//------------------------------//
// Chapter 23:  Papa Tango 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Dumbledore watched as Bonbon placed the latest report, once again twice as tall as it was wide, on his desk, then sat down.  This would be the fourth report of the year; amazingly, the first three weeks had been uneventful though, judging by the slight tick in the corner of Bonbon’s mouth, she had bad news.
Hailey had finally been released from the Hospital Wing just minutes after Lockhart’s first class ended- and apparently, shouted at Lockhart not ten minutes later, since a vast majority of his students were missing books, wands, bags, and other assorted necessities, until they could be fished back out of the lake.  Nobody had sat in on the class, but as near as Bonbon’s team had been able to tell from what the students told them, he had quizzed them on himself then unleashed a cage of pixies on them without so much as telling them to take out their wands.
One thing Dumbledore had been alarmed to hear had been that Hailey had lost her hand.  She still had about half of her left forearm, but the rest of it, and her hand, had to be removed, because of the damage from Ron’s wand.  It would be possible to regrow it- but they would have to wait for her to hit fourth year, since the potion required would be dangerous for her to drink until then.  She’d done a quick trial with Oliver Wood, and apparently was still just as able a Quidditch player as she had been before.
Then Lockhart had tried to make her a little late for her Herbology class- by her choice, she was attending all her classes as a girl this year- by stopping her at the door so he could, according to her, try to tell her how to be famous.  She had been on time for the lesson, and he had been found lying on the floor outside her Herbology class about halfway through the same, unconscious from the stunning charm and absent from his own fourth-year lesson.
Dumbledore had been told that, as early as her stop in Flourish and Blotts, she’d been forced to deliver a very low blow indeed to get him to let her go.  Apparently, he had ignored several orders, from herself and a few others, including Arthur Weasley, to get his hands off of her.  He’d even seen that one in the news- and it was immensely satisfying to watch Hailey punch him in the nuts on the front page of the Daily Prophet over and over and over again, under the headline ‘Gilderoy Lockhart forced to apologize after assaulting unsuspecting stranger’.  He still had that one in his desk drawer.  For as satisfying as it was to watch, he knew she’d only done it to escape his arm, which he’d been using to crush her against his side; she lacked the strength to do it without artificial advantages like that.
According to the story, he’d started to advance to recapture her- but she had drawn her wand, and Lockhart had made the fortunate decision not to make it a wizard’s duel, no matter how thoroughly he would undoubtedly trounce her in combat.  It had gone on to note that any use of said wand would have been in violation of the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Sorcery, even if Lockhart had drawn his own, but also asserted that the Decree really needed an exception for situations just like that.  After all, as Rita Skeeter had pointed out, even an underage witch or wizard could find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to resort to magic to protect themselves.  The Statute of Secrecy had that exception, so why not the Decree?
But back in present times, Bonbon sighed.  “One,” she stated.
He raised an eyebrow.  “Oh?”
“One student,” she continued.  “Didn’t show up for Defense Against the Dark Arts, but still got a good score.”
He rolled his eyes.  “Oh boy.  Who was it?”
She actually smiled.  “Hailey,” she answered simply.  “She chose to sit in on the class under her Invisibility Cloak instead, and tells us Professor Lockhart was sorely disappointed when he didn’t see her- and proceeded to reenact another scene from his books.”
He sighed.  “Can’t say I didn’t see that coming,” he told her sadly.
She nodded.  “In other news, just last night, Hailey heard a voice traveling upwards.  Ron and Hermione- who were with her at the time- couldn’t hear it, but Fluttershy, whose Unique Talent lets her understand any spoken word, no matter the language, said she heard something too faint to make out.  She wasn’t nearly as close to the source as Hailey, though.”  She sighed.  “We don’t know what it was, but we think it was a probably non-human language that sounded different enough from human speech that anyone else that heard it didn’t realize they heard it.  As for why she understood it…”  She shrugged.  “No idea, really.”  She looked up at him.
Dumbledore scowled.  “It’s possible that, when Voldemort tried to kill her, he transferred some of his powers to her, giving her his own very rare gift, as a Parselmouth,” he mused.  “I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Parselmouth?” Bonbon asked, one eyebrow raised.
He nodded.  “The ability to speak Parseltongue- snake language.”
She scowled.  “Interesting.  Unfortunately, none of us can actually speak animal languages, so we don’t really have any way to test.  She’s not aware of any other languages she can speak or understand.”





“Who could it be, though?” Hermione asked, closing the Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two with a snap.
Draco looked up at the non-sequitur.  He’d just joined them to do some joint studying; he wouldn’t be able to stay long, unfortunately, but he could stick around for a couple hours at least.
“Who’d want to frighten all the squibs and muggleborns out of Hogwarts?”
Draco gave a very small nod of understanding.  He’d talked to her in private a few times on the subject- they were both fairly sure that Ron and Hailey both believed that Draco was the Heir of Slytherin.  They were unsure of exactly how to convince them he wasn’t- but their best bet was starting to look like Polyjuice Potion…  which wouldn’t be easy.
“Let’s think,” Ron said, in mock puzzlement.  “Who do we know who thinks muggleborns are scum?”  He looked at Hermione.
She just looked back at him.  “Who?” she asked.
“Draco Malfoy, right?” Draco asked, before putting on an imitation of his natural form.  “ ‘You’ll be next, mud-bloods’.”
“Exactly,” Ron nodded.  “You’ve only got to look at his foul rat face to know it’s him!”
Draco very nearly let out a snort of laughter at the revelation that Ron liked his natural face about as much as he did himself.  With Ron that decisive, it wouldn’t be all that hard to convince him to join the Polyjuice Potion Plot…  though Hailey was a bit less energetic.  She looked a bit doubtful, but seemed to be going with the flow out of curiosity.  The only challenge would be keeping Alastor out of it, so he could play Draco.
Which, as the date crossed his mind, he realized would be all too easy.  The winter holidays were coming up soon, and if the Potion was timed for the holidays, all he’d have to tell Ron & Hailey would be that he had to go home for the holidays.  It’d be a pain, avoiding Alastor and his friends for that long, but he could do it.





“We’re being flattened,” Wood half-moaned at his team.  “What’s going on?”
He knew perfectly well what was going on.  Fred and George had been way up in the sky trying to protect Hailey from what looked like a rogue Bludger, and Angelina’s broom just wasn’t behaving nearly as well as it usually did- meaning that she, as his best Chaser, had yet to acquire the Quaffle even once.  Her broom wasn’t the worst one on the team- Fred’s was- but it was acting like it was.
Hailey took a deep breath, then looked at Fred and George.  “Fred, George, go back to the rest of the team.  I’ll never see the Snitch with you whirling around me like that- and we all know I’m really good at dodging bludgers.”
Wood scowled, but allowed it.  He didn’t like it any more than the Weasleys did, but what choice did he have?  Hailey was their only chance to win the match!
As Madam Hooch walked over, he noticed that Angelina looked thoughtful.
“Ready to resume play?” Madam Hooch asked.
Before Wood could speak, Angelina did.  “Do the rules specify how players fly?” she asked.
Hooch looked at her, an eyebrow raised, and was silent for a second.  “They do not,” she stated.  “So long as you can fly, and can be knocked out of the air by a bludger.”
“Hmm…”  She rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
Wood sighed.  “Alright.  Ready.”





Angelina soared higher, and higher, and higher, watching the Quaffle progress below her.  The Slytherin brooms were just too fast, and hers was underperforming by too much.  Was this what Hermione had meant about wand magic being less powerful in her original form?  After her ‘doctor’s office visit’ with her dad, they had convinced her to stick with her original form at school…  despite occasional, massive waves of dizziness, because she was so different in her new form.
But at this rate, she didn’t have much choice.
Besides, she really hated using her original form, and the reasoning for using it all the time kinda paled against her free transformation ability and the whole point where magic didn’t really care how many extra organs you had, it still fixed them.  She’d shown Wood her new form on the train- but he was the only one on the team that knew she had it- unless Hermione had told Hailey- and she was certain that he didn’t know she had wings.
She watched Hailey do a little twirl in midair, showing off for the crowd as she let the rogue bludger rocket past her.
Finally, Angelina decided that she’d climbed high enough and leveled off, watching the Quaffle.
She picked a time, and dove, for the Gryffindor goal posts.  That one Slytherin Chaser, Graham Montague, hadn’t gotten the Quaffle past Wood even once in over a year, and he was looking to try.  Angelina lined herself up for where she expected the Quaffle to fly when Wood blocked it…  then dismounted and continued to dive, headfirst.
In the past, she had always kept herself firmly on her broom, and one of her worst fears had been that it would stop working or that she would be separated from it in the air.  She liked flying, but she was deathly afraid of the fall.
Not any more.  Sure, they didn’t exist at the moment- but she could feel the back of her brain just itching to unfurl her wings to help steer her downwards even faster.  For some reason her parents hadn’t been able to identify, she had been able to fly in most rooms of the house, despite having a wingspan greater than the longest dimension in those rooms.  She didn’t have to unfold them completely- and amusingly enough, so long as she kept them moving up and down, and it didn’t seem to matter how slowly she did, she’d stay floating, unmoving, in the air…  and actively ‘flying’.  She was pretty certain that, at least there, it wasn’t her wings so much as the magic in them that was holding her up.
Montague threw the Quaffle.  Angelina watched as Wood blocked it- but it was deflected in the other direction.  She was about two seconds away from rocketing past Wood.
She flashed almost instantly into her new form, spread her wings that little bit, and bent her course almost instinctively to meet the Quaffle.  Rather conveniently, her wings seemed to pass right through anything she wore without holes, whenever she wanted them to- so she didn’t need to worry about shredding her red and gold Quidditch robes.
She captured the Quaffle as she zipped past, then made a near-perfect ninety degree corner in midair to head straight for the Slytherin goal posts, all without losing any speed.  As she went, she mounted her broom once again and folded her wings, but didn’t go back to her old form.  As she did so, she noticed that she seemed to be leaving a bit of a red and gold contrail, fading to nothing behind her, but ignored it.
She had a goal to score.
She zipped past one Bludger, four Beaters, and four Chasers on her straight-line path, then curved at the very end and unleashed the Quaffle through one of the side hoops, before circling around the hoops to score again before any of the Slytherin chasers could catch up, and also before the Keeper finished saying his prayers, after- presumably- thinking she’d been going to ram him.  Hermione’s comments about wand magic must have been applicable to however brooms worked as well, because all of the sudden, her broom was outperforming Hailey’s- the best on the team, by a rather significant margin.





For as much as her right arm had been broken by that bludger, Hailey had somehow managed to catch the Snitch with that same hand- and after her crash in the mud, she could still feel it struggling in her hand.
Then there was Lockhart.
“Gryffindor won with three hundred and seventy points to ninety,” she heard Lee Jordan cheering in the background, while Lockhart looked down at her.  She could also hear Wood and the Slytherin captain, Marcus Flint, yelling at each other about something in the background.
“Not to worry, Hailey, I’m about to fix your arm,” Lockhart told her.
“No,” she ordered.  “Keep your useless hands off of me.”
Lockhart scowled.  “Doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said.  “It’s a simple charm, I’ve used it countless times.”
“Madam Pomfrey has used it many more times than you,” she retorted immediately.  “Let me go to her.”
“She really should,” another voice pitched in- Angelina Johnson, one of the Gryffindor chasers, had fast become a friend of hers.  Not nearly as close as Hermione or Ron, but still a friend.  “Even Professor McGonagall won’t try to heal a break herself.”
Lockhart ignored her, twirled his wand, and cast his spell.  Hailey closed her eyes, silently praying for it to fail.  Then…  it hit.  The strangest thing she’d ever felt, even counting how strange it had felt the first time she’d become a girl, started at her shoulder and spread down to her fingertips.  It felt almost like her arm was being deflated- and while it didn’t exactly hurt any more, it didn’t feel even remotely like an arm, either.  She heard Angelina’s horrified gasp- then Lockhart let out a terrified gasp of his own, and Hailey heard a little thump and an ‘Ow!’ from Lockhart’s direction.
She opened her eyes.  “How bad is it?” she asked.
Angelina looked up at Lockhart, then back at Hailey.  “At least he managed to hit himself as well,” she told her amusedly.  “But it’s…  Bad.”  She reached down to take Hailey’s handless arm.
She sighed, and reached it up, to allow herself to be pulled up by it.  Her other arm was obviously bad enough Angelina didn’t think she should be lifted by it.
Then she looked down at it- and almost wished she hadn’t.
It was immediately apparent that Lockhart hadn’t mended her bones- he’d removed them.  Her arm looked like it had been made out of rubber.
Then she looked up, and had to stifle a giggle.
Gilderoy Lockhart, honorary Dark Force Defence League member, Order of Merlin, third class, and five-time-winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award- Hailey was sure she got it out of order, but it all was true- had managed to vanish not only the bones from her arm, which he’d been trying to fix, but from his own right leg as well, and was staring at it in horror.
Angelina sighed, looking at him, then put her arm around Hailey, almost casually snatching the freshly-freed Snitch out of the air with her other hand.  “C’mon, let’s get you to the Hospital Wing.”
Lockhart looked up at them.  “Wait, take me with you!”  He sounded almost panicked.
Hailey felt Angelina’s muscled body harden, almost like stone, before she answered.  “No,” she barked, before taking a step forwards, turning both of them sharply towards the exit- then, there was a sudden flash of deep red fire and she found herself blinking in the relative darkness of a torchlit corridor.
“What the-!?” Angelina asked, looking around wildly.
Hailey took a step forwards, towards what she recognized as the infirmary doors, despite the apparent gloom from her un-adjusted vision.
“Weird,” Angelina said, catching up and stepping past her to knock on the door anyways.
“You’re right, that was weird,” Hailey told her.  “And random.”
Angelina scowled.  “It wasn’t random, though,” she muttered- right before the door opened.
“Is anyone dead or dying?” Madam Pomfrey began, as her greeting had become at some point during the prior year.
“No,” Angelina answered her.  “Only Lockhart’s reputation.”
Madam Pomfrey snorted.  “So what’d he do this time?”  Then she spied Hailey’s arm, and sighed.  “Alright.  Is it just the bones or does it still hurt?”
“Uh,” Hailey muttered.  “It does not hurt.  It…  doesn’t do much else either, but…”
Madam Pomfrey rolled her eyes.  “Then it’s just the bones, and it’ll only take one night to regrow them.  Come on in.”
“Um, Lockhart managed to hit himself as well,” Angelina noted.
Madam Pomfrey raised an eyebrow.  “Alright then.  Ward Two for you, Hailey.”





Draco had been walking towards the gathered party, from where he’d landed near the stadium entrance, deliberately as far from Flint as he could get, when very suddenly, Hailey and that Gryffindor chaser- was it Angelina Johnson or Katie Belle?  He could never remember which was which- vanished in a flash of bright yellow fire.
He froze, staring.  He’d been caught completely by surprise when that chaser’s hair had suddenly turned Gryffindor as well, after which she had taken the scoreboard by storm- and even when he was in the air, as the Slytherin seeker, he’d heard more than one person in the crowd commenting on just how fast the girl was.  As it was, Hailey had caught the Snitch- but had the match gone on for two more minutes, it wouldn’t have mattered.  They had already been a hundred and thirty points up- and that’s all the girl would have needed to make it more than a hundred and fifty.





Angelina stopped, turning to look behind her.  She was on her way to the library to turn in a reference book she’d borrowed; she’d finished with that piece of Defense Against the Dark Arts homework, which had actually been provided by the foreigners as an ‘optional addition’ to her upper-year class with Lockhart, and didn’t need it any more.  On her way, she’d just rounded the corner at an intersection where two corridors crossed paths.
About halfway down the corridor in the other direction, there was a girl, hair looking almost exactly like hers, staring at her.  She’d felt the stare.
The silence held for several seconds.
Finally, the girl spoke.  “Hi.”
She nodded, curious.  “Hello.”
“How did you hide it?”
She tilted her head.  “Hide what?”
“You’re a Phoenix-born.”
“I’m a what?”
The girl, confused, walked closer.  “A phoenix-born.  You…  know what that is, right?”
She shook her head.  “Enlighten me.”
“I-  But how?”  She scowled.  “What’s your name?”
“Angelina.”
The girl blinked in astonishment.  “Wait.  You’re British?”
She nodded.  “Yeah?”
“Okay we’ve got to talk,” she said.  “Do you have time?”
She shrugged.  “Bout as much of it as anyone else,” she answered.  “Common room?”  She couldn’t tell which House the girl was in; her hair was hiding the House crest on her robes.
She shook her head.  “Slytherin.”  She peered into an empty classroom next to them.  “Hmm, this should work.”
Angelina, still confused, followed her in.  She knew the weird fire teleport earlier hadn’t been random- she’d been able to tell that it was she that had done it.  And if that was the case, especially since she was at least two years this foreign girl’s senior, she didn’t see any real danger in at least seeing what she had to say.
Especially since the girl seemed to know something about it.
“So…  what’s a phoenix-born?” Angelina asked, once the girl shut the door with a snap.
The girl took a deep breath, and let it out.  “Before that,” she stated, then looked up at Angelina, and held out her hand.  “I’m Sunset Shimmer, and I’m the only surviving Phoenix-born in Equestria.”
She took the hand gingerly.  “Angelina,” she said.  “Angelina Johnson.”
“So…  I take it Phoenix-born are a thing of legend or something around here?”
She shrugged.  “Never heard of it.  I have studied phoenixes, though.”
She scowled.  “Hmm.  I…  We never considered phoenix-born a possibility over here.  Maybe there’s…?”
“So what is it?” Angelina asked.
“You’re part Phoenix,” Sunset told her simply.  “So am I.”  She shrugged.  “Nobody knows why it happens- in Equestria, Phoenix-born appear once every hundred and fifty years or so, and always to two ordinary parents.”
She tilted her head.  “What if two Phoenix-born get together?”
She shook her head.  “Always female,” she told her.  “Male phoenixes exist, but male phoenix-born are actually physically impossible.  Don’t ask me how Proof Impossible proved that when we still don’t understand how or why it happens in the first place, but she did.”  She sighed.  “Yes, there is a spell that will get around that.  I don’t know if there’s a comparable British spell, but it’s about five hundred years old and was invented by a Phoenix-born.  Invented by me, specifically.”  She sighed again.  “The problem is that no two Born have ever gotten together, so we don’t know what would happen.
“But how have you kept it hidden?”
“Kept it hidden…?”
“The hair,” she answered.  “It’s the most obvious sign.”
She blinked.  “Oh, um, I haven’t always had it.”
“What.”
She giggled lightly at the disbelieving look Sunset gave her.  “Funny story, actually.  You probably heard how I was nearly killed during finals last year?”
She nodded.  “That was you?”
She nodded as well.  “It was.  Hermione managed to save my life by using…  I don’t know.  She said it was some kind of spell, that did it by transfiguration or something.”
She scowled.  “Huh…  I’ll have to ask her about-!”
Very suddenly, someone knocked on the door, and pushed it open.  “Someone call my name?”
Angelina looked up.  It was Hermione.  “Uh- Yes, actually.”
“What-!  How-!”  Sunset began, before slapping a hand to her forehead and breathing deeply.  “Remember, Sunset, she’s been studying Pinkie Pie.  This is normal.”
Meanwhile, Hermione stepped in, leading a first-year girl that Angelina immediately realized had to be Fred and George’s little sister, Ginevra Weasley.  “Um, is it okay if Ginny comes too?” Hermione asked.  “I’ve been showing her, ah, a bit of the magic I’ve discovered.”
Ginny giggled.
“Uh-!” Sunset began.
“Sure,” Angelina told her.  “That…  Spell, thing, you used on me.  Might it have made me part phoenix?”
Hermione blinked.  “No, no, you were already part phoenix,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were telling her the sky was blue.  “What it did- at least, what it was supposed to do- was to bring the Foreigner’s magic capabilities to this world, through you.”  She scowled.  “Which, because their magic relies on a physical channeling focus, required transformation.”
“A physical channeling focus?” she asked.  “Like a wand?”
She shook her head.  “No, a biological one- it has to be part of you, not just something you’re using.  That’s why you have so many new organs.”  She sighed.  “And by the way, I’ve now been trying to find something to call it for over a year.  Been thinking about phonetics for something, but ‘Foxtrot Tango’ just doesn’t sound right.  Ideas?”
“Papa Tango,” Sunset muttered, in awe.  Then she looked at Angelina.  “You didn’t happen to look in the alley near the Leaky Cauldron in muggle London, did you?”
She tilted her head.  “Where all of you were coming from?”  She nodded.  “Looked like a portal of some kind.  Why?”
She put both hands to her forehead.  “It’s the Papa Tango,” she muttered.
Hermione tilted her head.  “Why Papa?”
Sunset turned to her.  “Hermione.”
“Hm?”
“That spell.  That you described, and demonstrated with Angelina.
“We have been calling a theoretical spell that does exactly that the ‘Papa Tango’ for about a year and a half now.”
She blinked.  “Okay.  But still, why Papa?”
“Because-!”  She broke off, then looked at Ginny.  “Miss…  Instructor Weasley, was it?”
Ginny blushed, and nodded.
“Okay.  I need both of you-  No,” she looked at Angelina too, “all three of you, to understand that what I’m about to tell you is at the very top of the Top Secret list.  Do Not Repeat it, under any circumstances.”
All three nodded.  “Okay,” Angelina said.
“Understood,” Hermione stated.
Ginny made an attempt at a military-style salute, but failed rather dismally.  “Got it!” she cheered.
Sunset chuckled softly.  “It’s because, on the other side, in Equestria…  we’re ponies.”
Hermione blinked.  “Oh.  So…  It’s ‘pony transform’, isn’t it?”
She nodded.  “Yes.”
Angelina tilted her head.  “Why was my seeing the portal important?”
She turned sharply to her.  “Because that portal is invisible and immaterial to anything that can’t safely traverse it,” she told her.  “And cameras and the like as well, because it’s selective visibility rather than selective invisibility like the Leaky Cauldron.  And the only beings we’ve found that are capable of safely traversing it…”  She took a deep breath, and let it out.  “Are from the other side.”
Ginny tilted her head.  “So how does this Papa Tango work?”