//------------------------------//
// Chapter 40 
// Story: The Gate 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“What in the world…?” Harry asks.
He’s staring at his reflection in the mirror.  He hadn’t noticed, down in the dungeons, what his hair looked like; he also hadn’t looked at it, since waking up in the Hospital Wing, until now.  He’s also ignored it over that same span; he’s had a world to save, after all.
“I look like Bonbon,” he mutters.
Hermione lets out a snort of laughter.
“Bonbon?” Fred asks, holding the mirror.
“Is that the Slytherin with two radios?” George asks.
“Yeah,” Harry nods.
“No, no, you do not look like Bonbon,” Hermione informs him.  “Though I will admit, you do look cute with her hairstyle.”
“Exactly!  I look like Bonbon!”
“You do not.  Her hair is pink and purple, yours is green and purple.  And she doesn’t have the gold stripe!”
“I…  I still look like I should have a higher-pitched voice.”
Hermione snorts.  “Meh, I think you look just right the way you are.”  She shrugs, stepping up next to him and glancing in the mirror.  “George, are you sure you got that mirror spell right?  It makes me look like a boy.”
“Uh, yep!” Fred declares.
Hermione raises an eyebrow at him, then raises her wand.  Moments later, the mirror shimmers, flickers, and turns green.
Harry rolls his eyes.  “Whatever…  Did it get my hair right, though?”
Hermione shrugs.  “More or less,” she states.
“Ahh.  Anyways, there’s a dinner coming soon, and I’m hungry enough I could eat a horse.”
Hermione bursts into laughter, at which the twins tilt their heads confusedly.
Harry stares at her.  “Was it something I said?”





“Come on, Harry.  You’re going to love it.”
Harry trots slowly after Hermione- not that he has much choice, with how hard she’s pulling on his hand.  “Are you sure about that?” he asks.
“Absolutely sure,” she answers.  “Early in the year, I got together with Draco to make a sort-of ‘papa tango club’.  I mean, until recently, we were the only two papa tango subjects, but so?  We’ve been experimenting with exactly how different that makes us from the regular Equestrians… or other wizards.  Come on, it’s fun.”
“Wait, Draco?  You mean Malfoy?” Harry asks.  “Isn’t he in Slytherin?”
Hermione grins at him.  “And me muggleborn?  Yep.  But that’s just the trivial details.”
“Trivial details,” Harry repeats.
She nods.  “Yep!  It’s not like either of us care if his father’s going to hate me to death.  I mean, if I can get Lyra to have a good look at my parents, we might even be able to make me a pureblood.”  She giggles.  “Oh, here we are.”  The door flies open in front of her.
Inside the room she’d selected, Draco is sitting on a table, playing a silver flute.  He’s really good with it.
He lowers the instrument as she walks in, pulling Harry behind her.  “Oh, there you are,” he greets.  He taps the flute with one finger, smiling.  “One of the Equestrian musicians gave this to me a few months back.  Haven’t tried playing it until now, and apparently I’m really good at it.”  He tilts his head, staring at the ceiling.  “Had some kind of glowy thing, too- covered by my own magic aura for a few seconds, even floated in the air.  Didn’t disappear to another realm like earlier, though.”
Hermione scowls.  “Huh.  Well, wouldn’t be the first time Equestrian magic has gone and done something strange on us.”  She rolls her eyes.  “I mean, doing a Rainboom at warp point one isn’t exactly common.  It’s supposed to be flat-out impossible, as a matter of fact- I asked.”
“Warp point one?”
“Yeah.  Remember falling lessons?  Mach eight hundred and someodd is about one thousandth the speed of light- and since you cube the warp factor to get your actual veloci-cee, that’s about warp zero point one.”
“So, you have a warp drive attached to your back,” Malfoy states bluntly.
She blinks.  “Uh…  Something like that, I guess.”  She scowls.  “Though, the Rainboom is less related to the wings as to the pegasus magic.  Meaning…  Yeah.  I basically have an internal warp drive.”  She giggles.  “Oh, that’s going to be fun.”
“Very possibly,” Malfoy agrees.  “So, ah, do you happen to know if this means I’ve got one too?”  Sparkling silver wings spread from his back.
Hermione stares for a second.  “Wait, you have wings?  When did that happen?”
He chuckles.  “Down in the chamber, after we smashed Quirrell.  It was when I disappeared for a moment- looked like I was in a land of clouds.  Right before I got back, I suddenly had wings.”  He shakes them out.  “I’ve been able to confirm they’re like yours- here to stay, take care of themselves, and so on.”  He shrugs, folding them again.
“I guess that makes us three for three,” Harry mutters.
Hermione turns on him.  “What-?  That mean you have wings too?”
He doesn’t answer, simply unfolding them and looking.  They’re really dark blue- midnight blue.
Malfoy hops off his desk and trots closer, reaching out to run a finger across the leading edge of Harry’s wing.  “Yeah, same as ours, here to stay…”  He then strokes the feathers a few times, ignoring how Harry’s wing is flinching away from him as he does so.  “And yeah, it’ll take care of itself.”  He shrugs, stepping back.  “Interesting.”
“They look good on you,” Hermione informs Harry.  Then she smiles.  “Just like that hair.”
Harry blushes, folding his wings.
“Hmm,” Malfoy mutters.  “You might want to be careful in that Quidditch match tomorrow, Harry.  Hermione tells me the Snitch stood out to her like a lightbulb in a dark room every time she glanced in its direction back in that first match- I suspect that’s pegasus magic.”
Hermione nods.  “That’s…  distinctly possible.”
Harry blinks.  “Wait, what?  You mean…”
“I mean the game will be in the bag the moment the Snitch is released,” Malfoy continues.  “I’d recommend you delay for a bit, and only really book it for the snitch if it looks like the Ravenclaw seeker is going to get it.  Other than that, the Gryffindor chasers are a league ahead of the Ravenclaws- and Gryffindor is a mite bit far behind in points.  Probably,” he glances at Hermione, “thanks to the Crusaders.”
Hermione nods.  “Probably.”
“In any case, I’d hate for Gryffindor to wash out quite that easily.  So give them time to score, oh, a two-hundred-point lead before catching it?  That ought to be enough to get Gryffindor back into the running, at least.”
“Two hundred might be pushing it,” Hermione mutters.  “We’ll have to enlist both Weasleys in Snitch-deflection.  And I don’t think you can wait that long without someone realizing something’s up, or winning the game.”
“Unless you can get Lyra to papa tango a few of the Gryffindor chasers, and possibly Wood himself- and hope at least one of the chasers is a pegasus.”
Hermione nods.  “That would do it, yes.  But we’d have to get those team members’ permission.  And, I don’t think Bonbon would ever approve of it.”
“Well,” Harry muses, one hand on his chin.  “Ever since Hermione joined our regular team practices in March, Wood’s training plans have become massively more effective.  We’ll have to see exactly how much of an edge that has given us- I might be able to wait all the way to two hundred points without waiting to the last minute.”  He grins, glancing sideways at her.  “The Ravenclaws might be smart, but they’re just not brave enough to do some of the things we do.”
She grins back at him.  “Speaking of brave, do you want to find out what your pony form looks like?  Lyra’s new matrices work so fast she tells me even she didn’t see it.”
“My…  pony form.”
“Yeah.  ‘Papa Tango’, the phonetics for a P and a T, originally selected to mean ‘Pony Transform’.  Turns out the Equestrians are all ponies when they return to their universe- and with the ‘papa tango’, we’ve been turned into ponies as well.  Bonus, thanks to some part of our British magic we still have, we can transform ourselves between forms at will, something they can’t do.  So, do you want to find out?”
“So I’m…  a pony.”
“Yeah.  Concentrate on being one, and you can transform yourself.  Same thing works to go back to human.”
He unfolds a wing, looking at it rather pointedly.  “Human.”
She shrugs.  “Winged human, whatever.  Lyra’s still not sure why I held onto my wings when I became human again.”
“What.”
She nods.  “Yep!  I’m a pegasus.  Draco here’s a unicorn.”
“Or,” Malfoy inserts, “I was.”  He shrugs his wings, before folding them again.  “Unicorns don’t have wings.  I’m…  starting to suspect what that disappear-and-reappear thing down in that chamber was.”
Hermione looks at him.  “What?”
“Secondary transformation,” he states.  “Into an Alicorn- both wings and horn.”  He glances at Harry.  “Um, you didn’t have wings before that vanishing act, right?”
He blinks.  “Ah, no, I didn’t.”
“And you made that hole in the wall?”
He nods.
“Musta been an earth pony, then.  Incredibly strong, but lacking both horn and wings.  Come on- I’m curious what you’ve become.”  He chuckles.  “And how you look as a pony.  I mean,” he glances at Hermione, “given what happened to me…”
“You first,” Harry states.
Malfoy raises an eyebrow at him.  “Only if you change with me,” he answers.
“Uh, Hermione?” Harry asks.  “Uh…”
She raises an eyebrow as well.  “Alright, how about we all change simultaneously?”
Harry lets out a breath, closing his eyes.  “Alright,” he mutters.  “But if I turn green-!”
“You won’t,” Malfoy answers.  “You’ll be dark blue, like your wings.”
“I will?”
He nods.  “Yeah.  Hermione’s and my wings both match our coat colors; I don’t see any reason yours wouldn’t, as well.”
He sighs again.  “Alright.”
“Everyone ready, then?” Hermione asks.
Harry and Malfoy both nod.
“Okay.  In three, two, one.”
On the unvoiced zero, all three suddenly and simultaneously shrink.
Harry ends up sprawled on his front, having not caught himself when he fell forwards.
“Uhh…  Okay,” Hermione’s voice comes from his left.  Something twitches on the top of his head.
A light clopping comes from ahead, where Malfoy had been, before an unfamiliar, female voice comes from the same.  He’s busy staring at the ground as he gets his hands- er, hooves- under him.  “Huh.  Interesting.”
He looks up, to find a shiny silver…  tiny pony, with a blue-striped silver mane and tail, wings on its sides and a spiral horn sticking out of its forehead, looking at him.
It turns its head.  “Oh, and Hermione, it seems you’re an alicorn too.  When did that happen?”
He glances towards Hermione, met with the vision of an amused looking, bronze-colored, horned-and-winged pony wearing Hermione’s hair.  “I am?” Hermione asks.  “Does that mean I have a- Ow!  Owowowowow…  Um, I guess I do.”  She rubs her horn, which she’d just clubbed with a hoof.
“Well, that would explain your levitation ability,” the silver one- which does not sound like Malfoy- nods, before turning back to him.  “And Harry, it would seem that like me, you became a filly.”
He blinks.  “Wha-  Oh…”  He lifts one hand- er, hoof- up in front of his mouth.  “Aaaah.  Ooooh.”
Hermione starts giggling.  “What she means, Harry, is that your pony form is a girl.”
He looks up.  “Wait, what?”  She’s right, his voice does sound way more girly than it normally does.  He looks back at the silver…  filly, he thinks.  “Then- then you’re Malfoy?”
She nods.  “Yep!  Though, since Draco Malfoy isn’t exactly a filly’s name, I go by Silversong when in pony form.”
“Huh,” Harry mutters, looking back at Hermione.  “This mean I should come up with a…  ah, pony name as well?”
Hermione shrugs.  “You can, if you want to.  I still go by Hermione in both forms, not that…  I mean, this is about the first time I’ve let anyone see my pony form outside of, ah…”
“Distracting circumstances,” Malfoy- Silver- nods quickly, before turning back to Harry.  “I mean, you don’t have to, but you might want to anyways- ‘Harry Potter’ will get you a lot of strange looks in Equestria.”
“Ah, okay,” Harry mutters.  “I’ll…  I’ll have to come up with one, then.”
“Speaking of Equestria,” Hermione inserts.  “Lyra’s invited the three of us to come visit during the summer sometime.  I know I’d like to see what their world looks like.”
Silver nods.  “Yeah.  I’d like to see what it looks like when half of Ponyville isn’t at Hogwarts, too.”
“Wait, what?”
She nods again.  “Yeah, I’ve been there before.  Once.”
“That’s…”  Harry begins, staring at his hoof.  “That sounds like a plan.  Though…”
“We should probably go to bed for now,” Silver mutters, looking up.  “Curfew is in five minutes, and neither of you know how to teleport.”  She shrugs, glancing at Harry.  “I suppose it goes without saying, we don’t mention our pony forms to anyone, even Equestrians?”
He nods.  “Yeah.”