Mary-Sue and the Bombastic Booty

Part One: HARRY POTTER AND THE PANDORA'S BOX or MARY-SUE ARRIVES

CHAPTER TWO

If Harry had returned to Hogwarts wishing for nothing but a little peace, he was certainly disappointed.

The first day of classes was horrible.

Misery couldn't wait until the first session, oh no, but announced her presence with loud cries at breakfast, "I'm here! I'm here!" like a drunk and tottering Dementor.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione entered the Great Hall to confront a sight they had never expected to see. Dozens of Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and *Gryffindor* boys and girls huddled around the Slytherin table, standing on their tiptoes or books or chairs to catch a better glimpse of the new girl, Mary-Sue Darkstar-Riddle. Seamus Finnigan was there, swaying drunkenly, and Dean Thomas, who grinned while absent-mindedly massaging a very annoyed looking Pansy Parkinson. Dennis Creevey sat on Colin's shoulders for a better look, and a black-eyed Neville Longbottom struggled desperately to escape from an irate Ginny. Only Justin Finch-Fletchley seemed not to notice.

Mary-Sue herself was at the center of the table, her chair leaning back to rest soundly against the wall. She sat right in the crook of the chair, her legs extended and resting across Crabbe's thighs, while her head lay in Goyle's lap. Unlike the plain, black robes she had arrived in the night before, she now wore a pair of shocking pink bell-bottoms with translucent swirls and spirals cutting across the fabric (matched by the sleeves of her shirt) changing colors between yellow and blue, and her green midriff shirt had a pink star in the middle. She wore small earrings designed after the planet Saturn, complete down to the rings and liquid Hydrogen ocean.

"She isn't Mary-Sue," gushed Ron in penitent awe. "She's Lisa-Frank!"

But Mary-Sue also wore a serene smile, and her fair, slender arm trailed languidly up to run her fingers across a face... a familiar face...

"Ack! Ack!" cried Harry in a voice that made Hermione and Ron think he was choking. But Harry found words to describe his anguish. "MALFOY!" he gagged.

He was right. The Mudblood-hater himself lay across the table, facing the girl, and the sublime smile on his face with his pointed chin and slick, blond locks combined to form a picture of angelic bliss that had never before crossed the face of a Malfoy.

"I hate her," said Hermione. "What a bitch."

Harry fainted.

***

The Boy-Who-Lived awoke a short time later, to find himself propped up at the Gryffindor table with a spoonful of oatmeal hovering in the air before his mouth.

"You have to eat, Harry," chided Hermione.

Only a few minutes had passed, and the Gryffindor table had gradually repopulated as the boys and girls, graced by simple winks and passionate hugs from the stellar-elusive Mary-Sue, were placated and able to think again.

"Wh-- what happened?" asked Harry, reluctantly poking at his oatmeal.

"You passed out," said Hermione, an irritated frown on her face. "Her mother was a veela, you know."

"Wh-- what?"

"You heard me. Her mother was a veela. Betcha can't guess who her daddy is?"

"Who's her daddy?"

Hermione smiled, angstily.

"Ron doesn't know who her daddy is."

"Who is her daddy?" repeated Harry, confused.

Hermione shrugged her shoulders.

"Think about her last name, Harry," she said.

'Darkstar-Riddle,' Harry thought. 'Riddle. Oh!'

He scratched his head, wondering why he hadn't noticed before.

But then again, she was so beautiful, so beautiful... rings of Saturn, pink star, green eyes, snakelike somehow.

'The most beautiful girl ever!'

***

Breakfast didn't improve. Ron didn't return to the table until he'd waited in line with the Slytherins for a half hour, only to receive a breathy "pleased to meet you" from the new girl.

"Great to see you again, Weasley," Draco had sneered, slapping Ron on the back, but for the first time, Ron hadn't noticed and hadn't cared.

Hermione was so angry she'd left the table, and Ron, flustered and clueless as usual, had set off in pursuit of her.

Harry was alone when he received his class schedule and noticed with curiosity that Defense Against the Dark Arts was his first class this year.

The Gryffindors were to share this class with the Slytherins...

***

When Harry and Ron arrived at Artaud's class, Hermione was still indignant.

"What are you so mad about?" asked Ron.

"Nothing!" she exclaimed.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing!" she replied, and then, forcing her frown into a malicious grin,

"I'm writing Viktor. I'm asking him out again. Maybe I'll go visit him in Bulgaria."

Ron went red in the face, but he rolled his eyes with an exaggerated motion.

"Really," he said. "I don't know *what* you see in him."

But Hermione went on writing.

As Harry and Ron found themselves seats on the other side of the classroom, the assembled Gryffindors fell into a general hush.

May-Sue had entered the classroom, followed by her retinue of Slytherins. They fell all over her; metaphorically, of course. Crabbe and Goyle, decked out in their finest robes, threw tulip petals at her feet, and Millicent Bulstrode followed quickly after, ardently tying Mary-Sue's wild tresses into intricate braids.

But the focus in the room was about to shift...

"Class... ... ..." came a low, quiet hiss, like a breath of hot wind, or like a furnace shuddering into life.

The room fell into panic as the Slytherins scrambled to their seats. Only Mary-Sue was relaxed as she calmly walked to her chair, sat, kicked her feet up, and commenced filing her nails.

"Harry," said Ron.

"I am in love with her," said Harry suddenly.

An awkward pause.

"But she's a Slytherin!"

"I don't care. I don't even care."

The hiss passed through the room again, with a turbulence that almost laughed at them.

This time Harry noticed.

The dark room seemed to grow even dimmer, cooler, and then, gradually, and with an imperceptible increase in pressure, as though filled with a moist fog, settling like the tropical mists, the room warmed again.

A figure sputtered into being, sitting at the desk.

"Class," said Professor Artaud. He was smiling, a hideous, withered, toothless grin, that seemed frozen on his face.

And then he froze.

For several moments nobody realized what had happened, but as the temperature continued to shift both up and down, the apparition that was their new teacher stopped moving. He was stuck in space, neither blinking nor breathing, and the moment drew long as though time had stopped. Artaud was as still as a Muggle photograph.

"What's goin --?" began a Slytherin girl, but Artaud erupted into a volcano of screams.

"SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE!" he cried in deafening shrieks. "I DEMAND OF MY CLASS SILENCE!!!"

And then he froze again.

The girl stopped speaking and sat in her seat, shivering. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The Gryffindors and Slytherins were almost as still as the ghost who, transfixed before them again, statue-like, glared out at his class with petrified, yet burning, eyes.

Only Mary-Sue remained unperturbed, filing her nails, and then gracelessly untangling Millicent's failed braids.

Moments passed.

Minutes passed.

These minutes stretched out, grew long, extended, distended, and the sweating students began to feel the weight and warmth building again. The hour dragged on in this manner as the new teacher continued to stare at his class.

Ron showed Harry his Wizards' Watch, a gift from Hermione, and the glowing pixie within held up a placard reading 57%, indicating that the class was past halfway over, yet still nobody moved before the soundless, unblinking gaze of Professor Artaud.

"This is worse than it was with Gilderoy!" Harry whispered to Ron, with a furtive glance toward Artaud.

"Tell me about it. At least he was funny. This guy's just dead!" Harry nodded sleepily. Many of the other student had begun to drift off. Several heads had already collapsed onto the long table and the unflinching, unblinking Artaud didn't even seem to notice.

And then Harry noticed someone was missing.

"Where's Draco?" he whispered to Ron.

Before Ron could say anything they were answered by a hiss directly in right in front of them.

"Shhhhh!"

It was Neville, who held his index finger to puckered lips, sweat pouring down his pale face.

Artaud also noticed this.

He whipped an ethereal wand from the folds of his ghostly robe and pointed it at Neville.

"Muipo!" he cried, and Neville screamed as he began spinning in his seat, bones contorting and snapping, skin changing color. The class watched in stupefied horror as sparks flew from Neville's eyes and hair and his screams grew more hollow and guttural. And when Neville stopped spinning, something was different about him.

This Neville was white and gray, with delicate feathers brushing back along his neck and face. This Neville had a long beak and piercing gray eyes. This Neville had feet painted blue, as if by malachite.

"He's been turned into a blue-footed booby!" cried Seamus.

"Squaa!" said Neville in a throaty chirp, hopped from the desk, and waddled out of the room.

Artaud was restive no more, however. He floated up and down the room in a frenzy.

"I demand SILENCE and I receive no SILENCE and all I ask for is SILENCE! And Mister Harry Potter," the ghost stopped before Harry's desk and looked him straight in the eye. Harry shrank before those twin dark tunnels. "Shall it be with you as it was with Abelard? Shall it? I say that 'life dwindled before his eyes. Whole regions of his brain rotted. Yes, the phenomenon was known, but even so it was not simple. Abelard did not present his state as a discovery.'"

And the ghost whisked on, leaving Harry in a state of suspended shock, yet Artaud ranted on:

"'All the mouths of dead males," he said, "laugh at the risk of their teeth, through the arcade of their virgin teeth or through teeth coated with hunger and plated with filth, like the armature of Abelard's mind.' That is a quote, yes? Me. 1925. Make a note of that. 1925. 1295. What is the difference? My brain has exploded a billion times, but what does that really mean? What tincture? What esophagus? What excrement?" Artaud mused on this for a moment, smiling.

"And one of you will meddle where he or she does not belong, and one of you will die as a result. Know this."

***

Artaud's ranting continued through the rest of class, until he suddenly froze again and, with an agonizing slowness, faded away.

When Ron looked at his watch, the very bored pixie gestured to a discarded placard reading 107%... they were late to their Herbology class.

As Ron and Harry began gathering their books, however, Mary-Sue walked to the front of the class, trailed slightly by a Slytherin girl... the same girl Artaud had screamed at earlier.

Mary-Sue gleamed at the class, cheerfully, as though she had been completely unaware of the agonizingly slow class, Artaud's rants, or Neville's transfiguration into a blue-footed booby.

"This," said Mary-Sue, gesturing to the slight, timid-looking girl at her side, "is Appolonia Moonwhisp. She is my best friend here. If you have any questions for me, please ask her first. I am getting too much attention these days, and it puts a stress on both my schedule and my composure. This is my solution."

Appolonia smiled shyly, and waved a little wave to the class.

Nobody stirred until Mary-Sue had packed her belongings and walked from the classroom. The other Slytherins had quickly knotted into a tight group. As Harry walked from the classroom, he overheard Goyle speaking.

"Where's Draco?"

"He's in the boy's bathroom crying," explained Pansy.

"Whyyyyy?" asked Crabbe.

"Because Mary-Sue was given his position as Seeker of the Quidditch team."

"About time!" Ron shouted with glee, giving Harry a shove as they ran from the classroom, Slytherins in pursuit.

***

In the upcoming days Harry's day wasn't any easier.

The first big event of the year was the Gryffindor Quidditch match against Slytherin.

No ony ha May-Sue replased Daco as te sekker of the Slythin quidich teem, but she was the bast Siker he'd ever seeen az wel. Batter thin e Mugle kud have evver be!

'Viktor Krum couldn't hold a candle to this girl!' Harry thought as she swept under his Firebolt, whipped around him in a spiral for seconds, then pulled up abruptly, holding the quivering snitch in the pearly toes of her right foot.

The bell rang.

Harry swore.

At game's end, the score was Slytherin 150, Gryffindor 0.

***

Hermione still wasn't speaking to Ron, and her mood only became fouler when she read a Rita Skeeter article in Witches' Weekly describing Viktor Krum's lurid entanglements with a Mackled Malaclaw.

***

To everyone's horror, not only had Neville failed to revert back to human form, but he was much more competent as a blue-footed booby than he had ever been as a boy.

"I have to admit," said Snape one day, wrinkling his nose in such distaste he looked like he'd been standing in a particularly foul outhouse, "Neville, this is one of the most effective coitumtriste potions I've ever seen..."

"Squaa!" yelped Neville in gratitude.

"May... I... retain some of your mixture for personal use?" asked Snape with a frown.

Neville bobbed his thin head up and down.

Ginny, of course, was displeased, and began pining for Harry again.

***

On other sides, Dumbledore had seemed distant all year, Hagrid was downright surly to Harry, and Sirius hadn't even written a letter.

At night, in his four-poster, Harry closed his eyes and struggled to remember happier days, when Hogwarts had been a place of joy for him.

'What is happening?' he thought to himself. 'I knew it was going to be hard, because Voldemort's come back, and after last year... the Triwizard tournament, and Cedric, and Moody. And I expected death-eaters, dark magic, serpents, Slytherins, or even me riding into the sunset with the Order of the Phoenix, hand in hand with Ginny, or Cho, or Hermione, or Draco... um, depending on who you ask... but now! What is happening now I cannot understand. It's like Chaos theory or the Delta-Epsilon theorem. It's like the people I've always placed the most trust in are turning their backs on me. It's like everything is totally out of synch. And nobody else seems to notice.'

Unbidden, one of Artaud's rants flew through Harry's mind: 'When confronting the Dark Arts you have structure your answer as an execution of cruelty. And by cruelty I do not mean that you subject your opponent to undue torment, but only that you apply the necessary torment rigorously. It is necessary to execute your intentions with complete resolve. Your resolve is your cruelty. Your cruelty is your intention.'

'If I only knew what my intentions were!' thought Harry desperately. 'I wish I knew what I wanted here!'

"I can tell you what you want," a voice dropped, and the drop was as soft as the wind, and hushed like an echo.

Harry opened his eyes. In the darkness before him hung a dim light and the dim lightened, and the light frowned, though sadly, and somehow bound tightly upward, proud and glowing, and shaking with a quiet resolve.

It was Professor Artaud.