Title: False Alarm
Author: Nopporn Wongrassamee aka the Evil Author
Email Address: EvilAuthoraol.com
Spoilers: Everything!
Summary: Sunnydale as seen from the Wizarding world's point of view.
Disclaimer: Characters and concepts belong to their owners who I'm too lazy to list.
"Bloody hell!" Harry Potter yelped as his scrying bowl flashed crimson. "Tonks!"
"What is it, Harry?" Nymphadora Tonks asked as she rushed over to the junior Auror.
After graduating from the Auror academy, Harry had been partnered with Tonks so that the more experienced Auror could show Harry the ropes. Although Harry had defeated Voldemort, he was still the "new kid" in the eyes of his immediate boss. Thus he had been assigned magical monitoring duty. The job consisted entirely of looking into a charmed bowl of water looking for criminals using wands, underaged magic, and anything that might be interesting.
The scrying bowl was now telling Harry that he was looking at an Apocalypse level event. What was it the Chinese said about interesting?
"Tonks, it looks like the end of the world," Harry told her. "There was this huge magic pulse, some kind of spell I can't make heads or tails of... whoa, there's another one!"
"Where is it Harry?"
"It looks like... America? Southern California to be exact." Harry frowned in thought. "Either this scrying bowl is more sensitive than I thought, or something big is going on."
"Southern California?" Tonks said. She sighed. "It's Sunnydale, isn't it?"
"I think so." Harry noticed Tonks relax. "What?"
"Don't worry, Harry," Tonks told him. "It's just another false alarm."
"Another... what do you mean by another false alarm?"
"It's Sunnydale, Harry," Tonks began, waving her wand over Harry's bowl to shut off the alarm. "We've been getting these alerts for years, and nothing's ever come of it. The American Department of Magic claims that they have everything under control and nothing is really going on. Apparently, the town's built on some kind of mystical convergence, which is in earthquake country to boot. The combination creates some kind of freak lensing effect sometimes so that when a witch or wizard there casts a spell, it's signature get amplified several orders of magnitude."
Harry frowned at his now quiescent bowl. "That didn't look like any spell I'm familiar with."
"The Yanks practice some odd spells," Tonks said with a shrug. "Anyway, it's well outside our jurisdiction. We'll just file a report and forward a copy to International Relations. Nothing ever comes of it, anyway."
The next day, pictures of the Sunnydale Crater were splashed all over both the Muggle and Magical newspapers. The American Department of Magic put out an official statement that Sunnydale had suffered from an "explosive de-mystification" resulting in a vacuum into which the town had fallen. The Department of Magic however had known ahead of time that this would happen so had discreetly evacuated the town with a few well placed spells. They were so successful that the actual body count from the collapse was in the single digits.
However, the Quibbler disagreed. The magazine trumpeted a story in which the Department of Magic played little if any part at all. The Quibbler story claimed that Sunnydale was actually built on an interdimensional doorway to Hell, and that the doorway was welded shut by a "Red Goddess" and three animagi called only by their animal forms of Wolf, Ram, and Hart.
Given the two stories, Harry thought the Quibbler's was less likely. What was next? A invasion by an army of demons to kill one guy?