//------------------------------//
// Chapter 11 
// Story: On the Implications of Parallel Worlds 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Hermione stared at the solid metal barrier between platforms nine and ten.
It was time.  Well, it was two minutes past ten in the morning, but neither she nor her parents were fans of being anywhere close to late.
“You ready?” Emma, her mom, asked her.
She took a deep breath.
“We can come onto the station with you,” Dan, her dad, reassured.  She knew that; so long as they are touching her- or any other witch or wizard- the first time they go through the barrier, they should be able to pass through it at will, just like she should be able to.
She nodded.  “Yeah.  I’m ready.  I think.”  She resisted the urge to glance up at them.
Ever since she’d opened up some of the extracurricular books she’d gotten from Flourish and Blotts, she’d been dreading the day she’d board the train to Hogwarts.
The day she’d next meet the boy Dudley’s gang liked chasing around the schoolyard.  She’d seen him clearly before, knew his name- but never thought much of him.
Until she’d read Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts…  and learned that he was famous.  Like, the famous Harry Potter.
She dreaded meeting him, and having him condemn her for changing the color of that teacher’s wig…  or for not standing up for him.  Not that she could have stopped Dudley or any single one of his gang members if she tried, as she never had that fine of control over her ‘Accidental Magic’ and has always been on the weak side, physically.  Besides, she had no idea how Harry survived some of the beatings Dudley had given him.  She’d studied a couple of them from afar, for her research paper- the one that the teacher gave her a hundred and ten percent on- and concluded that she would have been killed several times over, had she been in his place.
It wasn’t a happy thought.  She hoped- prayed- she wouldn’t have to enlist a few of the ‘Etrah’ Equestrians to protect her from him.  Which, actually, she had good hopes for that- the times she’d seen, he never really fought back with any force.  The blows he’d given Dudley and gang when they’d caught him, before they could pin his arms, amounted to panicked blows.  And, by her math, they might’ve bruised her, had he been attacking her, but that would have been it.
Perhaps it was how he always seemed so small, almost stunted, at school?  Perhaps he was undernourished, so his muscles couldn’t grow properly, leaving him understrength?  Or maybe it was something he did just because, when he already knew he was screwed?
She shook her head to clear it.  Something to worry about later…  hopefully.  “Okay.  I…  Can we go slowly?  Just in case it doesn’t work?”
“You sure you’re ready, Hermione?” Dan asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she stated, and started forwards at a steady walk.
Now that she was thinking about it again, the Equestrians…  had a very peculiarly named country.  Did Equestria have anything to do with the Equestrian peoples she’d found in her books?  Was it named after a large population of them?
She was drawing closer to the barrier, and focused her mind on it, losing speed.  If it didn’t work, and she crashed into it, she didn’t want anything to go flying.  She felt her parents’ comforting hands on her shoulders- and as much as she knew they needed it to make it across the barrier, she also knew they only needed the barest of touches, and were deliberately going beyond that.
She counted down the last few feet, then inches, in her mind, ready for whatever the transit would feel like…  or the collision.
Then, just as suddenly as a collision would have been, the scenery around her changed.
The transition was seamless; she was just suddenly on the platform.
Both her parents were looking around, trying to reassert their location; she quickly joined them.
While the station outside had been the normal hustle and bustle of the train station, Platform Nine and Three Quarters- identified by the wrought iron archway she’d just come in through- was pandemonium.  There were only a few Equestrians visible, off on one far side of the station, doing something with a couple of strange towers with what looked like chains of symbols glowing all over them.  Lyra seemed to be inspecting and manipulating them with threads of golden light from her fingers, while Bonbon looked to be on the phone…  which Hogwarts: A History informed her wouldn’t work at Hogwarts.  She found herself briefly hoping, for their sake, that they read that as well, and leave their technology at home.
The rest of the station had what looked like fully grown witches and wizards running up and down it and shouting things at each other, in front of the train.
She stopped to look at the train, blinking a few times.
There was a scarlet steam locomotive, with its tender, with the words Hogwarts Express written on the sides.
There were nine matching scarlet passenger coaches with golden livery, the Hogwarts emblem, and so on.
Then there were dozens, hundreds, of passenger coaches coupled behind those.  Some of them were a different shape, and at least one still had ‘Amtrak’ written on it, a team of wizards working quickly to turn it a plain scarlet.
And in front of the scarlet locomotive were four bright yellow diesel-electric monstrosities, ‘Union Pacific’ written across their sides, and a massive black steam locomotive at the head with its equally massive tender.
She blinked twice.
Why, exactly, was the Hogwarts Express pulled by one passenger locomotive and five freight locomotives, four of which were diesel-electric?
One of the calls going up from the wizards running back and forth down the train- interesting, it looked like they had extended the platform by quite a ways, and in a hurry at that- then caught her attention:  “Ack!  The first ones are here!”
“Are we…  early?” Dan muttered.
One of the Equestrians trotted over- one with a teal stripe in her wavy purple hair.  “Hello!  Coming a bit early, I guess?”
“Er, yeah,” Dan answered the girl.  “Who might you be?”
The girl blinked, looking taken aback, for about a second, before she shook it off.  “Oh, sorry.  I’m…  used to everyone knowing who I am.  The name’s Starlight Glimmer- and you would be?”
“Emma and Dan Granger,” Dan gestured to Emma.  “And this is our daughter, Hermione.”
“Hermione?” She sounded mildly surprised.  “Sweet!”  She offered her hand for Hermione to shake.  “Nice to meet you!  I didn’t get to participate in any of Pinkie’s parties, but Lyra had a lot to say about you- and all good.”  A sigh.  “I’m almost certainly going to be a Slytherin, though, and she said there’s about no chance you’ll end up there.  Regardless, let’s have a good, fun year, eh?”
Hermione grinned, and chuckled lightly, accepting the hand…  and wondering which tribe Starlight belonged to.  Whichever one it was, she could feel a certain strength to the girl’s hand, though it was a metered strength.  So, Aether or Etrah, then.  The ones with strength boost.  “Nice to meet you too,” she muttered.
Then Starlight glanced over at the train.  “And yeah, you’re a bit early.  We asked- they normally start seeing the first few early birds in about…”  She glanced at her wristwatch, which immediately demonstrated itself to be a smartwatch.  “Twenty-five minutes or so.”  She glanced back up at the train.  “So, they’ll be ready for us to start boarding in another fifteen minutes, according to what they told us earlier.”
“...  Ahh,” she muttered.  “So, what’re you doing here?”
She shrugged.  “Security, mostly.  Lyra’s here right now, so I don’t really need to worry about it- but it’s my job to keep people off her stuff while she’s at the other side.”
“So, what is she doing?”
“Mm?”  She turned back to the odd pillars, and grinned.  “She and Twilight are one-upping old Starswirl the Bearded, and building a portal that Equestrians can walk through to get from our base directly to this station.  And only Equestrians- any non-Equestrians that tried passing would simply get wet, since they’re making the portal surface out of water.”  She shrugged.  “The concept build in their backyards last week worked flawlessly, so they’ve been working on this much bigger one.  At this point, she’s just pentuple-checking her work here, while Twilight gets the other end.  I think she’s doing it mostly just to make Twilight happy- with her perfect recall, she doesn’t need to look it over again to be sure it’s perfect.”  She grinned.  “And- don’t tell Twilight- she gave it a trial run last night, it’s already confirmed to be working nicely.”
“Okay.”  She looked up at the train.  “Do you know why there’s so many freight locomotives on a passenger train?”
Starlight grinned.  “Yep!  That’s because that’s how many they needed to pull the number of cars they had to tack onto that thing in order to fit twelve and a half thousand students.”  She snorted.  “Speaking of which, the train is about four and a half miles long, if you happen to fancy walking from one end to the other.  We’ve arranged for a magic-based speed-travel, so the Equestrians can take all the trailing cars, and the non-Equestrians can take the lead cars.  Feel free to mix, if you like, but that way everyone can get onto the train in a reasonable amount of time.”
“Ahh,” she muttered.  “I…”  She looked at the train again.  “...  Did they run out of space or something?”
Starlight chuckled.  “Heh heh, you could say, yes.  Thing is, because Lyra opened the gateway from Equestria to your world a couple months back, Hogwarts’ attendance lists changed rather dramatically.  I understand they normally only have about three hundred students at the school each year, and this year, we’ve boosted that count by at least forty times.  Speaking of which…”  She turned back to the other Equestrians, and called out to them.  “Lyra!”
Lyra looked up from the tower thing, wearing an expression of immense boredom that vanished in an instant, before she came jogging over.  “Oh, hey, Hermione!  Yes, Starlight?”
Starlight grinned.  “Well, I just told her about Hogwarts’ attendance anomaly, and I believe you had something you wanted to ask?”
Lyra grinned.  “Yep!  How much did you cover?”
“Just the general information, really.”
“Hmm,” Lyra muttered, looking at Hermione for a second, before dropping her hand back down from her chin.  “Well, Hermione, you know about how massively we’ve overloaded Hogwarts this year, right?”
“Uhh,” she muttered.  “She said attendance went up by at least forty times?”
Lyra nodded.  “Yeah, thereabouts.  We don’t know the exact number, because we don’t have attendance counts for non-Equestrian students, but…”  She shrugged.  “Anyways, we’ve been in contact with Hogwarts over the last month.  They haven’t been able to hire any additional teachers- and expecting the teachers they have to manage all of us would be expecting the impossible of them- there just aren’t enough hours in a week, even if food, sleep, homework grading, and so on all took no time at all.”
Hermione blinked.  “Then…”
Dan tilted his head.  “Does that mean they’ll be dropping students?”
Lyra smiled, and shook her head.  “No- that’s what we’ve been working with them about.  Many of our Equestrian students are already masters in their own right- and even of the ones that aren’t, many of us will pick up new material virtually instantly, and/or be gifted in that particular material.  So, we’ve set up an extended teaching program with the Hogwarts staff, so they only need to teach one class, and we’ll handle the rest, passing on the lessons we receive to our peers, such that everyone gets a good education out of it.
“Of course, in an effort to expand the talent pool, among other things, we haven’t restricted that search to Equestrians.  We haven’t been able to interact very much with very many of the non-Equestrian students, but of the ones we have been able to meet, we’ve been able to identify two that would be good matches for that program.”
“Uhh…” Dan muttered.
“Are you telling me…?” Hermione muttered.
“That you’re one of those two?  Yes.  It’s completely optional, don’t worry- and you wouldn’t be alone at the head of that classroom, either.  You’d have at least one other student-teacher with you, to help cover any deficiencies and provide a quality learning experience for all involved.”  She shrugged.  “And a crash course with some of our finest before your first class, so you would at least know what to expect.”
“So…  what happens if I say yes?”
Lyra shrugged.  “Then you’re on the list.  I can’t guarantee anything until after the sorting ceremony, but I can say that if you say yes, you will most likely be tapped for such a role.  If you say no, I can guarantee you won’t.  And the deadline for that decision would be bedtime tonight, if you want to think on it a bit first.  I’m sorry I wasn’t able to reach out to you sooner- we only finalized the agreement with the school late last night.”
She could almost feel her parents raising their eyebrows; they know her.
“No, no,” she began.  “I’ll do it.  I was just surprised.”  She looked up at her parents, who were smiling down at her.  “I’m going to have a good year.”