Chapter 1: A Hairy Situation

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“Sunset Shimmer,” Professor Dumbledore spoke calmly, looking over the rims of his glasses. “I expect you already know why you’re here.”

The girl shook her head with an air of polite confusion, but Dumbledore could tell it was a lie- she wasn’t quite as skilled as some of the trickier Wizengamot members.

That was one of the many things that were confusing about her. In late July, she had suddenly stumbled out of the base of a statue of Boris the Bewildered on the fourth floor of Hogwarts Castle and slammed head-first into the wall opposite, instantly knocking herself unconscious. Argus Filch, who had happened to be waxing the floor in that very corridor, had been furious- and rather than helping her, he had gone to get Dumbledore to punish Peeves.

But magical scans of that statue had indicated that it wasn’t Peeves. For whatever reason, a strange, interdimensional portal existed within the statue. It was beneath the surface of the stone, making it inaccessible from Hogwarts’ side- but the stone didn’t seem to stop things from coming through it from the other side.

Like Sunset Shimmer.

She had still been unconscious in the Hospital Wing when an owl had visited Madam Pomfrey to deliver a Hogwarts invitation destined for the girl. When she had awoken, she had initially panicked at her surroundings, and apparently even at seeing her own body- and when Madam Pomfrey had tried to restrain her, she had demonstrated tremendous control of her Accidental Magic and fled… only to get lost in the passages of Hogwarts. Even the ‘navigation spell’ she mumbled about a couple times hadn’t helped her- most likely because, on her way past him just outside the Hospital Wing, Dumbledore had hit her with a Confundus Charm from the Elder Wand.

As a result, she’d ended up right back where she came from three times in a row, finally given up, and allowed them to talk to her.

She hadn’t let on any more than her name. She still refused to talk about whatever past she had in that other world- but she had allowed Dumbledore to explain his findings about the portal. She had spent two days helping him try to find a way to get through it- but neither of them had managed anything, even though she’d said something about ‘two skilled mages’. So, while Professor McGonagall took the girl to Diagon Alley, Dumbledore had erected some powerful magical barriers around the statue to make sure nothing potentially harmful came from that world.

He had been too late. Something harmful had already come out of it.

Her.

Even at a glance, she was… abnormal. Her exotically-colored hair, a mixture of red and gold that made it look almost exactly like a bonfire, was completely undyed, and had not been touched by color-changing charms either. It just… grew that way.

Finally, the Sorting had taken place, and she had become a Ravenclaw.

Had he known what was coming, he would never have allowed her to enroll.

He had since learned that she was a deceitful little monster. In just the few short months before the Christmas holidays, she had managed to destroy most of the friendships in the school and even- in some cases- get his staff against each other. In the two months since the Christmas holidays had ended, she had kept going. By now, hardly the beginning of March, basically the entire school was afraid of her. Students would do whatever she told them to, and even teachers- all of them- were very careful around her, and reluctant to punish her.

Which meant that the time had come for some direct action.

If he was entirely honest, that time had come and gone a long time ago, but he hadn’t realized it at the time- apparently, she had taken steps to keep him from realizing what was going on.

But he had finally realized, and called her to his office. Now that he laid his eyes on her for the first time since August, he realized that she now had a smug, aggressive look to her, like she knew what she wanted and was going to get it no matter what.

It would certainly explain the magical experiments that had put a fair few students in the Hospital Wing over the last week. Two of them had been transferred to St. Mungo’s, but all were expected to survive.

He paused for a second to decide how he was going to broach the subject, and sighed. “I cannot have your experiments hurting my students,” he told her calmly. “If you keep doing this, I will be forced to expel you from this Castle.”

A tiny glimpse of fear appeared in her eyes, but it was rapidly washed out by determination. She obviously understood what he was talking about… and it looked like she was disappointed, too. Had she tried to keep him from finding out about that, and failed?

She bowed apologetically. “Understood, Professo-!”

Her hand shot forward, and a blast of magic shot out of it.

But Dumbledore had done his research. He knew what that spell was, even if he couldn’t figure out how to cast it himself- it was some sort of mind control or memory modification spell, which had been involved in a few of her experiments.

And, he was ready for her. Both his hands were beneath the surface of his desk, in his lap- and the Elder Wand was in one of them. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to use it, but alas, he had to.

Blocking her spell was easy. He immediately counterattacked- but she was also ready for him. She didn’t use her wand, only her strange Accidental Magic, as she projected a powerful shield of her own to block his stunner.

Then she attacked him again… and he blocked it. She wasn’t all that good of a duelist- he definitely had the upper hand.

Except that her shield wrapped entirely around her… and she could attack through it, while he couldn’t get in without using spells that would surely kill her.

Which meant there was only one possible outcome… Unless one or the other of them gave up.

They had only exchanged a few more blows before she seemed to acknowledge the same thing, and stopped shooting spells at him, staring at him as she evidently thought about what to do next.

Then it crossed Dumbledore’s mind exactly why he didn’t have an omnidirectional, always-active shield charm like that. It was simple, really- if he hermetically sealed himself inside an enclosed magical environment and fired spells out of it, it wouldn’t be possible for any magic to enter that environment- so he would necessarily eventually run out.

So, by using that shield, she had placed a limit on her own magic supply… whereas he was still open to his surroundings, and could still absorb additional energy as required. Thus, if the fight went on, he was the one that was guaranteed to win, not her.

“Fine,” she muttered, and raised her hands over her head.

Magic started to swirl through the air above her- and amidst the center of it, a tornado of energy sparked to life, controlled by her magic.

So, she had a limited magic supply, but huge reserves.

“You know that’s not going to work,” he told her.

She laughed. “Oh, it will,” she told him. “It’s a higher form of magic, after all. And one I was able to perfect in those-!”

A sudden squeal made both of them jump. One of Dumbledore’s many gizmos around the room was whirring fast, screaming and flashing with various colors as it emitted puffs of red smoke.

Very few people realized that his gizmos were actually nothing of the sort. They were designed to look like gizmos, while they served as the physical manifestations of a number of different monitoring charms.

This one monitored danger to Dumbledore himself.

The rest of the duel happened very fast.

Dumbledore wasted no time at all in casting the most powerful shields he knew between himself and the deadly ball of magic floating over the girl.

And even so, he was only barely in time.

The girl wasn’t. She was still staring uncomprehendingly at the contraption, face full of alarm and shield faltering, when the ball of magic tilted… then ran into a set of instruments.

These three were actually a set: Together, they informed Dumbledore of any dangers to young Harry Potter- one physical, one emotional, and one spiritual.

For a split second before the magic made contact, all three of them went nuts.

Then the ball smashed firmly into the one monitoring for spiritual dangers.

All three instruments and the ball promptly vanished in an explosion of bright white light.

Many miles away, a three year old boy with a shaggy head of hair and a lightning bolt scar bolted awake with a small scream of pain and fright. He breathed heavily, clutching at his forehead, for several seconds before the pain went away. Finally, he curled back up under the covers. “Just a nightmare,” he told himself. “Just a nightmare.”

Professor Dumbledore shook his head to try to remove the dizziness, but it didn’t work. He struggled to move- and managed to free his right hand… Which, miraculously, was still holding an undamaged Elder Wand.

So he pointed it at his own head and muttered a quick healing incantation.

It worked. His mind was instantly clear, his vision unbroken- and the various pains in his lower body gone. He was still being crushed by the pile of debris on top of him- but he was no longer injured.

His next spell removed the debris so he could rise to his feet and examine the aftermath.

Nearly everything was destroyed. All of his instruments- and the monitoring spells they displayed- were gone. His desk- everything. Even the photos of old Headmasters had been shredded by the blast- fortunately, a quick repair charm was all it would take to restore them.

But he could worry about that later; the pictures couldn’t die.

The girl, however, could. She was lying, her body twisted in a way it definitely shouldn’t, against one wall, and covered in blood and debris.

He pointed the Elder Wand at her, and cast a few charms. The first one stopped the bleeding. The second cleared the blood and debris off of her. The third gently moved her into a decent lying position- and the fourth conjured a stretcher for her to land on.

Even with the Elder Wand, injuries like this- it did seem she was still breathing, though it was faltering from all the blood loss- were not his specialty. The healing charm he’d used on himself only worked when cast on one’s self, after all; a tradeoff for being safe to cast even with a concussion.

So he rushed her to the Hospital Wing.

“What in the name of Merlin happened to her?” Madam Pomfrey asked, once she’d satisfied herself with her spellwork.

“She decided to use some higher form of magic,” Dumbledore answered the school nurse. “It backfired.”

Madam Pomfrey sighed. “She’s got over a hundred fractured bones and even more dislocated or fully separated joints,” she muttered. “She’s got fragments of her right forearm bones in her liver and even her heart, and that forearm is simply beyond repair.” She sighed. “She’s lost everything from just above the elbow on that side- and that’s not even counting that her right eye is also gone for good. And her ear. And…” She trailed off, then sighed. “I doubt she’ll be able to survive on her own after this.”

When Harry Potter climbed onto the bathroom counter the following morning to brush his teeth, he immediately noticed that his hair seemed to have gotten longer overnight.

But, he was three. He thought it looked pretty while he missed his toothbrush with half a tube of toothpaste and subsequently chewed the end of the brush.

The Dursleys had yet to successfully teach him to do it properly.

Petunia Dursley sighed. “Vernon?” she asked.

Her husband, Vernon Dursley, was a busy man. He was a director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills- and he devoted as much of his time as he could to it, in his effort to provide everything that Petunia wanted- and quite a bit that she didn’t, sometimes. He was still learning to tell the difference between the two.

“Yes, Petunia dear?” he asked shortly.

Petunia decided not to mention the toothpaste and damaged toothbrush that she’d cleaned up from the bathroom sink that morning. He was evidently in a hurry- and there was something more important.

“Harry,” she said. “His hair… got longer again. All the way to his waist this time.”

Vernon shrugged. “So cut it off.”

When Vernon got home that day, it was to find the living room practically carpeted with black hair- with a huge mound in the middle. “What the-?” he began.

Petunia looked up, looking desperate. “I- I cut it,” she told him. “Then it was back a minute later. So I cut it again, and…” She sighed. “Then Dudley started playing in it, so it got everywhere.” She gestured around the room.

“And… And the boy?” Vernon barked.

“He seems to be having fun,” she muttered. “No sign of exhaustion or anything else from growing so much hair so quickly.”

Vernon sighed. “I guess we’ll have to tie it up in a ponytail or something, maybe tuck it into his shirt,” he muttered, then bent down and scooped up a handful of it. “Hmm. This is… This is oddly soft. How possible do you think it would be to weave a cloth from it?”

Petunia looked around. “Um… No idea. Might be worth trying, though.”

As it turned out, when Petunia put Harry’s hair through the weaving loom, a machine she still couldn’t understand why Vernon had bought her the year before, it wove like a dream. The resulting cloth looked and felt like silk, could be stretched twice as far as even spandex, and was so strong that the chain they used to test its strength broke before the thin strip they were testing did. Neither she nor Vernon had been able to tear it, no matter what they tried. Vernon’s drills and even chainsaw had been unable to cut it after the kitchen shears and knives failed- yet the sewing scissors had no real difficulty. It was almost like it knew what was cutting it.

When they thought about that, and about how Harry had been given to them, the implications terrified them- so they agreed never to tell anyone.

But they still started making things from it. The clothes were almost stupidly comfortable, and as fashionable as all get-out. The blankets were decently warm when they were cold, and pleasantly cool when they were hot. The towels worked like a dream- and didn’t drip, but when wrung out, it was effortless to get them completely dry. The sheets soothed Petunia’s tired muscles in only a single night of sleeping on them- and when she made a pillow, and stuffed it with more of Harry’s hair, Vernon stopped snoring. As a result, he was so full of energy the next day that he came home because he’d run out of work to do at Grunnings!

And of course, when they needed more, Harry seemed to think their war with his hair was funny.

Chapter 2: Accidentally Magical

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“Ready?” Madam Pomfrey asked.

Professor Dumbledore nodded, holding his wand behind his back. “Ready.” It was the beginning of March- and Madam Pomfrey had informed him, by a letter, that Sunset Shimmer had been healed as fully as she could… so she was ready to end the bewitched sleep she had been using to ensure the girl wouldn’t accidentally hurt herself.

Madam Pomfrey took a deep breath… and cast the spell.

The girl opened her surviving eye almost immediately… and stopped.

Then she raised both her arms to look at them. She had to look down at her right arm.

Finally, she allowed them to flop back down on her sheets, and sighed. “I guess that’s what happens when you do something that stupid,” she muttered. Then she glanced down at the end of the bed. “So… why am I not in chains?”

Dumbledore winced. “It has been two months since that explosion, Miss Shimmer,” he told her. “I was hoping we could come to an agreement rather than fighting. You have demonstrated a capability of the likes that I have difficulty even imagining.”

“And lost it,” Sunset stated darkly.

“Lost it…?”

She sighed. “In order to do that, I was using the magic of my home. Which relies on…” She trailed off. “I’m still not sure exactly what, but it’s in my right forearm. Which I don’t seem to have any more, so I’ve presumably lost the use of the magic of my home.”

“You seem… rather calm, considering,” Dumbledore muttered.

She sighed again, then sat up. “Yeah, I suppose so. It hurt a lot more the first time.” She sighed again. “I guess I can hope I can channel it through my wand. Er, if it hasn’t gotten…” She paused, looking at her nightstand- where her wand was lying. “Oh, good. I never really bothered to learn to use it, bu-GYAAAAH!” She had reached for her wand… and right as she had touched it, there had been a sizzling sound, and she had recoiled as if she’d been burned. She wrung her hand for a couple of seconds, before opening it to look at her palm.

Madam Pomfrey immediately set to work, magically treating the assortment of burns she’d gotten from touching the innocent instrument.

As she worked, Dumbledore recognized the look on Sunset’s face.

It was the look of a girl that had lost everything, found hope, and lost everything again.

It was the look of someone that had given up.

He sighed, stowed his wand, and walked around next to the bed to put his arm around her shoulders. “Cheer up,” he told her, gently. “Just because you can’t use it doesn’t mean you can’t make it. You’ve definitely got the mind for that, after what you did in just six months.”

She didn’t answer.

“Good evening, Miss Shimmer,” Dumbledore greeted. A week had passed since her awakening- and waiting for her to finish grieving her loss didn’t seem to be working.

“Hi,” she answered dully.

“I need you to return to your classes,” he told her. “Learn what you can, whether you can cast it or not- and when you’re done, or even before you’re done, you can help me research a few things.”

“Meh,” she muttered.

“Please?”

Around a month later, Sunset Shimmer finally started moving again- though she was much too late to save her grades. She failed her end-of-year exam, despite ‘medical’ exemption from using a wand because any wand seemed to burn her like that, and was forced to take the first year over again.

Meanwhile, over in the Dursley household, Vernon and Petunia were very happy- and their son Dudley and nephew Harry were as well.

As time passed and the two boys grew older, Harry willingly picked up tasks like pruning the rose bushes- though it had taken some time for Petunia to teach him to do it properly- and various cleaning tasks. He also liked cooking, which resulted in a lot of burned or raw food, at least before Petunia had taught him to cook.

His relationship with his cousin, aunt, and uncle also improved significantly. By the time he turned just five years old, he and his cousin were already play buddies. Dudley no longer resembled a beach ball, and Harry no longer resembled a stick figure. They both had well-fitting clothes to wear, at least some of which had been made from Harry’s hair, and neither were living in the cupboard under the stairs. Petunia and Vernon had stopped telling the neighbors he was a hard case, but were now telling anyone that would listen that he had been a hard case but- and they had no idea what had changed- he’d suddenly turned himself around and become an incredibly helpful boy.

As far as Harry was concerned, though, nothing had changed. Except, perhaps, that his scar slowly faded and finally disappeared completely by the time he was eight.

When the two boys were sent to public school, it seemed like Harry learned much faster than Dudley did- so as soon as Harry found out Dudley wasn’t getting a passing grade, the two became instant study buddies and both of their grades shot up, making them straight-A students.

Unfortunately, nobody could ever do well in that school without being bullied.

Unfortunately for the bullies, both boys completely ignored their taunts. When the bullies tried to fight them… They stopped very quickly, because Harry always jumped in between them and Dudley, and punching him was like punching a wall: It hurt. When the two boys told Vernon and Petunia, the two adults had given each other meaningful looks… but when they later discussed it, they came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be just because Harry was a wizard. Perhaps Dumbledore had placed some sort of protective charm on him?

So they told Harry not to rely on it, and to always expect it not to work, even right after it worked. That way, he could be sure that if it did stop working, he wouldn’t get hurt.

It still didn’t stop Harry from blocking anyone that tried to fight Dudley, though. He was just too fast.

Unfortunately, though, the two boys were never able to find any friends aside from each other. They stood out too much from the crowd.

Eventually, one morning in July, the mail slot clicked, as per usual.

“I’ll get it!” Harry volunteered, jumping up from the breakfast table to fetch the mail. His hair, as usual, hung down all the way to his waist- and as he liked it at home, it was hanging over his clothes, making him look very much like a girl. Whenever he left the house, he would put it in a ponytail of sorts, such that it came together below his collar, and tuck it down the back of his shirt; it would just regrow in a matter of seconds if he cut it.

He quickly retrieved the mail from the doormat and, ignoring the thick parchment envelope on the bottom of the stack, handed it all to Vernon when he got back to the table, before returning to his bacon.

Vernon made his way efficiently through the stack of mail. There was a postcard from his sister Marge; after flipping it over, he informed Petunia that Marge had eaten a ‘funny whelk’ and was ill. “No wonder,” he mused. “Bet it wasn’t a whelk at all.”

Then he ripped open a brown paper envelope that looked like a bill and, after finding it was actually an advertisement for the local church, snorted in disgust.

Then he looked at the last envelope.

It was addressed to ‘H Potter’, no ‘Mr’ attached, and had Harry’s bedroom on it.

He turned it over, slowly… and spied a wax seal. A lion, a badger, an eagle, and a snake, all wrapped around a large letter H.

“Petunia?” he asked, and turned the seal towards her.

She looked at it… and stared.

Then they made eye contact, and stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds.

Finally, they reached a mutual understanding. Vernon laid the envelope flat on the table, and swept it towards Harry. “You’ve got mail, Harry.”

Harry stopped it easily with one hand, swallowed his eggs, and put his fork down before he went to investigate it. “I have mail?” he asked, then paused. “H potter. No Mister or anything. Looks a bit weird like that.” He popped off the seal, without stopping to inspect it at all, pulled out the pages, unfolded them, and read them.

“... Weird,” he finally decided. “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” He looked around the table. “Um… Why is it only me? Is there a reason Dudley can’t come too?”

The next day, the mail slot clicked, as per usual.

“I’ll get it!” Dudley cried; he and Harry took turns getting the mail. He retrieved it just as quickly as Harry had, also ignored the thick parchment envelope on the bottom, handed it all to Vernon, and returned to his bacon.

Vernon worked through the larger pile with similar efficiency as he had the day before- and indeed every day that there was mail. It had long become a part of his daily routine.

But then, he got to the bottom of the pile. He turned the parchment envelope over, and inspected the same wax seal as the day before.

He rotated the letter to show Petunia, who nodded calmly.

Then, he slowly turned it around… to show Dudley’s name- as ‘Mr. D Dursley’- and bedroom.

“I-!” Petunia began, slightly stunned. “I knew weird stuff happened around Harry, but-!” She stopped. “Well, we were going to send him to a boarding school anyways. I think that’s great news.”

Vernon nodded, laid it on the table, and slid it across. “You’ve got mail, Dudley.”

Dudley blinked, and missed the envelope, so it flew straight past him- but Harry caught it out of the air as it flew off the table between them. “I have mail?” he asked- and, accepting the envelope from Harry, he scanned the front and silently flipped it open. “Oh, and it’s not just you, Harry,” he muttered, once he’d unfolded the contents. “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” He paused. “Do you think it’s real?”

“The letters have our bedrooms on them,” Harry observed, examining the address again. “But I wonder what it means by ‘we await your owl’?”

As if it had been waiting for those exact words, the doorbell rang.

Petunia rose to answer the door.

They heard the visitor’s high, sharp voice, though couldn’t make out the words, before Petunia’s voice echoed down the hall. “Er- Vernon?”

Vernon rose from his seat. “Who is it?” he called, as he walked out into the hall.

There was more of the visitor’s high voice, then they distinctly heard Vernon’s voice. “Er, could you come back in half an hour or so? We’re eating right now.”

The visitor’s voice sang some more, then the door was closed and both adults returned to the room.

“It’s real alright,” Vernon told the two boys, completely without preamble. “What do you two think about it?”

Harry looked at the letter still in Dudley’s hands, then shrugged. “I don’t really want to leave you behind- but if it’s real, I don’t see why not.”

Vernon laughed. “Oh don’t worry, you won’t be leaving us behind. We’ve, er, been kinda expecting this… For you, at least. Not so much for Dudley.”

Harry blinked. “Is that why you didn’t enroll me for the same private school?”

Vernon nodded. “Yes, that is. And if you go together, perhaps you can keep studying together and show the wizards how to do it right!” He laughed.

Harry laughed. “Perhaps,” he agreed, then turned to Dudley. “What do you think?”

Dudley rubbed his chin. “But weird stuff never happened around me without you,” he observed.

Harry looked at the letter. “Well, they sent the letter,” he said. “We can probably assume they know what they’re talking about if they’re magical and everything.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t assume that if I were you,” Petunia cautioned. “These wizards are awful sticks in the mud sometimes.” She sighed. “But if nothing else, they’re really good at detecting magic, and telling who has it and who doesn’t.”

“So,” Harry muttered. “You wouldn’t, yet you would?”

She blinked. “Er… Yeah, I suppose it’s a safe assumption to make. This time.”

“Oh,” Harry nodded. “I get it.”

“I don’t,” Dudley muttered.

“When we’re doing homework,” Harry told him. “It’s like when I just know you’ll get a question right before you even start it, versus when I don’t. The point is that, with these letters, we know- but basically anything else, until we learn otherwise, we don’t- and they could be wrong.”

“Oh,” Dudley nodded. “That makes sense.” He looked at the letter, and shrugged. “Alright. If they say I’m a wizard, I guess I’m a wizard, and Smeltings isn’t likely to teach me magic, are they?”

“I’d say not,” Vernon mused, amusement dancing in his eyes.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked at Harry, then nodded. “Yes,” he decided. “Yes, I’ll go.”

Chapter 3: Hair

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“Good morning. My name is Minerva McGonagall; I am the Deputy Headmistress and Professor of Transfiguration at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” The woman curtseyed slightly as well.

Harry blinked. “And the one that wrote those letters.” His hair was tucked into his shirt, since she was a stranger.

She paused. “Uh, actually no, but that’s a story for another time.” She glanced around the gathered family- Vernon, Petunia, Harry, and Dudley were all present. “I’m here to provide a magical introduction for Harry Potter and Dudley Dursley and, should such be desired, assistance in acquiring the necessary materials for a Hogwarts education.” She waited.

“Perhaps we should talk in the living room?” Petunia suggested, gesturing into the room in question.

The hour-long car ride was a little bit tight with Professor McGonagall seated between Harry and Dudley, but overall, it went quite smoothly, in Harry’s opinion. At least compared to the conversation- she’d mentioned his scar, and getting her to believe that it had just disappeared as he grew up had taken some time. Especially since he only barely remembered it, and it had taken Vernon and Petunia a couple of minutes to remember it.

“Welcome to the Leaky Cauldron,” Professor McGonagall told them, leading the way into the building. Apparently, Petunia and Vernon couldn’t even see it without Harry or Dudley holding their hands. McGonagall paused when there was no reaction, then nodded. “Alright then, moving on.”

“Good morning,” Professor McGonagall greeted the strange bank teller in the massive, open hall- ‘goblin’, according to what she’d told them ahead of time. “We’re here to, ahh, exchange some muggle money, probably,” she glanced at the Dursleys, “and get some money from Mr. Potter’s vault.”

“His vault?” Vernon asked.

McGonagall nodded. “Yes, his wizarding parents left him some money in their vault.”

The goblin sighed. “Do you have his key?”

“Ahh…” She reached her hands into her pockets, but only produced pocket lint. “I thought I had it…?” She tried some inside pockets, but also came up empty- all except for a foot-long straight wooden stick and a small pouch that jingled when she moved it.

Finally, she stopped. “Oh… Right. I think Hagrid still has it.” She sighed. “Which means… It’s going to be a bit of a pain to do now, but you’ll have to do it at some point anyways, Harry.”

Harry tilted his head. “What?”

“You’re going to need to reclaim your family vault,” she told him.

“Is that really necessary?” Petunia asked.

“Aside from giving him access to the money that’s rightfully his, no,” McGongall answered directly.

When Harry walked out of the strange goblin’s office to meet Professor McGonagall again, it was with an odd smile on his face.

“How did it go?” McGonagall asked him, as the goblin runner started leading them back up to the main concourse.

“They called me Miss,” Harry told her.

“What did you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I think I liked it.”

She sighed. “You do look very much like a girl, don’t you?”

Harry grinned back.

All three Dursleys ducked in the back of the cart while it rattled down the rails at breakneck speed, eyes pinched tightly shut and concentrating on resisting the motion sickness. Professor McGonagall sat up straight with her eyes open, but was largely unmoving.

Harry, meanwhile, only sat down when McGonagall ordered him to, preferring to stand in the middle of the cart so he could get the wind in his face. For some reason, it made him feel alive.

When the cart rattled to a stop, the goblin led everyone out of it, over to a huge door set into the stone wall. Harry followed the instructions he gave him, and opened the door.

Inside was mountain after mountain of coins of different materials. He stepped slowly inside, staring around in awe.

“All yours,” McGonagall smiled.

Which reminded Harry of something fairly important.

He turned right around to look at her. “All I see is a bunch of shiny bits of metal,” he said bluntly.

McGonagall let out a small snort of laughter. Vernon baulked, having evidently grasped the value of the coins in his exchange of the currency Harry was familiar with for them while Harry was off claiming his Vault.

She pointed at a pile of brownish-colored coins. “Twenty-nine bronze knuts to a silver sickle,” she said, and pointed to a pile of bright silver coins. “Seventeen silver sickles to the golden galleon.” She pointed at the tidal wave of gold that hid three of the four walls from view.

Harry nodded slowly. “Okay,” he muttered. “So how much do I need?”

“Er, fifteen galleons should be enough.” She gave him a small bag. “Here, you can use this.”

He accepted the bag, and stepped up to the tidal wave. He didn’t bother counting coins, and instead merely filled the bag before he closed and pocketed it on the way out of his Vault.

“Hogwarts, dears?” Madam Malkin guessed, glancing up when the door chimed. It was that time of year again- and this family was wearing entirely muggle clothing… even though there was no Professor with them. They were probably being guided by a magical relative, or perhaps even a Professor, that had gotten distracted or something and wandered off.

If it was Professor McGonagall, she was probably getting the kids ice cream. She usually did, since clothes shopping was perhaps the longest part of the shopping trip.

The man was well dressed in a crisp suit and tie- the spitting image of a muggle businessman. He’d probably been interrupted on his way to work by the appearance of Hogwarts staff to help guide his children to Diagon Alley. The woman- his wife, presumably- was similarly well dressed in an elegant black dress made from a fabric that shone gently- and perfectly matched their daughter’s hair. The cut was wrong for a formal dress, though- it was a casual dress made with expensive material.

Their daughter was wearing denim carpenter pants that probably came from the boy’s section and a blue tee shirt that looked like it had come from the same. She also had her hair tucked down the back of her shirt.

Their son had a similar, less-formal appearance than their parents. His outfit matched his sister’s, except for the green shirt instead of blue, and blonde hair. It also looked like he had recently started puberty, so his body was just beginning to change shape; his sister didn’t have that same look.

Overall, it looked like a rich but relaxed and perhaps casual family. They also practically oozed kindness- and it made Madam Malkin wonder how they’d managed to have two muggleborn children; her shop wards had reacted to both of them, though not the parents. Perhaps… Perhaps one of them was adopted?

Except that the blonde boy’s hair matched the mother’s as much as the girl’s matched the father’s.

And she could see the family resemblance.

So… maybe they’d just gotten lucky?

“Uh- Yes,” the mother answered.

“Got the lot here,” she chuckled. “Got another young man being fitted up right now, actually. So…” She glanced at the two children. “Who first?”

The two children looked at one another, then the girl stepped forwards. “Me,” she volunteered.

Madam Malkin smiled; she could practically see the strength of the sibling bond. They were a wonderful, happy family- something that had become increasingly more difficult to find in wizarding circles, as the political environment polarized itself into radical pure-blood families and ‘others’.

“Alright, right over here, Dear,” she told the girl, guiding her to the stool and picking a robe off of a rack.

“You Hogwarts too?”

Madam Malkin barely avoided wincing at the drawling voice. Speaking of radical pure-bloods- that was Draco Malfoy, the son of one of the most radical pure-blood families. He happened to be getting robes at the same time- and Madam Malkin’s assistant was working on his.

The girl looked- and Malkin sensed her sudden caution, like she could already tell that the boy wasn’t going to like her. “Hmm? Yes.” Her voice still sounded careless, though.

Draco continued promptly. “My father’s next door buying my books, and my mother’s up the street looking at wands,” he said. “Then I’m-!”

“Doesn’t the Wand choose the Wizard?” the girl asked.

There was a pause.

“Which means you’ll never get as good of results if you aren’t there to pick the right wand, right?” the girl continued. Then she smiled. “Besides, I hear getting your own wand is fun in its own way. I can’t wait.”

Draco stared at her. “Hmm, yeah, I suppose,” he muttered noncommittally. He sighed, then continued. “Anyways, once they’re done with that, I’m going to drag them off to look at racing brooms. I don’t understand why first years aren’t allowed to bring their own, do you?”

“Probably for safety,” the girl observed calmly. “They won’t know how good you are at flying until you show them- so they don’t want you to try until they have a chance to make sure you won’t hurt yourself.”

He stared at her again. “Hmm, yeah, I suppose,” he muttered noncommittally once again. “But everyone learns to fly before they go to Hogwarts, why can’t they just allow that?”

The girl looked like she wanted to shrug, but Madam Malkin was working on the lower hem of her robes. “I imagine it helps them avoid preferential treatment,” she told him.

He scowled. “They ought to give us preferential treatment,” he muttered. “Don’t you think so?”

“I think preferential treatment is the path to a dystopian world,” the girl said darkly.

“What-?” he began. “What house are you going to be in?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she answered. “Though I have a pretty good idea. You?”

“I just know I’ll be in Slytherin,” he muttered. “All our family have been. Just imagine being in Hufflepuff- I’d leave, wouldn’t you?”

“Hufflepuff might not be a glorious house,” the girl remanded, “but they’re known for their hard work and loyalty.”

He paused. “Uhh… Okay, yeah, I suppose,” he muttered noncommittally. Then he seemed to spot the girl’s family. “Er- your parents are our sort, right?”

“They’re a witch and wizard if that’s what you mean,” the girl answered coolly- and Madam Malkin, who was facing away from Draco, couldn’t resist raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you?”

It felt like Draco was planning on continuing, but the girl didn’t give him a chance. “I think it depends,” she injected, “on what they’re going to achieve throughout their life. There’s no use throwing out amazing talent where it appears just because they don’t happen to be pure-blooded, is there?”

Draco paused. “Hmm… Yeah, I suppose,” he muttered noncommittally.

“The challenge with that, though, is that it’s impossible to know what someone is going to achieve until after they do it, so they have no choice but to let them all in in the hopes of catching the talent.”

Draco sighed. “Yeah, I suppose,” he muttered. Then he scowled. “What’s your surname, anyways?”

“That’s you done,” Malkin’s assistant announced, doing what Malkin recognized as her level best to shove Draco off of the stool without seeming to at all.

The girl watched in silence as the assistant compiled the rest of his purchase, packaged it, attached the receipt from the payment his parents had made in advance, and sent him out the door.

When the door finally closed, her assistant hung her arms, letting out a breath. “Huugh, I thought that was never going to end.” Then she straightened herself back up again. “Anyways, though, sorry about that.” She turned to the girl’s brother. “If you would step onto the stool, please?”

The boy obeyed.

“How did you do that?” Madam Malkin asked the girl, as she finished with her hem and moved to her sleeves.

“Do what?” the girl asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“You got a Malfoy to admit that purebloods might not always be superior in every situation.”

“Huh,” she muttered, and shrugged. “I don’t know, it just felt like the right thing to say.”

She stared at her for a second, then shook her head and returned to her work.

“Your parents are a witch and wizard?” the boy asked.

“Yeah,” the girl answered. “No idea how I know that, but I do.”

“Witch and wizard?” Madam Malkin repeated, glancing towards her parents… Parents?

She nodded. “My Aunt and Uncle took me in when they died,” she said somberly.

There was a second of silence.

“I’m sorry,” Madam Malkin muttered.

“No worries, I don’t remember them at all,” the girl said, then looked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I wonder what they were like, though. And for some reason, I have an odd feeling that someday, I’ll be able to meet them.” She chuckled softly.

Madam Malkin sighed. “I’m still sorry,” she told her. “Aaand, that’s you done.”

The girl hopped off of the stool, removing the pinned robe so Madam Malkin could do her magic on it.

Malkin accepted it, used a quick hemming charm to make the hems she’d pinned permanent, and a second charm to remove all the pins. A third charm duplicated the same hems onto two more sets of robes, then a fourth tied their name tags to the girl- causing the name ‘Hailey Potter’ to appear on them- before she folded and stacked them and started pulling out the other uniform components she’d need.

“Uh- is that a skirt?” the girl- Hailey- asked suddenly, sounding confused.

She looked up. “Yes. It’s part of the Hogwarts girls’ uniform.”

She blinked. “I’m a boy.”

It was Madam Malkin’s turn to blink. “Really?” She looked back down at the stack of clothing. “But the magic said you were a girl…?” She paused. Was the magic wrong? She looked up at the girl again. “Are you sure?”

The girl blinked, looking taken aback. “Uh… I think?” It sounded like a question.

Madam Malkin turned fully away from the stack of clothes, to face the girl. “Do you… Where you pee, do you have a, er, dangly bit for it to come out of?”

She blinked. “What dangly bit?”

“How about…” She trailed off, then sighed. “Around that same place, a hole big enough to fit a fingertip.”

She flinched. “Feels weird when I touch it, but yeah.”

She nodded. “Then you’re a girl.”

She tilted her head. “Really?”

She nodded. “Boys have the dangly bit. Girls have the hole.”

“... Oh.” She looked at her aunt and uncle. “So I guess I’m a girl?” She still sounded confused.

Both of them seemed to be confused too, while Madam Malkin resumed preparing and packaging Hailey’s robes. Even her… Cousin? Unless he was adopted too, at least- seemed to be confused.

Harry was a little bit preoccupied for much of the rest of the shopping trip, though Professor McGonagall was unable to figure out why. When it came time to get him a wand, he seemed to enjoy watching Ollivander dash all over the shop, fetching wands, one after another.

Then the wandmaker had asked the Dursleys about the material Petunia’s dress was made of- apparently, it was extremely powerfully magical, and he was curious what it was because apparently he had never encountered a material that was so perfectly suited for use as a wand core.

Harry had, for some reason, looked uneasy ever since then, even though Petunia hadn’t told Ollivander anything.

Then both of the parents had gotten wands too, which seemed to surprise them. McGonagall had been about to stop Ollivander in the middle of finding Petunia’s wand- the first of the two- when a stream of red and gold sparks leaped from the end of the wand she had just accepted to wave around, scaring her so much she dropped it. Vernon also jumped when he found his match, but didn’t drop it- or let out any ungainly shrieks of surprise.

The rest of the shopping trip had been uneventful- though when Harry had mentioned that the letters mentioned owls, and McGonagall had subsequently explained that owls carried wizard mail… and the family had promptly purchased three of them. Harry got a beautiful snowy owl, which he had named Hedwig on the way out of the shop.

Finally, after Professor McGonagall helped them load their luggage into the back of their car, she gave them the envelope of tickets. “This’ll be their train tickets,” she told Vernon, who was closest.

He took the envelope, opened it right away, and slid a gold-colored ticket out. “King’s cross, platform…” He paused, and checked the other one before looking up. “Nine and three quarters?”

“Yes,” McGonagall nodded. “Just walk straight through the barrier between platforms nine and ten- and don’t be scared you’ll crash into it, that’s very important.”

He sighed. “Alright.”

And then, they were headed home, and McGonagall was heading for Hogwarts to tell Dumbledore that Harry and Dudley were going to be attending.

When they got back home, the sun was beginning to go down, so Harry’s and Dudley’s things were transferred to their bedrooms- and the family owl got placed in Vernon and Petunia’s bedroom. Especially since both kids had owls, it was going to be easier to keep visitors from realizing they had a mail-carrying owl that way- even Vernon’s sister Marge, whenever she visited.

Harry, meanwhile, went straight to his room with his luggage, locked the door, and opened the package with his robes in it.

He then undressed, and examined himself critically in the mirror.

Yes, he decided, he did seem to be a girl, judging by Madam Malkin’s description.

So… was ‘he’ the right pronoun to use, or ‘she’?

Well, he had always liked it when people mistook him for a girl and used female terms of address- so perhaps he was a girl, and had always been a girl… and just hadn’t realized it?

Which meant that he was actually a she.

For some reason, being able to definitively claim the female pronoun for himself- herself- made him- her- feel giddy.

He- she- ran back to the clothes she’d- yes!- left on the floor, grabbed the ones she’d just gotten- which even came with underwear- and put them on. She recognized three… Those were called bras, right? But her chest was still as flat as a boy’s, so she left them on the floor.

Finally, she swept her Hogwarts robes about her, did up the fastenings, pulled her hair out to drape down her back, and stepped in front of the mirror as she set her pointed hat on top of her head.

She very nearly let out a squeal of glee.

Then her eyes tracked down to her chest… where her name plate proclaimed her name to be Hailey Potter.

“Hailey,” she muttered. “I’m… Hailey.” Then she smiled. “I like it.”

After that, she looked at the long, thin package containing her wand… then at Hedwig, still sleeping in her cage. “Hmm,” she muttered, then reached up and plucked a single hair from her head. She coiled it up gently, while being careful not to kink it, folded a blank piece of paper around it, slipped that into an envelope, sealed the envelope closed, then wrote just one word on the face of the envelope.

‘Ollivander’.

Right when she finished, and set the pen down, there was a soft hoot next to her. She looked- Hedwig was awake and looking at the letter. The owl then looked up at her.

She looked between Hedwig and the letter for a second, then settled on Hedwig. “It’s going to Mister Ollivander in Diagon Alley. Are you saying you want to take it now?” she asked.

Hedwig gave an unmistakable nod.

She blinked. “Okay then.” She undid the latch on the cage, and held out her arm. Hedwig obediently hopped onto her offered arm, then she carried the owl to the window, opened the window with one hand, and held up the letter. “Have a safe journey,” she told her.

Hedwig nodded, gave another soft hoot, clamped the sealed envelope in her beak, spread her wings, and took off out the window.

“Even without breakfast,” Hailey mused, as she watched her disappear into the distance, then chuckled. “Let’s be fair, she’s probably going to fetch her own breakfast either along the way or on the way back.” Then she scowled. “Wish I could tell him what that hair is from without…” She sighed. “I don’t want people to start pestering me for my hair.”

Vernon looked up when Harry appeared in the doorway into the living room… Wearing his sweeping black robes and tall, pointed hat.

It was interesting how easy it was to tell that he wasn’t wearing pants under it, but a skirt.

“Looks nice,” he nodded. “Though your hair is sticking out.”

Harry smiled. “I know,” he said. “And since I’m apparently a girl, and my name is apparently Hailey…” He touched the nametag, and shrugged.

“True,” Vernon muttered, putting his hand to his chin. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m a girl named Hailey,” she said simply. “I wonder what happened to make us think I was a boy?”

Vernon laughed. “Yeah, I wonder.”

Then she twirled around in a circle, causing her skirts to twirl out around her. “How do I- Oooh, I like that.” Then she spun in place several times, making her skirts fly up high enough Vernon was certain it was a full skirt… and that her robes weren’t enough to pin it down.

Then she stopped, wobbled, and braced herself against the wall. “Woo, dizzy! But that was fun!”

Garrick Ollivander was just getting ready for bed when a sudden tap sounded on his bedroom window. He looked- it was a snowy owl, holding a letter.

So he opened the window. The owl held the letter out to him- and when he accepted it, it turned around and took off, vanishing back out into the night.

“Huh,” he muttered, and looked at the envelope as he closed the window with one hand.

It looked to be a muggle envelope, constructed with paper and glue, with only his last name written on it. He slit it open with a tap of his wand, and removed the contents.

When he unfolded the piece of paper at his reading desk, it was to find a single, very long hair from… something. It gave off the same impossible energy as Petunia Dursley’s dress had- and he was right, it was perfectly suited for wandmaking.

But what was it?

He looked at the page it had been wrapped in… and spied a few words, written in a strange language that he had never seen before, but could understand anyways.

Hair from the head of a goddess.

There was nothing else written on it- on either side, on the inside of the envelope (though the ‘security weave’ made verifying that difficult), or anywhere else.

He looked at the window again. “Thanks,” he muttered softly. “Whoever you are.”

He then headed downstairs to his workshop, in his pajamas, to set the undamaged hair carefully on his work table for the following morning, before returning upstairs to sleep.

Had Petunia Dursley’s dress really been made from the hair of a goddess? How much hair did that goddess have? How many goddesses had it come from? What kinds of effects would wearing a part of a deity like that have on the wearer?

Because it most certainly would have effects of some sort or another. Perhaps that was why the family had seemed so happy when they came in? Perhaps that was why he’d sensed that the adults had been muggles when they entered… yet when he finished finding wands for the children, one of which had claimed the wand that had the second of Dumbledore’s phoenix’ tail feathers in it, he could tell that they had somehow become a witch and wizard.

But why would something Petunia was wearing affect Vernon? Was he also wearing something made from the hair of a goddess, but that was covered up somehow?

Chapter 4: Wand

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Garrick Ollivander shivered with excitement as he closed his shop at the end of the day, just three days after he had received the hair from the head of an unknown goddess. He’d had record low sales for the Hogwarts shopping season these last two days- but he had done it.

He had taken exquisite care in preparing the best quality wood he could find in his entire storeroom, then trimmed it to the exact length that would allow him to make the best wand he could with the materials, and finally crafted the wand.

It had taken two days, to the usual one, but he had ended up with a wand crafted of vine, and exactly ten and three quarters inches long. As usual, he knew when the wand had been crafted successfully when an ornate carving appeared on the wand, carved by the wand itself to better facilitate the bond between the wood and the core. This one had been particularly tricky to complete- but he had done it.

The carving had taken nearly an hour to complete itself, far longer than most wands- which indicated to him that even the wand was taking great care to properly craft itself.

Then of course, the ornate carving spanned the entire length of the wand. That alone meant one of two things: Either the core was far substandard or damaged, resulting in a very weak to useless wand… Or the core was extremely powerful, requiring the larger carving to reach its full potential without burning the wood. Unfortunately, he’d only ever had three full-length carvings before. They had all been wands with magically damaged cores- and the full-length carving was because it was attempting to make up for the damage. Despite their efforts, they had been very, very weak, and two of them had burned out during his quality control testing. The last had been discarded as a failure.

Those three wands had also taken mere seconds for their carvings, in their desperate bids to be strong enough.

But this one… This one seemed to be an exception. Even standing two feet away from it, he could feel the tremendous power stored inside the tiny wooden stick, just waiting to be unleashed.

He had already coated it in the special lacquer that protected the wand wood from any sort of outside damage, including from finger oils; he always applied it as quickly as possible after the carving was complete… while wearing gloves. The lacquer also helped to bolster the wand’s responsiveness, though not by much.

He reached out… and, very gently, touched it, at the base. The area that every wand carved, and where the wielding wizard held it; the carving also served as the link between the wand and the wizard, and a wand could not be used by a wizard that wasn’t touching its carvings.

He shivered as an electric tingle traveled up his arm- and instantly knew that the wand hadn’t accepted him as its master… But had acknowledged that it needed to cooperate with him for quality control.

He’d never had a wand demonstrate high-level decision making like that.

So he lifted it gently into his hand, and closed his hand around it. He had his own wand stored safely in his pocket already.

The wand didn’t react.

He tried ‘feeling into’ it as he usually did to measure its absolute power level- and ran into a wall of pure energy inside the wand, almost like it was protecting him from hurting himself with its power.

So he took a deep breath, apparated to his testing grounds, and began his testing routine.

As he went through the routine, he made a few observations. When he tested its maximum power… he didn’t get the idea it was emitting its maximum power- because in every single one of the three different tests, it used just barely not enough power to ruin the testing area for the next wand. When he tested Charms, it worked flawlessly. Transfiguration, the same. Everything, it did flawlessly.

Except for the Dark Arts. When he tried casting the Imperius Curse on a mouse in a cage… nothing happened. On the very next spell, it produced the most powerful Patronus he’d ever seen- and his very first corporeal Patronus, both in one go.

When he got back to his shop, he tested its flexibility- it rated a ‘slightly springy’- before he polished it and placed it in a fresh wand box.

If only he knew where to find more goddess hairs.

Though perhaps, he sighed. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a good thing to have too many Goddess wands out there- it might even be more powerful than the Elder Wand!

… Probably was, when he thought about it. The Elder Wand was made with mundane, though extremely rare, materials… whereas the hair from the head of a goddess wasn’t ‘mundane’ by any stretch of the imagination.

Hermione Granger took a deep breath, and let it out.

It felt like forever ago when Professor McGonagall had shown up on her doorstep with a letter and the news that magic was real. The Professor had done a little demonstration… But her father, Dan Granger, had been at work at the time- so her mother had told McGonagall upfront that she would be unwilling to allow any shopping journeys same-day.

Hermione had also declined to pass judgement on whether or not she wanted to go to Hogwarts at all right away- she wanted to talk it over with both her parents, and take some time to properly consider it, before she decided.

So her mother had picked a date three days later, and suggested if McGonagall could come back then, when both parents would be home all day- they were both dentists- she could receive Hermione’s decision and, possibly, guide the family wizard-shopping. Hermione had accepted the span as ‘plenty long enough to decide’, and McGonagall had promised to return.

Unfortunately, whenever that day had come around, Dan had been absent again; one of the other dentists at the practice- it was some kind of large facility that served quite a few of them- had called off sick, so he’d been called in to cover for them. They had told McGonagall that Hermione did want to go to Hogwarts… but had to reschedule the shopping trip once again.

This had happened some two or three times.

Then, on the latest scheduled day, both of her parents got called in to cover for call-offs.

Hermione had taken it upon herself to prepare for McGonagall’s arrival- and when she had come… She had explained that, once again, they’d been called in to work, and suggested another fresh shopping date on their next joint day off, during the following week.

Unfortunately, as Professor McGonagall told her with a saddened tone, they couldn’t push it off more than just two days- to Friday. Any further, and they would have to call off her attendance at Hogwarts entirely.

But when she had examined the schedule, both parents worked both days.

“Is… Do you think it would be possible for them to drop me off on the way to work, and pick me up on the way home?” She had asked the question with a bit of a hopeless tone, expecting a no- but the answer had surprised her. Yes, it would be possible. Tom, the barkeeper in the Leaky Cauldron, could watch over her.

So she had told McGonagall when her parents usually left… and asked if she could arrive some half an hour or more before that, so her parents could make their decision. When her parents got home, she’d told them about what happened. They hadn’t been happy… but they had taken it.

She had been afraid that they would miss it somehow, and she wouldn’t be able to learn magic.

But she needn’t have been.

She had gotten up especially early that morning, and eaten breakfast with her parents- who had also gotten up early- rather than as they were walking out the door.

Then McGonagall arrived on schedule, her parents made their decision, and the four of them piled into the car.

They had driven to the Leaky Cauldron. Her parents had accompanied her to Gringotts, exchanged some money for her, made her promise to be certain all of her required supplies were covered- preferably purchased- before she got anything that wasn’t on the list, and had returned to London and driven to work. Professor McGonagall seemed to be amused that they hadn’t thought that asking her to enforce that promise was necessary.

So now, she and Professor McGonagall were standing just outside the Leaky Cauldron, in Diagon Alley. Her parents were nowhere to be seen, and her pockets were full of gold. McGonagall had talked to Tom, so he was lending one of the rooms upstairs in the Leaky Cauldron to her for the day- she wouldn’t be confined to public spaces for the entire day.

“So, ahh,” she muttered, looking around the busy street in front of her. She glanced down at the shopping list she had in her hand. The traffic wasn’t so dense she couldn’t see the businesses on the other side of the street- but she didn’t see anywhere that looked like it sold magic wands. “Where do we get the wand?”

McGonagall raised an eyebrow. “You want to start with that?”

She shrugged. “Might as well,” she answered. “I can see everything else, and a wand is probably lighter than all this gold.” She chuckled nervously.

Professor McGonagall nodded soberly. Hermione wasn’t very strong at all, thanks to some disease that inhibited her muscle growth. Fortunately, it had set in late enough that she wasn’t likely to become disabled from it, but it did put her fairly firmly on the weak side… for the rest of her life. According to McGonagall, when her parents had warned her about it before they left the house, even wizards had never found a cure; they could only slow the onset.

“Ollivanders is a little ways down the street.” She pointed.

She winced. “Well… No time like the present, I guess.”

One hundred four. One hundred five. One hundred six.

Ollivander rushed back to the front of the shop with the three fresh wand boxes- and winced when he saw that the girl that was getting a wand today had evidently grown tired of standing. She still looked eagerly at each box he brought out to her, and eagerly tried every wand he handed her, but now she was doing it from where she’d sat on the floor.

Still, though, no response.

Four hundred eighteen. Four hundred nineteen.

He was starting to get desperate. By now, the girl- Hermione Granger- wasn’t the only one with tired legs; Professor McGonagall had also sat on the floor to wait, since the only available chair had already been buried under a pile of tried wands. Even he was tired of running back and forth, after over an hour of rushing around his shop, collecting wands.

Something caught his attention, in the corner of his eye, on his way back towards the shelf that held the next set of candidates.

A wand box was glowing gently. That almost never happened… and when it did, it was almost always the perfect match.

Only… He knew this box. He’d put it on that shelf less than a week before. In it was a wand of vine, ten and three quarters inches long and slightly springy. Its core…

It was the Goddess Wand.

He removed it from the shelf, noticing that it stopped glowing the moment he did so, and turned back towards the entrance, where the girl waited, with only the one wand.

Four hundred twenty.

He went down on one knee next to the girl once again, placing the wand box on the floor, then opened it.

“Fancy,” Hermione observed promptly.

“It is,” he agreed, removing it from the box with one hand on either end and turning to offer it. “Vine, ten and three quarter inches, slightly springy, with a core of-!”

He knew she was listening to him; she had that attentive look to her, even as her hand accepted the wand from him.

The moment her hand closed on it, he felt a sudden warmth in the wood where he was still touching it- and a ripple of pure white energy flowed through the engraving from her hand, quickly filling the whole wand and making it that much fancier. At the same time, the girl let out a gasp of surprise, and seemed to be stunned into inaction.

Ollivander quickly withdrew his hands- and as soon as the energy finished filling the whole wand, a blast of red and gold sparks shot out the end of it and showered most of the shop in brilliance. He knew what that meant- the wand had found its master.

And judging by the energy in the bond… It hadn’t just found its master; they would also be forever inseparable. The wand would likely refuse to function at all for anyone else, should they ever get their hands on it.

McGonagall leaned forward, from where she’d been leaning against the wall. “Miss Granger? Are you okay?”

“No, I’m-!” Hermione began, breathlessly. “I’m fine,” she continued. “I’m just…” She trailed off, then finally took a deep breath and let it out as she lowered the wand from the position she’d accepted it from Ollivander in, to rest in her lap. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said, much more normally.

“You’re telling me,” Ollivander told her. “What happened?”

She looked at him. “Weird… tingly feeling, went through my whole body.” She shivered. “Caught me by surprise. I think it’s still there, but I can’t really feel it.” Then she raised the wand up in front of her, and looked at it. “Oh my. Really fancy now.” She frowned. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Who knows,” Ollivander answered, while McGonagall rose to her feet to walk closer. “That’s the first wand I’ve ever made whose core is a hair from the head of a goddess.”

There was a moment of silence.

“The hair of… what!?” Hermione asked, staring at him.

Chapter 5: Gringotts

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Some two hours after Professor McGonagall had left, Hermione emerged from her room once again. She’d unwrapped her books, and browsed them quickly… before coming to the conclusion that she would want a couple for background reading, but not too many.

Which was good- without Professor McGonagall around, she doubted she could carry more than a couple back from Flourish and Blotts!

And of course, her pockets were still too full of gold that she didn’t want to put down, lest it get lost or stolen, so she was considering seeing if she could get a vault at Gringotts. Her father had told her that she could hold onto any she didn’t use for the next year.

She had also unwrapped her wand again, and practiced picking it up. It still did the whole tickly tingly thing every time- except each time, it was more manageable to her.

It also seemed like it wasn’t nearly as strong if she picked it up within about a minute of putting it down- almost like whatever was causing the feeling was fading instead of just vanishing.

Which it very well could be- even when holding the wand, she could only barely tell that the tingly feeling was there, and even then only if she concentrated. Ollivander and McGonagall both had no idea what the feeling was, so…

She walked quietly up to the bar.

Tom, the barkeeper, looked up. “Good afternoon, Miss Granger,” he greeted. “Did you need something?”

“I was thinking about visiting Gringotts,” she muttered. “Then probably Flourish and Blotts again.”

He nodded. “You know where you’re going, then,” he observed. “Make absolutely certain you don’t wander down any side streets- some of them can get dangerous. As long as you stick to Diagon Alley, and really anywhere up or down the street, you’ll be safe- the shopkeepers will look out for you.” He paused. “Do you remember how to get into the Alley and back?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Three up, two across. And the brick with the cross on it to get back.” She paused. “I’ll need to go get my wand, though.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s pretty important.”

Hermione stopped in the courtyard out back of the Leaky Cauldron and took a deep breath before drawing her wand from her pocket. For some reason, even though it was twice as long as the pocket was deep, and she had a handful of galleons in that pocket as well, it fit entirely inside it.

She managed to only shudder this time, without having to pause to cope with the tingle. She raised it, tapped the brick… and, as the archway started to open, she pocketed it again.

Finally, she stepped back out into Diagon Alley.

Her eyes immediately fell on Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor… but she decided against it. Perhaps she could visit later, once she had fewer coins and more books.

She turned, and set off down the cobbled street for the bank, Gringotts.

“Uh, Hi,” Hermione muttered, walking up to a free teller.

The goblin looked at her over his counter. “What do you want?” he asked.

She flinched at his unpleasant attitude, but stood strong- or at least, as strong as she could. “What does it take to open a vault?” she asked.

The goblin gazed at her for a couple of seconds. “How old are you?”

She winced. “E-Eleven.”

“We do not allow wizards below the age of seventeen to register new Vaults,” he told her calmly. “We do, however, allow wizards of at least eleven years to reclaim Vaults left by magical ancestors.”

“Oh,” she muttered. “And I don’t have…” She sighed. “Thanks anyways.” She started to turn away.

“There are Vaults that have been passed down through muggle lines,” he told her calmly. “And many more that have never been reclaimed because the eligible wizards do not think to check for them.”

She paused, and looked at him again. “Say what? Er… How do I, ahh, check?”

The answer to Hermione’s question involved quite a lot more commotion than she expected.

A runner had guided her back to an office in the back of the bank. Then, the very curt goblin that worked in the office had spent nearly forty-five minutes having her do various things with various magical devices- none of which involved her wand, she noticed, so presumably they could do this before she got a wand- and, finally, seemed to decide that he’d pushed her around enough.

He put the latest instrument away, told her to wait for a moment, and started working at his desk.

This took another ten minutes, before he finally pushed a form towards her, alongside a very sharp quill in an empty glass inkwell. “Sign this,” he told her.

“Huh?” she muttered, and looked down at the document.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t written in English, so she couldn’t read it at all.

“Um… What is it?”

“Just sign it,” the goblin grumbled.

At the same time, she felt a sudden encouraging, reassuring warmth against her leg. Her wand… was telling her it was okay?

She was tempted to fold her arms and refuse to sign anything she couldn’t read- but for some reason, she felt like she could trust her wand, and it was telling her it was okay.

So she took a deep breath, took the quill, and looked at the tip. It was, indeed, extremely sharp. “No ink?” she asked.

“You won’t be needing any.”

She scowled, put the quill to the page, and signed it on the line he had indicated. The quill used a bright, ruby red ink… that seemed to be coming out of it.

No sooner had she finished than a stinging cut suddenly appeared on the back of her hand- and promptly disappeared again, without leaking a single drop of blood.

She let out a gasp of surprise, and almost dropped the quill, staring at it.

The goblin took the form, inspected it, and set it aside before reaching forward to pluck the quill out of her hand, sign the form himself, put it back in the empty inkwell, and set them back away.

“What- What was that?” Hermione asked, breathlessly. Her wand was still providing a reassuring warmth- but it was a quill that had cut her when she used it!

The goblin ignored her as he put the form into a drawer of his desk. He waited a couple seconds, before opening the drawer again to remove a tiny golden key, which he pushed into her hands.

“Now go.” He pointed at the door.

She stared at him, then sighed, rose, and left the room. She already knew he wasn’t going to tell her any more if she asked.

The warmth from her wand faded as she went, leaving behind a trace of its warmth.

Finally, she stepped out into the passage.

Griphook, the runner that had taken her there, was waiting for her- though he looked quite bored. “This way, please,” he told her, when she closed the door behind her.

She followed silently.

The silence didn’t last long. After a minute, she stepped up to walk next to him. “He… He gave me a key,” she muttered. “Does that mean anything?”

Griphook paused, looking at her. “He gave you a key, did he? Without explaining?” He sighed. “Again. Probably had you sign a document you couldn’t read, without explanation?”

She nodded.

He nodded as well. “That would have been the Vault Agreement,” he told her disappointedly. “It must be written in Gobbledegook- that’s our language- and signed in blood for the magic to take effect.”

“Signed in-?” she asked, wrapping her hand around the hand that had gotten cut. Her skin was still slightly red.

He nodded. “We use Blood Quills for that,” he told her. “He’s supposed to explain ahead of time, but…” He sighed. “He’s already gotten in trouble for that three times this month- especially when it cost us an extremely valuable Blood Quill two weeks ago, thanks to a girl whose natural wards were so strong they destroyed it when she tried to use it.” He sighed. “We had to teach her how to temporarily weaken her wards before she could sign it. Anyways, if he’s given you a key, you have a vault and that key will open it. We don’t give out unassigned keys.”

“Oh,” she muttered, looking at the key in her hand again. “Can… Can I visit it? Or-?”

He nodded. “Yes, this way.”

Griphook led Hermione back out to the great marble hall of the main bank, where all the tellers and the main entrance were- then back up the hall a ways and into one of the many doors along the side.

She blinked in surprise when the room on the other side of the door was not marble but stone- a long, stone tunnel that sloped downwards and curved out of sight, lit by wall-mounted torches. Railway tracks were built on the floor, with a little flat spot at the top- but there was no train.

Griphook gave a whistle- and after a few seconds, a cart came hurtling up the tracks and rolled smoothly to a stop at the top, waiting for them to get in. It looked much like the minecarts in that Minecraft game she’d played once, just larger and less… blocky. It also had a door in the side, and benches on either end.

She sat down on the bench that was facing downhill, with her back to the door, and Griphook sat opposite her before the cart took off, hurtling down the tunnel. It seemed to have a mind of its own, weaving in and out of various caves and ravines, taking switches this way and that, and it seemed to be passing over converging junctions as often as it did diverging junctions. Every so often, the track went up for a little before resuming going down.

“Wow,” Hermione muttered, peering over the edge as the cart crossed over an underground ravine. For some reason, her usual fear of heights didn’t extend to looking out of vehicles, such as airplanes or even roller coasters- that one had really surprised her. “This place is really complex,” she observed.

Griphook nodded. “Don’t lean over too far, some of these passages can get pretty narrow,” he warned her. “But yes. The Gringotts Underground is designed to lose anyone that enters or departs- these carts will only function properly when operated by a licensed Gringotts Goblin acting under their own free will. Many of these tracks in either direction form loops or travel to various traps, often with quite a few forks and merges with other wrong turns before reaching the end.” He sighed. “Even the lowest-security Vault in Gringotts is protected by nearly two hundred junctions along the shortest route from the Main Hall- completely aside from the invisible protections we employ.” He twisted around to look in front of them. “Looks like we’re headed for the medium security block, where most common wizards’ Vaults are.”

“This is taking forever,” Hermione observed. They were still going down, and the air was starting to get hot.

Griphook nodded. “We passed through the Med-Sec block a while ago,” he told her. “It looks like we’re headed for the Maximum Security block. Not many vaults there. Don’t reach too far outside the cart- before long, the air down here will be hot enough to boil water, and the protective charms on the carts only go so far.”

“We didn’t, like, miss it, did we?” Hermione asked, as a sudden heatwave heralded hurtling across a bridge just feet above the surface of a small underground lava lake.

“Nope,” he told her promptly. “That lake we just crossed is the only entrance to the Maximum Security block. Not long now.”

No sooner had he said that than a sudden blast of cool air met her face, and the track leveled off. The cart made a few more turns- then rapidly decelerated, and came to a full stop with a soft bump against a stop block.

“Ahh,” Griphook nodded. “Here we are.” He gestured to the side, as he opened the door and led the way out of the cart.

Hermione followed him gingerly, and looked up at the wall he had gestured at.

Set into the stone wall was a massive metal door, with what Hermione recognized as a tiny keyhole in it, even from so far away. There were a few strange symbols engraved in the door.

“Alright,” Griphook said, looking at it. “A bit overkill, but it works, I suppose.” He turned to her. “This Vault happens to be what we call a Cursed Vault. That key of yours will open the door- but that door is not the only thing protecting it, even at this point.”

“It’s cursed,” Hermione muttered.

“Well… Sort of,” he agreed. “More like warded. Once you open the door, you’ll have to authenticate yourself to the wards. First, you’re going to insert the tip of the key into the transparent blue barrier behind the door. You’ll see a burst of energy travel through the Vault- and at that point, you will be able to enter it.

“Before you enter it, though, if you insert the tip of your wand while the key is still partially inside, you will also be able to use your wand to open the door if you lose the key, and neither one will open it unless you are the one using it.

“That done, you’ll want to walk in, key-first, to ensure the wards are able to familiarize themselves with you. Once you do that, you’ll be able to treat the wards like they don’t exist at all- though others, including myself, will be unable to enter unless you hold their hand across the threshold each time. It will act as a solid barrier to them otherwise- and if they do manage to bypass it, they will die.” He sighed. “These wards were invented and implemented shortly after apparition was discovered, but before anti-apparition jinxes were invented; nowadays, they would actually be illegal on a home or business, but are just fine in one of these vaults. Are you ready?”

She nodded. “I’m ready.”

Hermione stepped into her vault, the process finally completed, and stared around, finally taking in the contents of her new vault.

There was a tidal wave of gold so large she could probably live luxuriously for her entire life, without working for a single day. There was an entire wall of bookcases, each loaded to the breaking point with books. There were shelves upon shelves of other assorted trinkets. There was a rack full of swords hanging on one wall. There was- There was-!

She reached over, and plucked a quill from its holder on a shelf next to the door. Yes, the tip was extremely sharp. “Is- Is this what I think it is?” she asked.

Griphook looked. “If you think it’s a blood quill, then yes,” he told her. “Speaking of- if ever you encounter a blood quill out in the wild, be wary. A wizard’s blood is a very powerful thing- and blood as fresh and pure as that which a blood quill procures…” He sighed. “If you sign an agreement with a Blood Quill and violate it, the best case scenario is that you lose your magic, but most often you die. If you write a document with a blood quill, your magic will do its level best to make it come true. If you don’t have enough magic… you lose your magic.

“And… If ever anyone tries to force you to write something with a blood quill, anything, no matter what it is, run. Forcing someone to write a statement about themselves with a blood quill is an ancient form of mind control, and it cannot be reversed without causing you to lose your magic.” He sighed. “Fortunately, all other forms of mind or body control, including the Imperius Curse, are reversible- and prevent Blood Quills from functioning. They only work for the willing mind.”

She placed it deftly back in its place. “Okay. Let’s leave that here, then.” She took a deep breath. “So… that ‘Vault Agreement’...?”

“The only thing you are agreeing to in that Agreement is to allow Gringotts to protect whatever you place in this Vault.” He shrugged. “Pretty hard to disallow that.” He gestured towards the cart behind him.

She took a deep breath, and scanned down the rows again, pocketing her wand.

A ripple of energy suddenly blasted out from her, rippling throughout the whole Vault.

“Yeek!” she gasped, looking around wildly. “What- What was-?”

“Oh, it’s wand-keyed?” Griphook blinked. “Huh.” He looked up at her. “Thanks to that, your wand will serve as an access point to anything in this Vault, from anywhere, both insert and remove- just pull it in or out of a pocket, cabinet, or whatever else that will fit it, while holding your wand and desiring it to enter or leave your Vault instead.” He chuckled. “Very convenient for Vaults this deep, even though it only works with the most powerful wands- and it seems yours is strong enough.”

She winced. “Er… Yeah. I mean, given its core…” She trailed off. “So, I can go home and summon stuff from here, without actually visiting?” she asked.

He nodded. “It’ll only work for you, and only with that wand.”

“Meaning…” She drew her wand again, then stuffed her hand into her pocket and removed the handful of galleons left in it.

Then she concentrated… and put them back in her pocket.

There was a gentle tinkling as a few galleons dropped out of nowhere to land on the tidal wave.

“Oh my,” she muttered. “I can… I can feel everything that’s in here.” Then she frowned. “Forty million galleons… how much is that worth, anyways?”

“Quite a bit,” Griphook chuckled.

“Well yeah, I know that, but…” She looked around, emptied the rest of the coins- mostly sickles or knuts, the large numbers of them to make up the larger denominations were a pain- from her pockets by the same means, and stepped up to one of the shelves to pick up a piece of parchment lying in clear view of the entrance.

She read it through, and scowled. It looked like it was a message from her long-dead ancestor- but it didn’t tell her much.

It only told her to take the ornate box that had been sitting on it home… and open it with ‘an unlocking spell’. Apparently, she would be glad that she did, but it didn’t say what was inside, or why she would be glad.

“Hey Hermione.”

Hermione looked up at her mom, Emma Granger, when she heard her voice.

“Hi,” she answered, around her ice cream; she had finally gotten over her shock, finished buying the extra books she wanted and sending them to her Vault, and headed to Fortescue’s to get some ice cream. She’d been slowly consuming this huge ‘un-meltable’ ice cream for a few minutes before her parents had arrived. “How was work?”

“Went pretty well,” Dan answered, sitting down at her table. “Hmm, that looks good. You happen to have any of those wizard coins left?”

“Er… About that,” she muttered.

“Uh-oh,” he observed.

Hermione smiled. “Well, a few hours ago, I went to Gringotts.”

He blinked. “You went back to Gringotts?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Thought I’d see if I could get a vault to store the rest of the gold for next year.” She sighed.

“They refused, didn’t they?” Emma asked.

She nodded. “They did. But apparently, I have- through at least one of you, but no idea which, really- some ancient magical ancestor that was…” She paused. “Really rich.” She sighed. “No idea who it was. Goblins wouldn’t tell me, and they didn’t leave anything in the vault to tell me either.”

“... The Vault,” Emma repeated.

She nodded. “They let me ‘reclaim’ their ‘lost’ vault. Which means…” She trailed off, took a deep breath, and continued. “Which means I now have… Literally millions of galleons.”

“Oh my,” Dan muttered. “But how long does it take to get them?”

“Thanks to magic… all I have to do is put my hand in my pocket when I’m holding my wand.” She paused. “I, er, did spend all of the stuff you gave me, by the way. Lotsa books for background reading. But I won’t be needing any more gold for…” She paused. “My entire life, I think.”

Then a waitress walked over. “Good evening,” she greeted. “Can I get you two something as well, or…?”

“Go ahead and get something,” Hermione told her parents. “I’ll pay for it.”

Dan nodded slowly, while the waitress blinked in apparent surprise. “Alright then. Um… What’s on the menu?”

“Fancy,” Dan observed, inspecting Hermione’s wand. It was around ten minutes after they had returned from Diagon Alley, and Hermione was recounting the day’s adventure to them in the kitchen.

She nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the fanciest one in the shop,” she told him, and sighed. “It gets even fancier when I hold it, too.” She held out her hand; she had already set her wand on the table to wait by the time they had finished getting changed for the evening.

He reached out, and set it on her outstretched palm.

She didn’t close her hand on it; she didn’t need to. White light rapidly rippled its way through the carving, filling it to the brim with vibrant energy.

“Oh my,” Dan muttered.

Emma looked instead at Hermione. “Something wrong?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no, it’s just…” She sighed. “Most wands don’t do that. And whenever it does that, it sends this… tingly feeling through my body as well.”

“It’s not hurting you, is it?” Emma asked.

“Oh, no,” she answered, placing it on the table and watching the light fade from the carvings as she drew her hand away. “As a matter of fact, it seems to be doing quite the opposite. Whenever I’m holding it… I can lift my trunk, effortlessly, with a finger. But only when I’m holding it.”

Dan tilted his head. “Why is it so different? Er, if you know.”

“Because…” She sighed. “Because a wand has two components,” she answered. “There’s the wood… and the core, which is of a powerful magical substance. This one’s Vine wood… which is pretty rare to find in a wand anymore, according to Ollivander, but not all that special.

“The core, on the other hand… Most wands have a phoenix tail feather, a unicorn tail hair, or a dragon heartstring.” She sighed again. “This one’s different. It… It has a hair from…” She took a deep breath. “From the head of a goddess.” She paused. “Nobody knows what goddess, only that she anonymously donated the hair to Ollivander’s shop by way of a snowy owl a week and a half ago. He crafted it into a wand… and this was the result. This…” She trailed off. “Masterpiece.” She curled up in her chair, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I keep wondering if I really deserve something this special,” she muttered. “It doesn’t seem to care, though. It even helped me overcome my fears when I was getting that Gringotts vault- and whenever I’m holding it, I feel safe, no matter where I am. Even though I don’t know any magic yet.”

Hailey accepted the note Hedwig brought her the following morning, and flipped it open. “Oh, he’s thanking me for… Wow. That was fast.” She leaned back in her chair, and looked at Hedwig. “Remember that letter I had you take to Ollivander? I put one of my hairs in it… and apparently, he just sold the wand he made with that hair.” She looked at the unaddressed letter. “I wonder what this ‘Hermione Granger’ is like?” Then she looked out at the window. “And I wonder if he would appreciate more hair? I mean, if my wand has a core from the same phoenix as Voldemorts…” She shrugged. “Oh, why not.”

A minute later, she had a small collection of hairs folded gently inside pieces of paper and tucked into a sealed envelope. On the face of the envelope, she wrote three words- one, Ollivander, was english.

The other two, she had written in a strange script she had never seen before… but could understand perfectly anyways, and somehow knew that he would as well. She had no idea where she’d learned it.

You’re welcome.

She then set the envelope aside, and smiled at Hedwig. “Whenever it’s convenient, then,” she told her. “No rush.”

Hedwig let out a hoot of laughter.

Ollivander stared at the face of the sealed envelope the snowy owl had delivered. The same owl as had come the morning before to take the note of thanks he’d drafted for whoever had sent him the goddess hair.

There was his name… and two words, written in that same strange script as had been on the note wrapped around the first hair.

The envelope had some thickness to it too- it probably had multiple hairs in it.

He sighed, and set it aside unopened. He would open it later, in his workshop; for now, he was going to finish breakfast.

Was that really all it took to get goddess hairs for wand cores? Thank her for the donation, and tell her who received it?

He said a quick prayer, praying that he wasn’t going to be unwittingly furnishing goddess wands to any that would misuse them. Like Voldemort.

“Alohomora,” Hermione muttered.

The lock on her bedroom door, which was standing wide open, clicked.

She tested the outside handle. The latch withdrew into the door, exactly as it was supposed to for an unlocked door.

So she locked the handle again, and tested again. It wouldn’t move.

“Alohomora,” she repeated.

It clicked.

And when she tested it, it opened.

She took a deep breath, locked the door, stepped outside, and closed it, such that she had locked herself out of her bedroom. She tested the handle just to be sure.

“Alohomora.”

The lock clicked, and when she tested it, the door opened easily.

She closed it again, this time with her inside the room and the door not locked, and sat back down at her desk with a smile. “One week,” she muttered. “One week, and I’ve already learned a spell.” She glanced at the door. “Not all that useful of one, but…” She shrugged, and pointed her wand at the little box she’d retrieved from her Vault, the one that had been sitting on that note.

“Alohomora.”

The extremely complex lock on the front of it burst open. The top of the box flung itself off- and all four sides also threw themselves off, as the box rapidly disassembled itself.

Inside was… She caught a brief glimpse of an odd red sand inside, before it burst into flames.

She let out a shriek of terror, tipping her chair over backwards- but then… the flames were gone. When she stood back up to look at it, completely unharmed and wand in hand despite bouncing her head off of the hard floor, the sand had all been turned to ash.

But why? What was it?

She was about to turn to the door to get a broom and dustpan when a tiny, newborn bird stuck its wrinkled head out of the ashes.

“What in the world-?” she asked.

There was no answer, unfortunately. Her parents were both at work.

Chapter 6: The Hogwarts Express

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When the Dursleys arrived at King’s Cross fairly early on September First, they had absolutely no difficulty getting onto the station. Each of the four of them walked through the barrier separately- then walked across the sparsely-occupied platform to the train, picked a car, and unloaded their luggage into an empty compartment. Interestingly, nobody seemed to be checking tickets- they’d even looked for them. There wasn’t a ticket inspector anywhere that even might check a ticket for Platform Nine and Three Quarters.

Dudley and Hailey both took the same compartment and, after lots of goodbyes and assurances that they would be okay, the Dursleys had left to go home, and the two children had only to wait for the train to go to Hogwarts… while they threw on their robes. They’d already been dressed in the rest of the uniform before going to the station, so all they had to do was add the robe and hat on top.

Hermione was a bit of a different story. She hadn’t thought to ask, and McGonagall had forgotten to explain with all the excitement of her abnormal shopping trip, how she was supposed to get onto the platform.

And of course, she didn’t have an owl, so they hadn’t been able to send a letter to the school when she’d inspected her tickets a week prior.

She did, however, have a pet- even though she hadn’t bought one. The bird that had been born from the ashes from that box had turned out to be a female phoenix she had named Philomena, who was riding on her shoulder. For some reason, her touch seemed to have a similar strengthening effect as touching her wand, albeit not as strong, so her weight wasn’t a burden. It really was amazing how much Philomena had grown in just two short weeks.

“Uh…” She looked up at the platform signs. “Nine, ten. Nothing in between.” She sighed, looking around. “I… I don’t see anyone waiting for…”

“Me neither,” Dan muttered.

“Oooh,” Emma cooed. “That group there- no, there, with the red hair. They’ve got an owl.”

Hermione looked.

Sure enough, it was a family with bright red hair. They had a few trolleys with heavy trunks, and one of them had an owl in a cage.

Then Hermione spied the base of the mother’s wand sticking out of her pocket. “Yup. What’s your bet they’re also sending students?”

“Looks like that one’s going… first…?” Dan observed, indicating one of the boys that had just pushed his trolley straight towards the barrier between the stations, only to have a bunch of tourists pass by.

“Is it something with the barrier?” Hermione muttered.

Another one went… and this time, there were no backpacks to get in the way. He reached the barrier… and was quite suddenly nowhere.

“Got to be,” Emma said. “How about… How about we try going against that barrier, slowly?”

Hermione tilted her head. “Might as well try. Probably have a chance to see what they’re doing from closer up, too.”

So they made their way over. Two more boys vanished as they did so- then they reached the barrier. Her parents each set a hand on her shoulder as they approached the barrier. Dan actually got her arm just below her shoulder, since Philomena already had her shoulder.

“Just in case it’s like the Leaky Cauldron,” Hermione muttered- then, quite suddenly, the barrier wasn’t in front of them at all.

She let out a gasp. The platform was crowded with people- and a scarlet steam locomotive was parked at the station, wafting smoke over the crowd. As they walked closer to the train, Hermione picked out the words Hogwarts Express written on each of the cars and on the tender behind the locomotive. The clock over the wrought iron archway they’d just come through, with text on it reading ‘Platform Nine and Three Quarters’, informed her they had about ten minutes before it was going to leave.

So they walked up to the train, found an empty compartment… Maybe? For some reason, Hermione got a feeling that a certain occupied compartment would be a good idea as she walked by it, so she stopped, knocked, and poked her head inside. “Hello,” she greeted. Inside was a boy, a little bit bigger than her and fairly muscular-looking, and a pretty girl with long, flowing black hair. They were both already wearing their Hogwarts robes. “Mind if I join you two?” she asked.

The girl looked at her… then laughed. It didn’t feel like she was laughing at her, just that she found something really funny for some reason.

“Sure, no problem!” the boy decided. “Are you putting your trunk in here, or…?”

“Er- Yeah, if that’s okay?” She looked at the girl.

He looked at her. “Don’t worry about Hailey,” he told her, amusement in his eyes as well. “Weird stuff always happens around her, and sometimes she finds it funny.”

“Weird stuff?” Hermione asked.

He nodded. “She was just wondering aloud if we’d get to meet anyone on the train when you arrived.”

She paused. “... Oh. Okay. Great minds think alike, I guess? And, er, I’ve got my trunk at least this far, thank you… Dudley?” She’d spotted his nametag.

He nodded again. “Yup, and you’re welcome.” Then he turned to Hailey as Hermione left. “C’mon, Hailey, stop laughing.”

Dragging her trunk into the train and down the passage to the compartment wasn’t easy; Philomena’s strength boost wasn’t nearly as strong as her wand’s. However, thanks to Philomena, she was able to do it without too much strain.

When she got back to the compartment, it was to find that Hailey had calmed down. “Hello again,” she told Hailey. “Done laughing?”

She giggled. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.” She glanced at Hermione’s trunk. “Are you going to need help getting that into the rack?”

“Uh…” She looked up at the rack, and decided that showing off the impossible strength granted by her wand wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do; Philomena’s strength boost only made her comparable to people her own age… that were body-builders. “Yeah, I think so.”

Philomena trilled amusedly, but Hailey and Dudley got up to help.

As it turned out, Dudley was- exactly as he looked- pretty strong. Even he couldn’t lift her trunk on his own, though- but Hailey was also pretty strong. Not as strong Philomena’s boost made Hermione- but between the three of them, it took no time at all to get her trunk up into the luggage rack.

Then Hailey offered her hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Hailey- Hailey Potter.”

“Hermione Granger,” she answered, and accepted the girl’s hand.

A familiar tingle shot through her body on contact with the girl’s skin. She flinched- she was working on working even that out- and blinked. But Hailey wasn’t her wand- why was she having a similar effect…?

“You okay?” Hailey asked worriedly, allowing their hands to separate.

“Uh- Yeah, just…” She trailed off, shook Dudley’s hand too- no tingle there- and looked between them. “Um, I still need to say goodbye to my parents.”

A whistle blew.

“Oh?” Hailey asked, glancing out the window. “Looks like we’re about to start moving, too.” She smiled back at her. “Go ahead, we can wait.”

No sooner had Hermione sat back down in the compartment, after the train had left the station, than Dudley stood up again. “Um, I need to use the bathroom, so if you want to get changed or something?” He raised an eyebrow politely to Hermione.

Hermione blinked, and looked at the door. “Oh. Um… Yeah. I’ll be locking the door, though- knock when you get back?”

He nodded. “Yup. Be back in a few!” He opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind him.

Hermione reached up and locked the door, before standing on the seat to reach her trunk and pull her robes from it.

Hailey watched, with a smile on her face. “That’s a beautiful bird,” she observed. “What’s its name, if I may ask?”

Hermione looked, stepping back down to the floor with a full set of her robes. “Huh? Oh, you mean Philomena?” She smiled- and Philomena, sensing what she wanted to do, spread her wings to fly down to the seat. “She’s a phoenix,” Hermione told Hailey, shivering gently as she adjusted to her usual weakness, and started to change clothes. Philomena liked riding her shoulder so much she was almost rarely as weak as her body. “And… apparently left for me by some long-lost ancestor. But she’s a wonderful companion.”

Hailey smiled. “Phoenix tears have healing powers- and phoenixes themselves can carry immensely heavy loads and can travel by phoenix fire, aside from making extremely faithful pets,” she said. “On top of that, if they die, by lethal blow or simply the end of their six-year lifecycle, they burn up and are reborn from the ashes.” She sighed. “It’s only possible to kill a phoenix during the first week or so after they rejuvenate like that. After that point, they’ll just rejuvenate if you try- even if it’s the Killing Curse.”

“Travel by phoenix fire?” Hermione asked. “Like when she scared us all by appearing in the kitchen in a ball of flames?”

She nodded. “Yeah.” Then she paused. “And don’t ask me where I learned all that, I have no idea.” She shrugged. “When Dudley said weird things happen around me, he meant it. And sometimes, it’s just that I- or sometimes people around me- randomly just… know stuff. For example, I have no idea what a ‘house’ is at Hogwarts, but I know mine will be Gryffindor. Whatever that is.”

Hermione laughed, positioning her skirt just right and reaching for her shirt.

Then she stopped, her shirt in her hands. “House… Good question. They don’t have houses in the school, do they?”

Hailey shrugged. “I expect it’s a concept on the level of the House of Potter or House of Granger or whatever, just a little bit larger. Apparently, Slytherin is also one of them- a strange boy in Madam Malkin’s said that’s where he expected to be, because ‘all our family have been’.”

“Huh,” Hermione said, slipping her shirt on and slinging her robe around her shoulders. “I wonder how we find out which one we’re going to be in?”

Hailey shrugged. “No idea. For all we know, it’s going to be… Oh, a hat that tells you where you belong.” She shrugged.

Hermione laughed. “Oh come on, that’d be silly.”

“Like mirrors that say hi, pictures that move, and sports played on cleaning tools aren’t silly?” Hailey asked, raising an eyebrow.

She let out another snort of laughter. “Oh, alright, if you put it that way,” she chuckled, unlocking the door as she topped off her outfit with her hat. Philomena quickly flew back up to her shoulder- and as she landed, she felt the strange strength flow through her once again. “What sports do they play on cleaning tools?”

“Quidditch,” Hailey answered. “Wizard’s sport. Played in the air… on broomsticks. Back in the day, they actually enchanted and used straw brooms- and when they landed, they took that same broom and swept the floor.”

Hermione blinked. “Oh! Is that why the shopping list said first years aren’t allowed their own brooms?”

She nodded. “It is. Modern brooms are very capable, and incredibly easy to kill yourself with.” She sighed. “They don’t want us flying until they can be sure we’re doing it right.” Then she scowled. “And I keep getting this weird feeling like I’m supposed to fly with wings, but I don’t have any, so…” She shrugged.

“Huh,” Hermione muttered.

Then there was a knock on the door- and when she opened it, Dudley was back.

No sooner had Hermione told Dudley what Philomena was than someone opened the compartment door without knocking.

Hermione noticed that Hailey immediately flicked her hair such that it landed right over her nametag, hiding it from view. She debated doing that herself- but decided that ‘Hermione Granger’ was a better name for her to be known by than something like ‘Phoenix-girl’.

After all, she didn’t have a name that was very similar to someone famous, such as Harry Potter… who Hailey’s name could easily be mistaken for.

It was a blonde-haired boy that looked remarkably like Dudley, though he carried himself differently and had two very thug-like boys behind him, looking like bodyguards.

“Good morning,” Hailey greeted him politely. “Have any trouble finding your minions?”

He snorted, then turned to the two minions. “Go back to our compartment,” he told them. “I’ll be fine.”

There was a moment of silence, before the two boys left, looking disappointed.

The remaining boy stepped just far enough into the compartment to close the door, and did so, behind him, before letting out a breath. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked, looking around the room.

“Uh-!” Hermione began, looking at Hailey.

Hailey, meanwhile, was studying him intently.

The silence held for a couple seconds, during which Hermione’s eyes picked out his nametag- Draco Malfoy.

“Alright,” Hailey finally decided, slowly. “Go ahead. May I ask why?”

“Well…” As he sat down next to Hailey, he looked critically at both Hermione and Dudley… and seemed to decide that he could ignore them. He looked back at Hailey. “I… Remember that conversation we had in Madam Malkin’s?”

Hailey nodded. “I do.”

“Well…” He sighed. “I… I thought about what you said,” he told her. “About… About not wasting talent.” He looked at his knees. “It got me wondering- if talent like that can appear amongst the mud-er, muggleborn students, are purebloods actually all that much better than anyone else?”

There was a pause. Hermione shifted uncomfortably. They were if the muggleborn involved was her.

Finally, Draco sighed again. “The only answer I could find was ‘they are’... but no explanation, no reason, just ‘they are’. And that’s not enough.”

“If anyone, it’s actually the muggleborn that are better,” Hailey informed him calmly. “And not because of power or ability or whatever else- magically, muggleborn and purebloods are exactly the same. Either you’re a wizard, or you’re not.” She paused. “Well, give or take the usual individual variation, but you know what I mean.

“Instead, it’s because they have access to the muggle education system.” She sighed. “Arithmetic. Reading. Writing. History. Science.” She chuckled softly. “But no matter how useful the Scientific Method undoubtedly is when experimenting with new spells, the actual subject matter is largely unimportant for the comparison.

“Muggles have muggle history, wizards have wizard history. It shapes who we are, but you’ll probably never use it again in either case. Well… I get the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of research into wizarding history this year and next, but that’s the exception rather than the norm.

“Reading, writing… Wizards have books. Wizarding families teach their children to write. Often a lot better than muggle children these days, thanks to the advent of computers. But it’s still helpful, because what they’re learning isn’t how to read more accurately or faster or whatever- they’re learning critical thinking and analysis skills that can easily translate into spells.

“Arithmetic… Wizarding families teach their children to do basic math. And at the age that muggleborn go to Hogwarts, they haven’t learned much more than that in the muggle education system either- but what they have done is spent five or six years getting used to studying, calculating, and problem-solving.

“As a result, according to the section on student performance in Hogwarts: A History, muggleborn pick up new spells on average about six percent faster than half-bloods, which are about two percent faster than purebloods- and muggleborn grades are usually about ten percent ahead of half-bloods and purebloods, which are about the same as one another.” She sighed. “And of course, the advent of the computer in the muggle world is increasing the challenge presented to the common muggle child- which is, according to muggle research, resulting in a global increase in IQ scores- the world is getting smarter. That’s very recent, though, so there’s no wizarding research to match it or spot any effects in the wizarding world, so…” She shrugged.

“... So it’s entirely possible that muggleborn are smarter than purebloods,” he muttered.

“Well… Yes, I suppose,” Hailey shrugged. “If so, though, it’s not going to be a big enough difference for you to notice.” She chuckled. “As a matter of fact, we’ve got the entire spectrum of that represented in this compartment right now.”

He blinked. “Really?”

She nodded. “Yes. Take our friend Hermione, for example.” She gestured towards Hermione- who blushed at being called a friend so quickly. She’d never been able to make friends before- everyone was too intimidated by her grades. “Straight A student, always top of the class- I think she’s lost a total of six points, including extra credit, on the various grading scales across her entire education so far- quite impressive, and it’s got to break records somewhere.”

Hermione blushed furiously, and covered her face with her hands. Was Hailey trying to keep her from making new friends? How did she learn that?

… Probably her ‘weird stuff’ knowledge, when she thought about it.

“And on the other end of the spectrum, there’s me,” Dudley chimed in suddenly. “I’d probably have failed every other year if not for Hailey’s assistance.”

Hailey chuckled. “Yeah.”

Draco looked at Hailey. “You must also be…”

“Really smart? Not really,” she told him. “On my own, I’m closer to average. Some As, some Bs, some Cs. For some reason, though, whenever I study with someone rather than alone, both myself and whoever I’m studying with shoot up to straight-A students.” She shrugged. “Me and Dudley have been kinda, well, abusing that, so we’re both also straight-A students, despite not being smart enough individually. I wonder what does it?” She sighed. “Anyways, if I go take an IQ test… I get a perfect score, every time, no matter how hard they make it. No idea why, and I’m definitely not as smart as those numbers say I am, but…” She trailed off, and shrugged.

“And…” He looked around. “You’re all muggleborn? But then in Madam Malkin’s…?” he asked.

Hailey shook her head. “I’m pure-blood,” she told him. “My aunt and uncle took me in when my parents died. They’re muggles… or at least, they used to be. I wonder what happened to change that.”

“Huh,” Draco muttered, then sighed. “Whelp. A Malfoy has appearances to maintain, so I better go.”

“Yeah,” Hailey sighed. “Too bad we’ll be enemies for most of the year because of that. Anyways, I’m looking forward to next time, Silver! Er- Draco, sorry.”

He stared at her, having frozen in the middle of getting up, a mixture of fear and surprise on his face. “H-How did you- How did you know?” he gasped.

She looked down. “I didn’t. It just felt like the right thing to say. Usually, when that happens, it turns out to be true later- but…” She sighed. “No idea why.”

Draco slowly sat back down. “Is… Is anyone going to be interrupting us?” he asked.

“No,” Hailey answered promptly. “You locked the door, remember.”

Hermione looked… And the door was, indeed, locked.

Draco sighed. “Can… Can you promise- no, can all of you promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to tell you?”

All three of them nodded.

“We can promise,” Hailey vowed, with a hint of finality in her voice adding the unspoken ‘or else’.

Draco looked at her, and sighed, before looking at his knees. “It’s common knowledge amongst wizarding society that anyone that wishes to become the opposite sex is afflicted by a mental disease called transgenderism,” he muttered. “Nobody knows how it spreads, and the cure is to put them through a ton of therapy to help them accept what they are.” He put his hands on his knees, and sighed again. The silence drew on for a few seconds before he resumed.

“I caught it when I was six,” he muttered, very softly. “I never told anyone. I don’t want to go to that conversion therapy. Instead, I wonder- what if that desire was satisfied instead? What if I actually could become a girl? Would I want to turn back into a boy, or would I want to stay as a girl?” He sighed. “If I could, I can’t imagine any situation that would make me want to turn back… but it’s a disease, right? Actually changing sex wouldn’t cure it, would it?

“With that in mind… one of my life goals is to invent sex-changing magic… and find out if conversion therapy really is the only cure.” He leaned back in his seat. “Then of course, if I am able to make that magic, and am able to… become a girl, and if it does cure it… What would I go by?” He looked at Hailey. “Silver happens to be one of the names I’ve been considering,” he told her. “For some reason, hearing you use it so casually like that… It made me feel happy for the first time in years. Aside from wondering how you learned about it, of course.”

“Interesting,” Hailey mused. “It sounds somewhat similar to how I wanted to become a girl for the longest time.”

He blinked. “What-? How’d you-?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t. I found out that I had actually been a girl the whole time. I wonder what happened to make me think I was a boy for so long, though?”

He stared at her.

Hailey then smiled at him. “But you’re right, who knows.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do what I can to help you make that spell,” she told him. “For Science.” She smiled and made a fist with her other hand, then removed her hand from Draco’s shoulder and leaned back herself. “I’m not sure why, but conversion therapy, and the whole part about it being a disease, just feel… wrong somehow.” She shrugged. “I hear Hogwarts has a brand-new research department this year,” she told him. “Perhaps they can help?”

“But- But!”

“Yeah, we won’t be able to tell them the actual reason for making that spell- I wonder what kind of reason we’ll have to come up with. But they might be able to help us make it.”

Chapter 7: Sorting

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“Sorting ceremony?” Hermione asked, tilting her head.

She and the other first-years had been ushered off the station by a giant that Hailey had called Hagrid. He had taken them down a path to a lake, then they had sailed across it in little boats to an underground harbor underneath the castle. The tunnel up from it came up next to the Castle, then Hagrid had handed them off to Professor McGonagall, who looked a lot more severe than she had at her house or in Diagon Alley, at the huge wooden front doors. She had taken them inside, into a side room- then told them about the four houses, and to ‘smarten themselves up’ for the sorting ceremony, before leaving the room.

“Makes it sound almost like a quiz,” Hailey observed. “But if it’s a ceremony, we can be fairly certain that anyone- including those that haven’t done any magic before, like me- can pass it, meaning we probably won’t be needing our wands. Probably a good thing, mine’s still in my trunk.”

Hermione let out a small snort. “Yeah. And I don’t want to show mine off, either.” She shuddered at the thought of becoming famous just for having a strange wand.

Quite suddenly, the door opened again, and Professor McGonagall returned. “Form a line and follow me,” she commanded.

Hermione took a deep breath and lined up behind Hailey, who was behind Dudley, as they followed McGonagall back out and across the hall.

McGonagall had them line up at the head of the room… and placed a large, ancient hat on a stool.

Then… the hat began to sing.

Hermione stared at it through the entire song, as it explained the four houses and what the Founders each sought- who would get sorted into which one.

“When I call your name,” Professor McGonagall ordered as she unrolled a large scroll, “you will come forward and put on the hat to be sorted. Abbot, Hannah!”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Hailey muttered.

Hermione let out a soft giggle. “For all we know,” she imitated quietly, “a hat that tells you where you belong.”

Hailey giggled as well. “Oh come on, that’d be silly,” she imitated, also quietly.

“Like mirrors that say hi, pictures that move, sports played on cleaning tools, and hats that tell you where you belong aren’t silly?” Hermione snickered back, before both of them covered their mouths and tried- valiantly- to stifle their giggles, because Professor McGonagall had shot a glare in their direction.

But, glared at and stifled or not, the gigglefest had the effect that all of Hermione’s nervousness was gone… Simply gone.

“Dursley, Dudley!”

Hermione watched, having finally calmed her giggles, as Dudley walked calmly over to the Hat, set it on his head, and sat down. It sank right down over his eyes, folding the brim of his own hat downwards as it did so. It didn’t look too comfortable.

And now that she was looking around the hall, she saw that lots of eyes were on her. And…

There was not one splash of scarlet and gold plumage across the entire Hall.

Except for Philomena, perched proudly on her shoulder.

She covered her face with her hands. Why had she missed that? How had she thought that phoenixes might be common pets, especially with all the magical properties Hailey had listed off? And how Hailey’s wand had a phoenix feather in it? If they were magical enough to provide wand cores-!

“HUFFLEPUFF!” the Hat yelled.

Dudley visibly jumped, then lifted it carefully off of his hat and went to join the Hufflepuff table.

Hermione took a deep breath, and let it out, as McGonagall called out another name- neither hers nor Hailey’s. But it sounded like she was in the Es, out of just forty- or so- students, so she was probably coming up soon.

She looked across the four houses… and quickly realized that she wanted to be in Gryffindor with Hailey.

“Who’s that with the phoenix?” Dumbledore muttered quietly, towards Sunset Shimmer, who was sitting next to him, looking gloomy. She’d been gloomy for the last seven years- through her entire education. Her wand still burned her if she dared to touch it, even through a glove.

“No idea,” Sunset mumbled, without looking up.

Sunset had been… a disappointment. Despite getting progressively gloomier each year, and being completely unable to use magic the entire time, she had aced all her OWLS and all her NEWTs- how she’d managed that without using magic or her ruined right eye, Dumbledore would never know.

Yet, she still seemed to think she was useless.

She’d even chopped off all her beautiful red and gold hair, exposing the full extent of the damage to the right side of her head.

But Dumbledore was at a loss for what he could do to help her. He’d already tried everything.

“Granger, Hermione!”

As Hermione walked towards the stool, she could hear the sudden murmuring throughout the entire Hall, even up at the staff table. She tried to pretend she couldn’t hear it as she accepted the Hat, raised it up-

She hadn’t even settled it completely overtop her hat when it cried “GRYFFINDOR!”

She blushed scarlet, put the Hat back on the stool, and walked steadily over to the Gryffindor table… Yes, this was the Gryffindor table.

She picked an empty spot, sat down… and covered her face in her hands as some of the other Gryffindors chanted “We Got the Phoenix-Bound!”

She stayed like that, ignoring everyone’s pestering questions about Philomena. It seemed to go on for forever- would it ever end?

“Potter, Hailey!”

Hermione’s head snapped up. She’d been concentrating on the insides of her hands for so long she’d missed a majority of the sorting.

Someone next to her noticed. “What’s the phoenix called?” he asked.

She ignored him, watching anxiously as Hailey walked calmly over to the Hat- and hoping, praying, that Hailey would join her at the Gryffindor table and save her from the embarrassment. She’d probably never be able to make another friend, afraid that they were simply attracted to Philomena.

And of course, in a corner of her mind, she expected to be at the top of the class in everything once again… which certainly wouldn’t help.

“Potter, Hailey!”

Hailey stepped forwards, walking briskly towards the stool with the Hat on it. As she walked, she noticed McGonagall double-checking the scroll- but for as much as the name had caused a bunch of students to look, most of them had promptly looked back again. She visibly wasn’t the Boy who Lived, after all.

Several of the teachers at the teacher’s table looked idly bored, and… That one triggered alarm bells in her head. Not Professor Quirrell, no, this was a different kind of alarm bells. This girl was staring at her plate with a forlorn look on the surviving side of her face, and it looked like she’d shaved off all her hair. Her right eye was covered by an eye patch, and that entire side of her head looked like it had been shredded by something; it was absolutely covered in scars. Professor Dumbledore- she’d seen his picture in one of the cards inside those Chocolate Frog candies- was eying her worriedly out the corner of his eye.

She had a sneaking feeling that neither she nor Hermione would be going to bed on schedule that night.

She let out a soft sigh. Too bad- she also had a feeling she and Hermione were going to regret staying up so late.

But then she reached the Hat. She lifted it, and allowed it to settle over her hat while she sat down on the stool.

There was silence for several seconds. Hailey wondered how the Hat decided.

A sudden, small voice in her ear made her jump the slightest bit in surprise. “Um… Are you wearing a tin foil hat?” the Hat asked her. “I can’t seem to get through to your mind.”

She blinked, and smiled amusedly, guessing as to what it was.

It wouldn’t be the first time her natural wards had been too powerful for a magical object to work properly. At least this one had a failsafe, so unlike that Blood Quill at Gringotts, it didn’t explode into a million pieces when it tried to do its job anyways. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, concentrating on suspending her natural wards. It was almost comical how easy it was to tell when she was successful.

“Um… Can you hear me?” the Hat asked. “I don’t seem to- Oh. Oh My.” She felt the hat shudder. “I… I have to say, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of sorting one of those before. And let’s see… There’s that, and that, and… GRYFFINDOR!” She heard it shout the last word out to the entire room- then, as she reached up to remove it, it murmured one last word in her ear.

“Definitely.”

She chuckled softly as she rose from the stool, replaced the Hat on it, and walked off to join Hermione at the Gryffindor table.

When she got there, it was to find several students poking at Hermione.

Hermione looked at her with pleading in her eyes. “Save me,” she mouthed.

Hailey smiled, and rested one hand on Hermione’s free shoulder, before looking up at the people pestering her… about Philomena, it seemed.

Hermione took comfort in the familiar tingle as Hailey put her hand comfortingly on her shoulder.

Then Hailey looked around at the people that were bothering her.

“Are you bothering my friend?” she asked coldly.

Hermione flinched. She hadn’t realized Hailey would be so protective of her.

She still felt embarrassed that Hailey was calling her a friend so quickly, but it was starting to fade. Hopefully, Hailey wasn’t going to discard her at the first chance she got.

Her statement only seemed to increase the questions- now about how they’d become friends.

Hermione was about to put her hands in her face again when Hailey spoke.

“Stop bothering my friend,” Hailey commanded dangerously.

A shockwave of silence rippled across their part of the table, and the askers all averted their eyes. Even the seventh year students.

“S-Sorry,” somebody muttered.

Hailey sighed, sat next to Hermione, and wrapped her arm comfortingly around her. “Sorry about that,” she told her. “It looked painful.”

“It’s all because of Philomena,” Hermione muttered, leaning into her. “She’s- She’s the only phoenix in the room. Phoenixes must be rare.” She shuddered. “But I’m not special, am I?”

Hailey hugged her. “Who knows. The only other known domesticated Phoenix is Fawkes… Professor Dumbledore’s pet. And I’m starting to suspect I’m being favored by a goddess or something- it would certainly explain a lot of the weird stuff. I don’t see any reason that you can’t also be favored like that- perhaps they know something we don’t?” She sighed. “Who knows.” Then she kissed the top of Hermione’s head, making her blush so hard it felt like her face might burst. “In either case, you’re special to me.”

Hermione sputtered incoherently.

Hailey laughed. “You’re the first friend I’ve ever made,” she told her. “Everybody has always been afraid of me and Dudley.” She sighed. “Damn teachers kept telling the whole class what everyone’s grades were- turned it into a competition… which got ugly during recess far too many times. Then of course, I’m stronger than I look- and I always stepped in front of Dudley. As a result, anybody that knows what’s good for them listens when I give them a command like that.” She glanced to the sides. “Kinda interesting how everybody here got the memo even without knowing me. Must be something in the magic.”

Hermione let out a snort of laughter, and Hailey joined in quickly.

Finally, Hermione calmed down enough to look up at Hailey. “You know… you’re my first friend too,” she told her. “Unless you count Philomena, she’s a great friend no matter how you look at it.”

“I bet she is,” Hailey nodded.

Hermione hugged Hailey back. “I’ve always been the know-it-all,” she muttered. “Smart-aleck, teacher’s pet, goody two-shoes, you name it, really. I even got called the ‘Mary Sue of the class’ once. Any time a teacher had a question that nobody could answer… they went for me, and I’d have it waiting.” She sighed. “At least they knew that, so they made sure to ask the others first- but it only served to exaggerate my…” She trailed off. “Perfectness,” she half-whispered.

“Something tells me magic is a completely different skillset, and that we’re going to be dealing with mostly practical lessons,” Hailey told her.

Hermione looked up. “But I already know twelve spells. Twelve! And the first class hasn’t even started yet!”

“That might be a problem,” Hailey agreed. “Try not to overperform too much, eh?” She chuckled good-naturedly.

Hermione sighed. “If only.”

“If you weren’t both girls, I’d say you’d make a wonderful couple,” someone said, from across the table.

Hailey looked, and chuckled, while Hermione blushed and looked down. “You know, I think you two would make a wonderful couple,” she told them, completely unabashedly.

The two sixth-year girls that had made the comment, who were sitting so close to one another the only way they could get closer would be by sitting in one another’s laps, and had arms wrapped around each other, both blushed scarlet and started sputtering incoherently.

Hailey laughed again. Hermione joined in this time.

Eventually, one of the girls recovered. “Y-You mean two girls can be a couple?”

Hailey shrugged. “Why not?”

They both stared at her.

“It’s called a lesbian couple,” Hermione said suddenly, the answer coming to her exactly as the answer to a teacher’s question always did. “Homosexuality isn’t mainstream, and having children can be difficult for a homosexual couple, but it is A-OK.”

Hailey let out a snort of laughter. “Difficult,” she giggled. “Yeah, I’d say it’d be difficult.”

“H-How do you know that?” the girl asked.

Hermione covered her face in her hands. “I read a lot,” she squeaked.

Chapter 8: Rescue

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Hermione yawned as she and Hailey followed the rest of the Gryffindor first-years up towards their tower. “I’m tired,” she muttered sleepily, hugging Hailey’s arm as they walked.

“Yeah, me too,” Hailey agreed, before letting out a sigh. Professor Dumbledore had introduced the depressed girl as the head of the new research department, and informed the school that anyone wishing to join the research department should come to her… and she hadn’t reacted at all.

Hermione looked up at her. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

Hailey shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered stiffly. “Something just feels… wrong.”

Then, quite suddenly, she stopped, looking down a side passage. “It’s…?” she muttered, then took a deep breath. “It’s that way. I’m going- are you?”

Hermione shook herself awake. “Um… Yeah.”

“C’mon.” Hailey walked briskly down the passage, with Hermione on her heels. Every once in a while, she accelerated- and she sometimes made sharp corners, navigating like she knew exactly where she was going.

“... Hangon,” Percy muttered, counting first-years as they passed him through the Portrait Hole into the Gryffindor common room.

“What is it?” Erica Sutton, the other new Gryffindor Prefect, asked, from the outside of the portrait hole. She’d been waiting for him by the Portrait Hole.

“Nine,” Percy told her, as the last one passed him. “Nine first-years just walked past me into the common room.”

Erica scowled. “We’ve got eleven.” She sighed. “Boys or girls?”

“Five boys, four girls,” Percy told her.

“So they’re both girls,” she observed, turning back down the passage. “I’ll look for them, you guide the rest to bed!” She ran off.

Percy took a deep breath, and let it out. She had deferred to him when they decided how they were going to get the first years to bed- and he hadn’t had anything in particular for her to do.

Now he knew. One of them should have led from the front… and the other brought up the rear.

Hermione’s tiredness faded away as she, like Hailey, gradually accelerated to a run. It was a good thing Hailey was still holding her hand; if she hadn’t been, she probably would’ve been unable to run nearly as quickly. They were already going too fast for Philomena to ride on her shoulder- and without the odd strength boost from touching Hailey or her wand, she would never have been able to run so fast. On top of that, Hailey’s touch seemed to have an exhaustion-nullifying effect; neither of them were even winded, despite running across what felt like half the school.

Hermione had long lost track of where they were, and even what floor they were on. Hailey had charged up so many stairs she was certain they were pretty high up- just like now, as she led the charge up a spiral staircase at a dead run, Philomena flying gracefully up behind them.

There was a door at the top- and when Hailey threw it open without breaking her stride…

Hermione froze up, staring at the scene before her in horror.

Hailey didn’t. Their hands broke apart- and Hermione at once found herself collapsing to the ground at a dead run.

Before she hit the ground, though, she could see Hailey bolt across the huge outdoor landing like greased lightning, seize the ankle of the girl that had been in the middle of jumping off of it with the evident intent to kill herself, and pulled her all the way back onto the tower proper with a yell of determination.

Then she landed. She felt her robes tear, and a sudden pain sprang up on her knee. Both her hands hurt- and she was fairly sure her nose was broken from how she’d landed on it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she heard Hailey yell angrily.

Hermione rolled over and sat up to inspect her wounds. “Ow,” she pouted, through the stream of blood coming from her nose. It didn’t hurt very much at all- was that adrenaline? Philomena landed softly on her shoulder, then laid her head on top of Hermione’s.

“Let me go!” the unfamiliar girl cried. Hermione looked; it looked like the girl- who only had one hand, her right arm ended quite abruptly about halfway down from the shoulder- seemed to be struggling desperately to reach the edge.

“No,” Hailey answered. “You are not allowed to die, you hear me?”

“Let go!” the girl yelled again.

“Sit,” Hailey commanded sharply

The girl sat straight away, looking flustered. “Wha-?” she began, blinking confusedly. Hermione almost gasped when she saw the entire right side of the girl’s face was spiderwebbed with scars- and her right eyeball was missing, making it a fleshy cavity in her face. No wonder she’d been wearing an eye patch earlier.

“Hermione!” Hailey cried. “I need your wand!”

Hermione blinked, and reached into her pocket for her wand. Why did Hailey-?

When her hand touched her wand, she suddenly felt the pains on her knees, hands, and even her nose begin to fade. Within seconds, she felt a little click in her nose… and all the pain was gone. She didn’t seem to be bleeding, either.

That wasn’t adrenaline.

She stepped up next to Hailey, and gave her her wand. “What are you-?” she began.

Hailey took her wand… and promptly stuffed it into the girl’s hand, before forcing her hand closed and clamping her own hands around it. “Promise me,” she commanded the girl, “that you will not try to harm yourself.”

The girl struggled, but Hailey had her pinned against the wall.

“Promise me,” Hailey commanded again.

“I won’t!” the girl cried.

Hailey winced. “Repeat after me,” she commanded firmly. “I promise not to try to hurt myself.”

“No, I-!” the girl began.

“Repeat after me,” Hailey yelled, straight into her face. “I promise not to try to hurt myself!”

Hermione flinched away from her intensity. She hadn’t realized that Hailey could be so scary.

“I can’t!” the girl told Hailey.

“Repeat after me,” Hailey roared impossibly loudly. “I promise not to try to hurt myself!”

Thunder rumbled overhead as Hermione sat down abruptly, still staring at Hailey. A part of her mind wanted to argue that it couldn’t be thunder- it was a clear sky, after all- but the rest of her didn’t care. She was too focused on Hailey.

“I- I-!” the girl stuttered, then finally let out a sigh. “I… I promise I will not try to hurt myself,” she muttered.

Percy Weasley paused in the middle of his pacing back and forth across the Gryffindor common room. A sudden column of light had caught his attention, shooting up from what looked like the top of the tallest tower- the Astronomy tower. “What the-?” he began, rushing to the window for a better look… but the light was already gone.

He drew his wand, and cast a few quick spells to find out what was going on over there.

Then he gasped, cast the charm that let him tap into the Prefect Layer of the Castle Ward Communications Network, and focused on the Gryffindor channel. “Erica! The Astronomy tower!”

“What-? Oh, Percy!” It was evidently Erica’s first time using the spell too. “I’m on my way. Might take a few minutes, I’m in the dungeons right now- keep an eye out for me?”

Percy nodded, resisting the urge to respond to the evident amusement of the four older Gryffindor prefects that were also on the channel. It was the two new Prefects’ job to ensure all the first years got safely up to bed on the first night- and it pained him to admit, even to himself, that he had failed. “Will do.” He paused. “Weird column of light got my attention,” he told her. “No idea what caused it.”

The other prefects’ amusement shifted instead to curiosity.

“Column of light?” one of them asked- Aurora Lowe, the Head Girl. “Weird. Lemme know what you find out?”

“Er… Yeah, will do,” Erica muttered.

Erica Sutton, an active Prefect for almost eleven hours, stopped, clutching at a stitch in her side, when she reached the top of the stairs in the tallest Astronomy tower. It had taken her rather longer than she’d liked- she’d had to slow down and even take a quick break to recover her breath.

The door was standing open… and there were three girls, leaning against the parapet. No… Only two of them were. One, she recognized instantly as Sunset Shimmer. She had all her hair back- and, it seemed, her right arm as well.

The second, right in the middle, was identifiably a first-year, by her lack of House patch above her nametag, but she couldn’t remember what her name was.

The third was easily recognizable- it was the girl with the phoenix, whose name she also couldn’t remember. She was fast asleep, head resting peacefully on the second one’s shoulder, despite the blood down the front of her robes.

Erica blinked. The phoenix girl wasn’t the only one leaning on the middle girl’s shoulder- no, Sunset was too. The middle girl had one arm around each girl, idly stroking the phoenix girl’s hair while the phoenix napped in her lap. The arm around Sunset wasn’t doing much- only resting on her shoulders. It looked like Sunset had lost her eye patch, but managed to mend her face.

Then she heard what Sunset was telling the middle girl about… and nearly stopped breathing in shock.

“Are you there yet, Erica?”

Percy’s voice, in her mind, couldn’t have come at a less convenient time… but at least she managed to survive the surprise. “Quiet!” she snapped back. “We’re talking Sunset down from suicide over here!”

Percy’s stunned silence was all she needed to hear.

Erica would later have to admit that, even in her wildest dreams, she had never imagined that her first major task as a Prefect would take nearly so many hours out of her night. She’d also never imagined that she’d have a good conversation with Sunset- but eventually, she, Sunset, and the black-haired girl- she still didn’t know her name- were chatting about much lighter subjects… and Sunset actually seemed happy!

Finally, Sunset sighed, looking up at the moon, shining overhead. “Anyways… We should probably head to bed before the sun comes up.” She glanced past the black-haired girl. “Your friend seems to have gotten the memo,” she observed.

The black-haired girl chuckled, and gently prodded the phoenix girl awake. “Hermione,” she said, as the girl began to stir. “Hermione, wake up, it’s time to go to bed.”

The phoenix girl blinked confusedly. “Why would I wake up to go to- OH! Oh! Um!” She was definitely wide awake now. “Hailey! How did-?” She paused, looking at Sunset.

The black haired girl- Hailey?- smiled. “All good,” she told her friend. “But it’s about three in the morning right now, so…”

Erica winced, and looked at her watch.

The girl was right.

“Wha-!?” she gasped. “Oh, that’s going to hurt. Classes start at eight.”

“We’d best get you three to bed, then,” Sunset told them, rising to her feet- then looked at the black-haired girl. “You’re Hailey, then?”

Hailey nodded. “Yep. This is Hermione.”

Sunset nodded. “I’m Sunset Shimmer, Head of the Hogwarts Research Department, and this…” She paused, looking at Erica. “Oh, I see you’ve become a prefect, Erica. Congratulations.”

Erica blushed and averted her eyes.

Sunset laughed. “And thanks, Hailey, for, ahh, stopping me, earlier.” She sighed. “Probably would’ve been the biggest mistake I’ve made yet.”

Hailey chuckled as well. “About time we start fixing them, then, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, about time,” Sunset agreed, then paused. “Oh, and Hermione? I believe this was your wand?” She held out a wand that had a faint white glow to it.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, thanks,” Hermione muttered, accepting it- causing the glow to intensify- and pocketing it.

“And, um,” Sunset looked at Erica, then back at the two girls. “Ten points to Gryffindor, each,” she told them. “For…” She sighed, and looked at Erica. “For literally saving the life of staff.”

Erica blanched. “L-Literally?” she gasped.

Sunset nodded. “I was… er, in the middle of jumping off when they arrived,” she told her, averting her gaze. “I don’t know how they did it, but they pulled me back onto the tower and slapped some sense back into me, even before you arrived.” She smiled. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still thankful for you too.”

“Then-!” Ercia blinked, the weird column of light Percy had mentioned crossing her mind. “Did… Did you see what caused the column of light up here?”

Sunset blinked. “Column of light?” she asked, confused.

Hermione scowled. “Column of light…?” she muttered.

“No idea,” Hailey told her. “Saw the column, but nothing to create it. Perhaps it was some kind of divine intervention?”

Chapter 9: Divine Detector

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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.”

Chapter 10: Cleaning Tools

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“Ohh, look!” Draco Malfoy cried, snatching something out of the grass. “It’s that remembrall thingy!”

Hermione looked. It was the day after Sunset’s lie experiment, and the second Thursday of the year- so it was also time for the first flying lesson for Gryffindors and Slytherins.

That morning, Neville Longbottom- a round-faced, very forgetful boy in their year- had unwrapped the Remembrall at the breakfast table. It was a large, glass marble, and it glowed red when held firmly by someone that had forgotten something. Neville had even demonstrated, complete with the red glow.

The description sounded awfully vague to Hermione- it wouldn’t tell you what you forgot, only that you forgot something… making it supremely useless for Neville, who routinely forgot the password to get into Gryffindor tower and which stairs on which staircases randomly disappeared to trip unsuspecting climbers.

Now, he had taken off before Madam Hooch’s whistle, lost control, and fallen off the broom from high enough to get hurt. Madam Hooch had taken him back to the castle, and told everyone else to leave the brooms where they were, on the ground.

She met Draco’s eyes- and instantly understood.

He was doing it for appearances- and to work properly, he needed a Griffindor to demand he give it back. Apparently, he was hoping she or Hailey would do it- though Ron Weasley, who had sat on Neville’s other side at breakfast, looked like he might.

“Give that here, Malfoy,” she commanded, doing her level best to sound angry… and praying that her wand, which was pinned under a wristband hidden up her left sleeve so it would protect her if she fell from a broom, wouldn’t block her from playing the part.

She was successful. As a matter of fact, she saw the pleasant surprise in Draco’s eyes at exactly how successful her effort had been.

“Oh?” Malfoy jeered, apology in his eyes. “Why should I? Why don’t I leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find- say, up a tree?”

“It won’t stay in a tree,” she answered reflexively, in a matter-of-fact tone. It was true- very, very few trees would have branches placed just right to hold the glass ball without letting it fall to the ground. “Besides, it’s not yours, and stealing is against the rules.” She sharpened her tone to a command again. “Give it here.”

He stared at her for a couple seconds. “Come and get it, then,” he sneered- then snatched up his broom and kicked off.

Hermione held out one hand. “Up!” she commanded.

Her broom, lying a few feet behind her, leaped up and forwards into her hand- and she promptly swept it under herself, careful to sit on her skirt such that she wouldn’t be flashing people down below… which was much easier said than done. Moments later, while a couple other Gryffindors- not Hailey, she noticed- cried for her not to and Philomena took off from her shoulder, she kicked off as well.

Instincts that weren’t hers took over right away, and she shot straight up in the air, before coming to a dead stop, directly in front of Malfoy- level with the tops of the tallest trees.

It was a weird feeling. She knew how to fly- she’d read all about it- but flying instinctively was another matter entirely.

On top of that, she somehow knew that those instincts were coming from her wand as well. It didn’t just make her strong and stop her from lying, an effect it didn’t seem to be having at the moment, but it also made her an expert flier.

Draco stared at her, his eyes filled with genuine surprise.

“Well?” she demanded. “Hand it over.”

There was a moment of silence. She could tell that he was doing some quick thinking.

“Catch it if you can, then,” he told her, threw it high into the air, and dove for the ground.

She watched it rise… then dove as well, following instincts that weren’t hers. She angled her dive- and when her path converged with that of the Remembrall, she held out a hand and easily caught it, before pulling up to swoop back around to Hailey, where she landed and allowed the broom to fall out from under her, to the ground.

For some reason, even though she had acrophobia- fear of heights- something fierce, she hadn’t felt it at all, even during her dive. Was that part of the invincible feeling of her wand?

“Hermione Granger!”

Hermione jumped, and looked.

Professor McGonagall was storming up the grass from the castle, her eyes boring a hole straight through her.

“Now I’ve done it,” she muttered.

Hailey chuckled. “Something tells me it’s not as bad as you’re thinking,” she told her calmly, as Philomena landed on her shoulder again.

“Never, in all my time at Hogwarts-!” Professor McGonagall resumed, so furious she seemed to be having trouble stitching together a complete sentence. “What were you thinking? Could have broken your neck!”

As if, Hermione thought to herself- but she determinedly kept that thought off of her face. Nobody needed to know that her wand made her so strong she could lift cars with single fingers- how her father’s car hadn’t broken when she’d done that accidentally, she had no idea- and that even sledgehammers bounced off her skin with a resounding bang, but no pain at all. She had even, when Philomena had surprised her when she’d unlocked that little box, dented the floor with her head!

So she fully expected that, even if she had fallen off her broom instead of pulling up and landed head-first… she might have had to pull her head out of the ground, but she would have been completely unharmed.

Meanwhile, the other Gryffindors around her- not Hailey, who seemed to be caught between amusement and confusion, she noticed- started trying to argue that it wasn’t her fault. Professor McGonagall shut them down pretty quick with a few orders to be quiet… then commanded Hermione to follow her, and left.

She shared a look with Hailey- and after Hailey shrugged, still looking confused, Hermione turned to follow Professor McGonagall.

She was sure she was going to get expelled… but then, why was Hailey, the goddess whose hair was hidden inside the wand still pinned against her arm, so unconcerned? Why was she confused by Professor McGonagall telling her off for flying without permission?

There was something deeper going on there, and she wanted to find out what.

Which reminded her- perhaps Sunset would stick up for her? She kinda doubted it, but given that ‘pact’ thing Sunset had told her about, she wouldn’t be surprised if she did it anyways. After all, the very same goddess that had granted Sunset’s pact had told Hermione she was special to her!

Unless they were wrong about her.

As she followed Professor McGonagall, it occurred to her that her path was wrong for taking her to her office, or up to the dormitories- was she taking her to see Dumbledore?

Professor McGonagall led her straight to the Charms classroom, knocked, and opened the door. “Excuse me, Professor Flitwick, but may I borrow Wood, please?”

Hermione blinked. Wood? What was that supposed to mean?

A minute later, the answer was revealed as a tall, fifth-year boy whose name tag said ‘Oliver Wood’ on it when he looked curiously at Hermione.

“Follow me,” Professor McGonagall commanded them, and they followed.

Wood kept glancing at Hermione, as if trying to figure out what was going on- and when she met his eyes, she shrugged to tell him she didn’t know either.

Finally, Professor McGonagall led them into an empty classroom- except for Peeves, who she drove out of the room before closing the door.

“Wood,” she began, excitement coloring her tone. “I’ve found you… a Seeker.”

“A what?” Hermione asked promptly. She was pretty sure she’d seen that word somewhere, but she couldn’t quite remember where- whatever it was, it must have struck her as ‘useless trivia’ when she’d found it, so she had instead memorized the potentially more important text elsewhere.

Wood went from politely confused to excited in a second. “Did you really?” he asked.

“Yes,” McGonagall went on. “The girl’s a natural. Caught that thing in her hand after a fifty foot dive.”

“It’s Neville’s,” Hermione muttered.

“Just the right build for one, too,” Wood asked, pacing around her and looking her up and down, which made her feel uneasy. “Was that your first time on a broom, miss… Granger?” She didn’t miss his glance at her nametag at the end.

She nodded faintly, and glanced down at the Remembrall. It was glowing softly red.

Predictable. She’d forgotten what a seeker was.

Wood met her gaze for a few seconds. “Hmm. Ever watched a game of Quidditch?”

She blinked. “Quidditch?” she asked alarmedly.

Quidditch… was the wizards’ sport. Played high in the air, on broomsticks, with four balls.

In normal play, the Quaffle- very similar to a football, or ‘soccer’ ball to Americans- was carried by the three Chasers on each team, who would try to throw it through one of the three goal hoops on either end of the field- massive, vertical hoops, placed fifty feet above the ground. Aside from the opposing Chasers, they also had to get the Quaffle past the Keeper, whose job was to protect the goal hoops. Each time the ball passed through a hoop scored ten points.

Two of the other balls, the bludgers, were heavy iron balls that flew around on their own, trying to knock players off their brooms… and leaving them to fall somewhere around fifty feet with no way to catch themselves. Quite a few people had died because of that, but Hogwarts had an amazing track record of zero deaths on the field, ever. To deal with that danger, each team had two Beaters, each bearing clubs. Their job was to knock the bludgers away from their team, and towards the opposing team.

The fourth ball, the Snitch, was a tiny, walnut-sized, winged golden ball, enchanted to mimic the behavior of a similarly-sized bird. It moved quickly and randomly through the field, and was supposed to be extremely difficult to spot, despite being constructed of very shiny golden metal. The seventh and last player on the team was the Seeker… whose job was to catch the Snitch, full stop. Catching the Snitch was the only way the game could end- and the Seeker that caught it also won their team a hundred and fifty points… which would make the Chasers and Keeper largely pointless, Hermione had observed back when she’d been reading Quidditch through the Ages, unless the Seekers were particularly unskilled.

And that was the position they were trying to give her.

The remembrall stopped glowing red.

She slapped her hand to her forehead. “Quidditch,” she repeated. “Of course.”

They stared at her.

“Are you okay?” Wood asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she told him distractedly. “I just…” She paused, and took a deep breath. “Now I understand what’s going on.” She sighed, and brushed her hair back nervously, hoping for an opportunity to casually turn down the offer. “No, I never watched any Quidditch games- I never was all that interested in sports- but I did read Quidditch through the Ages.” While it was true that she’d never been interested in sports, it was also true that she’d never had the opportunity to watch a Quidditch game. Her wand’s anti-lie behavior seemed to agree that, had she had such an opportunity, she would have turned it down. She was fairly sure her parents would have as well.

Wood paused, looking into her face; he seemed to be satisfied with her body. “Why so nervous?”

“Well, I-!” She broke off, looking at the ground. “I never expected…” She sighed. “I mean, I have muscular dystrophy and acrophobia, so I didn’t think I’d ever get offered a position on a sports team.”

“Acrophobia?” McGonagall asked surprisedly. “You’re afraid of heights? Then what was that dive?”

“I…” She shivered. “I used magic to offset it.”

“But you can do that again, right?” Wood asked.

She nodded faintly; she expected that her wand wouldn’t have let her say ‘no’. “It’s… I didn’t cast it, though.” It was an effect of her wand after all, so if she and Sunset were right, Hailey’s magic, whether she realized it or not. That’d make it a spell cast by Hailey, in theory at least; she wasn’t sure it was the sort of magic that was cast, though.

He tilted his head. “Who did?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She sighed. “It’s through a magic item.”

“Ahh,” Wood muttered. “Wouldn’t be too hard to work with that, unless…” He trailed off, then scowled. “And what’s that muscular… trophy thing?”

She let out a small snort of laughter. “Muscular dystrophy,” she answered. “It’s not one of the kinds known to muggles… but it’s a genetic disease that keeps my muscles from developing.” She sighed. “Nobody else in my extended family has it, so we think it must be a mutation or something.”

He looked at her. “You seem to be strong enough?” he asked.

“Well yeah,” she answered simply, and reached up to gently stroke Philomena. “I have help.”

“Hmm,” Wood muttered.

“Congratulations,” Hailey told Hermione calmly.

Hermione flinched. She’d just told her that she’d been given the position on the Quidditch team; she hadn’t been able to find any reason to turn it down, once Wood had mentioned strengthening spells that would last plenty long enough. She’d been afraid that if she turned it down without good reason, McGonagall would actually give her the punishment she had earned.

She had very carefully not mentioned her wand- which she had returned to her pocket as soon as she was alone.

“Please don’t,” she squeaked. “I don’t- I don’t want it.” She sighed.

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” Hailey told her. “I never wanted to be entered into various athletic and scholastic competitions against my will at my last school, either.” She sighed, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Never forget that I’m here for you whenever you need me, okay?”

Hermione smiled, leaning into her warm embrace. “Yeah,” she said, slipping her arm up underneath Hailey’s, and wrapping it around Hailey’s shoulders. “Same here.”

Hailey chuckled softly, and looked at the table. “Anyways, how about we get some dinner?”

Right at that moment, two red-haired third-year boys that looked almost exactly alike hurried over.

“Well done,” one of them told Hermione, as they sat down quickly on her other side.

“Wha-?” Hermione asked, looking up at them.

Hailey chuckled softly.

“Wood told us,” the boy- George Weasley, according to his nametag- continued. “We’re on the team too. Beaters.”

“We’re going to win that cup for sure this time,” Fred told her. “You must be good- Wood was almost skipping when he told us.”

Hermione buried her face in Hailey’s robes.

Both twins looked instantly uneasy, glancing past Philomena at Hailey before looking back down at her. “Wh-what’s wrong?”

“She didn’t want the position,” Hailey told them calmly, amusement in her voice, then patted Hermione’s shoulder. “But if that’s the case, why did you take it?”

Hermione leaned into her again, and looked up at her. “I didn’t have a choice,” she told her. “It was either that or I got thrown out.”

“She wouldn’t have thrown you out,” Fred told her. “Take points or detention, sure, but it’s hard to get expelled from this place.”

“Believe me,” George said. “We’ve tried. A few times.”

Hermione looked at them. “Did you ever do something you’d just been expressly ordered not to do?”

“Loads of times,” Fred told her.

“Like in our first flying lesson,” George told her. “After the usual skittish person took off early- you’d think they would expect it by now- George and I leaped into the air as soon as Madam Hooch was gone.”

“Yup,” Fred said. “When Professor McGonagall caught us, we were playing Quidditch with some apples Fred stole from breakfast.”

“Huh?” Hermione asked confusedly, looking between them.

Hailey giggled. “They’re wearing each other’s name tags,” she told her.

The twins blinked, and looked down at their own name tags. “Oh yeah, that’s right,” ‘Fred’ said.

Hermione joined Hailey in laughing- and moments later, they did too.

Professor Dumbledore sighed as he ate dinner. It was the day of the first flying lesson for Gryffindor and Slytherin first-year students- Thursday of the second week- and he had already caught himself hoping that young Hermione Granger wasn’t planning on standing out in any more ways. She was already the first phoenix-bonded since himself, and as of that evening was also the youngest Hogwarts quidditch player in about a century with even a school-provided broom- even though the broom hadn’t even been ordered yet.

Then of course, she was very, very close friends with young Hailey Potter- even though their houses were a hundred kilometers apart and both muggle dwellings, according to the Castle database- and could often be found leaning against or hugging her.

Such as now. Even while they ate- or at the moment, as they talked with one Draco Malfoy that had approached them from behind- they had their arms around one another, and Granger was visibly leaning into Potter.

Then of course, even though Professor McGonagall had guided Harry Potter through Diagon Alley, and Harry Potter had gotten the other wand with one of Fawkes’ feathers in it, Harry Potter… didn’t exist, according to the castle database, and hadn’t shown up at the Sorting. He’d even checked the Book of Attendance, but the name simply didn’t appear in it.

The closest match was Hailey Potter… who, according to Professor McGonagall, looked remarkably similar to Harry, despite being of the opposite sex.

The similarities stopped there. Harry had a lightning scar on his forehead, and had been given to the Dursleys to take care of, as his only remaining relatives… unless one counted death eaters, of course. He’d known how nasty the Dursleys were, and that they absolutely despised the magical world. Dumbledore wasn’t happy, but they would have raised Harry as a lamb for the slaughter, necessitating all of Dumbledore’s manipulative strength to get Voldemort to make the crucial mistakes that would ensure his defeat and Harry’s survival. After Sunset’s spell exploded, he’d been unable to reform his monitoring charms- so he’d relied on letters from Mrs. Figg… who had only seen the boy walking to and from school with Dudley, and seemed to be of the opinion that he was doing well.

Then Harry had… disappeared, and Dudley had turned out to be a wizard. How could he have predicted that?

But back to Hailey. She wasn’t just any total stranger that Hermione had gotten so close to so quickly. She seemed to have a strange sense of where she needed to be, enabling her to save Sunset on her first night at Hogwarts; that had made waves, at least in part to how quickly she’d managed to do what Dumbledore had failed to do in seven years by reforming her. On top of that, the entirety of Gryffindor house- including the upper-year students, prefects, and even the Head Girl- seemed to respect Hailey somehow. She was apparently a very scary girl should anyone ever cross her, and was extremely protective of those she held dear… such as Hermione, who rarely left her side.

But even so, Hailey and Hermione were both ‘straight-A students’, in muggle terms- both of them had perfect scores in every subject so far, even including Potions with Professor Snape… who had been awed by their performance. Both of them were members of Sunset’s Research Team, which had even already found a project… though Sunset had probably provided that by resuming her old research. Hopefully in a safe manner this time- but he hadn’t heard any stories about anyone getting sent to Madam Pomfrey, and the instrument in his office that tracked the number of patients there hadn’t responded, so…

Oh yes. Sunset Shimmer… She hadn’t just turned around so suddenly when Hailey saved her; she also practically worshipped Hailey, and lived for the research sessions that Hailey showed up for.

All in all, basically all of his plans were completely useless… and he had no idea where to begin in reforming them.

Especially since they had already begun. Voldemort was already nearby, probably hosted by Professor Quirrell under that ridiculous turban, and the Philosopher’s Stone was in the chamber sequence he had created for that very purpose. Even the Mirror of Erised was already on its way.

He needed to figure things out, and fast- and Granger and Hailey Potter throwing their unexpected wrenches into the mix was not helping.

“I wonder if you’ll be joining flying lesson number two today,” Hailey mused over breakfast.

Hermione looked up at her. “Huh?” It was Thursday morning, a week after the first flying lesson. “Um… Yeah? Why?”

Hailey shrugged. “Just because you did so well on the first one,” she answered. “After I ran circles around the rest of the class last week- apparently I’m a natural- Madam Hooch declared me able to fly and excused me from further lessons.”

Hermione shrugged. “Well of course you’re a natural,” she answered- then quickly stopped herself. She was pretty sure her crazy flying skill actually came from Hailey… who might just have ‘be really good at flying’ as one of her divine powers, as oddly specific as that would be.

Hailey chuckled. “Yeah, especially if I’m favored by a goddess, who knows what effects that has.” She paused, and tilted her head. “I wonder why, though?”

“Good question,” Hermione answered.

“Oh, the mail is here.”

Hermione looked up- and sure enough, a hundred or so owls were streaming into the Great Hall as usual. Also as usual, Hermione had to wonder why a castle containing only three hundred people received a hundred letters every day for various recipients, but again as usual, no answer was forthcoming.

Then an odd package got her attention. It was long and thin, wrapped in brown paper, and carried by a set of six owls. “Who’s receiving a piece of plywood?” she asked- and was rewarded by Hailey’s snort of laughter.

Then the owls swooped over, and dropped it square in front of her.

Hailey’s hand shot out, and she caught it mid-air, her fingers puncturing the paper on the bottom of it as she kept it from landing on their food.

Hermione blinked, then quickly caught a letter dropped by another owl.

“Ahh,” Hailey observed calmly. “Not a bad cleaning tool you’ve got here.”

Chapter 11: Troll

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Draco Malfoy released the spell he’d been maintaining for the last five seconds and dispersed the magic, before letting out a sigh and collapsing onto a chair, completely exhausted. It was hardly the end of September, and she was already working him harder than all the teachers put together.

“Yes,” Sunset told him. “Just like that.”

“Why do you need me for this?” he asked. “Wouldn’t a higher-year student be better?”

“One would think,” Sunset sighed. “Unfortunately, I tried it with all the higher-year students in the Research Program, and none of them could do it. Yet you can, Hermione picked it up in about a minute, and Hailey didn’t even need a wand!” She chuckled softly. “So unfortunately, I have to go to those students that haven’t already learned how to use their wands. I’m thinking it’s because this is unthinkable according to the standard spellcasting methods- you probably don’t realize it, but you’ve actually been casting even normal spells in a very different way than most, after studying with me.”

“Weird,” he muttered. “I haven’t had any trouble performing the various spells at all.” He chuckled softly. “I even managed to cast one before I said the incantation! That got a lot of points.”

“It’s probably because the common method is…” She paused. “The method you three are using has been refined by my people, who have a much more… intimate connection with magic than you do. Specifically, our magic instruments are part of our bodies- so while your wand does a ton of work to stabilize the magic you use and manage it, we are used to performing those tasks ourselves. It makes using a wand a pain, I tell you- if I do those steps myself when using a wand, it actually disrupts it and causes the spell to fail.

“But the overall technique, that allows us to minimize the amount of effort we have to expend on magical management tasks and actually exhaust our often vast magical reserves… That technique works exactly the same when using a wand as without. Speaking of, I think you’ve exhausted your magic reserves. That’s usually a very exhausting thing to do.” She looked at the stone he’d been creating out of sand. “That said, that was a very demanding spell. Not quite the same as the people of my home use- they compress sand into gemstones when measuring absolute capacity, and there are some people they had to take to the desert to properly measure… including myself, but I don’t mean to brag.

“That said, there’s nothing absolute about our reserve capacity. Mine was very large since birth, but it grows with you, as you grow up- and the more you use it, the faster it grows. Meaning, my reserves have basically, well, stagnated a long time ago, because I never really use more than a tiny fraction of the magic available to me. Yours, on the other hand, will be growing rapidly- even after you stop using it- and will likely exceed mine someday.”

“Huh,” he muttered. “So with this…”

“Yeah. Turning sand into rocks- and later into gemstones- also serves as a strength-building exercise. A couple months of that, I expect, and you’ll have the reserve depth to really start contributing to our research!”

“What about Hermione?”

“Hers is a little bit deeper than yours, but not by much. There likely won’t be all that much of a difference as you two mature.”

“And Hailey?” he asked.

Sunset paused, tilted her head, then smiled. “I’ve debated taking her to the desert, but I’m also a bit afraid of what might happen if I do.”

He looked at her. “Oh?”

She sighed. “I’m powerful enough to measure other people’s absolute power levels and reserve depths directly, and I know how to do that,” she informed him. “She’s the only person I’ve ever met that’s so powerful I can’t see through her natural wards to do so.”

“... Oh. You’re worried about a desert-sized amethyst, aren’t you?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Sunset muttered. “She probably wouldn’t go that big, even if she could, but she might just make something impossible to hide from muggle eyes.”

Draco took a deep breath and concentrated, holding his wand steady as he watched a ball of magic form in front of him. Most of his work with Sunset was one-on-one during mealtimes, since that was about the only time he could get rid of Crabbe and Goyle. Today, he was skipping the Halloween Feast; he hated the two crones’ performances at feasts.

“Yeah, just like that,” Sunset told him. “Make sure you remember to disperse it before your reserves run out,” she cautioned him.

He nodded softly, holding the spell. His magic reserves had grown far faster than he had expected- so he had graduated first to making gemstones… then to conjuring this strange, blue-white magic power and just holding it. The more there was, the harder it was- but he wasn’t holding so much of it that it was burning through his reserves too quickly. He had a good few minutes- and she’d trained him to recognize exactly what his limits were, and to be able to disperse and close out potentially dangerous spells- like this one- before he ran out of mana. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a higher form of magic,” Sunset told him, her wand in hand, “and the target of my research. I haven’t been able to do much with it just yet, but I do know it can rather casually violate the laws of magic as we know them.” She smiled. “It’s probably going to be the foundation of that spell you want to make.” She sighed. “Last time I used it for real, I lost control when something surprised me, and it nearly killed me.” She paused. “You’re maintaining about as much as I was using at the time. I’ve been, er, reluctant to draw so much ever since, focusing on the more efficient containment- back then, it took almost all of my power to hold it for just a few seconds, and you’re still nowhere near my capacity- you’re doing really well, by the way.”

“A higher form of magic?” he asked. “How do we use it?”

“I don’t know,” Sunset answered. “So far, I’ve really only been able to throw it at things, but I think I’m pretty close to getting it to actually perform tasks. It’ll be at vastly reduced power than the amount I’m spending on it, but I’ll be able to refine my technique from there, and improve the efficiency.” She paused, and glanced at the door. “I think there’s someone outside,” she told him. “Don’t be surprised if they knock.” She rose to her feet to walk towards the door, wand still in her hand.

There was a sudden, deafening boom, and the last thing Draco knew was something flying towards him in his peripheral vision.

BOOM.

Professor Dumbledore stumbled as the castle shook and the noise resounded from somewhere above him. “What the?” he began, looking up. That was the last thing he needed- some sort of magical disaster while a troll was on the loose and the students hadn’t yet had time to reach their dormitories!

Professor McGonagall looked up. “Th- That’s what we heard when Sunset exploded your office,” she told him.

He cursed, and started running. Hopefully, nobody had died.

When he got to the scene, half of the research room had been blown apart- and, sure enough, it looked like the damage from Sunset’s higher form of magic had. No bodies were in evidence, though- either they had been destroyed, or they had already been carried away.

Then he turned the other way, at the wall opposite the Research Room’s entrance.

That… wall had basically ceased to exist. From the entrance of the research room, he could see the remains of the troll, shattered into pieces and thrust through no less than three walls. The damage looked different, though- this was a different, albeit extremely powerful, spell.

He cast a quick charm to check for lifesigns in the wreckage in either direction, but there weren’t any- so he made his best guess at the path Sunset would have taken to the Hospital Wing, assuming she had been awake, and followed it to the infirmary.

When he arrived, it was to find that Sunset had beaten him there. Her clothes had been badly damaged, but she looked to be completely unharmed, nervously watching Madam Pomfrey work on someone lying on the bed between them.

“There doesn’t seem to be any major damage,” Madam Pomfrey was telling her. “Just that concussion and…” She trailed off, gesturing vaguely towards her patient.

As Dumbledore walked up close, he saw that the patient was a first-year girl with twin royal blue stripes in her brilliantly silver hair. She was wearing a hospital gown, a few shreds of black Hogwarts uniform were piled on the floor next to the bed, and the label on the headboard, which always reflected the identity of its occupant, read ‘Silversong’... with no surname or anything else.

He could swear he’d never seen that hair, or heard that name. “What happened?” he asked.

Sunset looked. “We were… We were practicing a technique required for future experiments when the door exploded.” She paused. “You witnessed an early version of that same technique in your office some eight years ago. I wasn’t actively using magic, but Draco was a different story. He was doing really well… until a piece of the door hit him in the side of the head and knocked him straight out.” She sighed. “As you probably know, an unconscious man has a lot of difficulty controlling major spellwork, so it naturally destabilized and exploded before I realized what was going on.

“I’m not sure exactly why the effects were so different. Maybe it’s because the technique to do it was so much more refined, maybe because he was holding about twice as much energy as I did that one time, maybe it’s because we were drawing it for a different purpose- but it wrecked the research room… and rather than injuring Draco, it…” She gestured towards the girl on the bed, and sighed again. “He was using his wand to do it, rather than leaving it in a pocket, so his wand took the brunt of the blast and was destroyed in the process. I… I have its remains here.” She pointed at the nightstand, where Dumbledore recognized the base of a magic wand… with the rest of the wand splintered apart like string cheese. The unicorn hair inside had been split into several separate pieces, clinging loosely to the remains of the wand as it gleamed dully.

He sighed. “This is going to complicate things,” he muttered.

Sunset nodded. “As you might be able to conclude by comparing hair colors, she wouldn’t look out of place in my homeland,” she told him. “I’m not sure why, though, we weren’t working with that kind of magic.”

“What is that… technique?” Dumbledore asked.

“The summoning and containment of a higher form of magic,” she answered. “With the more efficient techniques we’ve been using, it’s quite safe- and I’ve been carefully controlling interruptions so we don’t get a repeat of last time.” She sighed. “Troll didn’t care. Blew the door off its hinges, caused the explosion. I wasn’t hurt- not entirely sure why, but it might have to do with the distance- so I disposed of the troll and took her here.”

“You…” He paused. “Disposed of it,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes.” She paused as well. “I didn’t expect it to go through so many walls, but that was also the first time I’d channeled any significant amount of power into an offensive spell since… recovering.” She sighed. “I guess I’m stronger than I thought I was. Anyways.” She looked at the girl again. “I’d take responsibility, but I’m not sure where the troll came from- and anything less wouldn’t have penetrated the anti-disturbance spells I had around the experimentation area.”

He sighed. “We’re going to have to tell his parents,” he muttered. “Especially if his wand was…” He paused. “It might be best to bring them here after… After she recovers, and introduce them gently.” He scowled, accessing the ward network to check the castle records. “Then… Then we’ll need to hold a Late Sorting Ceremony.”

Sunset looked at him. “Sorting?”

He nodded. “The Castle magic appears to have been confused by whatever happened. She’s marked as unsorted, but the grades seem to have transferred properly.”

“... There,” Madam Pomfrey said suddenly. “Got the concussion taken care of, but I want her to stay here until she’s got a new place to sleep,” she informed Dumbledore. “For… ‘observation’, officially.”

“Unofficially,” Sunset nodded, “it’s because it’s very dangerous to be female in the Slytherin boys’ dormitories.”

“And we likely don’t want it to get out that she’s the same person,” Madam Pomfrey nodded. “It’d cause an uproar.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore muttered, rubbing his chin. She was right; it had to be the first time anyone had ever managed to change a wizard’s biological sex by magic, intentionally or otherwise. It was something even he was having trouble believing.

Very suddenly, the girl’s eyes opened- and she immediately sat up, looking around. “Huh?” she asked. “What- What happened? Where am I?” She paused, looking between Dumbledore and Sunset.

“Calm down,” Madam Pomfrey told her.

“It was a troll,” Sunset told her. “Looked like a mountain troll. No idea how it got in, but it attacked the door hard enough a piece of it hit your head. Then…” She paused, and gestured silently at her.

Silver winced, putting one hand to the side of her head as Sunset spoke, then glanced down at herself when she finished, and looked back at Sunset. “Then what?” she asked.

Sunset didn’t answer.

Silver looked back down at herself… then slowly raised her hand to her chest. “... Oh,” she muttered. “Crap.”

Nobody moved for several seconds.

Finally, Silver sighed, and set her hands in her lap. “Well. Unless you know how to reverse it…” She glanced around.

Sunset shook her head. “We don’t.”

Silver paused in her search, then reached over to the nightstand to pick up her wand and look at it. “Ouch,” she muttered, then rubbed her chin with her free hand. “Do you think this might be the reason I wasn’t blown apart?”

“It might be,” Sunset conceded. “It was hit first, and did seem to have a secondary explosion- but that doesn’t explain why you look like you come from my homeland.” She sighed. “No idea on that.”

She set the busted wand back on her nightstand, then laid down again. “How’re my robes?”

“Completely shredded,” Sunset told her. “They were reduced to small bits of scrap… and wouldn’t fit anyways- you’ve shrunk.”

“I bet,” she muttered. “Boys are taller than girls anyways.” She sighed. “How badly was I hurt?”

“Not at all, actually,” Sunset muttered. “Well… there was a concussion from the piece of the door, but the magic didn’t do any damage at all.”

“Despite shredding my clothes and rewriting my body.”

“... Yeah.”

“Maybe it hit me so hard it killed me, then brought me back to life by rebuilding my body?” She sighed, and put one arm up over her eyes. “Dad is sooo not going to be happy.”

“Uh… The nameplate says Silversong?”

Silver let out a soft chuckle. “Yeah, it would, wouldn’t it?” She lowered her arm and sat up again, attempted to fold her arms but gave up when her arms ran into her chest, and settled on putting them in her lap again as she folded her legs under the covers. “So, my clothes won’t fit, my wand is destroyed, my sex has changed…” She paused. “How thoroughly?”

“Thorough enough to ovulate,” Madam Pomfrey told her calmly.

Silver looked at her. “What’s that?”

Sunset let out a snort of laughter. “Very, very thorough,” she told her. “I’ll teach you about the differences later.”

“Okay,” Silver muttered, then rubbed her chin with one hand, her elbow sticking out so she didn’t touch her chest. “Is that all?”

Sunset turned to Dumbledore. “You said something about ‘unsorted’?”

Dumbledore nodded. “Yes. You seem to have lost your House assignment.”

“That’s going to make things complicated,” she muttered.

“You’re taking this a lot better than I expected,” Dumbledore observed, gesturing at her.

“Well yeah,” she answered. “I’m probably going to worry myself half to death about it later, but for now, I want to concentrate on moving forwards, so I don’t get stuck in a rut.”

“Really?” Madam Pomfrey asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Figure of speech,” Silver answered, waving off the question.

Sunset rubbed her chin, making no effort to avoid touching her chest. “Hmm…” She looked at Dumbledore. “Do you think we could invite Mr. Malfoy to the school, and reveal the changes in person, while we’re around to help explain?”

Gift of Divinity

by computerneek

Chapter 1: A Hairy Situation

Chapter 2: Accidentally Magical

Chapter 3: Hair

Chapter 4: Wand

Chapter 5: Gringotts

Chapter 6: The Hogwarts Express

Chapter 7: Sorting

Chapter 8: Rescue

Chapter 9: Divine Detector

Chapter 10: Cleaning Tools

Chapter 11: Troll