//------------------------------//
// Chapter 51 
// Story: The Gate 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Lyra scowls at the pages in front of her.
It’s not like she needs to study.  Her time at Celestia’s School was a breeze precisely because of her photographic memory and perfect recall.
But she’s always been a people pony.  Early last year, even before it started, she’d looked forward to finishing her Papa Tango and calling her work done, allowing her to make friends and enjoy herself for the rest of the year.
Well…  She’d finished her Papa Tango.  But while it was finished, it was also only temporary- so she’d set to work designing and making a more permanent installation.  She’d anticipated free time after that was done.
But before she’d finished, Hermione’s Papa Tango had happened…  and the animagus facet was discovered.  She’d then devoted all her mental free time- the times when she’s doing something mind-numbing with her hands- to figuring out how to add that facet to an Equestrian.  She still hasn’t gotten anywhere on that.  The Whiskey Tango had been a shot of genius- but unfortunately, it doesn’t work on Equestrians.  She’d tried; ponies have too high of magic resistance.  So she’d put her all into her permanent Papa Tango.
She’d finally finished it.  Before she’d told Harry of its completion, she’d tested it- on herself.
Her magic resistance is too high.  It never got in far enough to realize there was nothing to do.
So she’s back to the drawing board on that.
Of course, she hasn’t had much time to devote to it lately- during the summer, she’d been occupied by trying to solve the age problem.  Which, if she’s honest with herself, may have been exacerbated by her unending workload.
And now this year.  There’s lots of thaumic dead zones in Equestria; almost twenty percent of the Equestrian students had complained, through one channel or another, that their wands wouldn’t work where they lived.  So she’s been working on that little goal that was tacked on as an afterthought early last year:  Convincing wand magic to draw from the user’s internal thaumic reservoir, like pony magic.
She’s nowhere close to that solution.
Sure, she’s actually managed to do it, and rather easily- but only with her unique advantage.  And since a total of two ponies with love envelopes are attending Hogwarts, not counting Harry, it really won’t help.  Especially considering that Ponyville is an area of high thaumic density, thanks to the nearby Everfree Forest.
Oh, and she’s heard mention that Hogwarts’ history teacher, Professor Binns, is both very boring…  and a ghost.  Which should be a very interesting bit of research, and possibly a lot of work as well.
Completely aside from her eventual goal of making some means by which a wizard could replicate a majority of Equestrian magic capabilities, including levitation.
At this rate, she’ll be in her third year- or past it- by the time she finishes.
She glares irritatedly at her papers.  She scatters them around her, along with her books opened to random spots, as an indicator to others that she’s working.  It also gives her the appearance of studying, so no one has looked twice.
She refocuses herself on the task at hand:  Fully analyzing how the magic wand works.
She’d originally assumed it simply behaved as a channelling core, not unlike the Unicorn Horn.
She’d been wrong.  Any wand magic spell goes through a series of steps.
First, ambient energy soaks into the wood of the wand.
Second, the core of the wand- hers has a phoenix feather- converts that energy, that idle magic, into a more usable form- specifically, into active magic.
Those two steps happen continuously, all day, every day.  The produced active magic doesn’t last long- it bleeds out of the wand in a matter of seconds, returning to the atmosphere and once again, becoming idle, ambient magic.
When a wizard takes hold of a wand, a thaumic connection is formed between the wizard’s hand and the wand.  This connection mostly just enables the wand- aligns the wand’s internal thaumic channels, making it usable for spells.  A wand that has bonded itself to the wizard- ‘chosen’ them- will achieve a much stronger alignment effect than one that hasn’t.
When the wizard then wants to cast a spell…  They can say the incantation aloud, verbally telling the wand what they want it to do, and it does it.  Alternately, with a silent incantation, the wizard is able to leverage the thaumic connection to deliver the instructions instead- but it’s still an incantation.
Which reminds her.  When various people named a new spell she wasn’t familiar with, she’d evaluated it not by analyzing the incantation or looking it up, but by pulling her wand out, sucking all the magic out of her wand with her unique advantage, and using the spell.  It’d then have no power, so it’d do absolutely nothing- but the matrix would still form for her to observe before it shattered.
The difficulty is to get the wizard’s innate magic to flow into and through the wand on demand…  without temporarily fusing the wand and the wizard into a single entity on an ethereal level.
She’s pretty sure the secret lies in exactly how the thaumic bond it uses for channel alignment works.  And while it’s taking time to penetrate that, she’s doing it.
“Someone’s speaking death threats in Snake,” her radio mutters suddenly in her ear.  She recognizes the voice instantly- it’s Agent Soft Touch, who goes on to name her location…  and where she heard the serpentine offender.
She immediately abandons her work, formulates and activates a snake-to-Equestrian translation matrix (Thanks to her translation spells on the Gate, nopony seems to realize they’re not actually using Equestrian on this side), and teleports down to Soft Touch’s location.  Too bad she’s the only Agent capable of using matrices like that- it relies on her unique advantage to function.
And if Soft Touch is announcing death threats, that means at least two things:
First, that she can’t find the creature making them, and
Second, that she believes the creature making them poses a significant threat to someone.
She has work to do.





Filch bursts from the tapestry, eyes scanning for whoever set off Mrs. Norris.
…  It’s Potter and Granger, coming back all muddy from Quidditch practice.
He sighs.  He’s pretty sure he’s got the flu, but hasn’t had the opportunity to see Madam Pomfrey about it yet.  At least the frog brains someone plastered all over the ceiling in that dungeon had come off quickly with that cleaning spell.
Speaking of which, he doesn’t know when they teach that spell to students…  He notices Granger is wearing one of those ‘radio’ things.
“Um-!” Potter begins.
He cuts the boy off, pointing his wand.  “Scourgify!”  All the mud on their robes disappears.
Granger blinks, surprised.  “That seems useful,” she mutters.  She glances at Potter.  “Maybe we should learn it?”
Filch raises an eyebrow.  “When do they teach it to students?” he asks.
Granger blinks.  “...  Fourth year.  And it didn’t look too complex, either.  More like something we could have taught towards the end of last year.”  She glances up at Filch.  “Which was our first year.  But it’s in the Standard Book of Spells, Grade Four…”
He heaves another sigh.  “Well…”
“Didn’t you order that one?” Potter asks Granger.
She nods.  “It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow.”





“Candy Stripes?”
Lyra lets out a groan, through her mouthful of shepherd's pie.  It’s Halloween, and she’s right in the middle of a conversation with Percy, between bites of her pie.  She’d noticed Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s absences- but only because she knew to look for them; Agent Index Eye had informed her of the death day party the trio had planned to go to.
She finishes her bite, and raises her hand to her radio instead of answering Percy’s question about her progress on her wand-based Equestrian magic project.  She squeezes the button.  “What is it?”  She releases the key and looks up at Percy.  “Sorry, this might take a minute.”
“Harry’s hearing something neither of us can-!” Index Eye continues, cutting off suddenly.
Index Eye doesn’t stop transmitting suddenly, though- meaning, Lyra hears Harry’s yell through the radio.  “It’s going to kill someone!”
Index Eye starts talking again.  “We’re in…  Papa Alpha Seven, and climbing.”
Lyra winces.  “This might take a long time.”  She’s about to start transmitting again someone else speaks.
“Tango Charlie to point.”  Bonbon, ordering the designated Team Charlie to meet the trio and provide protection in the event of anything actually dangerous.  It does seem Hermione’s original, slightly-worried request escalated rather quickly to a potential mission.
At least she’s not on Team Charlie.  No; she and Bonbon are both on Team Alpha.
She sighs, and lowers her hand.
“Something happening?”  Percy asks.
Lyra nods.  “Something suspicious, at the very least.  But I’m not on the team that’s been assigned to investigate.  Um, about the non-transforming magic solution.  I’m getting close, I thin-!”
She cuts off as the bottom drops suddenly out of her stomach.
“T-Tango-”
Hermione sounds frightened.  She’s containing it well, but she’s still frightened by something.  Lyra closes her eyes and concentrates, blasting her magic out in a scan of the entire castle, looking for her.  Fortunately, since the Papa Tangos rather universally have power levels far in excess of her own, despite hers being the eighth highest amongst the Equestrian students, both Hermione and Harry are easy for her to spot:  Find the pair of shining beacons that aren’t in the Great Hall.
“-Charlie-”
Lyra teleports straight to them, off to the side a little bit.  Her scan picked up one British wizard- probably Ron- and one low-power signature…  and she doesn’t want to put herself in any more danger than she has to.  She immediately performs an instinct-level scan of her immediate surroundings, to make sure she’s safe, before turning to run the last few steps to Hermione.
“-to Papa Bravo Niner,” Hermione finishes, before releasing the button.
Lyra spots the message on the wall.  “The Chamber of Secrets…?”
Hermione whirls in alarm.  “L-Lyra!”
She nods.  “And…”  She steps closer, looking at the torch bracket under the message.  It looks like Mrs. Norris…  and yes, she still has a magic signature, albeit much weaker than normal.  “Well, she’s not dead.”  She raises her hand to her second walkie.  “Dumbledore, you’re going to want to see this.  Second floor, by the girls’ bathroom.  Might want to bring Filch.”  She switches radios.  “Sweetie Drops to Papa Bravo Niner, Papa One.”
“What is going on…?” Ron asks.
Very suddenly, Bonbon appears- with Draco as her courier, it would seem.  He must have been handy- he’s not an Agent…  though, if she’s right about Silver’s Cutie Mark talent, it may not be long before he becomes an Agent.
“What is it?” Bonbon demands flatly, muscles flexing stealthily.
Lyra almost smiles; the only times when she calls a Priority One is when something is really bad.  Which it is- there’s only one enemy the Agency has ever faced that was capable of reducing the strength of anything’s magic signature without killing them:  Tirek.  And the only other known creature capable of that is the Cockatrice…  which the Agency has never faced, even on the rare Everfree mission.  But Mrs. Norris isn’t stone, and she also isn’t moving, so it’s obviously an unknown creature.
She points.  “Looks almost like Tirek’s effect.”
Bonbon nods slowly, one hand rising to her radio.  “Ahh…”  She starts transmitting.  “Echo Three.”
Bonbon goes on to assign people to redirect the student body from the passage, keep the scene clear for the investigation, but Lyra isn’t paying attention to that right now.  She glances at Harry, Ron, and Hermione.  “What happened?”  Without waiting for their answer, she turns to start inspecting Mrs. Norris.
“Harry heard a…  voice, that neither of us could hear,” Hermione begins flatly.  All traces of fear are gone from her voice, replaced by an unnatural calm.  She will also have understood when Bonbon declared an emergency- and is responding in perhaps the most favorable manner that an untrained Agent like herself could:  Separating herself from her emotions.
The first thing Lyra notices about Mrs. Norris’ signature, once she starts digging, is that it’s stable, unlike the gradually deteriorating result of Tirek’s drain or the Cockatrice.  As such, whatever did this is not lethal…  unless it has another attack in its repertoire.
“It was moving up, through the ceiling, so we followed it.” Hermione continues, uninterrupted by Lyra’s fast-paced thoughts.  “Apparently, it was going to kill someone.”  She looks at Harry.
Harry nods.  “It was saying ‘let me rip you, let me kill you’... then ‘I smell blood’.”
Lyra scowls, pausing in her examination of Mrs. Norris.  She seems to have been petrified; judging by the nature of the damage to her magic matrix, the avenue of attack was her eyes.  She looks up at Harry.  “Did it sound like…”  She activates her Equestrian-to-Snake translation spell, and speaks in Equestrian.  The spell will translate it into Snake before it even leaves her lips.  “Let me rip, let me kill.”  She cuts the spell and nods; Harry’s reaction to the words was telling enough.
“That- That was…  close, um…  Little different, but-!”
“It’s called Parseltongue on this side of the Gate,” Lyra interrupts, examining Mrs. Norris’ magic matrix once again.  She wants to find out how complete the petrification is- is she truly rock solid, or could she have been repositioned after the attack?  She finds her answer; she truly is rock solid.  Meaning, her position is a clue.  She looks up at the trio.  Ron seems to understand, but both Harry and Hermione seem confused.  “Snake language.”
Harry blinks.  “What-!?”
Lyra nods; in the corner of her vision, she spots Dumbledore rounding the corner into the passage.  “Voldemort was-
“Don’t say the name!” Ron utters.
Lyra looks at him, and speaks in tandem with Bonbon.  “Voldemort!”
Then she turns back to Harry.  “Voldemort was a Parselmouth- a wizard capable of speaking Parseltongue- and so when he inadvertently left a piece of his soul on you, he granted that rare gift to you as well.”  She looks at the message on the wall.  “The rare gift that Salazar Slytherin was known for.”
“What about you?” Hermione asks.
She shakes her head.  “I used a spell.”  She looks back at Mrs. Norris, and starts tracing her gaze.  “It so happens that, just before midnight on the first Saturday of September, Soft Touch heard someone speaking death threats in Snake just upstairs.  We weren’t able to localize it.”  She identifies the puddle Mrs. Norris is looking at, under that door into…  the girls’ bathroom.  Interesting.  She glances up at Hermione.  “That’s her unique talent- she can understand, and be understood by, anything.”  She steps towards the puddle, her magic flashing through the door to scan for anything.  “It would seem whatever attacked her reflected off that puddle.”
“Attacked?” Dumbledore asks.
Bonbon points.
“Petrified,” Lyra states, “but stable.”
“That’s out of order,” Ron mutters suddenly, as Lyra reaches for the door handle.
She pauses, one hand on the handle, to smile at him.  “And to an Agent, ‘Out of Order’ means ‘Look Here First’.”  Her smile becomes a grin as she opens the door to step inside.  “Besides, this is where the attack came from.  I traced it.”
Dumbledore raises an eyebrow.  “Oh?”
“And whenever Filch gets here,” Lyra calls back through the open door, while she pads gently through the puddles, “tell him all we need to restore Mrs. Norris is a mandrake draft- and unless I miss my guess, the ones Professor Sprout had us repotting in September should be ready by the end of the year?”  She makes it a question, the door held open by her magic, as she searches the bathroom for anything suspicious…  other than the great big puddle all over the floor.
“What’s this about-  My Cat!”
Lyra smirks at Filch’s exclamation; she’d been forewarned of his approach by one of the guards Bonbon assigned at the ends of the passages.  “Oh, hello,” she greets.  “You’re…  Myrtle, right?”
The surprised ghost in front of her glares at her.  “Y-You’ve come to laugh at me, haven’t you?” she cries.
She scowls.  “No, why would I do that?  Besides, I actually wanted to ask if you’ve seen anything in here over the last, oh, ten minutes or so.”
“N-No, I’ve been t-too busy crying in my toilet,” she pouts.
Lyra winces, opening her mouth to speak- but Hermione, who had followed her in, speaks first.  “Peeves chased her out of the Death Day party right before we left,” she states.  “He was…  ahh…”
Lyra nods.  “Being Peeves.”  She glances at Myrtle.  “Would I be correct to assume you came straight here when that happened?”
Myrtle nods confusedly.
Lyra plucks a bright red telephone out of thin air, the shimmering golden cord hanging down and off to the side, into nowhere, and puts it to her ear.  It’s the spell she’d set up right around this time last year, for communication with Peeves.  Shortly after he realized just how painful it can be to get in a busy Agent’s way.
Peeves only takes about two seconds to answer the phone; he will have gotten a similar appearance near him, complete with a fancy ringtone he’d chosen, despite the entire phone being a thaumic construct.  “Peevesies’ Enterprises, dealing mayhem to those who ask since four oh two in the morning,” Peeves greets, over the noise of what she assumes is the death day party.
“Hi Peeves!  I hear you followed Myrtle out of the death day party earlier?”
“Ah, yes?”
“Did you happen to follow her all the way back to her bathroom?”
“I did, Miss, I most certainly did.”  He sounds proud of himself.
“While you were up here, did you notice anything odd?”
“This castle is full of odd,” he retorts, “especially around me.  But yeah, someone wrote on the wall.  And someone was hissing in that bathroom.”
Lyra’s eyebrows shoot up.  “Did you see who it was?”
“No,” he answers shortly.  “That’s a girl’s bathroom.  I can’t go in there!”
Lyra’s eyebrows return back down, one raised slightly in a Really? expression.  Then she straightens her expression again.  “Ahh, okay.  I take it you left immediately?”
“That I did.”
“Do you happen to know where Mrs. Norris was at that time?”
“Mrs.-?  Isn’t that Filchie’s cat?”
“Yes, that she is.”
“I do not, why?”
“She was found petrified, hanging from the torch bracket under those words on the wall, a matter of minutes after you and Myrtle left the death day party.”
“Oh…  I didn’t see anything.  I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Thanks- but be careful.  Whatever attacked her used her eyes as its avenue of attack.”
“Got it!”  He hangs up.
She drops her phone back into the air, and looks up at Myrtle, ignoring Hermione’s stare.  Right, Hermione doesn’t know about that spell- as a matter of fact, very few Agents do; she’s putting that communications failure up to the ‘foalification’ the Equestrians were subject to last year.  “It would seem it would have happened immediately after you arrived back here- did you see anything on your way in?”
Myrtle shakes her head.  “I think there was someone in here, but I don’t remember anything about them.  I wasn’t looking.”
Lyra scowls.  “Well…  Hmm.  I guess that’s about as far as we’re going to get right now.”  She glances back up at Myrtle.  “Peeves said he heard them hissing in here- may I ask that, if you hear someone hissing in here, you take a quick peek- quickly and quietly- before hiding back in your toilet, preferably without making a splash?”
Myrtle blinks.  “You make it sound like I might die,” she states, sounding amused.  “But I’m already dead.”
Lyra shrugs.  “I don’t know yet whether or not ghosts are immune to the attack- and I’m sure you’ll agree, I’d rather not find out the hard way.  Add that it might only take a glance of the actual creature doing the attack- I can confirm, this was not a spell- to, ah, be attacked…”
Myrtle nods.  “Makes sense.”  Then she tilts her head.  “Would that, uh, ‘Papa Tango’ of yours help?”
Lyra blinks.  “Probably not, but that is a good point.”  She rubs her chin with one hand.  “I have gotten complaints about a mildly uninteresting History professor who happens to be a ghost…”
Myrtle snickers.  Dumbledore, who had stepped in behind Hermione, chuckles.
“A ghost’s magic matrix differs rather widely from a wizard’s…  It may still be compatible with the Papa Tango, though- I’ll have to look into it.”  She turns to Dumbledore; there’s something else that needs addressing before the Agency meeting in fifteen minutes.  “And I have to ask, is there a reason this bathroom doesn’t have a floor drain?”