//------------------------------//
// Chapter 20 
// Story: On the Implications of Parallel Worlds 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Hermione scowled at the assembled class, before turning to Bonbon to mutter quietly.  “Where’s Malfoy?”
Bonbon shook her head slightly, answering in a similar mutter.  “He was bedridden for unknown duration by a severe reaction to Lyra’s…  thing.”
“Oh.”





“Here, Blinky.  Please take these to the instructors named…  but only when they’re not in class.”
The house-elf bowed, accepting the small stack of medical excuses.  “Will do, Madam!”  Then she disappeared with a sharp crack.
Madam Pomfrey sighed.  She knew the elf understood what she meant, and would accomplish her mission flawlessly, so that wasn’t why she’d sighed.  The reason she’d sighed was a combination of the fact that she’d needed to send so many medical excuses…  and that it had taken so long for her to track down Draco’s class schedule.  Had the Equestrians not come, it would have been as simple as finding the first year Slytherin schedule, and sending the notes to the appropriate professors…  but with the Equestrians, there were about three thousand student instructors running around…  and since she only had class listings, she had to search down every single one of them to identify which ones Draco was part of, and tell who she needed to alert.
This definitely needed fixing.
She took a deep breath, and looked out her open office door into the wardroom, at the curtain- surrounded bed that was Draco’s.  She didn’t know why his reaction to Lyra’s whatever-it-was had turned him into a small, shiny silver filly, but it had.  His headache had apparently been amplified massively at the same time, so she was fairly sure Draco didn’t realize he had been transformed like that.  She did, and as soon as he had transformed, she’d gotten out the privacy curtains.  She didn’t need anyone thinking he was an animal, or laughing at him.
She did find it rather interesting how, no matter how tangled and messy they got, it only took one stroke from her hand- not even a brush- to restore the perfectly neat brushed look to both his mane and tail.  Nevermind how the two royal blue stripes splitting his otherwise shiny silver mane and tail into even thirds were always clearly defined- all the blue hairs stayed in the blue stripe, all the silver hairs stayed on either side.  Even when she deliberately pushed them out of place, they just fell right back into place.
She’d helped groom the…  filly since his transformation.  She could tell, from the tiny twitches in his facial expression and other bits and pieces of body language making it through the apparently debilitating headache, that it provided him a small relief from the pain.  Not enough for him to properly awaken, but some.
And of course, food.  As she’d suspected would be the case from the moment she saw what he’d turned into, her diagnostic spells had taken half an hour to verify that he could only metabolize vegetables and water.  So, even though he made noises- with that cute feminine voice- about wanting some good meat to eat, she’d only given him vegetables and water.  By her best guess, meats- or any animal products, including milk- would mess his digestive system up…  and either poison him, or cause him to vomit.  Or both.
On the other hand, though, her spells had discovered enzymes for metabolizing foods that would normally be poisonous to humans.  That was one of the things that had caused her search for his schedule to take just over a full week- she’d been fascinated by that discovery, and had scanned most the rest of his body.  It seemed very much like he could come into direct contact with and ingest almost any plant, including things like poison ivy, without issue.
She found herself hoping that the transformation was just another temporary symptom; she did not fancy explaining why Draco had been turned into a filly…  and couldn’t be turned back to a human; she’d already verified that any kind of transformation magic would very quickly wear off, if it worked at all.
Speaking of which, there was another kind of magic that didn’t seem to be affecting him very much.
Back before the term started, she’d been contacted by his father, who had explained his special need.
Because the boy carried a family curse.
His hair would, if allowed to grow much at all, grind his scalp.  So, he’d had to come to her twice a week to be magically shaven bald- and he also had to wear a wig.
Then, he’d been turned into a filly…  and his mane, tail, and coat were all silky smooth and very soft to the touch.
The curse appeared to have been disrupted.  She prayed, for his sake, that it had been broken completely, not just suspended.  She hadn’t tried shaving his mane, tail, or fur- but she had placed monitoring spells to alert her to the first sign of injury, to allow her to come shave it the moment it became subject to that curse…  if it ever did.
She rose from her seat, and headed over to check on him.  As expected, he was still resting; his next meal wasn’t for another two hours, and assuming the seventy-two hour cycle that the symptoms had demonstrated so far continued, he wasn’t due for the next set for another twenty hours or so.
So she returned to her desk, stacked up all the class schedules, prepared thirteen thousand pieces of parchment and folders to put them in, and started down the schedules, creating class schedules for the individual students…  for her records, so she knew who to inform next time.
She’d have to ask Professor McGonagall if it was possible to have duplicates of the individual students’ schedules sent to her at the beginning of each year, so she could file them for quick retrieval if something happened.





Lucius Malfoy scowled at his breakfast.
“D-Did Dobby forget something?”
He closed his eyes, and let out a groan.  “No.  Now go.”
It wasn’t anything the elf had forgotten.  No; it was over a week since his last letter from Draco, who had been sending him letters almost daily…  then this silence.
He’d even sent two to his son, but gotten no response.
He let out a sigh, and ate his food.
After breakfast, he would write a letter to the school matron, ask her if Draco was still doing okay.  If he was still showing up for his regular haircuts.





Madam Pomfrey let out a sigh, upon reading the morning mail, and set it aside to start getting herself breakfast.
She hadn’t expected Lucius to ask about his son…  and she knew that, if she told him the whole truth, there was a good chance the boy would face undue hardship.  She wasn’t sure how much she could tell him- and to top it off, she knew better than to try lying or stonewalling; the man had a right to know.
The afternoon prior, she’d been with Draco for the seventy two hour mark again.  He’d transformed again- into a human girl.  He’d kept his mane from when he’d been a filly; it became his new waist-length hair…  and she’d checked, it was still silky smooth.
Meanwhile, he’d responded to what appeared to be a severe chest pain.
So she’d stayed up the entire night, studying his new form- she’d noticed about two minutes after the transformation that he still had all vegetarian teeth.  He could still only eat vegetables and water, but it looked like meat and other stuff would only give him an upset stomach, rather than a full-on allergic reaction like before.
Aside from that, she’d noticed that his headache seemed to be fading- her estimates put it fading completely at about twenty four hours after this latest transformation. .
She looked out into the wardroom again after her meal.  Ever since the headache had started, Draco had been completely unable to sleep.  She prayed, for his sake, that the pain would go away soon, and that he’d be able to sleep again.  She was even willing to keep him in, under her medical excuse, for a day or two after he made a full recovery, to let him catch up on his sleep!
She looked back at Lucius’ letter, and tilted her head.  It’d be two days before any reply to anything she sent got back, and that’d be the day of the seventy two hour mark.
She took a deep breath.  If she told him his son had been turned into a horse, or into a girl, he’d probably flip out.  But, she didn’t have to tell him the whole truth; as a matter of fact, he’d only really asked if the boy had been showing up for his haircuts.
She would tell him that he had been caught in a minor magical disaster a week ago, and had been recovering in the infirmary since.  She’d tell him she didn’t know when he would be fit for discharge, but that she expected it to be soon.
Which she did expect it to be soon.  The symptoms seemed to be fewer now, plus he was truly human, save only the vegetarian-only diet.  His magic seemed to be inactive, but that fit Lyra’s description rather well- she could discharge him while his magic was still inactive, once all the rest of the symptoms disappeared, so long as he made daily visits to make sure he was still recovering properly.
She heaved a sigh.  It didn’t feel right, but it was the best option she had.
She reached for a fresh piece of parchment.





Ginny Weasley stared out her bedroom window.
She wasn’t really staring out the window, of course; that was simply the direction her eyes were pointing.
She was contemplating.
It was something she’d contemplated many times over the last few weeks.
Should she go with the flow, and marry Harry Potter?
Should she instead try and break that marriage contract?  Follow her heart?
Should she write to the Ministry and ask for it to be cancelled?  It’d never actually be cancelled- Dumbledore and her mother would make sure of that- but her disagreement with it would be recorded.  It would be recorded forever- and that record would haunt her for the rest of her life.  That was the main reason she hadn’t done it already.
But then, especially once Harry Potter realized she had fallen for another man, would it be possible for them to be friends?
As near as she could tell, that answer was no.
That thought, that she would be forced to choose between her mother and her heart, had reduced her to tears for a week.
Nowadays, it still put tears in her eyes whenever she thought about it, but her mother- and the world- needed her to stay functioning, so she had determinedly suppressed those feelings.  It wasn’t easy- such was her curse- but she could do it.  She’d decided to declare that answer to be a yes, to herself and to the world.  If she had to, she would push Harry off a cliff when nobody was looking.  After stunning him, if he could apparate.  Or maybe tie him up in the basement.
Well, no, she wouldn’t, but she might just run away, grab that boy her heart had called out to, and leave the country with him.  Maybe- maybe even find out where all those new transfer students came from, that necessitated such a large train, and move to wherever that was.
She heaved a sigh.
She could still remember that boy with perfect clarity.  Such was her curse- or, in this case, she was more inclined to call it her blessing.  She would be able to recognize him on sight, completely independent of any pulls her heart made.
He was…  imperfect, to say the least.  He’d looked terribly undernourished- a little stunted, definitely small for his age; he was smaller than her.  Something that her mother would have fixed as a matter of course, were he to come visit.
But seeing all his numerous scars and the way his glasses were held together with a lot of plastic tape- it couldn’t have been very easy to see through them- told a story of its own.
He had been mistreated.  Underfed.  And so on.
But he had persevered.
He had an inner strength to him, that she had- rather disappointingly- found absent in too many.
Like Ron.  Sure, he was good at chess- but with anything else, he’d chicken out when the going got tough.  It was often only by threatening to tell their mother, or having one of the older brothers present, that she’d get him to stick around long enough to finish a task that had been assigned to them.
She sighed again.
She wondered if that boy shared in her curse, or not.
Her curse…
She shuddered.  She always did, when she thought about it.  She could still remember when she’d gotten it with perfect clarity.





It was the morning of her eighth birthday.  Ginnerva Weasley could feel that, even though she could also feel that she hadn’t awoken yet.  It was a strange feeling she’d never experienced before.
She opened her eyes.
She could see…  white.  She sat up, and looked around.
Endless…  white.  As strange as it was, she found it oddly calming to look at, rather than the alarm she knew she should be feeling.
She was lying, now sitting, on a circular platform of this whiteness.  It was almost like a bed, though it was soft to the touch and as solid as stone.  She even looked down- and found that she was wearing some kind of strange, pure white robes.  Even her skin seemed to be pure white.
She crawled to the edge of the platform, stepped off of it, and stood up, looking around.
The platform, once she was off of it, sank into oblivion.  She was then standing on a featureless white floor, looking around at a dense white fog that obstructed her view any more than about fifteen feet away in any direction.  The fog seemed to stand still when she moved around, like it was a fifteen-foot radius half-sphere of clarity in the middle.  She made her way to the edge, and tried peering into the fog, but it resisted her.  She pushed at it, but couldn’t get through it.
She tilted her head.  It was strange, and even though she knew that meant she was trapped, she didn’t feel trapped.  Did that mean there was a different point in all this fog that would let her through?
She tried that, and started clambering along the edge of the fog.
She was at the point of trying to climb it- without much success- when she heard a distant voice drifting out of the fog.  It sounded almost like it was the wind speaking, though there didn’t seem to be any wind.
“Ginnerva?”
She looked in the direction it came from, moved to the center of her space, and called out in response.  “Hello?”
“Ginnerva?”
“That’s me,” she answered.  “Who’s there?”
“I am an ancient goddess of old,” the voice spoke.  “I am not here; this realm, that you see, is the inside of your mind.”
She looked around.  “It’s so…  white.”
“It’s so pure,” the voice corrected.  “You are so pure.  It’s very rare, any more, to find one so pure.”
“Okay?”
The voice almost seemed to chuckle.  “And you’re also very much a Gryffindor at heart.  Good.”
She nodded.  “Well yeah.  My family has always been in Gryffindor.”
This time, it truly did chuckle.  “Dear girl, I have a very important mission for you, should you wish to take it.”
“Alright,” she nodded.  “I’ll do it.”
It paused.  “I have not told you what it is yet.”  It was not a question.
She nodded.  “I know.”
“Yet you are already agreeing to it?”
“Yes.”
“Alright then.  I like your determination.”  A pause.  “Your mission…  will be to reintroduce wizardkind to the muggle world- and vice versa.  Don’t rush yourself; you’ve got an entire lifetime to do that in.  Wizards need to realize that muggle society is ready for wizardkind to return to it- and the muggles deserve to be paid for what wizardkind is taking from them.”
She nodded.  “...  Okay.  Um…”
It wasn’t done yet.  “To help you in that mission, I give you the gift…  of vision.”
Something seemed to touch the inside of her head, and the fog blasted out in all directions, vanishing without a trace.  She looked around the now enormous plane of whiteness, all the way out to the brightly lit distance, and found herself feeling suddenly lonely.  “Woah.”  She spotted a spark of light some fifty feet behind her just moments before it spoke again.
“You will now remember anything and everything in perfect detail…  and see into the souls of those around you.  As a side effect, it should be distinctly easy for you to tell when you have found true love.  You will also be able to come back here whenever you want.”
Then it sparkled… and disappeared, leaving a glowing white scar floating in the air.
She sat on the endless, featureless surface, and wrapped her arms around her legs, somehow understanding that the goddess would not be able to hear her anymore…  nor she the goddess.  “Why am I…  alone?”
She closed her eyes…  and opened them again, willing herself to wake up.
It worked.  She sat up in her bed, looked around her room.
The lonely feeling was still there.