Professor McGonagall paused for a fraction of a second about a third of the way through the Sorting Ceremony, before calling out the next name on the list.
“Potter, James!”
There was no way it was the one she knew.
She glanced briefly behind her as a black-haired boy emerged from the throng of students still waiting to be sorted; it looked like Professor Snape had stiffened as well, and Dumbledore looked more attentive than he usually did during the Sorting Ceremony.
The boy that came forward did indeed look very much like the James Potter she knew- the one that had been killed by Lord Voldemort thirteen years before. He was, however, a first-year student, and not a fully grown adult.
“Gryffindor!”
With a chuckle, the boy set the hat back down- he’d been sorted instantly, that was always nice- and jogged off towards the Gryffindor table.
She looked down at the next name, and froze for almost two full seconds. That… wasn’t possible.
“Potter, Lily!”
Snape noticeably leaned forwards as the girl stepped out of the crowd. She looked much like she was Ginny Weasley’s younger sister, thanks in part to her vivid red hair- but as she danced up to the Hat, Professor McGonagall spotted her bright green eyes.
And on second thought, while there was no family resemblance between the two… when Lily sat between James and Hailey at the Gryffindor table- she’d been an instant-sort as well- the family resemblance then popped out at her between the three of them.
It wasn’t… It wasn’t possible, was it?
“Hailey, did your parents reincarnate?” Snape asked stiffly, over the psychic network- asking the question Professor McGonagall was certain the rest of the staff was wondering too.
Hailey’s answer was immediate. “No, I resurrected them. As children. Mom loves it, but Dad keeps wondering about the house.”
“It burned down,” Dumbledore informed her, surprise coloring his tone. He’d evidently been expecting the news of their resurrection just as much as Snape- who reacted to the news with stunned silence- and McGonagall had.
“I know,” Hailey asserted. “Even though it wasn’t on fire when I was pulled out of it.”
“I never figured that out either,” Dumbledore answered. “Maybe it was a lightning strike?”
“Professor Lupin did,” Hailey informed him calmly. “According to him, the Ministry of Magic decided the easiest way to keep our stuff from falling into muggle hands was to burn it down, bodies and all.” She sighed. “I thought about storming the Ministry to demand their policies be updated, but they’ve already done that and no longer routinely commit arson. Thanks to Cornelius Fudge, actually, just last year- when he ordered the law changed, he said he had a relative that had been declared dead, and returned months later to find all his stuff up in smoke.”
“Oh yeah, that,” Dumbledore nodded. “The Wizengamot refused to take a stance on that law when I took issue with it almost sixty years ago now.”
“Well it’s changed now. Fudge insisted on not just extending the waiting period, but instead preserving the property, with appropriate antimuggle charms, for the next person to inherit their Gringotts Vault.”
“That might be why all the older wizarding homesteads are heavily enchanted to be extremely difficult for even wizards to find,” Professor Flitwick observed calmly.
“I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve done down here,” Hailey observed calmly, as she and Ginny stepped off the magic platform in the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets the normal way, rather than by Void Weave Drive as they had when they’d been swapping Hermione’s body out for the new one a couple weeks prior. They still had the long, long-since-cleaned passage to walk down before they reached the Parselmouth Door, as they’d nicknamed it, that would let them into the Chamber proper.
Ginny chuckled. “Yeah, I did do something a little different since last time you saw it,” Ginny agreed, nodding. Only a couple days after the sorting, one of her sisters- Iris, incidentally- had requested permission to come pay her a visit… so she’d talked to Hailey, who had talked to Dumbledore. In the end, the answer was that yes, she could come… Provided that neither she nor anything she brought would look too ‘out of place’. Fortunately, the Chamber of Secrets would conveniently hide an Astrium vessel, allowing the definitely-out-of-place spaceship to be stored out of sight while her sister was visiting.
So, after another couple days to prepare (and, Ginny was guiltily aware, ‘reach the weekend’ so fewer of her friends would be stuck in class), it was time to welcome her first interdimensional guests about a week after the term started. But of course, they didn’t have a fixed time set yet- her sister knew it was going to be soon, but Ginny wanted to double-check the ‘landing zone’ first, and make sure the sensors necessary to guide Iris’ ship to a safe landing were properly set up and functional.
She sighed softly. “So, how were your new classes this week?”
“Professor Trelawney saw the Grim in my cup,” Hailey informed her calmly. “Might be because I was interfering with the magic involved to keep it from mentioning my abnormality.”
Ginny chuckled. “When the immortal Goddess of the Multiverse sees a Grim…” She chuckled again.
“The Omniverse, technically,” Hailey corrected her. “But yeah, considering it’s factually impossible to kill me, a death omen has to be perhaps one of the most amusing things for it to have displayed. How about you?”
“I like Professor Lupin,” Ginny told her simply. “He didn’t quite throw us in the deep end, but I actually learned something.” She smiled. “Even when I consider my prior knowledge as Lord Voldemort, he still managed to top seven years of Defense Against the Dark Arts training.”
“Sounds like him,” Hailey agreed. “Our first lesson with him was a practical lesson; he took us to the staffroom to eliminate a Boggart.”
“A Boggart?” Ginny asked, tilting her head. “Interesting. I wiped a few of those out as Lord Voldemort, but I can’t say I know what my boggart is right now.”
“Yeah,” Hailey muttered. “When it looked at me, it just sorta… vibrated until someone else got its attention.”
Ginny snorted. “You simply don’t fear, do you?”
She chuckled. “I mean, I do fear some things, but anything capable of making you guys stay dead wouldn’t fit in just three dimensions, so it couldn’t become my worst fear. Nevermind the impossibility of penetrating natural wards as powerful as mine to figure out what it is in the first place.” She gave a short bark of laughter. “Care of Magical Creatures was just as interesting; Hagrid showed us a Hippogriff, and taught us all sorts of different facts about them. We’re actually going to put it to the test next lesson.”
Ginny smiled, then glanced at the floor. “Somewhere along here, Lockhart laid for an hour or so while we rescued Luna,” she observed. “And I can’t help but notice he’s still at large?”
“Rita’s really taking her time,” Hailey observed calmly. “But don’t worry, I have her word she’s going to rip his reputation apart, piece by piece.”
“I hope so,” Ginny answered calmly.
“You’ve been busy in here,” Hailey observed.
“Well of course,” Ginny answered. “You’ll notice I cannibalized the ship again.”
“I do,” Hailey observed. “And unless I miss my guess, that’s one huge Void Weave Drive.”
Ginny looked, and nodded; it was tucked into the corner next to the entrance, but stood so massive it nearly blocked the entrance anyways. “There’s another one stacked on top,” she informed Hailey. “They’re powering a pretty productive mine-and-transmute operation behind Salazar’s statue; I’m excavating a bunch of stone and converting it into Astrium. The extra power that isn’t used by that is being funneled into a Luminous Astrium storage matrix so I can make as much Luminous Astrium as I want, whenever I want.”
Hailey nodded. “Yeah, I did notice the tanks down the length of the chamber.”
Ginny chuckled. “You noticed that, eh? Yeah. Between the pillars is parking space, but outside is storage space. A couple of those tanks are full, actually- with this amount of power to run the transmutation and the size of forge I have next to Salazar’s statue, the drilling process is going very quickly indeed. Anyways, when we went to the Void, I mounted a boatload of sensors on the ship so it could navigate its way back in here without assistance, but Iris’ ship isn’t nearly as… wallpapered in sensors.” She looked up, and reached out a hand towards the tanks on either side, ordering Astrium to ripple out the tops of the tanks- through hatches that sprang open for it- to become massive sensor arrays on the sides of the tanks.
“There,” she nodded softly. “Now I just need to calibrate them, which…” She paused. The calibration process was very finicky, especially with this many sensors- but the number and positions she’d set would mean Iris would be able to position her ship to within a millimeter of her desired emergence point without using her onboard sensors at all. As a result, it took a couple of minutes, then she finally let out a sigh and called up her sister. “Alright, I’m ready,” she informed her.
Within seconds, a spot in the air just about as far away from Ginny as she could see in the bright illumination cast down from the spotlights she’d mounted at the tops of the tanks- namely, a matter of feet in front of Salazar’s statue- began to twist around itself. A moment later, a small ring of pure, greyish energy appeared, with little bits of green, blue, and purple flickering throughout it. It quickly widened into a sort of funnel of energy large enough for a small bus to drive through- then a flash of blue light emerged from it, resolving into Iris’s ship with the dull thump of a pressure wave Ginny hadn’t realized would be there but Hailey apparently had, before the funnel shrank back to nothing.
Iris descended quickly, flying a little closer to them before she ‘landed’; the ship didn’t have landing gear, Ginny knew, instead using a magical structure to hold itself a couple inches off the ground when ‘parked’.
Finally, a door on the side of the ship opened, and someone stuck their head out- Iris, Ginny knew. She looked very much like Hailey, though she was an adult rather than a teenager.
“Welcome to the Chamber of Secrets, Iris,” Ginny began, with a gentle bow, as Iris descended the two steps to the stone, and more people began to emerge; she recognized three of them instantly as Hermione, Luna… and herself.
Iris looked around as her friends emerged as well, chuckling softly. “Well, this brings back memories.”
Ginny chuckled. “I bet yours wasn’t all full of Astrium tanks,” she observed.
The last to exit, an unfamiliar woman, grinned as she looked around, her rippling green hair flowing down her back. “I like what you’ve done with the place. Proper lighting, for one. A thousand years in a stone room lit only by green fire makes you appreciate those kinds of things.”
“Despite a little over two hundred years since, Ginny tells me,” Hailey observed calmly.
The woman smiled and her form shifted. Her legs fused together, elongating into a long, green snake tail as scales rippled into existence along it. When she finished, she was a large green snake with a human head and torso. “Basilisks have long memories,” she intoned.
Ginny blinked. “You mean-!” She broke off, trying to understand what was going on.
Iris giggled. “Allow me to introduce Lady Ashasra of the Chamber, or as we call her, Emerald.”
“That’s one way to solve the Monster of Slytherin problem.”
Ginny immediately looked up, following the voice to the top of the massive tower of Void Weave Drives next to her- to spot Hermione sticking her head off the top. “How long have you been up there?” she asked, to which Hermione only grinned.
Hailey chuckled. “There’s actually still a basilisk up in Salazar’s statue over there,” she said, gesturing past Iris and her friends. “Unfortunately, though, basilisks in this world are stupid, so that really isn’t an option for us.” She chuckled softly. “It’s nice to meet you, Emerald.”
Ginny glanced nervously between Hailey and Emerald. “Yeah, nice to meet you too, Emerald.” She scanned her eyes across the last three. “I think I can kinda guess your names,” she informed them. “Especially my older doppelganger.” She giggled softly. “Nice to meet you all. I’m Ginny, as you’ve probably guessed, and this is Hailey. Up on the top of my power plants somewhere is Hermione.”
Hermione picked that moment to jump off, taking advantage of her mechanical body’s strength for a very solid landing right next to Hailey, who didn’t even flinch despite the stone-shattering impact. “Nice to meet you guys!” she greeted.
Iris and her other three friends took the opportunity to transform themselves into similar creatures as Emerald. Iris’ and her friend Ginny’s tails both matched their hair, with dark black and bright red respectively. On the other hand, Hermione’s was honey-colored, and Luna’s was such a bright white it was almost painful to look at under the bright spotlights.
“So, uh-!” Ginny began.
Hermione rolled her eyes, pranced forwards, and tackle-hugged her snake-tailed adult doppelganger. “I never realized it’d seem so ordinary to meet myself from another world,” she told her cheerfully. “I guess being friends with Hailey has desensitized me.” She giggled.
Ginny blinked, staring for a second. “Oh come on, I was supposed to be the one to start the hugging,” she complained, putting her hands on her hips.
Iris grinned, and about a half a second later, she had already shot across the floor and wrapped her tail once around Ginny’s legs with an enthusiastic hug of her own. “You’ll never get to actually start it with this kind of adorable pouting.” She paused. “Which is not something I’d ever expected to be saying to the reincarnation of Voldemort, but I guess here we are …”
Hailey chuckled. “Now I just need to hug your Ginny, and we’ll have a full set. Though I don’t want to leave Luna out, so…” She chuckled, then jogged forwards, towards the snake-tailed Ginny and Luna. “Group hug, you two!”
Ginny winced as she hugged her sister back. “Yeah, just like I never expected to be a Weasley saying I was looking forward to meeting a Malfoy, but I did that just that a couple years ago.” She paused. “Um, the whole Voldemort thing is a secret, by the way, so don’t tell anyone else around here.”
Emerald was the one pouting now. “I know I used to live in a place like this, but I’m not set dressing, just for your information!”
Hermione released her snake-tailed doppelganger and turned to Emerald with a grin. “Then get over here, silly,” she told her, before launching herself into a very fast tacklehug.
Hailey chuckled as she broke from the snake-tailed Ginny and Luna. “Of course you’re not,” she agreed, then turned to glance slyly back up at where Iris and Ginny were still hugging. “Though something tells me you’re not just here for the hugs, right? I mean, there was enough of that when we visited the Null Star two weeks ago.” She chuckled. “Ginny got crushed when she called for a group hug.”
Emerald rolled her eyes. “Well, why do you think I asked for it when there were only six people around? You don’t call for a group hug on the Null Star, that’s just the kind of thing you learn after dealing with the Sequence for long enough.”
“Er- Yeah,” Ginny muttered, before meeting Iris’ eyes. “Hailey does have a point. You didn’t come here just to see me, did you?”
“Of course not,” Iris answered. “There is the bit about your galaxy-wide patronus, obviously, but we’re also generally curious what your world is like. Since we left our home universe after most of our business there was done, exploring our sisters’ universes is sort of what we do. Or what I do anyway, the girls are mostly just along for the ride.”
“Oh yeah, the Multiverse’s Strongest Patronus,” Hailey muttered. “That’s what happens when you get trillions of entities gathering their happiness together and concentrating it through a sufficiently powerful magical aperture to become a patronus.”
Hermione looked up from Emerald. “You always make it sound so simple,” she informed her calmly.
“Well it is,” Hailey answered simply. “That was by far the simplest spell to ever rise above one tera-thaum across the entire Multiverse.” She paused. “Though you wouldn’t express its power in tera-thaums so much as peta-thaums or higher. I don’t know, I didn’t actually measure it.”
Ginny looked at her. “A Patronus, the simplest? Isn’t it very complex?” She paused. “I’d hate to see what the rest looked like.”
The visiting Hermione frowned slightly. “Well, no. It’s difficult to learn, sure. But it’s not actually all that complex. Provide the right emotional impetus, use the correct incantation, done. There isn’t even a wand motion. It’s actually fairly simple in the grand scheme of things. Of course, wands do allow for greater effects with simpler spells than is the average. Keep in mind that most universes don’t have them, so their spells are usually more complex than what you’re used to by default.”
“Oh alright,” Ginny conceded.
“True enough, I suppose,” Hailey observed, tapping her chin. “Though the Patronus is actually one of the most complex spells you can cast with a wand. It’s mostly Harmony magic, though, which has a tendency of casting itself, and your wand does the requisite setup steps for you.” She shrugged. “And the rest… The you know what enchantment is perhaps the most powerful one ever cast- and simultaneously the most complex one, even including spells cast at lower power levels.” She paused. “I don’t think you could fit the spell matrix in this entire universe- it’s a good thing a majority of it is Harmony magic.”
“That’s huge,” Hermione observed simply.
Hailey nodded. “It is. Does its job well, though.” She paused. “By the way, how long can you guys maintain human forms?”
“Used to be it got unpleasant after eight hours and painful after twelve. But we’ve managed to extend it by a factor of three,” the visiting Luna spoke up for the first time, shuddering slightly. “We never actually tried how long we theoretically could hold these forms. After the second threshold, it gets very unpleasant very fast.”
“I’m not asking you to torture yourselves,” Hailey answered calmly. “I mean, I’m looking at the magic, and the absolute limit seems to be ‘indefinite’- so, limited by your pain tolerance, really.”
“Should be way more than enough to keep anyone from suspecting anything up in Hogwarts Castle,” Ginny observed. “Speaking of, are you interested in visiting that? I’m sure Silver would be interested to meet you too.” She grinned knowingly.
Iris gave a sort of lopsided smile in response. “Well, yeah, we wouldn’t have had to go through the whole song and dance with your Dumbledore if we didn’t want to see Hogwarts, would we? And damn it’s weird to think that he’s still alive in this world …”
“He does seem to have a habit of dying old, doesn’t he?” Hailey observed, then chuckled softly. “Sounds really weird when you say it like that.”
Ginny chuckled too. “Though I didn’t necessarily go to Dumbledore about it directly, I left that to Hailey.” She sighed. “Anyways, the exit’s this way.” She gestured towards the entrance, which slid smoothly open as she approached it, walking backwards. The entrance tunnel wasn’t nearly as well lit as the Chamber of Secrets itself, but thanks to relatively dim strip lights along the corners, it was pretty well lit as well. “You might be able to tell I’ve basically… seized the Chamber of Secrets for my own uses.”
“True, though if you haven’t already, you might want to add some extra security. There is someone else who is rather famously able to get in here,” the visiting Hermione pointed out, still slithering along.
“Someone else?” Ginny asked curiously, as she led the way up the tunnel. “Who? Salazar Slytherin himself?”
“Well, no. Even if you are a reincarnation, you aren’t the only part of you out there, are you?”
“Oh, you mean Voldemort.” She shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. But that’s why I’ve got a set of heavy Astrium doors in here before we reach the pipe- you have to not only be a parselmouth but also be able to control Astrium to get in, and there’s only one piece of me that can do that.” She pointed her thumb back at herself.
“Fair enough. But the chamber walls aren’t that heavily warded. It doesn’t matter how durable your door is if an intruder can just break through the wall next to it.”
“Yeah, but by then, I’ll be remoting in to all the Astrium in here, so they’ll look like a pincushion the moment they get in.”
“If they’re using a living body,” Luna pointed out absently.
“Even if they’re not, they’ll still look like a pincushion,” Ginny asserted. “Well… if I use hard munitions. Which, to be honest, I’m far more likely to use energy weapons. Anyways.” She paused as she glanced at the floor, and chuckled. “Every time I walk up this way, I find myself imagining Professor Lockhart lying unconscious on the floor right around here.”
“He managed to end up down here in your world too?” Iris asked curiously. “I guess that makes four for four. I wonder why that is. It’s not like he usually has any real reason to want to be down here.”
Hailey chuckled. “We were a little different. He didn’t manage to obliviate himself- and rather than dragging him down to help us fight, we dragged him down to figuratively burn him at the stake. Rita’s still working on the more literal version of that.”
The five visitors shared glances before breaking out into eerily similar and decidedly sinister grins. “You have a good Rita in this world?” Emerald prompted. “Oh my. Do keep us up to date on that one. Should be fun.”
Ginny laughed. “Oh, no, she’s still the evil, slanderous Rita we all know and love. She’s just really good at knocking particularly famous people like Lockhart down a peg, especially since he got it by taking credit for a bunch of other people’s achievements.” She paused. “I still haven’t seen anything about that yet. I wonder why?” She looked at Hailey.
“She’s been taking her time to do it right,” Hailey answered simply.
“Ah, yes, good old Rita,” Iris put in with a melancholy smile. “So long as you can point her in the right direction, she’s a very useful ally to have.”
“I bet,” Ginny muttered, and sighed. “Only time I talked to her, she was asking for details on Lockhart already. Mind, Hailey had already sent her a voice recorder…” She paused, glancing up. “Oh, and here’s my Astrium door.” A second later, the solid golden wall ahead of them responded to her command by splitting in half and sliding into the walls. Behind it, the iron pipe that led up to the second floor girls’ bathroom was visible.
Hermione chuckled. “I suppose the Astrium equivalents of welding and un-welding counts as a sort of locking mechanism, doesn’t it?” she asked, then sighed, folding her arms and glancing sideways at Hailey. “I’m still having difficulty believing wizards were that wrong about technology and Hogwarts,” she declared grumpily.
Hailey only chuckled softly.
“Well yeah,” Ginny grinned. “Even Alohomora can’t open that kind of lock.”
“Might be being a bit generous with ‘lock’ there, me,” the visiting Ginny pointed out. “That usually implies a locking mechanism.”
“Well there is one,” Ginny smiled. “Mechanical, in the walls, and I’ve also set up full locking and unlocking scripts within the Astrium itself, so all I have to do is wake up the right script. Overkill, I know, but where’s the fun in anything less?” She paused as they approached the pipe. “I suppose you guys have a couple different options here. First off, we’ve put lots of cleanliness spells on this pipe,” she glanced sideways at Hailey, “so if you slither up it, you won’t have to worry about getting covered in gunk. And the other option…” She brandished her wand at the pipe, causing the ‘elevator platform’ as Hailey had called it to appear, and the pipe to subsequently stretch upwards to accept it. “We’ll be riding this, and you’re welcome to join us.”
“That’s a lot easier than a running start and a nice fast slide,” Hermione observed.
Iris sighed softly. “Oh alright, guess it was inevitable.” Her form rippled once again as she shifted back into her human shape, the other four half-basilisks behind her following her lead a moment later. “We couldn’t risk slithering up anyway. Mind you, anyone but Myrtle being in the toilet to see us is unlikely, but still too risky. And turning back in the pipe is just asking for trouble.”
“I’d say even Myrtle is unlikely now,” Ginny observed, leading the way onto the platform, which stretched to fit all of them as she did so. “But yeah, turning back in here would be basically impossible- thanks to the ancient magic in here, this pipe is always just the right size for a passing basilisk to push off all the corners- or even connecting pipes- without issue.” She paused. “I’m fooling it into thinking this platform is a flying cube-shaped basilisk, so the pipe’s getting out of the way.” She glanced back. “Everyone on?”
Hermione chuckled. “Cube-shaped basilisk,” she muttered amusedly. “I wonder how many of those you find in nature.”
“None,” her visiting counterpart supplied readily. “Basilisk are artificially created.”
“True,” Hermione muttered, glancing back past everyone. “Looks like we’re all on, Ginny. But yeah, chicken egg hatched under a toad. Unless someone’s unlucky enough to have a toad farm in the attic of a henhouse, or a toad invades the henhouse and happens to jump on top of an egg right before it hatches. The rooster would probably kill it right away, though- unless there weren’t any, but I can hardly imagine an egg hatching without a rooster.”
Ginny smiled and flicked her wand, and the platform started sliding smoothly up the pipe. Behind them, her Astrium door slid shut and fused itself once more.