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// Chapter 1:  Gringotts 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
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“Ready for a new year?” Professor Dumbledore asked cheerfully, once the last professor in the school had entered the staffroom.  It was time for the annual school preparation meeting, before breakfast on the morning after the letters went out.
Professor Snape glanced at the empty seat that had held a different person each year for the last four decades.  “I notice we’re still short a Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor,” he began.
“Ahh, yes,” Dumbledore chuckled.  “I thought you’d notice that.  Professor Quirrell will be rejoining us this year as such- but he won’t be arriving until early August.”
Professor McGonagall scowled in response.  “Even though he has to know what happens?”
Dumbledore shrugged.  “I’m sure he, like all forty before him, believes he will be the one to change that.  And it remains to be seen whether he actually will, does it not?”
McGonagall sighed.  “I don’t suppose he told us when he wants his schedule, did he?” she asked.
Dumbledore smiled.  “He tells me he’ll take whatever we have to offer.  Lemon drop?”
McGonagall ignored the offer and let out a sigh of relief.  “Good.  That last one was a headache.  Anyone have any new scheduling preferences?”  She glanced around the room.
Heads shook.
She finished with a short nod.  “Excellent.  I’ll have the class schedules distributed as soon as we’re done.”
There was a palpable feeling of relief in the air at those words.  Usually, and especially the prior year, the DADA instructors tended to be very specific…  and didn’t seem to like settling on one thing.
Dumbledore chuckled.  “Alright.  We’ve also got our materials budget from the Ministry this year- and Quirinus has already opted out.  We have forty-two galleons and eighteen knuts for general classroom supplies…”  He looked up at Professor Snape.  “And only sixty-three galleons, four sickles, and two knuts for potions supplies.”
Right as Snape wrinkled his nose, the door opened to admit the caretaker.
“Ahh, Argus,” Dumbledore greeted.  “Glad you could join us.  Anything to add?”
Filch looked up at him, looking slightly perplexed.  “Huh?  Yeah.  The usual…  then, does anyone know where all the owls disappeared to?”
There was silence for almost two full seconds.
“Come again?” Dumbledore asked.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Filch added quickly.  “It’s been years since I could clean the place properly.  Only, as near as I can tell, there’s not a single owl left in the castle.  Where’d they all go?”
McGonagall scowled.  “The letters should have been sent out to the students yesterday,” she muttered doubtfully.  “Would that…?”
Filch shook his head.  “No, that’s only ever two hundred and fifty letters or so, and we’ve got just over six hundred owls.  Plus, most of ‘em are usually back by now.”





As usual, it took a couple of days before the first attendance note and accompanying letter was delivered to the staff table at breakfast.  Professor McGonagall always thought it inconvenient that muggle mail would often take a couple of days to deliver their letters.  She let out a small sigh as she accepted the note and letter from the house-elf, then unfolded the note.
Dumbledore watched her curiously as she did so.  He was always curious when it came to the students; she was unsure if it was healthy for him…  or them, for that matter.
Finally, she spoke.  “Just one,” she told Dumbledore gravely, “but she’s homeless.”
There was a collective groan at those words.  Homeless students, and otherwise muggleborn students that couldn’t pay their own way into college, had to fund their education through Hogwarts- which meant cutting into the school budget really wherever they could.  Additionally, homeless students simply didn’t receive mail- meaning, her appearing to them was usually their first word from Hogwarts.
“Where’s she at?” Dumbledore asked.
She looked back down at the note, and read the rest of the information on it.  Then, she tilted her head.  “She’s…  in Diagon Alley?  That…  that makes no sense.”
Dumbledore scowled, rubbing his chin.  “Huh.  Maybe she found it on her own?  Well, you should probably find her before she gets hurt.”
She nodded, and got up to head out immediately.  Homeless wizards were not unheard of- and in the only three cases in which they were school-age, two of them were in Diagon Alley for only a few days before taking the wrong turn down Knockturn… and meeting an unfortunate end.





One Hour Earlier…





Tom was still yawning when his first muggle-side customers of the day arrived.  When he looked over at them, he had to raise an eyebrow.  One of them, he recognized- there was no way he’d forget that strange, white and light blue hair.  The girl- Lyra- couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old, but that didn’t stop her from visiting frequently over the last couple weeks.  While she usually sat in a corner booth to read or chatted with his more regular customers, she never purchased anything.  She’d told him once that she didn’t have any wizard money.
This time, she had another girl with her.  This girl’s hair was very dark blue, with twinned pink and purple stripes running down the middle.  She also looked part curious, and part nervous- as different from Lyra, who had first come in slightly cautious but very curious, and now marched in just like everyone else.
Which reminded him.  There had been that one time when she’d tried striking up a conversation with a grumpy old wizard that was passing through.  Tom didn’t know who he was, but he must’ve decided to take her home.  He’d seized her arm…  and then, with a brilliant flash of greenish white light, she had disappeared.  He had disapparated immediately afterwards, avoiding the wrath of several other wizards throughout the pub…  then Lyra had walked in again no less than five minutes later, and cheerfully informed him that her failsafe had worked flawlessly.
She trotted up towards the bar, pausing only once to help her friend keep her balance.  “Hey Tom!”
He nodded graciously.  “Mornin’, Lyra.  Got a friend today?”
“Yup!”  She patted her friend on the shoulder.  “Meet Twilight Sparkle, soon to be Hogwarts student!”  She made it sound like an achievement.
Twilight rolled her eyes.  “Among how many others?”
She tilted her head.  “We’ve got…  almost three thousand, so far?”
“Three thousand?” Tom asked.
“Yup.  Must be a big school.”
“Ahh…”  Tom muttered.  “They normally have a total attendance of about two hundred and eighty students.”
The two girls looked at each other, then back at him.  “I hope they know what they’re getting into, then,” Lyra informed him.  “Either that…  Yeah.  There’s a post office in Diagon Alley, right?”
He nodded.
“Good.  Then we can stop at that post office to contact the school.  If they’re not going to be able to handle us all, the sooner we catch their rogue addressing spell the better.”
“Rogue addressing spell?”
Twilight nodded.  “It’s a form letter generated by a spell, probably from a list of eligible students.”  She looked at Lyra.  “We could probably pass it off as a spell error, and tell the country that they hadn’t intended to send nearly so many invitations.  Wouldn’t make po- people any happier, but it’d at least prevent a riot.”
Lyra nodded.  “True.  But I’d like to talk to the school before we start making any proclamations.”  She turned to Tom.  “Any chance you could help us through to Diagon Alley?  We don’t have wands where we’re from.”  She glanced at the door to the Alley.  “And I’m not sure which brick to tap, either.”
He chuckled, and stepped out from behind the bar.  “No problem.”  He led them into the little courtyard.  “Remember:  Three up, two across.”  He tapped the brick.
“Creative,” Twilight mused, as the archway opened.
“If you’ve got money to change, you’ll be looking for Gringotts- thataway, you can’t miss it.”  He gestured in the direction of the bank.  “Other than that, you should be able to find everything on your list in the shops on Diagon Alley, and not on any of the connecting streets.  For that matter, you’ll want to avoid those connecting streets, for safety.”
Lyra shrugged.  “If someone tries to hurt us, we’ll just find ourselves back home.  But yes, I’d rather avoid that kind of interruption to our shopping trip.”  She led Twilight through the portal.  “Well, we’ll see you on our way back through, then.  Thank you!”  She waved, and as the portal started closing, the two girls headed towards Gringotts and Tom back into his pub.





One of the tellers at the Gringotts Bank looked up as a couple of humans approached his counter.  They had both decorated their hair rather extensively, but he didn’t really care that much about humans.  No goblin did- the Treaty may protect the goblins, and bind the wizards to providing for them, but it also bound them to providing banking and currency to the wizards.  Fortunately, their pride in the indomitable nature of their bank was growing rather more rapidly than their resentment for the arrangement, preventing another war.  If there was one thing Banlor disliked more than humans, it was war.
The human with the blue and white hair spoke up first, as they stopped.
“Good morning,” it greeted cheerfully.  “You…  don’t happen to have an exchange rate already set for Equestrian bits, do you?”
He shook his head.  He prided himself in being one of the only goblins to have memorized the exchange tables.  He still checked them whenever he had to do something with anything other than wizard gold or British pounds, just to be sure he had the right number, but he could recite the whole thing off the top of his head.  It never changed, after all- engraved in stone and everything.  “No,” he said simply.
“Alright then,” the human continued.  “Where would we go to negotiate one, or would we be better off selling it as gold bullion?”
“Gold…  bullion?” he asked slowly.
It nodded, and dropped a couple small gold coins on his counter.  “Yeah.  Pure gold, nothing all that special about it.”
He lifted one of them up to peer at it closely.  It did appear to be pure, elemental gold…  and the human was wrong, the coin had a simple reinforcement spell on it to allow it to tolerate heavy impacts and pressure.  It didn’t look like a very hard spell to break.  “Huh,” he muttered.  With gold this pure, it would be very easy to make wizarding coins out of it…  but even wizard gold wasn’t this pure, making any reverse conversions nearly impossible.  “You will have to take it to our appraiser,” he told the humans, and returned the coin to the others.  “I will call someone to take you to him.”  He turned on his seat.  “Griphook!”





The goblin appraiser, Nurluff, inspected the golden coins placed in front of him by the two human girls.  “You want to…  negotiate a currency exchange with these?” he asked.  It looked like they were made of elementally pure gold worth about fifteen sickles apiece by materials.
“Yes, please,” the blue-and-white-haired one, who had introduced herself as Lyra Heartstrings, said.  The other- Twilight Sparkle- watched in an uneasy but almost authoritative manner, yet had not spoken.  “We should only need a one-way conversion, from Equestrian Bits to Wizard Gold, for now.  I expect a conversion in the other direction won’t be required for at least…  oh, ten years or so, likely longer.”
“Very well,” he agreed.  “How about…”  He looked at the coins.  “Two bits to the galleon?”
Twilight tilted her head, but Lyra spoke.  “It was seventeen sickles to the galleon and twenty-nine knuts to the sickle, right?”
Twilight raised her eyebrows.
He nodded.
“That’s…” Twilight muttered slowly, then nodded.  “Yes, that’ll work.  One galleon for two bits.”
“Very well,” he stated again, as he started scribbling on his forms.  He really liked that phrase.  Finally, he turned it around and held out the quill.  “Alright, sign here and the rate will be set,” he informed them.
Twilight leaned forward, accepted the quill…  then, unlike so many other annoying humans, she actually read the document before she signed it.  She blinked in apparent surprise when an unfamiliar but official-looking seal appeared on the page next to her signature.
When it did, he raised an eyebrow.  He had not expected the magic to recognize her as having the authority to negotiate exchange rates- but it had.  As he accepted the parchment back, he glanced at the royal seal of…  Equestria, it looked like- and where the magic had also printed her name underneath her signature, as Princess Twilight Sparkle.  He raised his other eyebrow slightly, then let them both down again.  “Alright, the rate is set.  Are you going to want to perform an exchange today?”
“Ah, yes,” Lyra told him.
He pulled out another form, filled it out, signed it, and activated the dated validity spell on it.  Finally, he folded it up and handed it to them.  “Present this to any teller for currency conversion until midnight tonight, after which it will not be necessary.”





Professor McGonagall was very strongly thankful, as she walked down Diagon Alley, that she did not need to waste minutes of time and hours of discomfort forcing herself into muggle clothing to meet a muggleborn that was already in Diagon Alley.  On the other hand, she was really hoping the girl hadn’t found Knockturn yet- and was scanning down both sides of the street as she hurried along.  The description was somewhat vague, but it said she had two-tone white and light blue hair…  which should be at least moderately easy to spot.
Very suddenly, she stopped, and turned to look back at Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor.
Yes, there she was.  She had nearly missed the girl, because the colors in her hair were so bright they looked unnatural- she hadn’t recognized that it even was hair, at first.
Then of course, the girl wasn’t doing anything that normal homeless kids do:  She was pouring over a piece of parchment with a friend and an ice cream cone.  Her friend- whose deep blue hair, decorated with twinned pink and purple stripes down the middle, also looked unnatural- had a quill and an ice cream cone as well.
She started back towards them, rechecking the description in her memory.  Yes, it matched this girl.  She’d have to ask about the name, but she rather expected she had the right person.
The girl looked up as she drew close.  “Can I help you?” she asked.  Then she tilted her head.
Her friend looked up as well, placing a hand over their parchment.
McGonagall smiled softly.  “I’m looking for Lyra Heartstrings?” she asked.
The girl straightened up in her chair.  “That’s me,” she informed her calmly, cautiously.  “Do you need something?”
“Ah, yes,” she informed Lyra, drawing the girl’s letter from her pocket.  “I have a letter for you.”  She held it out to her.
Her eyebrows shot up at the mention, then she accepted the letter wordlessly.  It took her mere seconds to open it and unfold it- then she let out a laugh and put it down.  “I was wondering where it had got to,” she mused.  “I opened the door, then everyone else started getting letters.”  She looked up at her.  “And you don’t happen to be Professor McGonagall, do you?”