“What the-?” Harry begins.
Hermione and Draco stop short. Harry had just opened the door and looked back into his bedroom.
Then Harry steps back, glancing up at them. “What is that?”
Hermione sticks her head around the corner, and blinks. “You mean the creature on the bed? I don’t know.” She scowls, before drawing back from the door and looking at Harry again. “And the list of books related is utterly confusing.”
Draco looks around the corner. “Dobby?” he asks. “What are you doing here?” He glances up at Harry. “He’s a house-elf. Specifically, my father’s house elf.”
“Ohhh,” Hermione nods. “That makes sense.”
Harry looks in again to see the elf staring at Draco, face white with shock. “Y-Y-Young Master!” the elf yelps eventually.
“You guys alright up there?” Uncle Vernon’s voice calls up the steps.
“Yep, we’ll be fine,” Hermione answers, calling back down.
“Okay,” Vernon calls again. “They’re pulling in now.”
“We’ve got about fifteen seconds,” Hermione mutters.
Draco glances at Harry, as if for permission, before stepping into the room. “Dobby, what are you doing here?”
Harry and Hermione quickly follow, the former closing the door behind them.
“I- I-!” Dobby begins, before making a choking noise.
“Okay,” Malfoy mutters irritably. “Is that something you can’t tell me?”
Dobby shakes his head.
“How about Harry?”
He nods.
“Right then. Don’t tell him, tell me. In a whisper.” He glances at Harry as he walks over to sit on the bed next to Dobby. “Stand back, please.”
Harry nods, staying near the door.
Dobby nods as well, waiting until Draco sits before reaching up to whisper in his ear.
While he’s whispering, Harry turns to Hermione and mutters a question. “Why did he… choke?”
Hermione shakes her head. “House-elves are really sad creatures,” she answers him, also in a low mutter. “Extremely powerful magic, but they can only use it if they have a master- and if they try to knowingly defy that master, their own magic will kill them.” She glances at Dobby. Draco had asked another question, so he’s still whispering. “I’m betting that’s what happened. Whoever his master is, told him not to tell you what he’s doing.”
They both look forward again, just in time for Dobby to lean back again and Draco to scowl.
“Well, that’s a doomed effort,” Draco mutters.
“What is?” Hermione asks, while Dobby looks alarmedly at Draco.
Draco shrugs. “My dad- his master- ordered him to ‘convince Harry not to go to Hogwarts’ this year. And, presumably, not to tell Harry about that.”
Harry nods. “Yeah, that’s not gonna work.” He looks towards Dobby. “I’m sorry, but Hogwarts is my home. I can’t not go.”
Draco sighs. “And his method for accomplishing that goal has been to intercept your mail.”
Harry raises his eyebrows. “I still got your letters,” he mutters.
“Because they were from me,” Draco answers. “He’s the family elf- he can no more oppose me than my dad, unless explicitly ordered. And intercepting any mail headed to or from me would be opposing me.”
“So… You’re the reason Ron’s letters keep disappearing midway?” Harry asks Dobby.
Dobby blinks, and reaches into his pillowcase. “D-Dobby has them here, Sir.” He pulls out a large handful of letters, bound together with twine.
“Can I countermand the order?” Draco asks.
Dobby looks at him. “Um…”
Draco shrugs. “Because we all know Harry’s going to Hogwarts. If he doesn’t go himself, you can bet I’ll be teleporting over to drag him to Hogwarts.”
Dobby sighs. “Alright.” He drops the letters on the bed next to him, and disappears with a little pop!
“I take it your father knows you can teleport?”
Draco shakes his head. “Actually, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m using portkeys. Dobby knows the truth, but I’ve asked him to keep it from my dad- even lie about it- unless the question is explicit and he’s ordered to tell the truth, such that he’ll die if he doesn’t tell.”
Harry tilts his head. “Portkeys?”
Hermione tilts her head. “Some kind of wizardly transportation method?” She glances at Harry. “The Art and Magic of Long-Range Travel.”
Draco chuckles. “Yeah. Basically, an item we anchor the spell to, turning it into a portkey. Touch it, or sometimes on a timer, and it’ll teleport you to the destination. My least-favorite method of travel, but the easiest way to take large groups and the only way for a youngster like me to travel long distances to ‘muggle’ homes, since they don’t connect muggle fireplaces to the flu network.” He grins. “Or so my dad thinks. I haven’t told him about the three different Equestrian teleportation spells I know.” He glances to the side. “Or the funny combination between that and flu travel that let me surprise Quirrell.”
“Funny?”
He nods. “Yeah. I got suspicious- there’s always a smell of smoke, but no soot, whenever I use it- so I asked Dobby to watch me use it to go six feet. After swearing him to secrecy, of course.”
“Oh?” Hermione asks.
Draco stands up, then vanishes in a burst of flame, to reappear simultaneously behind them in a matching flare. “He said it looked like phoenix fire.”
Hermione blinks. “Do that again.”
He does. Back to in front of them.
She nods. “Yeah, that does look like phoenix fire.”
“You’ve seen it?” Harry asks her.
She nods again. “There’s an excellent photo in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
Harry nods. “And that’s a schoolbook, so you didn’t need your magic to tell you where to look.”
She grins. “Yep.”
“So, Hermione,” Draco mutters, sitting on the bed again, as Harry and Hermione join him, Hermione once again sandwiched in the middle. “Have you heard anything from the RESS lately?”
She shakes her head. “No. They promised they’d always be here for me once I joined, but I haven’t heard a peep.” She scowls at the floor. “Even tried calling Lyra a few times, but it’s like she’s in some perpetual deadzone. Like, oh, Equestria.” She looks up. “I’ve actually been quite tempted to have you take me to the station to check up on them, Draco.”
“Actually,” Harry mutters, glancing up from flipping through the letters Dobby left for him. “We might as well head over there now, maybe spend the evening in Equestria. Lyra did invite us over anytime, didn’t she?”
Hermione scowls. “I’d hate to make a surprise visit,” she mutters.
Harry shrugs. “If they won’t answer us, we can’t exactly warn them, can we?”
Hermione nods. “Yeah, that’s true. You up for it, Draco?”
“Ready when you are,” Draco smiles.
Harry grins. “Ready in a sec.” He looks forwards, towards his desk. “Alexa, once the Masons leave, let Uncle Vernon know we’re headed for Equestria for the evening.”
The little device sitting on the back of his desk answers. “Alright. I’ll do that.”
Harry turns back to Draco. “Ready.”
Draco grins, then all three stand up- and promptly… nothing.
Draco scowls. “Huh… physical impediment safety routine is going off. Lemme try another spot.” A pause. “Nope, still there. I’ll go for the helipad this time- might need an invisibility spell or something.” He glances at Hermione.
“I got that,” Harry states instantly, before all three vanish soundlessly into thin air. “A gift from my dad. Lyra calls it a ‘Death’s Shroud’.”
“Huh, that’s a funny name,” Hermione mutters.
“Very complex, too,” Draco mutters. “Way bigger than anything Luna’s shown me. I… yeah, I don’t stand a chance of understanding it. Anyways…”
Moments later, the three are surrounded not by Harry’s bedroom, but by the inside of a helicopter.
Hermione blinks, then digs for her pockets. “Oh! Good thing I thought to bring my keys, isn’t it?” She quickly comes up with a keyring, including one keyfob that both unlocks the helicopter and disengages the security system surrounding it. “Alright, Harry, you can drop the shroud if you want to.”
Harry nods, and the three promptly appear out of thin air, just as silently as they had disappeared in his room a minute before.
Hermione pulls open the door, stepping out and looking around. “... Huh. Woulda expected more people around here.”
The other two follow her out. “Yeah,” Draco mutters. “Last time I was here, there were people scrambling all over. I mean, that was also a time when Princess Celestia was stopping by, but still. Gate’s this way.”
Hermione raises an eyebrow. “That’s Princess Celestia. Of course they’d work themselves up into a tizzy trying to prepare for her.”
“Did you get to meet her?” Harry asks Draco.
Draco shakes his head. “I don’t think I even glimpsed her.”
“I met her,” Hermione shudders.
Both boys look at her, pausing briefly on the way to the building.
“What?” Hermione asks. “I had to, when I entered the RESS. Or, actually, RIA. But don’t tell anyone.” She looks up into the air. “Lyra teleported me out here to meet her. After a quick meeting, Celestia herself gave me my radio, keys, and codename.”
“Codename?” Harry asks. “What is it?”
She grins. “I’m Agent Index Eye.” She lifts her keys again, unlocking the front door of the building by tapping a little plastic spade on her keyring to a larger block of plastic next to the door.
Draco blinks, listening to the high-pitched chirp the plastic block made and the sharp clunk that came from the door, while also looking at the now blinking green light on the block. It had been steady red. “What-?” he begins.
Hermione pulls the door open for him. “Muggle technology,” she answers. “That unlocks the door, and also disables the alarm- and barrier wards.”
“Barrier wards?”
She nods. “They said only Agents could teleport into the building, thanks to some fancy warding Lyra did. And they didn’t trust the locks to last against wizards, so they paired it with magical barriers placed inside the walls and door. I don’t know how she managed to get that to toggle with the electronic lock, but she did.”
“That’s… a very good question,” Draco mumbles. “Nothing Luna’s covered with me even suggests any kind of… ‘electronic’. In any case, do you know where the Gate is?”
Hermione shakes her head. “I only know that the same keyfob will get me into that room.” She looks across the room. “And that the complete lack of guards is a little worrisome.”
“Ahh,” Malfoy mutters. “Well, it’s this way.” He pauses for a second. “Hmm… All the warding around here is blinding me, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this side of the building, save us.”
“It’s blinding you?” Harry asks.
He shakes his head. “Blinding my scans. There’s too much magic in the air to get an accurate read with the scanning spells I know.”
Hermione glances back at the door. “And Lyra got near-field communications to work someplace with more magic than Hogwarts?”
“About thirty times as much magic, I’d say,” Draco mumbles. “Problem is, the little bits I’m catching suggest there’s more I can’t see.”
“How is that any different from the radios?” Harry asks.
“The reason wizardkind thinks electronics don’t work at Hogwarts is because wireless electronics don’t work at Hogwarts. Exposed electronics might also have problems, but modern stuff isn’t exposed. In any case, the reason that doesn’t work, Lyra told me, is because the wards generate a lot of electromagnetic interference- basically, the electric version of the blinding effect of all the magic in the air here.” She looks at Malfoy. “Imagine someone were standing at the far side of the building, making really fast magic pulses, and your job was to see those pulses from here, measure their timings, and decode a message from that. How possible would that be?”
Draco shakes his head instantly. “Zilch. Maybe outside, but there’s too much magic for the pulses to get lost in.”
“That’s exactly what the radios do,” Hermione continues. “They make pulses of electromagnetic energy. Um, electricity. They pulse so fast that we can’t hope to perceive it, but still. When there’s too much interference, the signal gets lost in the noise- hence why they don’t work at Hogwarts. Lyra used some kind of relay spell to force the accurate signal to reach the rest of the radios, regardless of distance or interference, so our radios do work at Hogwarts.
“The problem is, she couldn’t have done that with a near-field communications system like my keyfob- that relay spell causes them to behave like the antennae are touching, and the whole point of a near-field system is that it can only talk when it’s very close by- like, a few inches. It even has to get its power from the reader!” She stomps a foot in frustration. “Thus, it’s physically impossible, but Lyra did it anyways!”
“Or,” Draco suggests, “she could have just designed the wards not to make that electrowhatsits interference.”
Hermione blinks, and blushes. “... Yeah, she could have, couldn’t she? There is a book on that… authored by Twilight Sparkle.”
Draco blinks. “Wasn’t she at Hogwarts?”
Hermione nods. “Ravenclaw. And no, she’s not an Agent.” She holds out her keys to the next door, resulting in a similar result to the main entrance door.
“We should be able to ask her in a minute,” Malfoy states, before pulling the door open… and stopping in his tracks.
“What the…?” Harry asks, gazing up at the huge pile of splintered wood and twisted steel filling most of the room.
Hermione holds out her hand, almost casually ripping it apart and crushing the bits into sorted heaps against the wall with her icy blue magic aura.
It takes her about five minutes to recycle the entire tangled heap, revealing a small platform, rather gouged by the ruined material, with a few damaged train tracks still attached to the ground in front of it.
“Where’d the Gate go?” Draco asks.
“The Gate?” Hermione asks. She then scowls at the platform and tracks. “Why are there train tracks in here?”
“Because the Gate takes the form of a sixty-mile-long tunnel,” Draco answers. “They ran a train line down it. And…” He runs to the wall, and pokes along it. “Yeah… it looks like she’s closed it. It’s still here, though, so we can hope she’ll be back next year, but nothing’s going through it- and I don’t think I could open it if I wanted to.”
Very suddenly, Hermione lets out a gasp and whirls in place, looking around. “What-!?”
“What is it?” Harry asks, also looking around and crouching slightly.
Malfoy twists to face her as well, alarmed.
“That’s…” Hermione blinks, then sighs. “Oh.” She relaxes her stance. “Oh. It’s just that someone’s set off one of Lyra’s alarm spells back at Hogwarts, and it couldn’t find her.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket. “And if the Gate is sealed and this building is empty, I’m probably the only Agent on this side, so the only person left for it to notify.” She wakes her phone up, and starts tapping the screen. “I… should probably inform Dumbledore. At least her alert spell was smart enough to tell me exactly where it is in the castle… and what it’s guarding.” She raises her phone to her ear, and sighs. “This thing is going to take forever to connect.”
“What is it guarding?” Harry asks.
“Her papa tango spellwork. Someone’s penetrated the door- I need to tell him before whoever it is activates her work, accidentally or not.” She rolls her eyes, shaking her phone. “Come on! I know it takes time to connect to the castle wards, but it can’t be taking this long!”
“What.” Draco mutters.
“Oh, finally! … Professor Dumbledore? You there?”
A sudden blaze of blinding light fills the room. Multiple cries of alarm also sound, but nobody really hears them- they’re too busy making their own, or falling over backwards in surprise, or concentrating on not screaming from the pain.
Professor Dumbledore recovers first, thanks only to the silent incantation of a pain relief spell through the Elder Wand. He then lifts one hand to rub the last of the piercing headache out of his head, and sits up. His body feels… wrong, somehow.
He opens his eyes. The room seems too big. “What- Oh…” His voice sounds wrong. He blinks, and reaches back to pull his hair forwards. He’s always had long hair, so it’s no surprise that he can do that- but he is beginning to suspect just what the spellwork he and his heads of house had just accidentally set off was.
Nothing seems to have changed, except that it seems to have gained a bit of a wave and a curl or two at the end.
Then he looks up at his Heads of House, just in time for Professor McGonagall to rise, as the second to recover. The first thing he notices, is that she’s no longer a brunette. Her hair has become waist-length, wavy, and purple, with a couple of lighter stripes.
He puts his hand to his forehead. “I know what it is,” he announces.
“Professor Dumbledore? You there?”
Professor Snape jackknifes upright. “Who-!?”
Dumbledore tries responding to the call on the wards. “Who is it?” he answers.
“It’s Hermione Granger, Sir. The RESS made this spellwork- and the app, pretty sure someone named ‘Tech Nut’ made it- as an emergency contact method. I thought you should know, someone’s penetrated the door in front of Lyra’s ‘papa tango’ spellwork.”
Professor McGonagall facepalms. “Can I take points for this?”
Professor Snape drops back down on his waist-length mane of wavy blackness, laughing out loud.
“Ahh, yes,” Dumbledore answers Granger. “We’ve… figured that out. Why isn’t it Bonbon calling, or Lyra?” He briefly fingers the radio clipped to the front of his robes. It seems a lot bigger, now that he, and his Heads of House, have been reduced to first-year stature.
“Ahh… Well, it seems they’ve closed the Gate, actually. Which means, when it couldn’t find Lyra and started hunting for any Agent… I’m the only one it could find.”
Professor McGonagall groans. “Of course.”
“Alright then. Should we expect them back next year?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s been sealed all summer, and I don’t know how easy it would be for her to reopen.”
“What about you?”
“Draco’s the most skilled with Equestrian magic, and he doesn’t think he can.”
“Ahh. Well, keep us updated… by owl, please.”
“Will do.”
Dumbledore lets out a sigh as soon as he gets the distinct signal of Miss Granger’s disconnecting from the wards. “Well, that was… perfectly timed,” he mutters, before glancing at McGonagall. “And I don’t think we can take points for it… but we can ban Lyra from making any more of these in Hogwarts.”
Snape sits back up. “Are you sure that’ll be enough?”
Dumbledore scowls. “Shall we make some paperwork for her to fill out too?”
“Paperwork?” McGonagall asks.
He shrugs. “That’s what it takes to get through to her, according to Bonbon. Certainly works, too.” He sighs. “Requiring a heap of paperwork won’t stop her from doing something she really wants to do, though. She’ll just do the paperwork.”
“Really?” Snape asks.
Dumbledore nods. “Really.” Then he stares at Snape’s very dark blue wings.