Unicorns,” she murmured in a much quieter voice after a few moments. Harry looked down and marveled at the way Twilight Sparkle had managed to open the book and read through it in such a short period of time, while he had struggled just to subdue it enough to strap the fierce thing closed. The tiny unicorn was running her hoof down the page while a strange purring noise came from their vicinity, although Harry could not tell if it came from the book or the creature. “Umpleby.” She turned the page. “Urchin, frost. Urchin, fire. Urlocks. Ustilagor. Wait a second.” Turning the thick page back, she scratched the book along the index until the two stuck-together pages separated. “There we go, good book. Unicorns.” “The unicorns in Hogwarts were much larger than you are,” said Harry after a period of time reading over her shoulder. It was a clean shoulder, with a thin and uniform coat of fine purple hairs that showed she was cared for and did not have to struggle with living in the wild. Hagrid had taught him a lot about wild creatures during his time at Hogwarts, and if this creature lived in a forest somewhere, it certainly bore none of the signs. For a bookish (literally) creature the size and color of his Aunt Petunia’s lilac bath soap bottle, it appeared harmless, and even smelled faintly like lilac shampoo. “I’ve seen unicorns before,” said Harry quietly, although he did not want to explain how Voldemort had been drinking the blood of the innocent forest creatures. Somehow, he did not think the lilac-colored… thing would take it well. “You don’t seem much like them. Other than the horn, of course.” “I’ve always been a unicorn,” countered Twilight Sparkle in her pleasant high-pitched voice without taking her nose out of the book even in the slightest. “I think I would know if I wasn’t. Or at least I was one before I came here. This book helps, but I wish I had my library to research what happened.” “I’ve only got a few of my reference books and some pamphlets that Luna Lovegood sent me on Nargle repellent charms under the floorboards,” explained Harry, only to find he was talking to the tail end of the unicorn, who had dove into the opening in the floor with such enthusiasm that he was afraid she might go through the plaster ceiling of the living room downstairs. “My aunt and uncle locked all the rest of them in the cupboard under the stairs.” “Rest of them?” Twilight’s tail stopped moving, which was a little disturbing since that was about all he could see of her. “My spellbooks,” he explained. “The Standard Book of Spells from my first and second years, a bunch of rubbish books from Lockhart, about six books on herbs and potions that Hermione made me bring…” Harry trailed off, because he was imagining how his best female friend would react to a collection of precious knowledge being kept away from her. Twilight Sparkle seemed like a smaller concentrated Hermione. With fur. “School books,” she squealed in the darkness under the floorboards. “I can draw a baseline of this world’s magic, compare it to my own, and extrapolate out a comparison matrix in order to differentiate the thaumaturgical parallels and set intersections of …” To be honest, it had been a very long day. Harry was exhausted, weeks of his homework was ruined, and all he wanted to do was fall down on the bed and sleep. He most certainly did not want to chase after the rat-sized creature when she darted across the floor and over to the closed bedroom door, which he thought would stop her. The last thing he expected was for the doorknob to glow a light purple, the door to pop open, and the tiny pony to dart into the hallway beyond. Harry quickly followed behind her after a failed grab for the little creature that left him skidding on the hallway carpet. He barely scrambled to his feet as they both went down the stairs with the tiny pony clattering ahead of him just out of grabbing range, only to have her practically vanish when he tripped over a loose piece of carpet runner on the last step. “Boy!” bellowed Uncle Vernon from where the Dursley family was gathered around the telly, watching some comedian make a fool of himself on stage. “What is all the noise about?” “Nothing, Uncle Vernon,” said Harry, trying not to look at the floor where the pony had vanished. “You’re trying to get at your stuff, aren’t you!” For a big man, Vernon sprang up from the couch like a gazelle and strode purposefully over to Harry. “This studying you’ve been doing lately is just cover! You’re sneaking books out of your trunk, aren’t you!” “No, Uncle Vernon,” protested Harry, falling back another step as his uncle pushed forward and produced a key out of his pocket. “Good thing I’ve got ‘em locked up. Unless that school of yours has been teaching you to be some sort of criminal, that is,” he blustered, trying to work the key in the lock while Aunt Petunia came up behind him with a scowl of her own for Harry. “Honest, I haven’t touched the books in the cupboard since I came back from school.” Harry tried his best to subtly look around the floor to see if the little unicorn had been squashed beneath one of Vernon’s big feet. Since it had been created out of magic, it was not really alive, but it would have made an unmissable mess. And of course, Harry would get the blame, have to clean it up and get yelled at for most probably days. “There!” declared Vernon, yanking the cupboard door open and nearly hitting himself in the nose with the loose padlock. He had to dig into his pocket again for Harry’s trunk key, which had been surrendered reluctantly last month since Harry really had no need for it at school. After all, there he could use his wand to open and close it. “Ah-HA!” shouted Vernon once he yanked open the trunk, only to find it just as packed and stuffed with Harry’s school things as it had been upon his arrival at Privet Drive. “Is there anything missing, dear?” Petunia peered around the edge of the door much the same as Harry had seen her peeking at the neighbors. “Keep it quiet!” called out Dudley from the living room where an announcer was waxing poetic about the joy of canned luncheon meat. “The commercial is almost over.” Vernon’s sneer grew deeper, and he prodded Harry with one sausage-like finger. “Don’t you think you can put one over on me, boy. I’m watching you, and the first whiff of trouble it’s back into the cupboard for the rest of the summer. Do you understand?” While Harry nodded, behind Vernon something small and purple nimbly crawled up into Harry’s trunk and vanished inside. Harry just kept nodding while Vernon slammed the lid and locked it, muttering vicious threats under his breath. It took all of Harry’s concentration to keep from looking at the trunk, or talking back when his uncle locked the cupboard door and chased him upstairs to go to bed. Since Twilight Sparkle was made out of magic, it really would not hurt her to be trapped in Harry’s school trunk for a few days. Besides, if the creature was some magical glitch from his homework and loose magic, there was a fairly good probability that she would vanish by tomorrow morning and he would not have to deal with it. And far from being unhappy, the creature would be ecstatic to be trapped in there until then. He could imagine all of his spell books floating around the unicorn like some sort of book fortress inside his trunk. Besides, he would not have wanted to pry her attention away from the books without his dragonhide gloves and some fireplace tongs. So without anything else to do at the moment, Harry settled down in his bed and thought about his new temporary housemate. In minutes, he was fast asleep, dreaming about showing the unicorn off to his friends in school. All of the girls wanted to pet it, although Hermione screamed, of course. - - Ω - - Morning did not come easily. It did arrive as normal, with Aunt Petunia’s sharp finger poking him in the shoulder and her harsh voice in his ears. That was about where normal stopped. When he opened his eyes, his aunt’s face appeared to be host to a series of conflicted emotions instead of its normal sharp scowl. “It’s about time,” she huffed. “Just because I told you to clean up your room is no reason to spend all night doing it just so you can skip out on your chores this morning. Now get downstairs and start breakfast. Come on, move it.” Harry’s path to the door was a lot straighter today, although he was stumbling down the stairs before he realized that all of the items in his room had been stacked to either side, leaving space to walk for a change. Since today’s chores involved mostly grass clipping and bush pruning out in the yard, he did not get back into the house until noon. Even then he was only able to take a quick peek inside the quiet, organized, and unicorn-less space before heading back out to weed the daisies and haul several bags of noxious fertilizer to the flowerbeds. Aunt Petunia did not want to break a nail, and Uncle Vernon was at work, probably yelling at somebody, which left Harry to do all the digging and distributing and raking. It was a lot harder work than the greenhouses at Hogwarts, although it was safer because there was little chance of significant injury due to an errant mandrake plant. It made the afternoon pass by much faster if he imagined the wilted flower bushes as Rampaging Rosebushes, and checked them for magical parasites while pruning. Normally, it was Harry’s job to make dinner. With all the dirt and bits of bushes clinging to him, Petunia chased him upstairs to take a shower and wash behind his ears before he started. It gave Harry another chance to peek into his reorganized room, which still seemed far too quiet and organized to be the cluttered space he had been stuffed into a year ago, like he was another one of the unwanted and broken pieces of furniture from the Dursley family. Harry barely managed to make it downstairs before his uncle came blustering in the front door, his mood greatly improved by having made a large sale of drills at work today. He only cuffed Harry on the back of the head once for not getting a clean glass for his drink and shouted at him during dinner. Washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen let Harry get away from the family gathered around the telly, and once things had been put into their places, he slipped back to his room. His room. Having a sense of order in the clutter made the place just a little more like Harry’s own attempt to order his chaotic life. And for a change, he was absolutely certain the room was organized to the point of absurdity. Alphabetized too, if his casual glance was any indication. Even his homework, splattered with dried violet ink dribbles and ruined, was stacked into a neat pile on the desk for his attention this evening. Something was certainly up, although it seemed to be a good kind of up for a change. “A week’s worth of work to rewrite this,” he mused while flipping through the pages. “I wish I could use my wand to just remove the spilled ink instead.” “Why can’t Twilight do it for you?” The voice was very much not Twilight Sparkle, which was bad. Then again, it was not Aunt Petunia, which was good. A little looking around the desk revealed a small purple creature very much unlike Twilight Sparkle, who was dragging a scroll up from the floor by climbing the desk, looking much like an ant with a leaf on his back from the way that his overlarge burden draped over him. If it had been some sort of ant, Harry would have been less startled. The creature actually appeared to be more like a lizard, although the general shape and build made it resemble a dragon of some sort. The problem was that even newly hatched dragons were taller than a pencil, and dragons did not talk. Or at least if there were some sort of talking dragon, Hagrid most certainly would have brought one into the Care of Magical Creatures class, and most probably kept it behind his house afterward. So by simple logic, this had to be some sort of creature related to Twilight Sparkle, and therefore just as harmless. Or so Harry hoped. The tiny lizard flopped the parchment on the tilted desk and let out a deep gasp before holding up a clawed forefinger. “Just… a… moment… Mister… Potter.” Stuck between not-good and not-bad, Harry looked around the reorganized room to no avail. At least this creature’s addition was the extent of the changes, because the area seemed unicorn-free, and only had gained one of what appeared to be some sort of talking lizard. It did not appear to be too much worse of a situation than last night, and not much progress either. Well, other than the cleaning and organizing. “What happened to Twilight Sparkle? What happened to my room?” asked Harry in a low voice as not to attract any attention away from the Dursleys downstairs, who had the telly turned up like normal. “She teleported all your books up here and cleaned your room while you were sleeping, so she’s exhausted. I’m Spike,” said the little lizard with an outstretched hand, which felt sharp and prickly from the claws when Harry shook it. “I’m Twilight’s number one assistant.” Out of instinct, Harry looked over at his Monster Book of Monsters which Twilight had tied to the foot of his bed with a thin leash and a collar. “I’m a dragon,” continued Spike. “Although not like any of the dragons she showed me in the book. Twilight hatched me during the test she took to be admitted into Princess Celestia’s school.” “When I first went to Hogwarts school, all I had to do was put on a hat,” said Harry, feeling a little disconnected. He rubbed his scar, which had given off a quiet twinge, and tried to organize his thoughts. “Was the hat some sort of test also?” asked Spike. “Um… I don’t think anybody has ever failed wearing the Sorting Hat,” explained Harry. Well, that certainly attracted Spike’s curiosity, which turned into a long description of Harry’s first day in Hogwarts, an explanation of Norbert, the baby dragon that Hagrid had hatched that first complicated year, and a number of other events that seemed so far away now. He even told the little dragon about Voldemort, both the first time when he fought the Dark Wizard in front of the Mirror of Erised, and when he battled the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. And at the very end, Harry felt comfortable enough to show Spike the fresh scar on his forearm left by the basilisk fang and the lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead that Voldemort had made when he killed Harry’s parents. It was oddly pleasant to actually tell somebody outside of the wizarding community about his last several years of excitement, in particular talking to somebody who believed him. In return Spike told him the most bizarre tales of his life with Twilight Sparkle, starting from when she had traveled to a town with the strange name of Ponyville and saved Princess Luna from being possessed by Nightmare Moon. From there, the stories just got more wild, from giant star-bears to a being of pure chaos trapped in stone, all the way to her brother marrying a pony princess (and not telling her about it ahead of time, which Spike said was still a sore spot and something that he probably should not bring up in conversation). On the whole, Hogwarts sounded like a much safer place to be than around Twilight Sparkle. By the time he finished talking with the little dragon, it was far later than Harry had expected, with no time to work on his delayed or ruined homework. Stifling a yawn poorly, he stuffed the inkstained papers into a spare pillowcase, then pushed it under the bed so his aunt would not throw it away or burn it in the morning. “I guess I’ll start recopying my work tomorrow, Spike. Thanks for picking it up and sorting it.” Harry settled down in bed, then opened one eye as the sound of rustling pages began to sound from beneath a threadbare couch that had a few springs sticking out of the seat. “I’ll tell her to keep it quiet,” said Spike, hopping off the desk and scurrying away. “Goodnight, Harry.” “Goodnight, Spike.” Harry nestled down beneath the covers, then began to get out of the bed when he thought of a question he had not asked the little dragon. After a moment of thought, he slipped back under the sheets. Asking just how Twilight Sparkle had managed to get back into his room, and how the little dragon had shown up too would wait until morning.