Hailey swept her invisibility cloak off of herself and Sadarina as she walked around a large clump of trees on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Here, she could see the enclosure the First Task was due to take place in- and where the dragons were scheduled to be imported to tonight.
As it was, there were five dragons present, roaring and fighting, eyes bulging in either fear or rage, she couldn’t tell which. There were a few dozen wizards scurrying around them, several per dragon, tugging on chains connected to thick leather straps to try to get them under control, some two or three wizards per chain. One chain was the odd one out, with nobody except a single child holding it. She couldn’t have been any more than a toddler, yet she was pulling at least as hard as the larger teams of wizards, judging by the motions of the dragons.
“Keep back there, Hailey!” one of the wizards cried, straining on his chain with two others. “They can shoot fire at a range of twenty feet- and I’ve seen this horntail do forty!”
Hailey smiled, but continued to approach anyways, covering herself and Sadarina in a quick shield with her Unicorn magic. “Only forty feet, huh?” she muttered, while she walked up to the fence. “Even Spike can do fifty feet if he pushes himself, and he’s still a ‘baby’.”
Sadarina giggled while they both vaulted onto the fence and sat on it to watch. “Some of the biggest and most dangerous creatures I- or any of my family- have ever seen, yet your first comment is ‘I’ve seen bigger’,” she chuckled.
“Well I have,” Hailey shrugged. “Some of the largest Equestrian dragons can get a good three or four hundred feet tall- and even the smaller ones often have fire blasts of at least a hundred feet. Spike’s breed, one of the smallest at only twenty or thirty feet tall, usually has a range of about three fifty- but his fire was magically upgraded when he was really young, so we think he’s going to hit six fifty in his prime without any difficulty.”
A sudden fireball washed over them, but Hailey’s shield shrugged it off like it wasn’t even there.
“What- Keep back there, Hagrid!” that same wizard cried again.
Hailey turned to look. “Hi Hagrid!” she called, waving at where Hagrid and Madame Maxime had just walked around the same clump of trees. “These dragons can burn you from a piddling little forty feet away if you don’t have an appropriate shield set up.” She chuckled as, at that very moment, another fireball hit them, shrouding them briefly in flames- but just like the first one, her shield shrugged it off.
“Not that it could hurt you anyways,” Sadarina observed, looking up at her.
She shrugged. “It could hurt my clothes, though, and that would be…” She paused. “Unfortunate, I believe.” She giggled gently.
Sadarina nodded, looking out at the dragon keepers as they fought to control the dragons- and, it seemed, decided to go for stunners. “Does your notebook say why we’re here in the middle of the night?”
Hailey shook her head. “Nope- only that I will want to be here.” She shrugged. “And if my alternate timeline self believed it enough to state that I will want to be here, I’m going to assume she’s right. She is, after all, me. And besides, it’s underlined three times.”
“Stupefy!” the wizards all cried, in tandem with one another.
All five dragons wavered… then, slowly, crashed to the ground. They watched as the wizards rushed to fasten the chains to long metal pegs which they forced deep into the ground with their wands. A couple dragons away, the toddler forced one of the pegs in on her own, even though they were at least as long as she was tall, before any of the wizards arrived to help her with it.
“Alright,” Charlie called, as he turned to walk towards Hailey. “They should be alright now.” He sighed, then spoke much more normally. “Why are you so close?” he asked.
“I cast a shield,” she answered simply. “Then, thanks to Equestrian magic, any shield I cast is unbreachable, so…” She shrugged. “In any case, how’s Norbert doing?”
“Norbert?” Charlie asked, tilting his head. “Oh, you mean the Norwegian Ridgeback you and Ron sent us?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Oh. Well… About that, actually.” He chuckled. “We call her Norberta now.”
“Her?” Hagrid asked, stepping up behind Hailey. “Yeh can tell?”
“Oh, yeah,” Charlie chuckled. “They’re more vicious. Completely aside from how, about a year ago now, she… transformed.”
Hailey raised an eyebrow. “She transformed?” she asked.
“Yeah. She was a smart one, even before that, but now?” He chuckled, and turned towards the rest of the enclosure. “Hey Norberta!” he called.
The toddler looked up, from where she had sat down to draw something on the hard ground with her finger. There was two seconds of silence, before she leaped to her feet and bolted towards them, far faster than any toddler ought to have been able to run. “Mommy!”
“Lookout!” Charlie cried, glancing at Hailey.
Hardly two seconds later, she jumped and slammed into Hailey at full speed, wrapping her in a hug. “Mommy!” she cried again, black, leathery wings unfurling from her back to join in the effort. They weren’t all that long yet, only barely tickling Hailey’s sides.
Still, though, her momentum knocked Hailey clear off of the fence- not that it bothered her all that much. “Well hello there,” she chuckled, reaching up to pat the girl’s head.
Charlie stared at her. “Y-You’re okay?”
“Well yeah,” Hailey answered. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He blinked. “If… If you say so. We’ve had people spend weeks in St. Mungo’s because she’d hugged them less enthusiastically than that.”
She nodded gently in acknowledgement, still lying on the ground.
Sadarina hopped off the fence to crouch down next to them. “Hello, Norberta,” she greeted. “So Hailey is Mommy?”
Norberta looked up at her. “H-Hay-lee?”
Hailey chuckled. “That’s my name,” she told her, then held a hand out to Sadarina. “This is Sadarina- and if I’m your mommy, she’s your sister.”
“What?” Charlie asked. “You already have a daughter?”
Hailey giggled in response, and sat up gently. “Legally, yes. Even though she’s about a hundred times older than me.”
Norberta, meanwhile, was looking, confused, at Sadarina. “Sis-ter?” she muttered, then looked back at Hailey. “What’s that mean?”
Hailey blinked. “Uh-!” She looked at Sadarina. “How do I explain that?”
Sadarina chuckled. “Should be simple. You’re my mommy too.”
Norberta looked at her, then tilted her head. “So…?” She reached out her hand. “Sis-ter?”
Hailey nodded. “Yup! This is Hagrid, by the way.” She gestured towards him.
Norberta looked, then buried her face in Hailey’s chest. “He scary,” she muttered.
Hailey hugged her gently. “Don’t worry, he’s nice,” she cooed, while Hagrid flinched away, looking hurt.
Charlie sighed as he crouched down on Hailey’s other side. “Physically, she’s about two- even in dragon form. Mentally, our best guess is that she’s as mature as a seven or eight year old- which is about right for dragon years.” He paused to share a smile with Norberta before looking back up to Hailey. “She still has trouble with English, though- and whereas most dragons learn to fly by eighteen months, all she can do is throw herself at things.”
Hailey looked at Norberta. “You can’t fly?” she asked.
Norberta shook her head. “None of the other dragons will show me how,” she complained. “Their response is always ‘Ask your own mother’ or ‘Get out of my sight’ or even ‘Run for your life, she's here’.” She sighed, and hugged Hailey again. “So I have wings, but I can’t use them.”
Hailey chuckled. “Are the other dragons afraid of you?” she asked.
She nodded. “Most of them. I think I’m too strong.”
“Sounds almost like me,” she observed. She looked to the side and, with one hand, pulled up a large handful of the tall grass. After that, she bunched it together in her hands and started crushing it. Water spilled out of her hands at first- then steam started coming out. When it stopped, there wasn’t nearly enough space between her hands for the bundle of grass to fit- and sure enough, when she opened her hands, it was to reveal a small chunk of diamond.
“Wow!” Norberta cheered, clapping, while Hagrid and Charlie both stared at her in amazement.
Hailey chuckled. “I’m pretty sure wizards actually can’t do that, even by magic- but muggles can, if they’ve got tons of heavy equipment and a lot of patience.” She offered the diamond to Norberta.
Norberta accepted it… then popped it into her mouth, before blinking in apparent surprise. “Tasty!” she observed.
“T-Tasty?” Charlie asked, dumbfounded.
Hailey tilted her head. “Hmm? That suggests…” She looked out at the unconscious dragons, then back at Norberta, and finally nodded. “Yes. You’re part Equestrian dragon, not just British dragon.”
She looked up. “Is that important?”
Hailey nodded. “Unlike British dragons, Equestrian dragons live on a diet of gemstones and the occasional golden snack- which means that,” she glanced up at Charlie, “unless she’s been digging some up around your reserve, she’s probably gemstone-deficient.” She chuckled. “And fun fact: Diamonds are actually some of the most flavorless gems. Most dragons ignore them in favor of the tastier, more colorful gemstones.” She grinned up at Charlie. “Equestrian dragons are also usually a lot larger than British ones and have much more powerful fire breath, but they vary a lot by breed. It’s going to be interesting seeing how she turns out.”
“Very,” Charlie agreed. “You might’ve noticed she had an entire chain to herself earlier- that’s because, as near as we can tell, she simply can’t be lifted off the ground or dragged across it unless she wants to be.”
She raised an eyebrow. “She’s got Ground Hold?” she asked.
“Got what?”
“Ground Hold,” she answered. “It’s an Equestrian magic that allows someone to transfer a force placed on their body, possibly through their own strength, evenly across the nearest half-mile or so of rock. It only works if they’ve got direct contact with the rock or dirt, and only a third of the main population has it to begin with- the Etrahs.” She shrugged. “Means I’ve got it too.” She looked at Norberta. “But there is no recorded instance of an Equestrian dragon having Ground Hold capability. That suggests you’ve got a very interesting ancestry, young lady.”
Norberta giggled.
Hagrid rubbed his beard. “Tha’s… What? Four parents?”
She shrugged. “Something like that. Thing is, she started as a presumably pure British dragon egg. Only Si-er, Alastor had been Papa Tangoed by then, so that’s the only conceivable source of Equestrian magic- but she both isn’t a dragon and doesn’t have Ground Hold, as a Raeth. British magic isn’t as pushy as Equestrian magic, so while she could have absorbed a limited amount of Equestrian magic and become part Raeth from that she couldn’t have…” She paused. “No, wait. She didn’t show any Equestrian magic tendencies or smartness or whatever while she was living with you, did she Hagrid?”
Norberta tilted her head. “I was…?” she muttered.
Hagrid scowled. “Nah, I don’ think so.”
She nodded. “And that… That’d be because, on our way up to the Astronomy Tower to send her to Charlie, we unwittingly carried her straight through the core ley line of the Castle.”
Charlie blinked. “The Castle has ley lines?”
She nodded. “Right now, it houses some fifty-seven thousand and seventy-five students, plus the Professors. It actually doesn’t have the exterior size to hold that many- let alone to properly vent the waste heat and magical energies that so many students would create. Now, at the time, it was only holding a piddling little thirteen thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three, but that’s still quite a few.
“Interestingly, the Castle was built with a heavily-populated future in mind. Perhaps not this heavily, but it actually scales much better than the original designers had anticipated. All of our waste energy, wherever it is in the Castle, is absorbed into small channels in the walls and funneled down towards the core of the Castle. Each of the Houses has a larger channel in to the core- from which the core ley line, as it’s called, travels straight up through- guess what- the tallest astronomy tower, so as to beam all our waste energy up to the upper atmosphere, where it can get blown halfway around the world before it reaches the surface again.
“Now, that ley line is an extremely powerful beam of energy, even with only fourteen thousand people feeding it. It won’t generally interfere with magic- ley lines allow vast amounts of energy to share space with other magic without actually interacting with it, after all.
“But of course, any creature spends the first few months of its life absorbing any and all energy it can find, even directly from the ley lines- the closer they are, and the stronger the ley line, the easier it is and the more they get. We’re pretty sure that’s how both muggleborn and squibs work- and the reason Equestria doesn’t have muggles is because the worldwide ambient magic level is much higher, so an infant doesn’t need a source of magic- such as a magical parent or a ley line- nearby to become magical. The Castle lines aren’t strong enough to be drained that way- except, of course, when there are over a thousand people in the school, it’s strong enough. Fourteen thousand merely boosts it enough we can be basically guaranteed that there was energy available for absorption from every being in the Castle, not just the stronger ones.
“Anyways, since we carried her directly through that ley line while she was in that stage, she naturally absorbed a ton of energy from it- and even back then, the Castle residents included all three tribes and a few more esoteric creatures, such as Equestrian dragons. That, on top of the British magic, and the Papa Tango pattern shedding off of Si-Alastor, means she probably absorbed magic patterns of all sorts, making her a magical hybrid between some…” She paused. “What? Thirty different magical creatures, including humans?”
They all stared at her.
“What’s it mean?” Norberta asked curiously.
“It means you’re very, very unique,” Hailey told her.
“Wait a sec. If it’s dumping all that energy into the upper atmosphere…” Charlie scowled. “Isn’t that going to cause problems?”
Hailey chuckled. “Oh yes. A thousand years ago, muggleborns didn’t exist- and squibs were a lot more common than they are today, to the point where that was all a half-blood wizard could hope to birth. Wizards were, you could say, a ‘dying breed’- and the pureblood families were the only ones that stayed magical, hence their fixation on pure blood. The Founders built the Castle to harvest excess magical energy and use it to increase Earth’s ambient magic intensity. That increase has, over time, reduced the occurrence of squibs, given half-bloods a chance to birth wizards as well- and, within the last three hundred years, muggleborns started to appear.”
“How do you know all this?” Charlie asked.
Hailey shrugged. “I’ve been helping Rita with the research for an upcoming article about how the incidence of muggleborn wizard births is about five times what it was just three short years ago. It was just our luck Hogwarts was the right place to look for clues. Now.” She glanced down at Norberta, then back up at him. “Would it be a problem if I taught Norberta how to glide for a little?”
“Jus’ how ta glide?” Hagrid asked.
“Yes,” Hailey told him. “Unless she can turn into something with a completely different kind of wing, which is a distinct possibility when you consider that the Castle contained at least one full shapeshifter that year, that’s all I will be able to teach her. I only know how to fly with feathered wings, after all, and dragons have membranous wings.”
“Huh,” Charlie muttered. “Shouldn’t be a problem. The journey took a bit longer than we expected, so we still need to set up our tents over there and get settled in. That’s going to take at least a few hours, so…” He shrugged. “Be back by dawn?”
She smiled. “Shouldn’t be too hard.” She looked down at Norberta. “Ready?”
“Ready!” Norberta cried excitedly.
Hailey chuckled. “Alright, here we go.”
Then, she applied a Pinkie Transform to the Misty Step spell, and they vanished into thin air.