Alternate version of chapter 38 of “The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter”: “I Solemnly Swear I Am Up To No Good”

Note: I mentioned this before, giving a brief overview of this original version of chapter 38. Some people thought it sounded like a lot of fun, so when I found it again I decided to post it as an alternate chapter, sort of an alternate alternate universe. This was, of course, cut because A. “Mother” acts out of character in it, and B. It's bloody wild. Molly Elizabeth, our collective's resident little, went nuts on this, and I took one look at it when she was done for the day and said, “Funny, but it's Way Too Much. It's Off The Rails.” C. There are things about some of the characters that I haven't decided whether or not to include in the main story, as well as there being a lot of out of character stuff, and therefore you should not consider this story remotely canon to the Many Faces story.

This chapter is the same as the existing chapter 38 up until Zoey's part. If you need a refresher, go read that chapter first. :)

One last note: I didn't bother finishing it or proofing it or anything like that. This will be just as Molly wrote it, mistakes, in-text notes, plot holes, and all, before I stopped her.

Anyway, enjoy!

*MOLLY ELIZABETH!*

The next morning, Zoey woke up in their bed, and sensed that everyone else but Mother was asleep. She immediately got up and started her day. She had plans, and wanted to get them started as soon as possible. She practically inhaled her breakfast before running back up to her room to work on a new project.

Oh Moooother? Mother, where are You? I have a question for you!

% Fine, just a moment. %

Zoey sat there waiting a few moments. Then, suddenly, several things happened at once: she knew where Hypatia's hidden books all were and how to access them, she felt a lot smarter, and there was a brief visual glitch that passed as soon as it appeared.

“Thanks!” she said aloud, and started fetching what she needed.

As soon as she opened up one of Hypatia's books, she saw something in it that was confusing. Hypatia had apparently written out all her equations with the numbers all in different colors. It must have taken a lot of extra work to do. Shrugging, she continued looking through books and reading for a couple hours before really getting to work.

The next confusing thing to happen was when she started writing her own equations down on parchment. The numbers were again in different colors, but she hadn't done it on purpose. She stared quizzically at the quill.

“Is this color-changing ink?”

% Not that I'm aware of. Why? %

% No. This is new. I wonder if it's because of the cross wiring? Weird things can happen when we cross wire things in here. Like Hypatia's Mask making her laugh when she's sad and cry when she's happy. Odd. %

Shrugging, Zoey went back to work. She was designing a new spell, and had a good idea what she wanted it to do, but after a while she came to a standstill on it. No matter what books she read, or what memories of Hypatia's she tapped into, she couldn't work it out. That is, until she read a note in one of the books about ritual magic. That led her, via different paths of research, to the answer. She put her research aside and went outside to grab a fist-sized stone and take it back upstairs.

The ritual, as it turned out, needed an anchor to work, so the stone would be the anchor. She did the ritual, sacrificing her ability to change form for four days because she didn't trust herself to try Hypatia's sacrifice array for smaller sacrifices. That done, she slipped the stone in her pocket, grabbed the invisibility cloak, and went to go sneak into Ravenclaw tower.

“[Riddle]”

“[Clever answer.]”

“Well reasoned,” the knocker said, and let her in.

She pulled the Cloak out and put it on, walking invisible into the room. Being a weekend, most students were outside or in the library, and the common room had only two Ravenclaws in it, on opposite sides of the room. Zoey sneaked by them both and went up to the girl's dormitories into Luna's room. Using her wand, she used Accio to summon Luna's things from a list she'd written down. One by one, most of them came to her and she set them down on Luna's bed. A couple things were locked and couldn't get out, so she hunted them down and liberated them from the bullies' trunks.

Then she took advantage of the fact she was one of the only people who could get into Luna's trunk, and opened it, taking everything out. She then cast her new spell on each and every thing Luna owned, and put everything back but the things she'd recovered, so Luna could see that they were there. She put them under Luna's covers just in case her bullies got into the room first.

After that, she sneaked back to the Griffindor common room, put the anchor stone in her trunk, and went about her day satisfied she'd done good work. Now all she needed to do was wait.

While she waited for the new spell to start doing its thing, she used a different ritual to sacrifice her ability to cast the Featherlight Charm for a few hours in exchange for sealing Peeves inside of a broom cupboard for the same amount of time. He was going to be furious when he got out, and since he didn't know who had done it, it would be very entertaining watching him try to get his revenge on an unknown assailant.

She hid outside Snape's office door waiting for him to exit, which he did for lunch. When he was gone, she used Hypatia's knowledge of runes and arithmancy to make the door password-protected, setting the password to “I, Severus Snape, like to cuddle my pink teddy bear while sucking on my pacifier.” This had Mother laughing fit to burst in the internal space of their shared mind, which only made Zoey grin harder.

Zoey happened to have been walking from dinner to Griffindor tower when she heard Snape's screams of rage. If she understood Hypatia's knowledge well enough, that password on his door was going to be tricky as hell to get rid of. This was confirmed when the screams of rage doubled in volume. Laughing, she ran the rest of the way to Griffindor and did her best to hide until the screaming subsided. But then there were loud crashes and bangs and high-pitched yelling echoing through the halls; Peeves had been released and was in a fit of temper. She rushed out with everyone else to see what was going on. He was tossing inkpots and pieces of armor from the suits of armor while howling in rage, Filch ducking to avoid getting hit, Snape and McGonagall trying to subdue the poltergeist or calm him down. Unable to contain her laughter anymore, she ran off once more to find somewhere safe to let it all out.

Lastly, she sneaked out after curfew under the Cloak, going to the door of the Slytherin common room, and used another ritual to seal the entrance for the next 16 hours, sacrificing her entire ability to do magic for only an hour in the bargain. This very nearly blew up in her face, as a still-angry Snape stormed past her in the hall on her way back, probably to enlist Dumbledore's help removing the password. The other teachers and prefects were also in quite the state, still recovering from Peeves's tantrum earlier. But she managed to get back safe anyway.

~

George Weasley woke up on Sunday morning after a strange dream about a House-Elf staring at him, only to find Zoey Potter staring at him instead, a creepy grin on her face. He leaped back and shouted, getting himself tangled up in his sheets. His brother Fred jumped at the noise and fell out of bed in his own tangle of sheets. Lee Jordan and their other dorm-mate woke up at the noise as well, which now had a little girl's laughter added to it as Zoey laughed so hard she was literally curled up on the floor guffawing.

“Oh it's you is it, Miss Potter?” George said when he got untangled. “Fine then, you asked for it.”

He cast a tickling hex on her, and her laughter doubled in volume and she wriggled around on the floor trying to get away, her face turning red. She started to wheeze though, unable to breathe, so he lifted the hex and picked her up to set her on his bed to recover. Lee and the other boy left for breakfast while Fred and George stayed behind.

“Sorry about that,” she finally said. “Even though it was very funny. I just wanted to help you two out with your joke shop. I had some ideas. And, well, I made enough mischief yesterday I'd be taking my life into my hands if I tried more today.”

“Ah, so you were the cause of Peeves going mental yesterday, then?” George said.

“And I heard Snape couldn't get into his office,” said Fred.

“Yes to both of those. I also sealed the Slytherin entrance. You won't tell on me?”

Both boys put their hands on their hearts solemnly. “Trickster's honor. We never rat out someone unless a prank goes too far and gets someone hurt or bullies someone undeserving.”

“Oh, you're really gonna love what I cast on Luna's possessions, then.”

“Tell us all about it, and you can help us.”

She did, and when they were done laughing, they let her help them after breakfast. She spent most of the day in their room helping invent things with Hypatia's knowledge, which she was still plugged into. The others were all still being kept asleep, apparently.

~

Snape was prowling around the school, looking for any excuse to bust people who were hanging around in the corridors today, after Saturday's debacles. He had a good idea who had done it; Dumbledore had told him about Hypatia's skills with ritual magic, runes, and arithmancy. But when Snape had carefully questioned Draco Malfoy about her, he saw she was very unlikely to be the culprit. Suspecting that the 6 year old imp was somehow tapping into Hypatia's knowledge, the only thing keeping him from hunting her down and spanking her until she couldn't sit for a week was the knowledge that the one named Hypatia would be more furious at the little imp than even he was. She already hated being a part of the Potter collective, was already angry at them for her secret coming out. Yes, it would be satisfying.

Sunday had been quiet, after the chaos of Saturday; too quiet, in Snape's opinion. The imp was up to something, he knew it. But Monday classes came and went with no sign of more chaos. It wasn't until after curfew, when he was patrolling the halls, that it happened.

Because he was being extra vigilant, it was he who first saw the next bit of chaos erupt. He was passing the Ravenclaw entrance when he heard screaming from inside. He immediately turned around and snapped at the eagle-head door knocker to let him in because he was a teacher and it was an emergency. He was only halfway through this sentence, though, when the door slammed open and screaming Ravenclaws came pouring out. Half of them looked normal, if terrified, but the other half had turned purple and had snakes coming out of their ears.

More screaming erupted from another part of the castle; Griffindor tower, he thought. And then a patronus came to find him, McGonagall's.

“Severus, something is happening! Students from all of the Houses are panicking and screaming and out in the halls after curfew!”

He tried to respond, but got shoved against a wall by the screaming horde of panic-stricken children and fell over, using his hands to shield himself because he'd dropped his wand in the fracas.

“QUIET!” Severus yelled as loud as he could, but it made no difference.

“QUIET,” said the headmaster's voice, magically amplified. Everyone stopped in their tracks.

The amplified voice continued, quieter this time. “Everyone please go into the Great Hall while we sort out what is going on and deal with it. You are not to leave the castle. We have been stricken by what appears to be some sort of new magical disease and we must quarantine it until we can keep it from spreading outside the bounds of Hogwarts. Anyone caught leaving the castle before the quarantine has lifted will be expelled and detained until the crisis is over. Now please, walk calmly to the Great Hall. Anyone running in the halls now will be given detentions for a month.”

Everyone eventually got herded into the Great Hall, even Zoey, who was worried. This wasn't going to plan. There were far more people with the 'sickness' than she'd anticipated. About 75% or more of the school body were affected. Did that many people really call Luna “Loony”? They couldn't all be stealing her things, so that was the only other thing that she could think of that accounted for the spread of the thing.

She reached inside her pocket and felt the anchor stone. The spell could be lifted without destroying the stone, but if the ritual worked the way she thought it did, the stone could be traced. And if she destroyed the anchor stone, everyone would get better again, and all would be well. Ish. So she hid behind some seventh-years and surreptitiously tried to disenchant the anchor stone. When that failed, she tried Vanishing the thing. But it wouldn't Vanish, either. And she couldn't try any more destructive spells on it, not here, not now. She wondered if there was a ritual that could remove the spell's anchor, but for all the knowledge she had access to now, she didn't actually understand most of it.

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?” came a voice shouting at her inside her skull. It was Hypatia. “AND HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN ASLEEP?”

% Think of it this way: it's data. It's a failure mode. %

Hypatia sent them a very long string of nasty words and names that made Zoey blush all the way down to her toes.

“Oh lovely,” Hypatia said after a few more minutes. “Whatever you did caused the anchor stone to be traceable even when the spell has been lifted from it. Even if you destroy it, enough magical residue will remain that someone like Dumbledore could find it. We're going to have to hide it somewhere.”

Hypatia did something to the anchor stone, lifting the spell from it. Everyone who was purple and had snakes coming out of their ears spontaneously got better.

After the nurse checked out a dozen or so people, she declared it had been some kind of prank and not a disease. The quarantine was lifted, but they were still detained as the teachers tried to find the culprit or culprits. Hypatia did a quick ritual to make them unnoticed like she'd done in Knockturn Alley, and they sneaked out. Hypatia had a hypothesis to test.

Endnotes: Yeah, that's all she wrote before I was like “Yeah, no, that's ridiculous and out of character in so many ways.”

But I have to admit, Hypatia having synesthesia would be totally cool. If I can find a way to incorporate it in the main story, I may well do that.