“What in the world…?”
The redhead hanging up on the torch bracket looks at Professor Dumbledore, and sighs. “Can you please get Lyra or Twilight? I don’t think anyone else knows how to fix physics like they do, and I don’t know how much longer Instructor Granger’s arm is going to last!”
“Granger?” Dumbledore asks.
“Yeah,” the redhead states. “She’s… through the ceiling. She lost her grip an’ her arm nearly tore off ‘fore I let go, then Scoots managed to catch her by her other arm, but that one’s broken as well, just not as bad!”
Dumbledore blinks. “And Scoots is?”
The purple haired head sticking out of the ceiling looks up at him. “That’s me, now please, hurry up! I’m not as strong as Applebloom- I can’t hold Granger for much longer!”
Dumbledore raises his hand to the radio Lyra had given him during the very first night, and depresses the button. “Ah, Bonbon?”
“Yes, Professor Dumbledore?” the answer comes immediately.
“There’s a bit of a situation here, ah, fifth floor corridor on the right-hand side.”
“Ahh… I’ll be right there. I think.”
“Well,” the purple-haired one mumbles. “At least Bonbon’s got a radio to Lyra.”
A few more seconds pass in silence, before two girls- correction, a boy and a girl- appear in the passage. Dumbledore recognizes the girl as Bonbon right away, though the boy is not immediately familiar. His silver hair, accented with navy blue stripes, is quite… dashing, he believes. As the boy turns, though, he realizes he knows who it is: Draco Malfoy.
Bonbon glances quickly around, before turning towards him and trotting forwards. “Sorry about that, what is… Oh.” Her hand flies up to her radio. “Lyra to Papa Echo Niner, Papa One.”
Very suddenly, Lyra appears, looking around frantically. “What-! Hi Malfoy!- Oh. Um, mishap in Charms, perhaps?” As she speaks, the three girls hanging on the bracket begin floating downwards. Once completely free of the ceiling, each one pulls free of the others- and promptly crashes to the floor.
Crash! “Oof!”
Crash! “Ow!”
Crash! “I’m okay!”
The fourth, revealed when she was pulled back through the ceiling by the third, doesn’t crash to the floor upon reappearing, instead floating in the air in front of everyone while Lyra grumbles about something.
“Is… Is she okay?” the redhead asks, rising to her feet.
Lyra ignores her.
“What’s ‘epciliath’ mean?” the broken-armed girl asks, still floating in the air with her hair hanging up.
“Um,” Professor Dumbledore begins. “Can’t you just cancel the effect, like the other three?”
Lyra shakes her head. “Nah. For them, I just forcefully reset their magic fields. But she’s not an Equestrian; that’d kill her. I can only work repairs on what’s left… and it’s not looking good.”
“What-!?” the floating girl- whose nametag, Dumbledore notices, reads ‘Hermione Granger’- asks, her voice rising into a terrified squeak.
“Oh, I can apply a temporary fix, don’t get me wrong,” Lyra states. “But the damage looks too deep for anything long-term to work. We’d be looking at, oh, a week before anything I can do would wear off. And there’s no point bothering Twilight, the damage is in an area she can’t even see.”
Bonbon rubs her chin with a finger. “Would the papa tango work, or just make it worse?”
Everyone, save Lyra and Malfoy, turns to look inquisitively at Bonbon; Lyra just puts a hand on her chin. “Hmm… If… Yeah, the papa tango would work; the core state remains undamaged, even if there’s no way to restore that without killing her right now- but with the papa tango, it’d do that on its own as the final step.”
Bonbon gives a nod. “Apply that temporary fix, then. And, Hermione? The ‘papa tango’ in question is known to be excruciatingly painful in the final stages, and to leave you with a new, irreversible hair color and style. Is that something you would want?”
“It’s the only way to permanently fix… that?” Hermione asks, her hair suddenly responding correctly to gravity before she turns right-side-up in midair and lands on the floor.
“Yeah,” Lyra answers her. “I’ve applied pain relief and posilock spells to your arms, but you’ll still want to go to Madam Pomfrey.”
“Do it,” Hermione orders. “Please. I don’t care how painful it is, I do not want to have to worry about falling into orbit again.” Then she glances at Bonbon. “Uh, on a side note, how bad is the pain?”
Bonbon nods. “Alright Lyra, you’ve got the go-ahead. Hermione… The pain lasts for only about a second, but…
“Well, back in Equestria, there’s a lake, called Lake Don’t-Mess-With-Twilight. It was formed when Twilight missed her opponent only once; the errant blast vaporized a half a billion tons of rock and dirt. Imagine surviving being hit by that blast, and that’s about how bad it hurt for that second.”
Hermione winces, and shudders. “Ow-! Sorry. Um, yeah, go for it anyways, so long as it means I won’t wake up on the moon.”
Lyra winces. “Sorry, pain relief spells of this style only get so effective. And, ah, the way it was set… you would've never woke up on the moon. In deep space, probably. Any gravitational force behaves as its opposite on you right now.”
Hermione looks at the floor, then back up. “What?”
Lyra nods. “Reverse gravity spell. It’ll last about a week- good thing the papa tango only takes about seventy-two hours once we kick it off.”
“Can you do that now?”
Lyra shakes her head. “No, I can’t. There’s a good twelve hours of prep that has to go into it- laying down and masking the matrices, for the most part. Can’t risk someone acquiring the matrices- it’s extremely powerful magic, and extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. After all, it modifies your magical core.” She looks at Dumbledore. “Something that has only been successfully done by hand once, and that was a small change. This is a big change- and someone else might skip eleven of those setup hours: The safeties to make absolutely certain nothing can go wrong.” She sighs, turning back to Hermione. “If not for those safeties, I’m actually strong enough to apply the spells instantly. But if I did that, I’d probably kill you.”
Hermione shudders. “RRrrright. Um, I’ll find my way to the hospital wing, then- where might that be?”
“You’re in luck,” Dumbledore states. “It’s right over there.” He gestures down the hall to a closed door.
Lyra nods. “And while you’re in there getting healed, I’ll get started on the matrix. I’ll see you in, oh, classroom Charlie Seven this time tomorrow?”
“Works for me,” Hermione states, without even thinking about it. Then she looks up at Dumbledore and Filch. “Um…”
“Let’s finish this discussion in the Hospital Wing,” Dumbledore states, herding all four no-longer-floating girls towards it. He hopes he doesn’t have to take too many points.
Malfoy and Bonbon walk down the hall, back towards the Slytherin common room, in silence for a couple minutes.
“So, Bonbon,” Malfoy eventually begins uneasily.
Bonbon looks up at him. “Mm?”
He glances both ways up the hallway, checking for eavesdroppers, and not finding anyone. “Um-!”
“Peeves is two rooms away,” Bonbon informs him, pointing at a closed door just down the hall.
“... Oh.”
“Here- this’ll work.” She turns, tugging on his arm, and pulls him straight through a painting.
He lets out a gasp as the painting seems to simply disappear against his skin. Once through, into a small, comfortably-furnished cubby, he glances back- and the whole painting seems to be missing. “What-!”
“It’s a secret alcove we discovered on day one,” Bonbon informs him. “The painting’s still there, it’s just not visible from this side. To get in, you have to be thinking about bananas; there’s all kinds of secrecy magic placed on that barrier, making it virtually impossible for someone to hear us. We’ve strengthened it as well, making this one of the best places in the castle to find privacy.”
“... Oh.” He blinks. “Okay. Um…”
Very suddenly, the door Bonbon had pointed to bursts open, and Peeves swoops out of it, cackling as he races down the hallway.
Malfoy watches him go. “... That was sudden.”
Bonbon glances at the door he’d abandoned. “I wonder what kind of prank we’re going to have to deal with on Monday,” she mutters aloud.
“We?” he asks, looking right back at her.
She nods, gesturing to the open door as Peeves reappears to close it. “That’s our potions classroom. Anyways, you were saying something?”
“Ah, yes, um…” He sinks down onto one of the two sofas; Bonbon seats herself on the other, on the other side of the coffee table. “About… Well…” He lifts his hand to his hair.
Bonbon tilts her head. “Something wrong?”
He shakes his head quickly. “No, no- just…
“Well, for as long as anyone can remember, the Malfoy family has carried a curse down, from head of house to head of house. From the age of four to the age of twenty five, our hair, ah…
“I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s… kinda like sandpaper, but worse. Saint Mungo’s could never break the curse, though why it only ever affects future heads of the house, nobody knows. It wasn’t too long ago they came up with a way to keep it from shredding my own scalp- a couple years, as a matter of fact- but one of the things I have to do is to trim it very short every week. Is…” He draws the hand on his hair forwards, over his shoulder, pulling his hair with it. “Is this going to lose its softness?”
“Ah, no,” Bonbon smiles. “You’ll be fine. That sounds like a so-called ‘House Curse’- someone cursed House Malfoy to always have that problem. Only thing is, Equestrians are immune to generalized curses like that, so since you are one of us as well, that’ll never be a problem again. Not for you, at any rate- though if the next head of House Malfoy isn’t Equestrian, it might resurface.”
“Might?”
Nod. “Position-curses like that tend to break down over time without someone to bear symptoms. I’m betting that twenty-five is about when the next generation was four, right?”
He blinks, and starts counting on his fingers for a second. “Uh… Yes, actually. That’s… an interesting distinction.” Then he glances briefly down at his groin. “Speaking of which, since my Equestrian form is, ah…”
Bonbon nods. “Mmhm?”
“Which side of that coin would I play…?”
“Depends on where you do it,” Bonbon answers simply. “On this side, you’re a boy, with everything that comes with it- and on the other, you’re a filly, with everything that comes with that.”
“Side?”
Nod. “Yeah. There’s a gate, about four hundred miles away, between this world and Equestria. Aside from the papa tango, transformation to pony form shouldn’t be possible on this side of the gate, just as transformation to human form isn’t possible on the other.”
“Shouldn’t?”
She shrugs. “We haven’t been able to conclusively analyze the magic structures of this world yet, so we’re not dead certain, but we’re pretty close to that.”
“Ahh. Um…” He looks down at his hair- his permanently silky smooth hair. “I guess I’ll just have to make sure my dad hasn’t gotten it back, then… Um, there was another thing.” He looks up. “This morning, when I got up, all it took was a little shake and it became this- no brushing, no nothing.”
Bonbon nods. “The effect is that strong? Huh. You’ll also notice all it takes to clean is a dash of water. That’s the Equestrian magic- your hair will automatically assume that hairstyle, and repel contaminants, really whenever it can. You’re not as powerful as, say, Princess Luna, so it won’t do that entirely on its own- but a little agitation is all it needs.”
He tilts his head. “That strong?” he asks.
She nods. “Yep. If I wanted to shake mine out like that, I’d have to shake like an earthquake- and when I get it particularly messy, sometimes I need a dash of shampoo. A brush is more effective than shaking it- a few strokes, and it looks like this.” She gestures towards her head. “I can even do it with my hands, in a pinch.”
He stares at her for a second. “So, this is normal?”
She nods. “Yes. Well… The effect itself is normal, though it isn’t usually that strong. I mean… Well, I know Lyra’s got it that strong, and she’s a mighty powerful unicorn- but Moondancer is about as powerful as she, and regularly uses soap.” She shrugs. “I don’t know- I’d have to ask Lyra. No one understands our innate magics like she does.”
“... Oh. Then… There’s one other thing. Last night, I realized that I could, well… No incantation, nor wand…” A point of light appears in the air.
Bonbon looks at it, raising an eyebrow. “That all?”
He shakes his head, letting it disappear and making a diagram of the coffee table take its place. “No. There’s also…” He lets that disappear as well, and lifts the coffee table effortlessly with his strange blue aura. He puts it down, watching Bonbon’s really wide smile.
“That’s awesome!” Bonbon informs him. “If you’re already manifesting conscious magic independent from a planted spell like that teleportation one, you’re clearly ready for a regular, Equestrian magic education! I’ll have to see if I can’t get Princess Luna to teach you the basics.”
“P-P-Princess Luna-!?” he asks.
She nods. “Yeah. I mean, sure, I could probably get almost any unicorn Equestrian to do that, but I think you’d benefit the most from studying under Princess Luna.”
“But-!” He stares at her wide-eyed for a second. “Couldn’t you teach me? O-Or Instructor Tiara?”
Bonbon shakes her head. “Would if I could, but I can’t,” she answers him. “I’m an earth pony- so is Diamond. We can’t use unicorn magic like that.” She gestures at the coffee table.
Very suddenly, Peeves swoops past again, pulling open the door to that same classroom and disappearing in.
“Wait a minute,” Malfoy mutters, staring after him.
“What?” Bonbon asks.
“His nose is missing.”
“Oh? … Oh, that explains it.” She leans back. “There’s only one Equestrian capable of whistling a drum solo.”
“Wait,” Malfoy mutters, looking back at her. “He’s whistling that?”
Nod. “Yep.”
As he watches, Discord walks casually up the passage, waves to them, and pauses outside the classroom, fiddling with something in his hand.
“That’s… That’s Peeves’ nose,” Malfoy mutters, astounded.
Bonbon nods. “Yep. Dissy’s like that- it’s great fun, but you do not want to be on his bad side.”
“As I’m sure Peeves is finding out.”
“Eh, that’s actually a bit mild.”
Malfoy stares at her. “Uhh…”
Discord sticks his head into the wall next to the classroom, and his head sticks suddenly out of the couch next to Bonbon. “It’s only a bit of rude words,” he states. “I didn’t think I needed any worse. You?”
Bonbon shrugs. “Nah, I think that’s fine, for the offense. We can save the really strange stuff for when he inevitably does something less easily corrected.”
“Like smashing valuable magical cabinets, or mirrors.”
Bonbon looks at him. “He’s done that?”
Discord’s head shakes. “No, but I see it coming.” He then disappears back into the cushion.
Malfoy stares for a second, before looking back out in time to see Peeves emerge from the classroom, receive his nose back, and race away. Discord, meanwhile, resumes whistling his drum solo as he continues walking down the passage.