“You know, I’m curious,” Parvati muttered, as she worked with her hair. She and Hailey had just finished getting dressed and painting their nails- but unlike Hailey’s, Parvati’s hair wasn’t nearly so elegant on its own. Fortunately, Hailey had used a quick-dry charm Parvati hadn’t been aware of, so she didn’t have to worry about getting nail polish on her hair or whatever. She looked at Hailey in the mirror. “Why did you wait so long before you asked me?” she asked.
Hailey smiled good-naturedly. “Partly because I was waiting for Ron to realize that his eight girlfriends are, in fact, girls.” She sighed. “He finally did, but the only one he realized was a girl was Hermione, and at the time, I was the only one without a partner.” She shrugged. “And also partly because I knew just about anyone I asked was going to say yes, just because of my position, so I figured I’d let everyone else get their picks first.” She glanced up. “To be honest, I’m surprised you didn’t have a partner already.”
She sighed. “Nobody asked,” she muttered. “And I’ve never been an asker myself, so…” She sighed. “Neither my sister, Padma. She’s the timid one, between us, but nobody had asked her either.” She grinned, pausing to glance sideways at Hailey. “Whatever you did to get Ron to ask her was a stroke of genius.”
Hailey chuckled. “It’s not as sweet as it sounded,” Hailey muttered. “I just picked a random passageway to point him to, and suggested that he ask every girl he met on his way back to Gryffindor tower. She just happened to be, uh, fifth. The first four were taken.”
She paused, gazing into the mirror. “Did you ever consider asking… one of your friends?”
“Not at all,” Hailey smiled. “I’m sure it would have been nice, but all of us- with the exception of Ron, apparently- agreed that, since the Tournament is about meeting new people, we’d each find someone else to be our date, not each other.” She shrugged. “Meaning, had Ron asked Hermione before Krum asked her, she still would have said no. He would’ve gotten that explanation, though.”
“So…” Parvati trailed off, staring into the mirror. “Why did you pick me? There has to be someone more attractive.”
Hailey chuckled. “Oh, that’s a classic,” she muttered, and grinned. “You’re blind to your own beauty,” she told her bluntly, then shrugged. “Most girls are. But that wasn’t what I was looking for.”
She looked at her. “Oh?”
She nodded. “I mean, you know I’m the Student Instructor Program Management Team Lead, right?”
She nodded as well. “Yeah?”
“That means the amount of information I deal with daily is simply stupendous, before you consider I’m still the Head Student Instructor for Defense Against the Dark Arts and all that entails.” She flopped down on Parvati’s bed, which she had been sitting on the end of. “And that’s not even counting my other job, or my other other job, neither of which I can tell you about.
But as a result of all that, I’m pretty familiar with the personalities of around eighty percent of the students in this school right now, even if the number I could identify by appearance is well below one percent, so…” She sighed. “That’s what I was looking for. Kind, friendly, and not overly difficult to ask.” She sat up again. “So in the end, I asked you because, when I looked beyond such ephemeral things as physical beauty or attractiveness, I liked what I saw.”
“Ahh,” Parvati muttered, averting her eyes from Hailey, only to spy her in the mirror. She took a deep breath, then stepped over to sit next to Hailey. “Um… I know we just spent a lot of time making you look so nice, but if you are Harry…” She sighed. “Doesn’t he have to open the ball?”
“And I have to be there as well as one of the judges,” Hailey nodded, “yes. And while there’s going to be too much interaction for time travel to be safe… there’s a simpler way to be in two places at once.”
“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
She nodded. “Yeah. Hire a changeling.”
“A… Changeling.” She paused, racking her memory- but while she remembered hearing that term before, she couldn’t remember what it referred to. “What is that?”
“An Equestrian shapeshifter,” Hailey answered, “and the best there is at disguise and impersonation.”
Parvati blinked, and looked at her. “Does that mean you’re-?”
She laughed. “Oh, no, I hate being Harry. I’m the real me, the changeling is going to be Harry.” She grinned. “And we’re having so much fun with that.” She glanced at Parvati. “And honestly, I’m amazed that Rarity managed to work your heritage into your gown so well. They don’t have anything even remotely similar to it in Equestria.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh come on. Padma’s is better.”
Hailey shrugged. “I’d say they’re about even, actually. At least, they were when I saw them in Rarity’s shop.”
“... You can go to Equestria?”
Hailey didn’t engage in conversation with the other judges over the meal that started the Yule Ball, Parvati noticed. Not that they were talking about much of consequence, but Hailey’s attention seemed to keep going someplace else.
Eventually, her curiosity got the better of her.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Padma doesn’t look like she’s having much fun,” Hailey sighed.
Parvati looked. She picked her sister out of the crowd right away; Rarity had apparently had problems getting in decent help, and so had completed very few of the ball gowns that had been ordered from her, making Parvati extra glad she’d had both been the first and had also ordered one for her sister.
Padma was eating quietly, with a disgruntled look on her face, and kept shooting sideways glances at Ron… who was staring unerringly at Hermione, completely ignoring Padma.
“Oh my,” she muttered.
Hailey nodded. “I have to admit, it doesn’t surprise me, but…” She heaved a second sigh, skewering a neatly-cut piece of her steak with her fork. “Padma deserves better than to be ignored like that. Frankly, every girl does, but that’s beside the point.”
Parvati glanced over at the Champion’s Table, where Harry had already managed to dribble so much food down his front that his lap had more spaghetti in it than his plate. The unfamiliar girl seated next to him seemed to be delighting in his mess, and taking the opportunity to make it even bigger by distracting him so frequently he only rarely got to actually eat his food instead of adding it to his lap. Hermione was chatting with Krum, and Roger Davis looked like he was vulnerable to the attractiveness of a Veela. He was staring at Fleur in a kind of trance while they talked.
Silversong, meanwhile, was sitting next to an empty chair, looking depressed.
“It doesn’t look like Silver is having much fun either,” Parvati observed.
Hailey looked, and sighed. “Yeah. Bonbon is a very busy woman, and got called away on urgent business right when they were lining up next to the door. Knowing her, she’ll probably be back in an hour or two.”
Parvati looked at her. “What about your jobs?” she asked.
Hailey shrugged. “I’m still a student here,” she informed her. “Equestria is outside of my mission field, so unlike Bonbon, I don’t need to periodically go take care of a couple dozen criminal organizations in some random Equestrian city.” She sighed. “Even after I finished the STS, far too many Guards refuse to use it, and are subsequently losing their jobs in Equestria. I swear, it’s a minor disaster over there; I’m sure Celestia will be very glad when the only Equestrians getting Hogwarts invitations are those that are graduating Magic Kindergarten.”
“Magic what?” Parvati asked.
“Magic Kindergarten,” she answered, between bites. “Equestria enjoys a much higher atmospheric magic concentration than Britain does, so muggles and squibs simply don’t exist over there. So of course, they evolved to rely on that environment for their magic, and their magic diversified into three separate categories, which they call tribes: The Raeth, Aethr, and Etrah. Each person could only cast magic from one of those categories, and never from either of the others, with very, very few exceptions, so of course Equestria has a long and storied history of tribal warfare and unification.
“Meanwhile, because they’re evolved to rely on ambient magic…” She sighed. “When they cross into Britain, and our much, much lower ambient magic levels, most of them are completely unable to cast the spells they normally use, and even the most powerful- like Twilight, Luna, or Bonbon- can only barely cast simple Equestrian spells here. There just isn’t enough magic in the air for them.
“That’s one of the main differences. We evolved in a world with so little magic that the only way for even a pure-blood family to have a magical child was to surround their newborn with as much magic as possible… and, often, have many, many children. That’s actually why wizards have a fixation on enchanting objects that really don’t need it, like pictures, and the root of the pureblood supremacists. Well over seventy percent of live births were squibs, back in the day- but thanks to Hogwarts, this world has enough magic in it now for squibs to be rare, and even for muggleborn witches and wizards to appear.
“But since we evolved in that low-magic environment, our wandless- and accidental- magic is entirely cast from our innate wellsprings, with absolutely no reliance on ambient magic. As a matter of fact, because it doesn’t use ambient magic at all, it actually becomes less and less effective in greater and greater concentrations of ambient magic- with the result that accidental magic is rarer in wizarding households than in muggle homes. As such, if a raw British wizard were to go to Equestria… Aside from the magic concentration being so high as to kill him in a matter of seconds when he failed to synchronize his being with the ambient magic as Equestrians have evolved to do, his wandless magic just wouldn’t work, no matter how powerful he was.
“Wand magic, of course, is an entirely different animal. Our wands actually serve as thaumic batteries, absorbing and storing ambient magic whenever we’re not using them, before unleashing it in tightly-controlled bursts whenever we cast spells. As a result, while our wand spells aren’t nearly as flexible as Equestrian spells, they’re an order of magnitude more efficient- and will still work just fine in Equestria.”
Parvati nodded as Hailey stopped to order a dessert from her plate; she had been eating her steak between sentences all along, so it had been slow enough she had understood it without trying all that hard. “But you can use almost stupidly-powerful Equestrian magics in Britain,” she observed.
Hailey nodded. “I can,” she agreed. “That’s because, after I went through the long and frankly painful process we’ve codenamed the Papa Tango, I’m actually half-British, half-Equestrian. I have retained the British ability to cast magic directly from my wellspring, which has allowed me to retain the use of Animagus magic among other things… and gained the Equestrian magical facilities and focusing abilities. It’s almost stupidly simple to channel the magic from my wellspring into the Equestrian facilities, granting me full, wellspring-induced power with Equestrian magics no matter my environment.
“Then of course, because innate magic is naturally more powerful than ambient magic, that kinda automatically makes me much more powerful than most Equestrians in Equestria, in terms of Equestrian magic, without even trying- and that’s not even counting that I am also just a little bit more powerful in Equestria than here, thanks to the ambient energy levels.”
She scowled. “You mentioned… The three tribes. With a few exceptions?”
“Yeah. Because the three tribes actually include physical changes for their unique magics… There is an extremely powerful magic process in Equestria, rather simply called Ascension, that is the exception. Ascension magnifies the strength of the wellspring so far that ambient magic density is slightly higher around them than elsewhere, even in Equestria, and grants them far more robust magic facilities from each of the Tribes, allowing them to gather and channel far greater amounts of magic than anyone else.” She sighed. “Since Ascension is written into their magical cores, that meant I was capable of it too.”
“You… were capable of it?”
She nodded. “I Ascended last year,” she informed her. “If I lived in Equestria, that would automatically make me a royal Princess of the land, but I don’t. However, the massive wellspring magnification, paired with British cast-from-wellspring…” She trailed off, and sighed. “After that, I’ve become some kind of proto-goddess. Then because those that have Ascended are also immortal…”
“Um… You still seem to be growing to me.”
She nodded. “I am,” she agreed. “But because I ascended, I will grow until I hit my prime… Then stay there, forever. Paired with the only Equestrian magic that directly uses the Wellspring, which has the effect of granting each and every Equestrian- including myself- a unique power…” She paused, then offered a spoonful of ice cream. “Want some?”
Parvati blinked at it. “Oh, um,” she muttered, glancing at her empty plate. She, uninterrupted by Hailey’s monologue, had eaten faster than Hailey, and was already full. “Sure,” she finally agreed, more to be polite than anything else, and accepted the bite.
She almost gasped when it touched her tongue, and did put her hand over her mouth. It- It was simply amazing. Far better than any ice cream had a right to be- and she didn’t even like chocolate!
“W-Wow,” she gasped, while Hailey laughed at her reaction. It was a gentle, beautiful sound that was so very rarely heard from the girl- natural laughter. “H-How did you make that so good?”
“I didn’t,” Hailey smiled, scooping up the last of her dessert.
“Y-You didn’t?” she gaped. “But- But that was-!”
Hailey chuckled. “Ever since Twilight became the Princess of Friendship, some three or four years before the portal was opened, whenever there is an Equestrian involved, food will always taste better when a friend is feeding you rather than when you’re feeding yourself.”
Parvati turned to her plate. “Vanilla sundae,” she ordered, lifting her spoon.
The sundae appeared, and she took a small spoonful of it… then turned to Hailey. “Want some?”
Hailey laughed, and accepted it- then also put her hand over her mouth in surprise. “Oh My,” she muttered. “It must be just that much stronger for sweets,” she muttered. Then, grinning like a lunatic, she plucked a scoop of the sundae- which Parvati had moved to stand between them- with her own spoon and held it out for Parvati.
It was also ambrosia.