The Viagramus Curse

Extremely Important Legal Mumblings

Just in case there is something you would like to sue me about, please be sure to read this. It won't make my despicable behavior right, but it will make it unintelligible:

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 2

In which the Author breaks his promise to explain which member of the Hogwarts cast can best be described as a "Mick Jagger manqué." But we *do* meet Mary Sue, and we discover how the Evil One intends to set his plans into motion, and we even find out how Dementors get their kicks when they've no one to kiss.

A few hours later a bloodshot sun dragged itself over the horizon for its daily commute through the heavens. The house at Privet Drive lay still. After an apathetic glance over greater Harryland, capital of the Warner Islands, the sun settled into a protracted coffee break behind a bank of sallow clouds. But just before setting out across the Hogwarts Ocean for a stimulating lunch in Dean Thomaston (formerly know as Havana), it peered through the smog to witness a moment of unusual exertion.

Harry was trying to open the front door. It stuck at first, then jerked open. He staggered out of the house. He peered right, then left, and took a few steps toward the lawn chair. An obese, yellow-gray cat - one-eighth Crookshanks, one-eighth pedigree Persian and six-eighths anonymous - regarded him quizzically from beneath the chair. As he neared, it hissed and made a dash for the shrubbery, where it turned to monitor its pursuer.

Harry and the cat eyed each other for a few seconds till Harry dropped his gaze, putting both hands to the bridge of his nose. He rubbed for a moment, then pried open his eyes for another look at the cat.

"She done fed you?"

The cat hissed again.

"Aww. Get off my back, will ya?"

He took a few steps forward. The cat hissed a third time, then disappeared. Harry stared after it for a moment.

"What a bitch," he muttered, and stood for a moment in silent meditation. Did he mean his wife or her cat? He trudged back into the house, where he read the note for the third time:

"That was your last chance, Harry. I'm moving in with Mary Sue. Find someone else to mop up for you. "

* * * * * *

"Aw poor honey," said Mary Sue, considering Hermione from the depths of two amethyst eyes. "You know what I always do? I just fly up on my inner broom - contemplate it all from the ethereal perspective - and then I always know what to do. Like when Frank started making jokes about my new purse, and he kept eying Patricia's bosom, too - like she doesn't do it on purpose, the cat - and I thought he might be getting a little iffy, so I just had to calm down and get a new sense of perspective, and so I told him, 'Now Frank,' I said, 'you just have to decide what you really, really want in heart of hearts, or whatever it is you want things with - you can't have your fingers in my purse and her bra at the same time, now, can you honey bun?'

Hermione pondered for a moment. "Wasn't Frank the one with hazel eyes and the invisible Jaguar?"

"Naa. Frank was the one I kicked out of the house the next morning. He'd be lucky if he could drive a park bench these days. That was Jed with eyes and Alvin with the car, or it least he said so, I never saw it, but Jed woulda done the same thing if she'd given him half a chance, but my, what an ass. If I'd only got him house-trained good enough to close the god damn toilet seat and keep his grubby hands off my toothbrush.

"Men! But we were talking about you, honey. What you need is introspection, meditation and self-critical reflection - have you tried levitational yoga? That's the single most significant thing I've done for my self-image since that potato skin diet last March."

"How about killing Harry?" said Hermione.

"Hermy! Now fer cryin out loud! I know you feel bad and everything, but, I mean, hey - he is a hero! Why, I knew girls who used to say they used to - well, I mean, they used to say big things about him.

"Enormous, in fact." She stopped for a moment and blinked.

"But I guess that's not - I mean ... so why don't you just send him in for therapy? Make him go to a shrink and a gym for couple months, and he'll be as good as new. You can go, too, honey - to the shrink I mean, or maybe the gym too, even if you are awful skinny."

Mary Sue stopped to catch her breath and tug on a strand of golden hair as she gazed at Hermione with look of motherly concern.

"I mean, we are talking about Harry, aren't we?"

* * * * * *

Fame, they say, is fickle.

Whoever "they" are, they obviously haven't considered semi-perennials like Ms. Taylor, Mr. Jackson or Ms. Ciccone. Let alone Mr. Potter.

But they've still got a point. After all: the word "fickle" rhymes with pickle - suggesting that it may be sour, even if you can leave it sitting in fridge without having it grow legs and slink off into the sunset. More to the point, it also rhymes with a vigorous expression common to several Indo-European languages; but since it isn't a nice vigorous expression, we won't indulge in it right now. But it boils down to the same thing: Occasionally, notoriety isn't everything it's knocked up to be, at least not for the persons having it knocked up them. Even if it lasts a long time.

"But why?" wondered the gentle readers. "Our neighbor is a fat man with a permanent hangover, a grouchy wife and a normal cat, but nobody thinks he's a famous hero!"

An astute observation.

Like most things in the known universe, the answer had a lot to do with cash. After the most successful film run in the history of barbarian invasions, the Warner Brothers had purchased the entire globe from humanity, including rights to all constituent elements thereof - human, animal, vegetable, mineral, conceptual, contraceptual or otherwise financially viable. The contract was signed by both Warner brothers, the President of the United States of the Northern Hemisphere and a member of the Warner Brother's sixth best cleaning crew, selected to represent the United States of the Southern Hemisphere. However, the contract also granted extensive options including, but not limited to, all nearby solar systems and galaxies, as well as the spiritual essences and afterlives of all beings entailed in the transaction, should these prove to exist. Black holes were explicitly excluded from the contract until such a time as someone figured out how to get something out of them.

As for Harry: He had been immortalized in 58 movies. In fact, after 'Harry Potter and the Girls' School,' sequels 3 through 9, had won every category of all the Oscars for seven years running, the Oscars were abolished on grounds of superfluity. Several thousand episodes of the Harry 'n Hermy Show were broadcast throughout the day in every land where a Magic Potter BoxTM could be purchased. And the Harry 'n Hermy action figures reached such heights of aestheticism that an anatomically enhanced Harry blow-up doll was selected by unanimous vote of the citizens of Florence to replace Michelangelo's David.

So Harry was a hero.

And since the Warner Brothers had retooled the curricula of the world's ten premiere universities for the training of future Harry-Guys, they didn't spend very much time worrying about a fat man with a bald spot, a jinxed marriage and a disagreeable cat.

* * * * *

"I mean, we are talking about Harry, aren't we?" said Mary Sue.

"I know we are," said Hermione. "I was looking for someone who isn't."

And with that, she turned around and stalked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

* * * * *

What Hermione didn't know - but as a matter of fact, that was just as well, because it probably wouldn't have cheered her up.

But in a vast chamber at an indeterminate point in space and time, cathode ray tubes spread their baleful incandescence upon innumerable, fathomless faces shrouded in grayish cowls. Twice as many hands and roughly seventeen times as many fingers slithered over battered keyboards with the speed of terminal AOL addicts. The backs of the hands were thin and slimy, but the palms had grown plump and hairy since the old days.

(During their off-hours, the dementors were allowed to look at web sites. This reduced their urge to kiss people, but there's no denying the adverse effects on the bandwidth of websites associated with mortuaries and multinational conglomerations.)

But they weren't drooling over jpg's of spreadsheets just now. Each cowl hovered inches before its screen as words spilled faster and faster out of the keyboards.

In the eerie gloom, a sepulcher bass whispered:

"72.8 FpS. Q stable at 13.8."

"And if you can't do any better than that," it remarked smoothly, "we'll cut off access to the Warner Brother's accounting offices for the next three months."

The fingers slithered faster, and the keyboards clattered with a sound of menace and desperation.

"138.3 FpS. Q falling at 9.6," observed the voice a few minutes later. "That's more like it. If you can get it up to 250 FpS, Wormy has a little treat for you. But what the hell is this 9.6 Q business? Ever heard of getting the job done?"

But I saw that the readers were puzzled. FpS? Q? Let me explain:

The dementors were writing fanfics - 138.3 of them per second, to be precise. This was a reasonable average.

Of course, the more ignorant readers couldn't fathom why a quality rating of 9.6 out of 100 should indicate an excessive refinement of literary sensitivity. The better informed readers knew better - in fact, this was exactly why Wormy had to hire dementors in the first place. He had started the project using monkeys and type-writers; but after receiving several thousand editions of the collected works of Shakespeare, he had had to find beings more suitable for the job at hand.[1]

In any case: As the words "little treat" insinuated themselves through the gloom, the gray cowls perked up visibly. The clattering at the keyboards accelerated until the gloomy hall sounded like a convention for hyperactive tap dancers with arrhythmia.

"198.7 FpS. 6.4 Q."

Several minutes passed.

"212.4 FpS. 3.5 Q."

At this time a vision of horror was revealed to the reader. A hideous light appeared high above the clearing at the center of the room - and behold: below the light was a great Ming vase embellished with the depictions of unspeakable acts; and the vase perched at the center of a Persian rug embroidered with kabalistic figures arranged in an endless game of ticktacktoe. And it seemed to the reader that the light twisted slowly, extending pale green tendrils toward an object at rest upon the vase, as the arcane symbols danced about the circle in endless variations of futility. But as for the object itself - it was an ancient 56K modem.

"238.6 FpS. 1.3 Q!" murmured the voice. "We are approaching critical mess."

As a single finger of light reached the modem, the dementors began to wail and chortle and yodel. The barrage of noise from their malevolent keyboards fused into a thunderous roar. A second greenish finger touched the modem, and the Ming vase began to grow and expand into a mighty pillar, casting shafts of violet radiation throughout the room. A third tendril caught hold of the modem, which began to blink and throb to an exquisite beat - it was the dementor's favorite song!

"249.8 FpS. 0.06 Q!" screamed the voice, lapsing out of its bass monotone into a hyperventilating falsetto.

Above the keyboards' roar, the first strains of "Oops I did it Again" filled the room.

"CONTACT!" shrieked the voice.

"Oh Baby, Baby - " howled the dementors in unison.

And suddenly, there was silence.