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// Chapter 9:  Divine Detector 
// Story: Gift of Divinity 
// by computerneek 
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“Good evening!”
Dumbledore looked up at the unfamiliar voice joining him at the staff table for dinner on September Second.  Who was-?
It was Sunset Shimmer.  Her hat was once more perched atop a veritable bonfire of hair that flowed down to her waist.  She was drawing her chair out with her right hand, and smiling with an unmarred face as she greeted him.  She was just as skin-and-bones as she’d been for the last few years- but unless he missed his guess, there was also- quite suddenly- some muscle on her frame.
The contrast from the day before was so strong that he found himself just staring at her.
She sat down, and looked at him.  “Um, can I help you?”  Her voice had an odd, friendly quality to it that he’d never heard before, even when the girl had first arrived at Hogwarts.
“How?” he asked.
She seemed to be confused, but turned to the table in front of her as she collected her dinner.  “How what?” she asked, gathering far more than her usual starvation ration.
“...  You have both arms,” he muttered, voicing the first thing that came to mind.
Sunset paused, and looked at her hands.  “...  Huh.  You’re right.”  She shrugged.  “Whatever.  How’s all the paperwork been going?”
Dumbledore stared at her.  She was right; even though he had been worried when she hadn’t shown up for breakfast, he’d had to go straight back to his office to battle his way through a mountain of paperwork, and so hadn’t been able to investigate on his own.  The same mountain of paperwork he had to deal with at the beginning of every year- if only the Board would let him take care of it ahead of time!
“How?” he repeated.
“No idea,” she answered, before shoving a piece of steak into her mouth.  There was a pause while she chewed- then she spoke up again before taking her next bite.  “If my arm is back…  I might be able to use a wand again,” she observed.  “Kinda too bad mine, er, got destroyed a few months back.  Oh well, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a new one.”
“It got destroyed?” Dumbledore asked.
“I picked a bad time to try touching it,” she told him.  “I was already angry, so when it burned me, I… snapped it and threw it in the fire.”  She sighed.  “Childish, I know, but there’s no use crying over spilt milk.  Anyways, I imagine I can replace it Saturday without much difficulty.”





“Ahh, Sunset Shimmer.  Eleven and a quarter inches, Yew, phoenix feather and quite swishy, was it?”
Sunset blinked.  “Ahh… Yeah, it was, until…  it, er, got broken not too long ago, so…”
Ollivander gave her a stern look.
“Anyways, I’ve learned from that mistake,” she told him briskly, “but I still find myself in need of a replacement.”
He sighed, and jogged off between the shelves.  “You know, it’s never as easy to find a second wand as it is the first,” he told her.
She winced.  “And I assume the third and so on is progressively more difficult as well?”
Ollivander sighed as he returned to her.  “To the point where there is no guarantee that you will ever find a third match,” he told her.  “The second will already be hit-or-miss in my shop.”





“This’ll be number five hundred,” Ollivander told Sunset, opening one last box to offer her the wand inside.
She sighed.  He hadn’t been the only one counting wands- and it was his policy that, for second and onward, he would only show a maximum of five hundred wands per week to any given customer.
“That’s an interesting one,” Sunset observed immediately.  “Almost looks like Hermione’s.”
Ollivander held it out to her.  “This one is Yew,” he told her.  “Ten and a half inches, flexible.  Goddess hair core.”
Sunset flinched away, inches away from touching the beautifully carved wand.  “Did you say goddess hair?”
He nodded.  “Yes.  The core of this wand is a freely donated hair from a goddess.”
She looked down at it again.  It was carved over its entire length, which indicated a weak wand in every case she’d ever learned of…  Yet if it had the hair of a goddess in it- perhaps it was just weak by divine standards, making it impossibly powerful to regular people like herself?
She reached out again…  and took the wand.
A sudden tingle shot up her arm and throughout her entire body.  Especially in her arm, where she had discovered the day before that her Equestrian magic facilities were indeed fully intact, even if she’d lost much of her skill over the years.
As the wand glowed and showered Ollivander’s shop with brilliant blue and bronze light, she analyzed it with those same Equestrian facilities.
Finally, she let out a sigh.  “The last one happened to be it, I guess,” she muttered, allowing Ollivander to package it for her, and scowling.  “Felt kinda weird, though.  And it had the same glow effect as Hermione’s wand.”
“Hermione?” Ollivander asked, raising an eyebrow.  “Oh.  Her wand also has a hair from the same goddess inside it.”  He smiled at her.  “The glow effect seems to be a characteristic of Goddess-hair wands.”
She rubbed her chin.  “So they’re sister wands, then?  But then why did it feel so much like Hailey?”
He blinked.  “Like who?” he asked.
“Hailey,” she answered.  “She’s so much more powerful than me that I can’t even read her core to tell exactly how powerful she is- but she’s always sharing her power with me and Hermione whenever we’re close by.  Her Gryffindor spirit must be huge to keep her out of Slytherin with something like that- I swear, she’s a born leader.  Then of course, that wand…”  She gestured at the box Ollivander was wrapping in brown paper.  “It’s not so powerful I can’t read it, though it is a few orders of magnitude stronger than me.  And when I touched it, it channeled its power through me, making it one with my magic and allowing me to use the full power of the wand, even in excess of my own power.
“When it did that…  its power felt almost exactly like Hailey’s power.  But Hailey’s not a goddess…”  She trailed off, then tilted her head.  “Is she?”  Then she sighed.  “Research for another time,” she decided.  “So, how much do I owe you?”





Sunset held her brand new wand gently in her fingertips.  She was back at her desk in her office- but it wasn’t going to be a problem if she indulged herself a little by delighting in her restored ability to touch a wand for a few minutes, was it?
Her few minutes had already stretched to almost two hours, but she was still excited to be able to touch it.
The fact that the wand glowed resolutely in her hands, and that she could feel its magic protecting and strengthening her, was completely beside the point.
She jumped when someone knocked on the door, then quickly hid her wand in an open drawer.  “Come in,” she called.
Her office door opened, and a blonde-haired Slytherin boy entered her office.  She didn’t recognize him right away- not that she recognized very many of the students.  Erica, the week before, had been one of the exceptions- as a matter of fact, she was the one that had nominated Erica for the Prefect job.
The boy looked nervous, and shut the door quickly behind him- and as he did that, she realized that she did recognize him, though not by name.  He was the one that had been strutting around the school like he owned the place this year, two massive thugs in tow.
Yet…  somehow, he felt too vulnerable to be that boy.  Perhaps he was instead someone that just looked like the one strutting about?  She scanned his magical core directly rather than reading his nametag- he was Draco Malfoy…  though it looked like he was unsatisfied with that.  His entire magical core was in a state of flux, constantly rippling about itself- it didn’t like something about itself.
“Uh- Hi, um, Miss Shimmer?” Draco asked nervously.
Sunset nodded, some part of her mind checking the Castle database to find out why the name ‘Malfoy’ seemed familiar to her.  She found it right away- his father was one of the Governors…  and his behavior was extremely uncharacteristic of a Malfoy.
And he was, indeed, the one that had been going around with the goons.
“Do you need something, Mr. Malfoy?” she asked politely.
“I-!” He paused, took a deep breath, and continued.  “I heard I’m supposed to come to you to join the research team?”
She nodded.  “Yes, I am the Head of the Research Department,” she told him calmly.  “Why do you want to join?”
“Well, I…”  He paused, looking conflicted.
“Feel free to take a seat,” Sunset told him, gesturing politely to the chair on his side of her desk.
He sat, slowly, and spoke.  “Because…”  He sighed, evidently still thinking hard.  “Because I want to make the world a better place,” he finally decided.
Sunset nodded gently, and steepled her fingers under her chin.  “How so?”
He flinched, looking taken aback…  then took a deep breath, and let it out, averting his eyes as he thought.
The silence drew on for almost a whole minute before he spoke.
“I…  I don’t know if you know already,” he muttered.  “There’s this…  disease affecting the world.  Nobody knows how it’s transmitted, and it…  affects the mind of anyone that catches it.  The only cure anybody knows about is painful and arduously long, and isn’t always successful, either.  I…  I want to find a better cure, that’s faster, less painful, and more reliable.”
She nodded slowly.  “And this disease is?”
He winced, staring at his knees.  “It’s…  Transgenderism.  The cure is conversion therapy…  and my idea for a new cure is physical transformation.”
She gazed at him for a few seconds.  “You’re trans, aren’t you?”
He flinched away from her so hard he nearly knocked the chair over, staring at her in abject terror.
She sighed, laying her hands on her desk.  “It’s not a disease,” she told him.  “It’s not contagious.  It can’t be caught.  And conversion therapy is an evil process that destroys their identity.”
He stared at her.
She smiled gently.  “What transgenderism is…  is a mismatch between the body and the soul.  The fix- the true fix- is to modify the body to match the soul.  Where I come from, the magic of the land is so powerful it forces the body to match the soul from birth to death- resulting in a few interesting cases where a child is identified as one sex before birth, but comes out as the other…  and when such a child dies, they can leave behind a body of the opposite sex- of the one they were identified as before birth.”  She sighed.  “The magic of Earth is not nearly as powerful, and does not have that effect, so we have to use some kind of transformation spell to fix the problem.  Unfortunately, the magic to turn a boy into a girl, or vice versa…  does not exist, currently.”  She looked up to meet his eyes.  “And I will gladly help you create it.”
He stared at her, too stunned to speak.
“Though I do have to ask,” Sunset muttered.  “Why do you bully other students with those two thugs so much?”
He flinched away from her- and she read the answer on his face.
“Wait, let me guess,” she told him.  “It’s appearances, right?”
He nodded vaguely.
“Of course.”  She smiled.  “I know ‘appearances’ myself,” she told him, “so I’m not going to judge you by them.”  She sighed, leaning back in her chair.  “Back before I came here, I was the personal student of Princess Celestia Solaris, the supreme ruler of the land I came from.  I had to conduct myself in a manner suitable for royalty at all times, no matter what- and that was actually part of why I came here.”  She let out another sigh.  “I got fed up with those appearances, and fled from them.  I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t the main reason why- I was a power-hungry fanatic at the time- but it was one of them, and the main reason that I haven’t been working nearly as hard as I might’ve to open the gate back home.”  She looked over at him.  “So with that out of the way, you wanted to join the research team, correct?”
“Er- Yeah,” Draco muttered.
“And would I be correct to assume you want to do it, er, ‘on the down-low’ as well?”
He nodded silently.
“Alrighty then.”  She rubbed her chin.  “This could get complicated.”





Hermione drew her wand.  “Like this?” she asked, holding it casually.
“Yes,” Sunset told her.  Sunset had decided to launch straight into experiments- and the first one, for some reason, required Hermione specifically…  and not Hailey, who was doing homework with Dudley in the library.  “Now…  can you tell me your hair is blue?”
Hermione blinked.  “That…  That my hair is blue?” she asked.  “Why?”
“For science,” Sunset answered.  “Just tell me your hair is blue, okay?  Like you mean it.”
She stared at her.  “Oh…  Okay then.  My-!”  She broke off, took a deep breath, and tried again…  but no sound came out.
She tried a few times.
Finally, she sighed.  “Weird,” she muttered.  “The words just won’t come out.”
“It’s like I thought,” Sunset muttered.  “Our wands won’t let us lie.”
Hermione looked down at her wand.  “So…  my wand is a magical lie detector?”
“Less lie detector and more lie preventer, but yeah.”  She looked down at hers.  “And I get the funny feeling they won’t keep us from lying in certain situations, either- almost like they don’t mind us deceiving our enemies, so long as we’re honest with ourselves.”  She sighed.  “It’s got to be a characteristic of the Goddess Hair wands.  I looked it up over the last couple days, but there’s absolutely no mention of truth-detection effects- nor even spells, truth-finding is reserved to potions as far as most of the world is concerned.”  She leaned back in her chair; they were in the brand-new Research Room, in the corner that had a half-dozen comfortable armchairs set around a circular table.  “And…  have you noticed how similar our wands are to Hailey?”
“Similar to Hailey?” Hermione asked, looking at her wand…  then she paused.  “...  Yeah, I suppose so.  She gives me the same, er…  tingle-and-strength effect, as my wand.”
Sunset nodded.  “That’s her magic, protecting and strengthening yours.  And when you touch the wand…”  She sighed.  “That’s why I think it’s her hair in our wands, not just any goddess.”
Hermione stared at her.  “But…  But Hailey’s not a goddess?”
“That’s the big question,” Sunset told her.  “Our wands sharing her power- it’s definitely her power, not just a similar power- while being labeled as Goddess wands…  is a vote to the positive, right?”
“But she seems pretty sure she’s a pretty ordinary girl that weird stuff just happens around,” Hermione scowled.
Sunset nodded.  “There’s also…  I’ve been magically examining myself quite a bit, after a simple conversation turned me around so completely…  and healed my arm, magic, face, and hair, all at once.
“And as near as I can tell, my magic is intertwined with divine magic.  Any guess what that means?”
Hermione scowled.  “Um…  You’re favored by a goddess?”
Sunset shook her head.  “It’s incredibly rare in my world, thanks to how rare goddesses are- but that’s exactly what it looks like when someone forms a pact with a goddess.  So long as that someone fulfills their side of the agreement, they actually have access to a part of the goddess’ power.  They’ll get things like divine healing, which is the only thing that can heal a biological magical instrument like the one in my right arm, strength, speed, magical prowess, even immortality.
“The problem is, I don’t remember ever making such a pact.”
Hermione blinked.  “What…  What happens if you break it?”
“You die, usually.  For that reason, whenever a goddess has someone agree to do something they aren’t certain they can do easily, they like to add a qualifier such as ‘to the best of my ability’ to it- it protects them from death should they fail due to a factor outside their control, or even a flawed plan, so long as they were doing their best.  A Pact can also complete- say, the task agreed upon was completed, or whatever other condition was met- where the Pact simply dissolves, leaving the Goddess’s servant exactly as they were before.”
“And…”  Hermione paused, unsure if she wanted to hear the answer to her next question.
“And if you don’t remember what the Pact is?  No matter, it’s still in force.  The Goddess in question usually provides a couple reminders in those situations, but something tells me I won’t get any.”
“Why do these goddesses form pacts at all?”
“Usually?”  Sunset shrugged.  “Most Goddesses are like weak human beings.  They have all that divine power…  but they can’t actually use it directly.  So in order for them to affect the world around them with any significance, they have to gain the agreement of various people around them, and manipulate the world that way.
“But Hailey?”  She laughed.  “Even with the magical boost from that Pact, she’s simply too powerful for me to figure out how powerful she is.  All the goddesses I’ve ever met- I never was one to accept a pact from one- were easy for me to measure even without a Pact boosting me.”
“If they offer boosts like that…  why wouldn’t you accept one?” Hermione asked.
“Well…  They’re not all sunshine and daisies.  Not only are you bound to whatever promise you made the goddess, which they can manipulate to their liking because you’re usually in a trance when you form such a pact, but it also gives the goddess a level of control over your mind.  They can give you a really strong urge to do something you wouldn’t normally do- and the magic of the pact forces you to be okay with it, meaning they have de-facto control over your life.”  She sighed.  “The strange thing is that being mind-controlled by a Goddess, even Hailey, is still a frightening thought to me.  Meaning, as near as I can tell, that this pact of mine is of a different breed nobody’s ever encountered before, that doesn’t include mind control.”
“Wouldn’t a goddess be able to just modify our minds on a whim?”
Sunset blinked.  “Nope.  Most of them can’t use their divine power, remember?”
“Oh,” Hermione muttered.  “So…  How are you going to avoid breaking that pact?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Sunset told her.  “I just need to not try to hurt myself, which basically means I can’t commit suicide or try and cut myself open for no better reason than to hurt myself.  Little nicks for extracting blood, and even being exceptionally brave in combat, won’t trigger that kind of pact.”
She tilted her breath.  “How do you know what it is if you don’t remember it?”
“Because I do remember it,” she told her.  “It just…  wasn’t created in an ordinary way.  Do you remember, back on that Astronomy tower, when Hailey had just pulled me off the edge and was yelling at me, and I finally capitulated and promised not to hurt myself?”
Hermione nodded.  “Yeah…  Then that weird column of light came out of nowhere.”
“That weird column of light is an effect caused by the formation of a Pact,” Sunset told her.  “Since I promised Hailey something to cause that and not some other goddess, that’s a pretty clear indicator that Hailey is the goddess I formed the Pact with.”
“But Hailey-!” Hermione paused.  “She can’t be a goddess…  Can she?”
“She very easily could be,” Sunset told her.  “In particular, I think she’s a young and extremely powerful Goddess that has unrestricted access to her divine powers, growing up through her first childhood.  Yes, goddesses can reincarnate really whenever they want, but it doesn’t give them extra powers or anything, only appearances.
“The challenge if she’s a young goddess like that…  is that it’s far, far better for her to experience a normal childhood rather than being revered for the whole thing.  I’ve read stories about universes where goddesses were revered as such from birth, and…  Let’s just say they didn’t last very long.  The people…  Or the goddesses, for that matter.”
“But the immortality…?”
She nodded.  “Killing innocents damages a Goddess’s soul,” she told her.  “Beyond a certain point, they become demonesses…  and if they keep going, their divine powers will eventually evaporate…  which kills them.”  She sighed.  “If we go with the assumption Hailey is the most powerful goddess me or anyone else I know has ever seen, then I’d say she rather clearly doesn’t know how to control her divine power- that’d be what’s causing all the weird things around her.  Fortunately, they all seem to be beneficial, so we shouldn’t need to risk breaking her bubble by teaching her to control them.”
“All beneficial?  But on the train, when she suddenly knew my grades-!”
“One of a Goddess’ best-known powers is that of information,” Sunset told her.  “Both collection and implantation, that is to say, putting it where it needs to be.  It’s one of the few powers they have access to without going through a Pact.  May I ask, what did she do with that knowledge?”
Hermione blinked.  “She…  She turned Draco Malfoy into an instant friend.  Then she called him Silver, and he talked about transgender stuff.  He said that was one of the names he was thinking about adopting if he managed to change his sex.”
“Silver?” Sunset asked, tilting her head.  “Huh.  That information power does not extend into the future, so I wonder how she got that?”  She sighed.  “Anyways, since her divine power is behaving so nicely, we don’t have to teach her to control it- it’ll merely fulfill her wishes for her, and she’s a good girl, so…”  She sighed again.  “She…  You haven’t noticed anything about her personality, have you?”
“Uh…  she’s crazy protective?  I mean, she talked about always protecting Dudley in muggle school, then kinda came down on everyone that was bothering me, then when she stopped you, it felt like she was trying to protect you from yourself.”
“Protective, huh?” Sunset mused.  “Well…  In what sample size I was able to find in Starswirl’s research, how protective a goddess is has a positive correlation to their ability to survive long-term.”
Hermione tilted her head.  “Correlation?” she asked.  “Is that…  co-relation, so like…”
Sunset nodded.  “That is to say, the more protective, the more likely they were to survive long-term, and vice versa.  There were a lot of other factors, and the sample size was small enough it could just be coincidence, but…”  She sighed.  “We should only need to try and keep her from finding out what she is until she discovers it on her own.”
“Which means…”  Hermione looked down.  “Ollivander sends letters to donors whenever a wand is sold,” she muttered, then looked up.  “Which means she knows her hairs are in our wands, and we need to avoid telling her they’re goddess hairs.”
Sunset nodded.  “That’s the conclusion me and Ollivander came up with, yes.  We’re the only two he’s ever presented a goddess hair wand to…. So far.”