“Come in,” Professor McGonagall sighs, looking up at her office door. Someone had just knocked softly.
The door opens, admitting an Equestrian with bright pink hair and one of their ‘radio’ devices clipped to the front of her robes. “Um,” she begins. “Professor McGonagall?”
McGonagall raises an eyebrow. “Yes, Fluttershy?”
She looks uneasily at the floor. “Um… I know the Board just ordered us all expelled for no good reason, but I thought I should still ask you about something.” She looks up at Professor McGonagall. “Is it possible that an unregistered animagus could be pretending to be a student’s pet?”
Professor McGonagall blinks; not only does the rate of information transmission amongst the RESS still amaze her, but the question is unexpected. “Um… Well, if the animagus form is something that could be made a pet, I suppose it’s possible,” she states. “Not likely, though. Why ask?”
“Ronald Weasley’s rat, Scabbers,” she answers immediately. “I’m good with animals; I can talk to them and everything. Scabbers… not so much. So I asked Harry if anything looked strange about his aura; Lyra taught him how to view that.” She sighs, staring at the floor. “Most animals self-identify by either the name given them by their owners, or by something in their native language that only I would be able to understand. Scabbers self-identifies by the English name Wormtail, and Harry mentioned his aura seemed a lot stronger than most animals- much more like a student.” She looks up at her again. “I suspect he might be more than he appears.”
McGonagall nods. “And animagus fit the bill?”
She nods.
“Hmm… Well, there is a spell to reveal animagi, and it’s completely harmless against anything that’s not an animagus. Wouldn’t hurt to try that, I suppose. So, if we bring him here, we can find out.”
“Um… Wouldn’t it be better to use a random classroom closer to Gryffindor Tower? If he is an animagus, bringing him all the way to your office might tip him off that something’s wrong.”
She pauses, and nods. “That is true… and there is a hidden passage just down the corridor that lets out very close to the Gryffindor common room, as well. So…” She looks at the clock. “Ten o’clock, today?”
Fluttershy glances at it as well, and nods. “Classroom Gamma-Two?”
“Gamma two?” McGonagall muses, concentrating for a second on the map embedded in Hogwarts’ wards. “Ahh, yes. I’ll see you there.”
“He… never left the school?”
“Not on the train,” the minister answers. “It’s still parked in the depot.”
“Well, he has to have gotten out somehow! Nobody there seems to know a thing!”
“Perhaps he left by broom, or side-along apparition, or perhaps floo or even foot travel? All I know for certain, Mr. Malfoy, is that he did not ride the Hogwarts Express away from the school. She’s not even roadworthy right now- they’ve pulled the wheels for repair. The ‘tires’ got rusty, made a bit of a bumpy ride. Then of course, the wheels seem to be wearing out-but they’re working on it. Would you like to see?”
Lucius blinks, and shakes his head. “No, I’ve got better things to do than to waste my time looking at that contraption.”
The ground is chaos as the helicopter approaches the ground.
“What’s going on?” Malfoy asks.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Cherry Berry answers. “The school board has decided to mass-expel all Equestrians for ‘being dangerous’, so Princess Celestia is making a state visit to complain about their unwarranted expulsion of twelve thousand perfectly safe students. Compounded by our preparations for your arrival here-mostly to do with securing the helicopter, maintenance checks, and so on.”
“Oh.”
Bonbon leans forwards as the helicopter touches down. “So, you ready for your adventure?”
He chuckles. “I think.”
“Using your Equestrian name yet?”
He rolls his eyes. “Please. Call me Draco on this side; it’s only when I transform that I become Silversong.”
Cherry sighs. “In either case, we’re on the ground and the engine’s off, so we might as well step inside.”
“Mr. Malfoy, need I remind you that Hogwarts is not connected to the public Floo Network?”
Professor Dumbledore jogs down the passage, towards the open door. He’d promised he’d be there for the testing of Miss Shy’s theory on Scabbers the Rat, and he’s just a little late.
As he approaches, he hears the incantation of the animagus reversal spell. He feels the thaumic patterns of it doing its work- it seems Miss Shy was correct- and then he hears a voice, speaking very quickly.
“Avada-!”
That’s as far as he gets, though, before the entire passage is filled to bursting by the echoes of an incredibly loud boom from inside the room. He draws his wand, throwing a quick spell up at his ears to repair the damage he can already feel happening, and charges around the corner.
Professor McGonagall is standing opposite the door, wand raised, and looking startled, but in control of herself.
An unfamiliar man is in the middle of the room, falling over sideways in a dead faint, one hand clamped over its opposite.
Ronald Weasley is off to one side, staring in utter shock.
The small, grey thing in the steel-eyed Fluttershy’s hands is emitting a thin trail of smoke out the little hole in the tip- which she’s keeping pointed directly at the falling man’s head.
“What just happened?” he demands.
Fluttershy answers, her voice as hard as steel. “We revealed Scabbers, he tried to kill Professor McGonagall. I shot the wand out of his hand, McGonagall stunned him.”
“Peter,” McGonagall finally mutters. “Peter Pettigrew.” She looks up at Dumbledore, lowering her wand. “I thought he was dead.”
Dumbledore steps closer. There’s a wand in the man’s back pocket; why would- Oh. He sighs; the remains of a wand, the base shattered just as thoroughly as the man’s right hand, rest on the floor before him. He raises an eyebrow, tracing an imaginary line between Fluttershy and where that hand must have been when he was standing- then following it on, to the wall near the door. There, he spots that something has slammed into the wall, taking a sizable bite out of the stone.
He turns back to Fluttershy. “That’s a pretty powerful… what is it?”
“A gun,” she answers. “Far faster than a wand.” She lifts it up, pointing it at the ceiling, to blow the tip- then brushes her robes aside to insert it, pointing down, into a shaped pouch on her belt. “For use against mortal threats.”
“So…?” Hermione mutters. “Is that it?”
Lyra nods. “Yep, all done. Feeling anything you didn’t before?”
“... No. I was kinda expecting to feel it, um, doing something.”
“Yeah… With most types of magic, you would- but not this type. I’m actually quite proud of it- it’s using you to change you. Makes it an order of magnitude safer, and far less uncomfortable.
“... Oh. Yeah, that would be…”
“Anyways, we’ll plan to meet somewhere on Tuesday morning, immediately after breakfast?”
Hermione smiles. “How about at breakfast, then you can lead me somewhere hidden?”
“Works for me.”
“Awesome!” Hermione grins ear to ear. “Now I just need to check out The Advanced Magic of Runes.” She heads for the door.
Lyra catches her by the arm, stopping her. “You are aware British wizards can’t use any of the runes in that book, right?”
She looks back. “What?”
Lyra chuckles. “That’s an Equestrian book, and no copies were ever brought over here. Makes me wonder… Where would you look if I asked you for the most accurate account of Nightmare Moon’s defeat?”
“The Friendship Journals.”
“How about the design and layout of the Friendship Express?”
“The Equestrian Railroad: Past, Present, and Design.” She blinks. “Wait, how do I know that…?”
Lyra grins. “Equestrian magic,” she states. “In particular, something unique to Equestrians- but ubiquitous to all of us. And yet, unique for each one of us. Something whose name sounds utterly ridiculous on this side of the gate, so we simply call it our ‘unique talent’.”
“... What?”
She sighs. “Hermione, you think of something and you instantly know what book to look it up in. That’s a very special kind of magic- and you’re the only person on either planet capable of doing that. Malfoy’s, ah, unique talent, first manifested as an ability to instantly see and respond to threats he didn’t know were threats with actions he didn’t know how to perform.” She nods. “And perform them flawlessly. I leveraged that same ability when he was transformed during that first flying lesson- I gave him the teleportation spell matrix, and he instantly knew how to use it, even though all I did is give him the runic pattern. I didn’t tell him how to translate a runic pattern into a spell matrix, or how to channel that into a functioning spell. He did those himself, instantly- and, apparently, remembered how he did them.”
“Wait, Malfoy teleported?”
Nod. “Yep. Hogwarts’ wards are designed to bar British magic, not Equestrian magic.”