//------------------------------//
// Chapter 61:  Time Loops 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

Dumbledore scowled.  “I already know all that,” he told Hailey.  “Well…  most of it.  I was there, if you recall.  So.”  He steepled his fingers on his desk.  “This notebook you mentioned.”
Hailey nodded, reached into her hair, and removed a pretty ordinary but well-worn notebook.  “This notebook, to be specific.  Notes from my future self on exactly how the Tournament will go down, and exactly how I should be ready for it.  It includes things like who was selected, exactly how each Champion solves each task, who dies, when they die, how they die, and why they die.  Exactly when various things happened, like Harry storming into the Great Hall last week, or his extremely timely arrival at the Weighing of the Wands.  There’s even a particularly fun triple event, where my Past, Present, and Future selves all meet at once, in which Future Self gives Past Self this notebook.  Now, that event hasn’t happened yet, and I’ve only gone through it as my Past Self just yet anyways, so I can’t tell you about it without risking breaking the timeline.”  She shoved the notebook back into her hair.
“So,” Dumbledore scowled.  “What have you gone through?”
She shrugged.  “Well, last summer, a couple days before the semester started, I did a bit of time warping.  Jumped to the triple event, met my future selves, and got the notebook.  Jumped from there directly into the Thaumion Flow to read the first half in subjective time, then turned into Harry, burst into the Great Hall on schedule last week, and went through that process.”  She raised an eyebrow at him and, after his nod, continued.  “After that, I got separated from Silversong by use of my future self, and jumped up to the Weighing of the Wands, burst in on schedule, and took care of that.  Following that, after getting lost again, I jumped to the First Task and completed it.
“Then I jumped straight to the Second Task, completed it, and finally to the Third Task, completed it, waited for Voldemort to wake up, and abandoned a magical construct in my place so my future self could swap it out for the body and let him get killed.  Following that, I went straight into the Thaumion Flow again to read the other half, the stuff that was important for my past self not to know, and returned to Bonbon’s house- where I’d left from in the first place.”  She smiled.  “Jumping in and out of Equestria is always fun.  Anyways, after that, I rebuilt the student schedules with the team, presented them to the school, and came to Hogwarts.  Right now, I’m going through it as a ‘normal’ year- looking forward to that triple event, between the First Task and the Yule Ball- before, at the end of the year, I’ll make sure the notebook isn’t missing anything before I jump back to the triple event to hand it off to my past self.”
He scowled again.  “So…  This notebook.”
She nodded.  “Yes, the notebook is experiencing a stable time loop.  Not the first one of those I’ve created, though admittedly the largest one I’ve done.  I’m not entirely certain where it came from, but I do know about how it came into being.”
“Oh?  How is that?”
“Well…”  She scowled.  “Wizards aren’t really familiar with what happens when you cross your own timestream, but Harmonia helped me understand it quite a while ago.  Thing is, the timeline isn’t fixed in stone- and if an unstable time loop doesn’t stabilize, it will be erased from the timeline, along with as many other elements as necessary to make it never happen.  That, of course, is the danger of killing your past self- you’ll just erase yourself from the timeline.  Poof, ceased to exist.
“Things get complicated when you, for example, save your past self.  In the initial branch of any given time loop, the future self doesn’t exist- so you had to have been saved by something else.  Harmonia told me a story about a world like ours where I didn’t turn into a girl and the Gate hadn’t been opened.  In that world, Sadarina was never saved, Hagrid was sent to Azkaban for a couple months during the Chamber of Secrets scare, and Sirius Black was never acquitted, because Peter got away.  But of course, there was a time loop on that last one- because Harry, Hermione, and Sirius had collapsed on their way around the lake, surrounded by unsaved dementors…  Then suddenly Harry’s future self sent a Patronus across the lake and drove them off.
“But that can’t have happened in the first iteration.  In the first iteration, Buckbeak- a Hippogriff that had been accused of mauling Draco Malfoy in that world, then sentenced to beheading- died, then Black and even Harry got Kissed before Snape’s Patronus drove the dementors away.  Hermione, unable to live with her survivor’s guilt when she woke up, found out how long it had been and used her Time Turner- she’d needed one to make all her classes, since the Student Instructor Program hadn’t existed to get them to line up as nicely as we did- to travel back and try to change something.  She knew what was at stake, and was determined to save Harry, even if it cost her life.
“But since she did it of her own volition, she didn’t have any goal except to save Harry.  She hid herself in the bushes and, when the dementors came charging, she mustered her courage and started fighting them in the only way she knew how:  Throwing things at them, by magic and otherwise, since she couldn’t manage a Patronus.  Sirius was still Kissed, but she was successful in saving Harry- and when Snape got there, she was put into detention for crossing her own timestream and would have gotten in big trouble with the Ministry…  except that the moment her past self turned her Time Turner, that iteration of the timeline ceased to exist.
“To her past self…  Harry, Hermione, and Sirius were overcome by dementors, then this crazy girl with a wand and a throwing arm like a wet noodle comes out of nowhere and starts throwing clever charms at the dementors.  She’s successful in saving Harry, but only barely.
“But of course, the Dumbledore of that world was very much like you.  He saw what happened, made an inaccurate assumption, and- unaware that she’d done it on her own- told her past self, after she’d recovered in the Hospital Wing, that she should be able to save herself and ‘one turn’ should do it.
“Naturally, she misinterpreted those words, looped the chain around Harry too…  and fumbled the Turner in her nervousness.  Harmonia did that part, since had she not fumbled it, it would’ve made a degenerative loop and ended up erasing them both.  Anyways, it completed two extra turns before she was able to regain control of it- so, two hours further back in time than they had wanted to go, Hermione explained it to Harry…  then because they thought they were supposed to be saving someone other than Harry, they ran out and saved Buckbeak.  They then returned to the side of the Lake and hid in the bushes to watch the scene with Sirius and the dementors, because they both remembered and hated it and were unsure what to do with the hippogriff.  So, as the dementors got close, Harry jumped out and cast his corporeal Patronus across the Lake, driving the dementors off, with both Harry and Black unkissed.  They ended up letting Buckbeak go and sneaking up to the Hospital Wing- but they never got there, because again, the Dumbledore of that world was like you.
“He saw Harry and Hermione transferred to the Hospital Wing, and Black to Flitwick’s office…  and knew Buckbeak had been freed.  So, he made another inaccurate assumption, told Hermione’s past self where the window into Flitwick’s office was, that three turns would do, and that they should be able to save two lives, and left the room.  She got excited, turned her time turner…  and then, all of the sudden, things were looking good for them.
“They ran down, saved Buckbeak, hid in the bushes, cast the Patronus, waited until the executioner ran off to get a Dementor to kiss Black, flew up to Flitwick’s office, saved him, landed on the Astronomy tower, sent him off, and ran back to the Hospital Wing in time to meet their Dumbledore and slip back in undetected.  The Dumbledore of the next iteration saw nothing different from the one in which Black had not been saved, so gave the exact same words to Hermione, which stabilized the loop on the fourth iteration and removed any danger of self-erasure.
“Just like it, the original me in this loop would have delegated her duties as a Judge to Ginny, transformed for each Task of the Tournament, probably revealing the connection between Harry and Hailey to the whole school, built this notebook, and gifted it to her past self.
“The second iteration would have been refining the notebook, but still doing the warp-ahead as I did in the current iteration, this time knowing when each would be.  A few more iterations of refining…  And now, according to my notebook, we are on the twelfth iteration- and if I query the timeline, there is absolutely no danger of self-erasure, meaning the loop is stable.  All I have to do now is hold onto this notebook as it is until it comes time to hand it to my past self.  Everything else will, essentially, take care of itself- and so long as I don’t overthink it, the loop will stay stable until it’s finally closed out at the end of the year.”
Dumbledore stared at her.  “How…  Who is Harmonia?”
“She’s…”  Hailey paused.  “I don’t know how to describe it.  She manages our world, and helps guide us to harmony.  Same for Equestria, in fact- it was she that put the idea in Lyra’s mind to open the Gate, and caused our worlds to be tied to one another.”
“Okay,” he muttered.  “What is Harmonia?”
There was a couple seconds of silence.
“You know…  I have no idea.  All I know is that she’s not human- and that visiting her realm with an unterminated time loop waiting on you is generally a bad idea, since then she has to be oh so careful what she tells you, so…”  She shrugged.  “She watches the iterations back to back, and is the only being in the universe that will actually be able to perceive anything but the most recent iteration of the timeline.  Then of course, since she’s outside the timeline…  If I visit her now, one tiny mistake on her part can erase me entirely with no warning at all.”
The silence drew on for a few seconds.  “How…  How many iterations…?”
She shrugged.  “The average wizard can create a time loop with up to fifty iterations or so before the timeline decides it’s easier to just erase him.  If I actively supply power to the timeline, I can hit probably about fifty thousand iterations- but fifty is already well beyond the point where the loop usually either stabilizes or degenerates.”
“Degenerates?”
She nodded.  “A degenerative loop alternates between two or more states.  For example, if I kill my past self, that kind of paradox creates a degenerative loop- unless somebody else goes back to kill me in the iterations where I’m dead, I suppose.  Once a degenerative loop hits that maximum iteration count, it reverts to the original cycle…  and the time travel event that started the loop would have failed, instead dumping me directly into the Void for total erasure from the timeline.  After that, the timeline proceeds as if there was no loop at all.”  She paused briefly.  “If I were to kill my future self instead, that usually also results in a degenerative loop, but it’s not nearly as certain.”
“Ahh,” he muttered, slowly.  He stared at his fingers for a few seconds, thinking on what he’d been told, then finally looked up again.  “So…  with the Weighing of the Wands…”
She nodded.  “Yes.  Yesterday…”





The Day Before…





Hailey sighed as she walked into the classroom they were using for the Weighing of the Wands.  She was a couple minutes late, having been sitting in on Astral Effort and Big Nuisance’s Astronomy class; they had yet to find a Head Student Instructor for Astronomy.  Rather annoyingly, Big Nuisance was exactly that- but she’d seen the astronomical amount of effort that Astral Effort was putting into her work, including in her perfect scores across the board, and would be nominating her for review as a potential Head Student Instructor during the next Management Meeting.  She expected that even she wouldn’t have been able to carry Big Nuisance’s dead weight, but the unicorn mare made it look almost easy.  He was enough of a drag to keep her class from drawing management attention by excelling, though.
No doubt the mare’s pegasus sister, Lack Effort, would be jealous of her sister’s promotion, and perhaps start putting in some more effort of her own.  They both had enormous potential, if only Lack Effort would use it.





“You’ve found an Astronomy HSI?” Dumbledore asked.
Hailey nodded.  “She passed the review earlier today with flying colors- but she doesn’t know yet.  I’m going to be offering her the position next week, and we’ll see if she takes it.  If she does, we might be looking at a revolution in Astronomy student instruction.  She’s only a third year, so not normally eligible to be an HSI; that’s reserved for the highest year involved in the program, currently fourth years.  However, Astronomy has gone without for so long precisely because nobody was qualified for it, so the team agreed to make an exception.  Anyways, you asked about the Weighing of the Wands, did you not?”





When Hailey arrived late for whatever reason, she already knew she was earlier than Harry; he wasn’t scheduled to burst in for another few minutes.
“Ahh, Hailey,” Mr. Bagman cheered.  “There you are.  I was starting to wonder.”
She shrugged.  “With as many hats as I wear, you’re lucky I showed at all,” she told him seriously.  “In any case.”  She glanced around.  Fleur, Krum, Cedric, and Silver were all present- the last sitting in the corner next to Rita Skeeter, arms and legs folded while she glowered at the judge’s table.  “Looks like we’re still missing Dumbledore and the expert?”
“They’re upstairs right now,” Bagman answered promptly.  “We’re also missing Harry.”
She shrugged.  “He should be coming.”
Bagman scowled.  “Why hasn’t he been around the Castle…?”
She sighed.  “Because the brat never steps out of the shower except at night,” she told him.  “He hasn’t shown for a single class all year- if not for the Tournament, he’d be in danger of expulsion right now.”
“The shower?” Silver asked, blinking.
She nodded.  “Yup.  Had to go invade his dormitory and bang on the door a few times to get his attention, then tell him to pack up and get down here.  He’ll probably be a few minutes.”





“Is that…  all?” Dumbledore asked.
Hailey nodded.  “There was a little smalltalk as we waited, but aside from that, you saw it all.  When Harry left, he stormed in the direction of the library before phasing back into the Thaumion Flow.”