//------------------------------//
// Chapter Closed 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“What the-?” Ron began, blinking up at the staff table once they’d sat down in the Great Hall to await the sorting.  “What’s Fleur doing at the staff table?”
Hailey looked up, at where Fleur was sitting, looking extremely nervous next to Hagrid’s empty seat at the staff table.  “Since the Hogwarts Student Instructor Program is now officially sanctioned by the Hogwarts Board of Governors, Dumbledore decided that our non-student hires ought to be considered Hogwarts staff- so of course, Fleur got a seat at the staff table.”  She shrugged.
Hermione looked at her.  “I wasn’t aware the Student Instructor Program was allowed to hire outsiders,” Hermione observed.
Hailey nodded.  “I suppose it’s true- the Board only gave the Management Team Lead- ergo, me- the authority to invite outsiders into the Castle for the purpose of employment just over a week ago.  Before that, the Program was technically allowed to hire outsiders, but it couldn’t bring them to the Castle, so there wasn’t much point.  Now, though…”  She shrugged again.
“Who’s…  The new Defense teacher.  Is it the one in pink?”
Hailey nodded.  “Delores Umbridge, Professor for Defense Against the Dark Arts as appointed by the Ministry.  She’s going to be fun this year.”  She paused, grinning mischievously.  “To mess with, that is.”
Ron laughed.
Then Hagrid sidled into the room, and moved quickly to take his seat at the staff table.
“Oh, the Sorting is about to start,” Hermione observed.
“How many this time?” Ginny asked, curiously.
“Seven hundred and thirty seven thousand sixty five,” Hailey answered simply.  “And thanks to some rather creative magic by Hogwarts’ deities, we’re able to sort twelve hundred of them per second, so the whole thing will be over in about ten minutes- and everybody, even the hatstoppers that take fifteen minutes to sort, will experience it as about ten minutes.  On top of that, nobody is going to notice just how quickly they’re being sorted- they’ll think it’s still the same rate it was before we ever came to Hogwarts.”
Ariel tilted her head.  “Why does it look like Umbridge is giving Fleur the stink-eye?”
“Because she is,” Silver answered promptly.  “Umbridge thinks all part-humans are ‘filthy half-breeds’.  You can expect she’ll do everything she can to get Fleur, Hagrid, and even Flitwick fired, just because they’re not pure human.  According to Dad, thanks to a demand by the Board of Governors, she can’t drop new Educational Decrees on a whim- it’ll take her a couple days.”
“And a couple days is way more than we need to gun down anything we don’t like,” Hailey agreed.
“How?” Hermione asked.
Hailey only grinned.





Professor Dumbledore yawned and stretched as he stepped up to his desk on Thursday morning.  He needed to do his usual check of a number of magical instruments set around his office, all visible from his desk, to make sure nothing had happened through the night.  These instruments didn’t exactly look like monitoring instruments tapped into the Castle wards- rather, most people that entered his office called them ‘whirring and smoking contraptions’.  Three of them were completely silent and unmoving; those three had monitored Harry- now Hailey- to make sure she wasn’t in any real danger.  They had been handy a few times- once, he’d even stepped in himself to protect her.  However, they had abruptly ceased functioning during the week of the Goddess of Reports- causing him quite a panic- most likely thanks to her impenetrable natural wards.  That didn’t worry him any more- ever since he’d met her in the Chamber of Secrets, and she had revealed her new invulnerability.
As expected, the one that indicated the number of patients in the Hospital Wing relative to the normal number was indicating an increase with puffs of red smoke, though not nearly as large of an increase- as many puffs each minute- as it had back when the Equestrians had first appeared.  The school had jumped from fifty seven thousand students to over seven hundred thousand, so an increase was expected- but interestingly, the increase wasn’t nearly as large as he had expected it to be.  Perhaps this year’s wave was more safety-minded?  Or perhaps the Program had found some new way of teaching that allowed them to reduce the likelihood of an accident?
Finally, he looked down at his desk…  and paused.
There, in the middle of the desk he always verified was completely clear when he went to bed each night, were two scrolls, unrolled and pinned by paperweights.
He bent closer.
“Educational Decree number Twenty Three,” he read to himself.  “Henceforth, Hogwarts shall be forbidden to employ non-human or part-human Professors and any presently employed will be summarily dismissed, effective September Fourth, twenty twenty five.”  He glanced at the clock.  “That’s today.”  He looked up- but the instrument that indicated danger to the employment of his staff, which had whirred constantly the previous year, was hardly turning at all, as per usual.  The one that indicated the number of recently released staff members…  was also silent, standing unmoving in an unlikely position to indicate no losses.  Professor Flitwick and Hagrid were safe, then, as expected; this law would fly in the face of all the nondiscrimination laws he’d been sneaking through the Wizengamot for decades.
Then he looked down at the other scroll.  It was much longer.
“The finding of the Wizengamot,” he muttered, scanning down it.  “Educational Decree number twenty three…  Illegal by…”  He paused, scanning down the list of five different laws that each rendered the named decree illegal.  Only four of them had come to mind before he’d read the last one.
And at the bottom, he counted the signatures of every Wizengamot member, including himself- a fully unanimous vote, which never happened- and the seals of both the Wizengamot and the Department of Records.
It was dated on Wednesday, September Third…  and, he realized, he could vaguely remember signing it in the Wizengamot chamber…  except that there were no Wizengamot meetings on Wednesdays, and he knew he hadn’t left the Castle at all the day before!
“This should be interesting,” he muttered, rolling up the Wizengamot decision- which did have the tiny stamp in the corner to indicate that it was a copy of the original document, the original stored safely in the Department of Records- and inserted it into his robes.  Phantom decision or not, it would still be a useful weapon against Umbridge.
He also suddenly remembered a separate, unwritten decision by the Wizengamot, also in that phantom session, that should very many more illegal Educational Decrees be passed, they would void all Educational Decrees issued this school year as abuse of power, and ban the creation of further Decrees for the rest of the year.





Dumbledore watched amusedly as Umbridge stormed away.  She’d been in the middle of presenting Decree Twenty-Three to Fleur Delacour, who had only raised her eyebrows at it, when he’d interrupted her to read off the Wizengamot decision.
Fleur shrugged.  “Already knew about that anyways,” she informed him.  “I spent half the summer reading up on British laws so I knew-!”





Some stuff that was stored for installation in later chapters…





Fleur shuddered when the world went white around her, and folded her wings.
The white faded away…  and she floated gently down to land in an opulent entryway.
She looked around…  but she was the only one here.
Then someone entered the room through a door.  “What the-?” the girl gasped, looking at her- then blinked.  “Oh, Fleur!  I didn’t know Hailey told you how to get here.”
“Ah, heh heh,” Fleur muttered, rubbing the side of her head.  “You…  don’t happen to be Harmonia, do you?”
“I do, actually.  Hailey’s the only person that’s ever come here just to keep me company, so I’m going to guess that you have questions?”
“Uh- Yeah,” she muttered.  “Hailey said you might know why I ascended while making pancakes?”
“Oh, that,” Harmonia chuckled.  “That was fun.”
“I was making pancakes.”
“You were.  And can you think of any particularly complex or novel magical tasks you were completing at the same time?”
“Uh…  Not really.”
“Well, how were you making pancakes?”
“I…  I cast a spell to make the magic do it for me,” she answered.  “It didn’t take as much power as I expected.”
“Of course it didn’t,” Harmonia agreed.  “That spell was the first closed-loop self-powering spell ever cast on Earth or in Equestria.”
“Closed loop self-powering…?” Fleur muttered.
She nodded.  “It used the same Thaumic energy over, and over, and over, and over again.  Had you not given it limits, and had nobody cancelled it, it would still be making pancakes by the time the world ended.  That is why you ascended.”
“But…  That was easy.  Why wouldn’t it be invented before?”
She shrugged.  “Because it’s not possible without Twilight’s magic language, and she doesn’t believe it’s possible at all.  Normally, whenever a spell uses some Thaumic Energy, that energy is vented into the Magic Elemental Plane when it completes its work- but not so for Twilight’s magic language.  The used thaumic energy is still in the spell until it reaches the end of the spell ‘program’, at which point it gets vented to the MEP.  Since you had a loop, it didn’t reach the end until the loop was complete- and all the pancakes finished.”
She tilted her head.  “Wouldn’t that happen for any loop?”
She nodded.  “It would- but Twilight thinks a loop like that would run out of power and stop functioning somewhere in the middle, so she instead uses additional triggers with extra power, which means stuff gets vented all over the place.”  She sighed.  “She grew up as a skilled mage, so it’s hard for her to accept that there are entire laws of magic that Equestria simply never knew about.  That’s slowed her learning of Hermione’s concepts by quite a bit- I don’t think she’s realized the unique properties of her magic language yet, either.”