21 Kids + 4 Men + 1 Woman = ...Trouble

Once there was a girl named Hermione. She had some problems, shall we say, but none of them were serious. Well, none of them were too serious. Her biggest problem was multiplied by sixteen, as she and her husband Ron had spent the majority of their marriage to date in the sack (the rest was spent in the delivery room, if you get my drift). So she and Ron had sixteen kids and were pretty frazzled a lot, as you can imagine.

A vacation seemed to be in order, so when Ron surprised her with two tickets to rent a boat and go boating somewhere in the Polynesian Sea from their home somewhere in Alaska, she accepted. It sounds like a cool idea, right?

Wrong. Simply because, when she and Ron were boating around, a huge wave came up and knocked Ron out of the boat. Hermione watched helplessly as he swam to a nearby island, but, being unable to steer the boat herself, she couldn't rescue him and had to wait to be carried back to the docks where the boats were kept.

When she reached the docks, who should she see but Harry, looking pretty worried and upset. And she, overcome by the stress and worry of the situation, found herself "involved" with Harry. The result of this "involvement" was child number seventeen.

Seventeen children can get to be quite a hassle, as Hermione and Harry soon discovered. Once again, Hermione decided to take a vacation...this time with Harry. Italy seemed like a nice, quiet place to be, especially since there were no open patches of ocean to get blown over in.

Unfortunately, Italy has canals, which you can gondola around in, which is what Hermione and Harry did together. Well, together until Harry fell out and was sucked down through a pipe into the city sewer system. Hermione watched helplessly as this all occurred, but, being unable to steer the gondola, she couldn't rescue him and had to wait until she was gradually washed back to the gondola rental place.

At the gondola rental place, Hermione saw someone who looked vaguely familiar. It turned out to be Neville, who was looking pretty upset. Hermione, overcome by the stress and worry of the situation, found herself "involved" with Neville now. Children numbers eighteen through twenty arrived not long after, and Hermione's stress only increased.

Neville asked her about a vacation one day. Having finally learned from her past few experiences with water and paramours and losing them, Hermione suggested that they not try boating. Neville agreed, and it was soon after that Hermione found herself in Australia on the back of a kangaroo. Yes, a kangaroo is what she found herself on, and it made for quite a bouncy ride, let me tell you.

Neville had more trouble with the bounciness of his kangaroo ride, as was evidenced when he fell off his kangaroo, off some cliffs, and hit the Great Barrier Reef. Hermione watched with terror but, since she couldn't steer her kangaroo any more than she could steer a gondola or a boat, she was forced to sit upon her kangaroo and endure the bouncy ride back to the kangaroo ranch.

At the kangaroo ranch, she saw someone who looked like he could have been a person from her past, though not from the ranch, and as she drew closer she could see that it WASN'T someone from the ranch; in fact, it was a very worried-looking Draco. Owing to the stress and worry of the whole situation, and perhaps some opium, Emma found herself "involved" with Draco. This resulted in child number twenty-one, a vaguely ferret-like child.

Twenty-one children are known as a health hazard under the category of "stress" so it was obvious that Hermione and Draco would go on a vacation at some point. And, since Hermione wasn't quite so sure she liked her ferret-like twenty-first, she decided that they should go boating and maybe lose the child AND Draco.

So Hermione played the whole situation up, packing a picnic lunch and making sure to include cloth napkins in bright checker patterns.

Once out on the boat, Hermione began to get Draco to steer in erratic patterns in the hopes that the boat would capsize. When it finally did, however, all that happened was that the boat's rudder snapped off and they found themselves drifting helplessly around in the ocean.

"Draco, what did you DO?" Hermione asked him in despair. He shook his head with a little ladylike shriek just before they struck an island and were tipped off the boat. Hermione landed in soft sand with a familiar sight of palm trees. She didn't THINK this was California, but who knew?

It was proven NOT to be California, however, when a hermit stumbled out of the dense palm forest at the center of the island. He had a scraggly red beard, and very familiar brown eyes.

"RON!" Hermione cried in shock and astonishment. What would Ron say when he caught sight of Draco and the unmistakably ferret-like child?

The answer was not much. He stared for a minute, making the connection from the child to Hermione and Draco, and then shook his head in confusion. Draco, on the other hand, had managed to read Hermione's cry perfectly and had made the connection in a split second.

"Hey," he began, just as Ron took him by the arm and led him away with a glance over his shoulder at Hermione.

Hermione couldn't hear what they were saying, but the looks on their faces were getting more and more mutinous as time went by.

In the late afternoon, someone splashed up onto the island with a shaking of wet brown hair.

"Hermione!" the person (who was actually Neville) shouted. He had been swimming ever since he had hit the Great Barrier Reef (in hopes that he might eventually catch up with Hermione). He caught sight of Draco and Ron just then, and the ferret-like child, and immediately knew that Hermione wasn't the person he should be making friends with at that point in time. So he made his way over the soft sand to the pair of angry guys and began to acquire the same mutinous look they wore. Hermione, in her frustration, stabbed the ferret-like child to death viciously and felt much better.

That evening, they broke their council of war and came over to talk to Hermione. They still looked pretty pissed off but they stayed calm enough to hear her story as she barbecued the ferret-like child for their dinner (the picnic basket had, sadly, been washed overboard). As she told it, they nodded. Until, that is, she got to the part where Harry had found her in the boat.

"We need to find him!" Ron said decisively. And that was that, as they discovered as he fashioned a rudder for the boat and shoved them all onto it.

Once in Italy, Hermione led them all to the gondola rental place and helped them get a gondola, then to the place in the canal where Harry had disappeared. From down in the sewer pipe, they heard a voice say, "Ooh! Mutant fish!"

"Yep, that would be Harry," Ron sighed and hauled him out of the sewer pipe with a fishing pole and such rig. He proceeded to give Harry a three-second bath in the canal before letting him onto the gondola.

Now all that remained for Hermione was Judgment Day, as far as she was concerned, when Harry would find out what had happened and also be mad at her. According to Ron's wishes, they all went back to Hermione's house (which was, surprisingly, still standing after the twenty kids had been left alone in it) and held another council-of-war. After a few hours, Hermione could no longer stand the suspense of not knowing what they were going to do to her so she abandoned her kids to them and ran off to America. There she lived alone for a while before she met Ron's older brother, Bill, and decided he was her lifelong love. Of course, they got married and live happily ever after to this day...childless.