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// Chapter 24:  Sorelia 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
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Hermione took a deep breath, and let it out, as she approached the unused dungeon classroom door she knew Draco would be waiting behind.  She’d told Hailey and Ron- she didn’t think she’d seen Harry once all year- that she was getting Alastor for the dueling club.  She technically was, even, but she needed to talk to him before they headed up to meet the rest.
Specifically, she needed to ask him some very personal questions…  and she was pretty sure she had finally worked up her courage to do so.
Finally, she stepped out of accelerated time in front of the door by wiggling the lurgid side to side, twisting the three-quarters-plurdled gabbleblotchits three and a quarter turns to the inside, and squeezing the freddled gruntbuggly to one third of its normal fortitude.
Then she put her hand on the door, and opened it in the normal way, just seconds after she had stepped through the portrait hole in Gryffindor Tower, almost as far away as she could get without leaving the castle.
As expected, Draco was waiting inside, doodling at the teachers’ desk, and the rest of the room was empty.
He waited until she closed the door before he spoke.  “Good evening,” he greeted.
She smiled back at him.  “Good evening,” she answered, though her tone betrayed her worry.
He raised an eyebrow.  “Something wrong?” he asked curiously, rather than the ignorance or outright aggression he would’ve shown in public to a ‘mud-blood’ like her.  After all, he had the family name to uphold, and Hermione was certain that politics were one of the nastiest things she’d ever heard of.
She shook her head.  “No, nothing’s wrong,” she told him, walking over to sit next to him.
He leaned casually against the desk.  “C’mon Hermione, something’s bothering you, I can tell.  What is it?”
“Would-!”  She sighed, sat down, and looked up at him again.  “Draco, I…”  She took a deep breath, and let it out.  “Are you a girl or a boy?”
He stared at her.
She averted her gaze uncomfortably.  “Just because I did a few aura checks in Charms today, and I noticed that your essence says you’re a girl.”
He blinked, looked down at himself, and back up.  “It says I’m a girl?” he asked.
She nodded.  “I- I don’t know when it changed, but it definitely didn’t when I scanned it before the Papa Tango…  which was the last time I looked at it.”
He looked at her.  “Papa Tango?” he repeated, confused.
She blinked.  “I never did tell anybody, did I?  My gain-the-foreigners’-powers spell was named the Papa Tango a week or so ago.”
“Ahh,” he muttered, then scowled.  “Well, I certainly seem to still be a boy.  Though I certainly wish I could turn into a girl.”  He tilted his head.  “What might’ve changed the essence thing?”
She stared at him.  “Are…  Are you trans?”
He blinked.  “What’s that?”
“It’s-!” she began, and paused, trying to think of a way to summarize the multiple-hour-long explanation her parents had given her during the summer.  “Hailey,” she finally decided.  “Essentially, a witch born in the body of a wizard, or vice versa.”
“I don’t know.  I certainly seem to be a wizard, but…”  He scowled.  “What do you mean, a witch born in the body of a wizard?  Wouldn’t they just be a wizard?”
Hermione rolled her eyes.  “Well yes, but also no.  The point is…”  She paused, thinking.  “I know you’re physically a wizard…  but in your mind, in your dreams, maybe, are you, or do you identify as, a girl?”
He scowled.  “One of my fondest dreams involves discovering a new sex-change potion that’s safe for juveniles to drink,” he told her.  “I keep waking up before I drink it, though,” he added, in a disappointed tone.
“The Mirror of Erised,” she said suddenly, the idea flying into her brain.  “It showed you a girl, right?”
He nodded.  “Yeah.  Pretty one, too- I’ve decided to call her Silversong.”  He showed her the notebook he’d been doodling in, which was filled with drawings- some in ink, some in pencil, some colored, some not, but all of various girls.  The ones he showed her were of a strange, silver-haired girl.  “That’s about what she looked like.”
“Yet Hailey saw Hailey,” Hermione told him, “even when she was Harry.”
He nodded.  “Yeah?”
She tilted her head.  “Is it possible that she- that Silversong- is who you really are, on the inside?”
He looked down at the page.  “I…  I don’t know.  I suppose it might be, but Silversong isn’t exactly a British name, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” Hermione agreed.  “Sounds like one of the Foreigners to me.”
He shrugged.  “She looks like one of them, too.  I wonder who she really is?”
She scowled at the page.  “I…  I have no idea.”  She looked up.  “But…  You’ve said you’d take the sex change potion in a second if it wasn’t so dangerous- would you ever want to change back?”
He shook his head immediately.  “No,” he said decisively.  “I hate being a boy.”
“Then you’re probably trans too,” she concluded.  “And…  And a witch born into a wizard’s body.”
He looked at her, tilted his head, and thought for a second.  “I…  I think I understand now,” he muttered.
“Do you have a chosen name?” she blurted out, before clapping her hands over her mouth, blushing cherry red.  “Oh, sorry, that was terribly-!”
“Sorelia,” Draco laughed.  “Whenever I manage to turn myself into a girl, that’s what my name will be.  Sorelia.”  He paged through the notebook, and showed her a drawing of a female version of himself.  “See?”  He glanced at it.  “I’ll need quite a few cosmetic spells and potions to look like that, but it shouldn’t be too hard.”
Hermione smiled.  “Cute,” she told him.  Or her?
Draco looked at the drawing for a couple seconds, before looking back up at her.  “Anyways, what might have made my ‘essence’ say ‘girl’?  I thought you said that never changes.”
She nodded.  “It doesn’t,” she agreed.  “It’s in the set-in-stone section of the Essence, that no potion can touch.”
“Stone can be molded,” he observed.
She nodded.  “It can be.  And something did just that, to make it say ‘girl’.  The only thing I’m aware of powerful enough to do that would be my Papa Tango, but it shouldn’t do that.  I specifically designed it to maintain the target’s ident-!”  She gasped, the matrix for the same running through her mind, then slapped her hand to her forehead.  “Yup, it did it, almost certainly.  It’s designed to maintain the target’s identity throughout, not their body.  The new form it turns you into is supposed to match your identity- as provided by your soul- as closely as possible, before it adds your old form back on again.
“Which means, since the transformation rewrites how your body works, it also had to rewrite your essence to tolerate the changes.  And with that focus on identity, it could very easily have slipped up and let that control those parts of the Essence, rather than the old essence.”  She breathed a sigh of relief.  “Which means I don’t have to worry about it messing things up, because it’s only going to make things more right than they were before.”
“Interesting.”  He tilted his head.  “What effect might that essence change have?”
She smiled.  “None.  Except that the Ministry’s file on you will insist you’re a girl, no matter what you look like, and unlike Hailey, you’ll be able to enter the girl’s dormitories.”
He blinked.  “Is that…  it?”
She shrugged.  “And your new form from the PT is almost certainly female to match, but yeah, that’s it.”  She took a deep breath.  “Anyways…  Sorelia, unless you still want me to use ‘Draco’ in private?”
He smiled, and chuckled.  “Sorelia, then.  Go ahead and tell the others about it, even, but keep her as an ‘anonymous friend’?  Kinda like Alastor is for Draco.”
She chuckled.  He- no, she- was right, while out in the Castle, Draco liked to brag about his anonymous friends that had all sorts of abilities and could get information from the most unlikely of sources- but he had never named a single one of them, making them sound like unfounded claims.  “Anyways, Sorelia, we’d probably better go to the Dueling Club.  Will you be showing as Draco or Alastor?”
He shook his head.  “As Draco, unfortunately.  It’d be suspicious if the Malfoy Heir randomly decided he didn’t care about dueling.”
There was a sudden knock on the door, making both of them jump, before someone opened it and stepped in.
It was Bonbon.
“Ahh, there you are,” she greeted, shutting the door and walking over.  “Hermione, and Draco,” she bowed her head to each of them in turn, as she approached the teachers’ desk from the other side.  Then she smiled, looking at Draco.  “Or should I say Alastor?”
“What- er-!” Draco began, taken aback.
Hermione looked at him, then back at Bonbon.  “H-How’d you know?”
She shrugged.  “It was kinda hard to miss how Alastor- who didn’t have a class record- played Fluffy to sleep last year, but it was Draco that returned,” she commented lightly.  “Don’t worry, I haven’t told anyone.”  She glanced at Draco.  “Though speaking of, I haven’t seen Alastor around nearly as much as I’ve seen Hailey- is there a limit to your transformation or something?”
He winced, and nodded.  “Time limit, yeah.”
She nodded.  “Then you’re probably not going to want to waste any of that precious time teaching, will you?”
“T-Teaching?” he gasped.
She nodded.  “Now that we’ve finally got all our classes covered, we’re looking at putting together a Special Instruction Team to help tutor struggling students in whatever they need help with.  We’re getting a fair few students in each subject regularly coming to their instructors for so much extra help it’s negatively impacting those instructors’ own performance by cutting into their study time.”
He blinked.  “So…  your solution is to make more instructors?”
She smiled, and nodded.  “Specifically, an interlocking instructor team capable of relying on one another but also with a wide range of specialities, allowing them to very quickly find the best way to help any given student, and help them as quickly as possible with as little disruption to their own work or other duties as possible.  We also anticipate the team would teach a remedial class for those students that need it.”
He snorted.  “So, Crabbe and Goyle?”
She nodded.  “Yes.  Though for those two, our psychologists are saying they’re not stupid, they just can’t seem to get through to them.”  She glanced at Hermione, and turned back to Draco.  “Before you make any gung-ho decisions, I should probably warn you that Hailey is on the list as well.”
He scowled, putting a finger on his chin.  “Which would mean…  But then…”  He sighed.  “I guess that’ll just have to wait for me to become Sorelia, then.”
She tilted her head.  “Sorelia?”
He blinked, blushing.  “Oh, um…”
“Um-!” Hermione muttered, looking between them, and finally settled on Bonbon.  “Sorelia is to Draco as Hailey is to Harry, just…  without the book to the face.”
Draco let out a small snort of laughter at her word choice, but Bonbon just nodded understandingly, glancing at Draco and seeming satisfied.  “Assuming the change is large enough, yes, Hailey need never know it’s you.”