The Viagramus Curse

Extremely Important Legal Mumblings

JK Rowling holds the rights to Harry Potter and all other characters in this story, except for Mary Sue, who is me, or at least what I would have been if I were a blond young lady of a character and intelligence only marginally less stunning than her legs.

Further: it so happens that several other people have also borrowed Ms. Rowling's characters for their own literary activities. In this story I have taken the liberty to sub-let their own borrowings - very briefly, of course, and with solemn promises to return said characters to their respective plots posthaste and intact. I just sent emails to all of them asking whether they mind, so I'd better submit this story before any of them has a chance to remonstrate.

I got all the words in this story from The Unabridged American Heritage Dictionary, except for drunken mumblings, net-speak and spelling errors. (Never having been drunk myself, I had to make up the intoxicated bits, with some help from comic books. I got the Net-speak from the Internet, and the spelling errors came naturally.)

Finally, the community of Harry Potter fans should ultimately be held responsible for this. Without their aid and abetment, my abuse of crackpot theories and fanfiction would never have reached critical mass.

* * * * * * *

Chapter 1

The little house at Privet Drive looked the same as ever.

From a distance, at least. People who got close enough for a good look couldn't help but gawp. The lawn, once a triumph of horticultural sadism, had long forgotten the touch of sharpened steel. A single bald spot in the grass was crowned with a broken lawn chair. The paint on the shutters was peeling visibly - even in what little moonlight managed to seep down through a smoggy sky. A pale light flickered in one of the upstairs windows.

Exactly fifty-one years before, a tall, bearded figure had paid a mysterious visit to this house, armed with destiny, a squirming bundle and a contraption that turned off the streetlights. This evening's visitor wasn't tall, didn't have a beard (unless five days' stubble counts), and didn't need to worry about the streetlights either, since most of them were broken. For that matter, he wasn't even a visitor - though in an attempt to shroud his presence in mystery, he had tried to crawl through the hedge. This had turned out to be a bad idea, and he was stuck in a patch of brambles, squirming unhappily.

Despite all these dissimilarities, a sharp-eyed observer with a keen sense of history might have perceived a fundamental similarity between his squirms and those of that primordial bundle.

The woman sitting next to the flickering light in the upstairs window had a very keen sense of history. A light went on in the hall, then in the stairwell, then on the porch. The front door banged open, and her thin figure advanced on the hedge, her dressing robe billowing behind her.

The gentle reader may perhaps feel that vampires generally avoid pink dressing gowns - especially the fuzzy sort that unravels within three months of purchase (on clearance sale) in a supermarket. The gentle reader is right. Nonetheless, from his vantage point in the hedge, the intruder saw remarkable similarities. For a moment he wriggled all the harder - perhaps he could escape.

He couldn't. Resistance was futile. Reaching the hedge, the vampire towered over him.

"For Christ's sake, what possessed me to marry such a klutz? If you really, really wanna sneak in at two in the morning, how about trying on your friggin invisibility cloak?"

Her victim mumbled something and gave a violent squirm. A moment later he was sprawled in the grass. He tried to stand up, but something over his shoulder snagged in the hedge. He staggered to his knees, muttered some more and began to fumble at his cloak.

The vampire moved to one side, to let the light shine more directly on her catch.

"So what was it this time, Harry?" She asked. "Stag night at the Weaving Warlock? Gobstones championship at the Tipsy Witch?"

"Shavinga world show. Voldykiller act. Very reshpecable. Got cash," replied Harry. "Had cash. All gone. Lemme alone. Willya?"

Harry managed to untangle his cloak and crawled a few feet away from the hedge, back into the vampire's shadow. "C'mon, Hermi. Cantcha turna. Light off? Neighborsch'll she ush. I'm shtilla - shtilla Hero, you know."

He sat down, put his head in his hands and hiccoughed quietly. "And itch my birthday."

Something halfway between a sigh and a grimace crossed her lips. "Oh come on. Get into house, at least."

* * * * * *

As the Potter family straggled into the kitchen, the readers of this story came to several unhappy realizations about their erstwhile heroes.

For starters, they perceived that Harry Potter had married Hermione. Several of them were so disgusted that they stopped reading the story immediately. Their friends argued that they were overreacting, since Harry didn't seem to be enjoying himself much.

Another group of readers had the same discussion, only the other way around. This group kindly referred the Potters to a family-counseling clinic in Surrey, only to discover that the Potters had been on the books for roughly fifteen years - as patients for the first six months, as deadbeats for the last fourteen-and-a-half.

Other readers - particularly the male ones - got a disappointing glimpse of Hermione. They had been hoping for - and got - a peak under her dressing robe, but it turned out that she was wearing sensible, if threadbare, pajamas. They consoled themselves with the remark that she looked so gaunt and frazzled that it wouldn't have been worth the bother anyway. Their wives and girlfriends muttered something about sour grapes and demanded a turn at the computer.

Not that they fared much better. The sight of Harry on his first drinking spree as a rosy-cheeked twenty-something would have snagged the author of this fanfic a generous product placement contract with any brewery on earth. As it was, the author has had to settle for a donation from the temperance union. Harry's complexion was awful, and his gait had the verve, insouciance and sex appeal of a despondent hippo.

Nor was the reference to hippos misplaced. To their dismay, the readers realized that Harry's cousin Dudley had inherited his girth not from Mr. Dursley but from a recessive gene in the Evans family. However, whereas Dudley had bones big enough to wield his girth with authority, Harry, at 230 pounds, might have put many a pig to shame - even without a wig. (Which, en passant, might have served him gallantly.)

Finally, someone with exceptional hearing pointed out that Hermione was speaking with an American accent and even deduced that Harry was trying to talk the same way. This annoyed the readers until the author explained that the United Kingdom (with energetic encouragement from their cousins across the ocean) had since repented of linguistic heterodoxy and embraced the one pristine and truly English tongue of the greater Americas.

Reassured and invigorated by this last discovery, the readers returned to the action.

* * * * * *

Far, far away, in a palatial dungeon so unplottable that Rowling herself mistook it for a Slytherin lavatory, a figure slouched in a seat upholstered with lizard skins conjured to look like green vinyl, behind a mahogany desk coated with semi-transparent, flamingo-pink shellac. From a pair of dragon hide boots resting on the desk between a flat screen monitor, an ashtray, a whisky bottle and a glossy edition of Hags & Whips, protruded two bony legs. Above the legs a pair of eyes glowed thin, malevolent and red. Between the eyes and the legs was a pair of silk boxer shorts embroidered with bleeding hearts and the words, in scarlet, "Momma never loved me."

As the figure finished reading the words on his screen, he leaned back and took a drag from his cigar. He stretched a withered arm toward the cool light of the screen, and letters began to take shape in a chat box:

"What? The fated child was never conceived - she is barren?"

As a thin wisp of smoke curled up and disappeared into the darkness, a jumble of letters appeared in the chat box and tried to untangle themselves: "Yeah rite boss. But, like, so wat?"

"Wormy, you rattling nutcase, don't you know the ancient prophecies? Until the moment of conception, the link between the alternative universes is open! All we need is a bridging spell to retrieve the three mighty talismans and the full potency of the Viagramus Curse will be mine!

"Gee wiz boss?! - whose Gramas Curse?"

"The *Viagramus* Curse, you insensate numbskull! Once you have retrieved the three talismans, the entire might and power of every wand in the universe will surge into my own!

"lolz!!! like, giga, boss!!! Swat are they???"

"Simple, my woolly worm: they are the Leather Trousers of Draconian Virility - the Purple Cloak of Magnificent Paradigms - and the Sable T-shirt of Snitching Vice! Clothed in their powers I shall work the magic!"

As a wisp of smoke spiraled toward the ceiling, and the wizened figure began to chuckle, then to cackle, then to laugh in gales of mirthless hysteria. The tonal quality might have been a bit trebly and uneven for an Evil Overlord in his prime, but it was really quite impressive, considering his age, his misfortunes and his lumbago.

On his screen, a sequence of letters arranged themselves into a single, chilling word: "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"