How Lucius Malfoy Accidentally Destroyed the World
by me
Have you ever considered
He'd had the idea at random during an ordinary Muggle-torturing session in his dungeon. The Muggle had called him something odd, and Lucius had stopped to wonder just what the hell it meant. Muggles were such strange creatures.
"What is an encyclopedia salesman," he'd demanded, "and in what way am I worse than one?"
As the Muggle had explained it to him, Lucius found himself growing more and more awed by these encyclopedia salesmen. They sounded positively... Slytherin, aside from the fact that they were filthy Muggles. It must have been a very lucrative profession indeed.
Then Lucius had had his genius idea: why not sell encyclopedias to Muggles? It sounded quite profitable, and he needed money. Many people assumed that Lucius Malfoy did not want for anything - but he did. He had a lifestyle to support, after all, and the billions and billions of galleons he'd inherited didn't even cover his hair gel expenses.
At first, it had been rather awkward, and he'd had to Avada Kedavra a few of the Muggles when things went sour, but eventually he got the hang of it. Muggles were extremely easy to manipulate, given their very low average intelligence. Selling encyclopedias wasn't as lucrative as Lucius thought it would be, since he could only sell so many in a day - but he was a genius when it came to being a social parasite, so he eventually found a way to improve it.
One day, Lucius arranged for an accident in the Time Room of the Department of Mysteries (accidents happened frequently around the Department of Mysteries) involving Augustus Rookwood, Evan Rosier, Broderick Bode, Lily Evans, some Time Turners, an exploding duck, a shrunken head that would later accompany Ernie Prang on the Knight Bus when he left the Department of Mysteries, and a Bell Jar full of Time that had a tendency to get stuck on people's heads because Rosier had spelled it to do so, secretly. Naturally, the whole area was cordoned off and the remaining Time Turners were moved, temporarily, and not put under heavy guard like they should have been because many wizards, particularly those working for the Ministry, were extremely irrational and illogical people. This allowed Lucius to steal several Time Turners for his own personal use.
Now he could walk around several times in one day and sell a lot more encyclopedias than before. And that meant he could make a lot more money than before.
Things were looking up.
the advantages of owning
A typical working day for Lucius Malfoy went like this:
Lucius strode through the halls of Malfoy Manor, looking extremely regal (as always) and perfectly groomed (as always) and like his head was the source of all hair gel in the world, rather than the destination of it (as always).
He took a large, bottomless bag full of encyclopedia sets from a cupboard and went into the secret vault under his drawing room with it. The room was filled with all the highly illegal things that the Malfoys had accumulated over the years, like bottled Dementors, Muggle-decapitating toilets, and a shelf full of Horcruxes belonging to various Dark Lords.
In the very back, there was a box. Lucius opened it, and a golden light shone from it. The Time Turners he'd stolen were there; he took one and turned it, and with a whoosh he was thrown back three hours into the past.
He Apparated into a Muggle neighbourhood with the bottomless bag he'd taken from the cupboard earlier, or later, or whatever. There were rows and rows of little boxes on the hillside, of different colors, and they were all made of ticky tacky, and they all looked the same. The blond man approached one of them and was disgusted by its incredible mundaneness. Then he rang the doorbell.
"Yeah?" said the Muggle that answered. It was in its late forties and wearing a sweater vest, and it looked rather weirded out at Lucius's own (designer) attire.
Lucius sneered down at the filthy, inferior creature. How dare it occupy the same universe as him? How dare it not kill itself for being so abominably, pathetically beneath his sexy, blond-haired, pure-blooded self? It was almost enough to make him vomit.
But he didn't, because he had to save his vomit for after he'd actually spoken to the vile thing.
"Muggle," Lucius said in his most self-important, arrogant tone, "have you ever considered the advantages of owning a complete, four hundred and twenty seven volume set of encyclopedias?"
The Muggle scratched its head, looking confused. Lucius wondered if the question had been too difficult for its defective mind to comprehend. "What the hell is a Muggle?" it asked, eventually. "And what the hell would I need four hundred and twenty seven encyclopedias for?"
"If you had four hundred and twenty seven encyclopedias, you'd be able to look up the word Muggle and thus not have to embarrass yourself by asking stupid questions like that," replied Lucius sagely.
"It's not a stupid question! It's a stupid word, is what it is. Muggle. It sounds like some kind of foreign dessert. Or a pair of binoculars."
"It says that in the four hundred and twenty seven volume encyclopedia set," Lucius offered. "Clearly, the people who publish the encyclopedias think along the same lines as you, Muggle."
The Muggle looked confused again. "But that means you're either calling me a dessert or a pair of binoculars!" it whined. The stupid thing. Why couldn't it just buy the encyclopedias and crawl back into its miserable, mundane, non-massive, non-ancient-and-noble familial dwelling?
"It's, ah, also a term of... great respect, in some cultures." There. That ought to work.
"I don't know," said the Muggle, sounding and looking extremely suspicious. "You've got a funny air about you..."
"I'm an encyclopedia salesman," Lucius reminded him. "We're all a bit funny in the head." If you take up any more of my patience, I'll point Bellatrix to your house and she'll leave you a bit funny in the head.
"I still don't know..."
Lucius sighed. "I'll throw in a free pack of spearmint chewing gum."
"Oh, all right. I'll buy your four hundred and twenty seven volume set of encyclopedias. How much is it, then?"
Taking out his handy Galleons-to-Pounds conversion calculator (with up-to-date exchange rate self-adjustments), Lucius did some quick math. "Twelve and a half thousand pounds," he said.
The Muggle looked at him like he was crazy. "What? You must be mad! I'm not paying twelve and a half thousand pounds for four hundred and twenty seven dumb encyclopedias!" It tried to slam the door in Lucius's face, but Lucius stuck his pimp cane in the doorway to keep it open.
"Oh, no!" he exclaimed. "I am not leaving until I have sold you a set of encyclopedias!" He drew his wand and jabbed it in the Muggle's nose. "Imperio! Buy my encyclopedias, you stupid Muggle!"
"Let me get my chequebook," said the Muggle through the drool that was running down the side of its mouth.
A short time later, Lucius had a cheque written out to 'Pimpca Neman' that he was going to cash at a Muggle bank under one of his many, many fake accounts later that day. As he was leaving the driveway, he saw an identical blond man coming down the sidewalk.
"Hello, Lucius," he said as he passed himself.
"Hello, Lucius," he said back as he passed himself.
Both of them went to more ticky tacky Muggle houses, sold more encyclopedias, ran into Lucius again, went to more ticky tacky Muggle houses, sold more encyclopedias, ran into Lucius again, went to more ticky tacky Muggle houses, sold more encyclopedias, and so on...
a complete, four hundred
Since there was no one to tell him to stop messing around with the Time Turners, Lucius eventually discovered a way to travel further back in time than three hours, and thus sell even more encyclopedias every day and make even more money for his beloved hair gel. He turned one Time Turner, and then he turned the other before the first one ran out. He went back six hours instead of three. It was brilliant; Lucius was a genius. But he already knew that.
Then he had an even better idea: what if he used the Time Turners to create a temporal army of Lucius Malfoys that would spread his encyclopedias across the face of the earth? No one would ever tell him he couldn't afford hundred billion dollar hair gel again.
So he snuck into the Department of Mysteries one night (this was after the Dark Lord fell; Evans and Rosier were dead and Rookwood was in Azkaban, so he couldn't stage another accident using the exploding duck, sadly) and stole every single Time Turner the Ministry had.
There were a lot of them. Lucius needed almost every single one of his bottomless bags to hold all 81,434,660,207,537,746,899 of the Time Turners.
Lucius started used the Time Turners in groups, turning one back three hours and then immediately turning another back three hours, and then another, and another, and so on, until his envisioned army of Luciuses was selling encyclopedias to Muggles throughout the world and at any given time in history.
He was making billions of dollars a minute.
Selling encyclopedias in different eras was very profitable in many other ways, besides the increased gullibility of the Muggles. For one thing, people in general (not that Muggles were really people, of course) were just plain stupider back then. For another, depositing a large amount of money in a Gringotts bank account in the mid-to-late 1700s and letting it sit there meant that he could take it out two hundred years later and be up to his eyeballs in interest.
Genius.
It was so genius that later on, Lucius went back in time and told his ancestors about it so they could do it and make him the money he was raised and pampered with, and then he sent himself a bunch of notes explaining how it worked so he could start doing it earlier than he did, which made him even more money, and then he went further back in time and sold encyclopedias to ancient people, who paid him with huge gold coins the size of hubcaps that he tried to use to get into the Quidditch World Cup in 1994, but the Muggle groundskeeper wouldn't accept them so Lucius just sold him some encyclopedias instead and laughed because he made more money.
He eventually started an encyclopedia franchise, and completely ignored the massive paradox he created with all his time traveling. He was well beyond paradoxes now, actually; the amount of work Time was having to do to keep up with his abuse of it was backbreaking. Especially when he got his various selves, his son, grandson, and even his dead father involved as well.
Business was booming; the Malfoys were making figures that could barely be calculated. Unfortunately, Lucius didn't even think of the ramifications of everyone using all 81,434,660,207,537,746,899 of the Time Turners at once.
Inevitably, something was bound to happen.
and twenty seven volume
In the Department of Mysteries, Augustus Rookwood had discovered something disturbing.
He'd been mapping the History of Time when he found it.
Rookwood looked down at the pattern of arrogant, identical blond men through the course of Time, as per his map.
For the last 1,223,302,397 years, there was an unbroken chain of self-important ponces with pimp canes who strongly resembled Lucius Malfoy strutting around the world selling four hundred and twenty seven volume sets of encyclopedias. And it was growing. In reverse.
What would happen if the chain of Malfoys reached the beginning of time, he had no idea. But it was probably going to be really, really bad.
Unfortunately, Rookwood never got to do anything about it, because two minutes later an accident (they happened frequently around the Department of Mysteries) involving himself, Evan Rosier, Broderick Bode, Lily Evans, some Time Turners, an exploding duck, a shrunken head that would later accompany Ernie Prang on the Knight Bus when he left the Department of Mysteries, and a Bell Jar full of Time that had a tendency to get stuck on people's heads because Rosier had spelled it to do so, secretly, destroyed all his time maps and erased his memories of the last week.
set of encyclopedias
As it turned out, it was Scorpius Malfoy who brought Lucius's fantastically genius encyclopedia scheme crashing down in ruins, literally. One day, he went a little too far back in time, and he used one too many Time Turners, and Time just couldn't fix itself anymore, so Scorpius accidentally tore the very fabric of reality apart. His soul mate, Albus Potter, was devastated. That is, until he turned into a sound, sprouted wires for hands, started vomiting quills, and generally experienced the worst acid trip in history before ceasing to exist - just like everybody else.
In 1995, Cedric Diggory's head morphed into a muffin and he started singing the blues after being hit with the Killing Curse, while Wormtail melted into a puddle of spinach-flavoured ice cream and Voldemort's makeshift body sprouted enormous hairy arms that he used to strangle Harry Potter at last, though Harry Potter had already turned into a pile of confetti, both before and after Voldemort killed him.
In 1992, Ginny Weasley wrote in Tom Riddle's diary and discovered that it was actually a mental link to Harry Potter's scar in the year 1996, when Harry's legs had turned into wheels. Ginny comforted him as best she could until her head split open and Peeves came out of it, followed by a nine-year-old Teddy Lupin in a Halloween costume and Prongs' antlers.
Before that, in the year 2018, Scorpius Malfoy was hit by the 1835 Hogwarts Express while standing on the Muggle side of the Platform Nine and Three Quarters barrier, saying goodbye to his parents, who were yogurt containers from the 1980s. Also during that year, Harry Potter received his first Hogwarts letter, which read, "I'll throw in a free pack of spearmint chewing gum." The Dursleys were long gone; they had never been there in the first place, and they had left anyway in 1314.
During the Battle of the Department of Knees, as it was temporarily known, Sirius Black fell through the Death Archway. However, he just came out the other side, unharmed. It was a miracle. But when he stood up, he was crushed by Walburga Black's painting, which fell off the wall at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place a week later. Also in 1982: the Lestranges and Barty Crouch were imprisoned for stage diving at a Hobgoblins concert without a sufficiently large crowd, which was an automatic life sentence, and killed immediately before being granted parole and escaping. They were hailed as martyrs by the Voldemorts, who were followers of the Dark Wizard Eater Death.
While Dumbledore and Snape walked under the gardens during the Yule Ball, talking about Voldemort, Bellatrix Lestrange and Molly Weasley duelled on top of their heads, because 1994 and 1998 had overlapped by accident. Snape's nose dripped Sirius Black's motorcycle and Dementors made sweet depressing love in the sky as Celesta Warbeck, an enormous, stunningly beautiful stone brick, electrocuted people and turned them into dead fruit flies every time she opened her mouth.
In 1992, Lucius tried to get rid of his remaining encyclopedias by giving them all to Ginny Weasley. Unfortunately, it killed her because Bellatrix was living in his encyclopedias and didn't like being disturbed. Lucius went on trial before a bag of popcorn and was eventually thrown out of the courtroom for transforming into Horace Slughorn for thirty seconds. Slughorn himself died that very day before the week before the weekend of the week he died, and it was determined that he died of hair loss. When Lucius's head was chopped off for treason against the Kingdom of Weasel, it fell into 1995, where it watched Dolores Umbridge carve every single word in the four hundred and twenty seven volume encyclopedia set into Dobby the house elf's favourite socks with a blood quill while presiding over a court of gibbering little Cornelius Fudges.
Rookwood recovered his lost memories at last, just moments after reality collapsed; he remembered how, during the attempt to get the Prophecy about Potter almost five hundred and sixty years ago, a mountain troll had come into the Department of Mysteries and smashed all the Prophecies, which were toilets on shelves. Then Nagini came out of Ronald Weasley's armpit in 1996, soared through the air, and vanished into Bathilda Bagshot in 1997, the same year that all eight hundred of Voldemort's Horcruxes simultaneously imploded.
Unspeakable Evan Rosier and his friend Wilkes stole Time Turners from the Department of Mysteries and went back to the dawn of time so they could ride the massive wave of surreal insanity into nonexistence, using Mad-Eye Moody's severed leg as a surfboard. Rosier started deforming like Stretch Armstrong, and Wilkes's head turned into a pumpkin with no face on it, so he had to punch a big hole in the front to see, which made all his brains dribble out, and they generally had great fun until Moody jumped from 1981 to the dawn of time to get his leg back. Then the three of them had even more great fun, with Rosier and Wilkes running from Moody, who was shooting severed legs at them and shouting "TNATSNOC ECNALIGIV!" because the words were going into his mouth instead of coming out, and they were waving his spell around at him and laughing hysterically, and then all three of them fell into the Bell Jar full of Time and vanished.
When Harry Potter arrived in the Forbidden Forest to die by Voldemort's hand, he instead found the entire Malfoy family sitting at a table there, having a family reunion over piles and piles of gold and encyclopedias.
"Have you ever considered the advantages of owning a complete, four hundred and twenty seven volume set of encyclopedias?" all of the Dracos chorused, and there were so many of them that the sheer noise blew Harry's eardrums out.
In the end, a great black void opened up in the sky and started sucking everything into it. Only nobody knew it, because when they looked at it, it sucked their eyeballs right out of their heads, as well as their ability to comprehend images, and then their brains in general, and then the rest of them. Two of the last people to go were Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, because the vortex hadn't sucked in the part of Destiny that controlled Prophecies yet, and so those two were still stuck together, up to the waist in unreality, trying to strangle each other.
"I will kill you before I cease to exist, Potter!" Voldemort screamed.
"I'll avenge all the lives you've destroyed!" Harry shot back heroically. "This is your fault anyway! I know it because you're evil and everything is your fault!" He squeezed Voldemort's neck harder, but nothing happened.
"Foolish brat! My neck is far stronger than yours! I looked up some neck-strengthening magic in one of Lucius's encyclopedias for just such an occasion!"
"What?" said Harry, temporarily dumbfounded.
SKKRCRRIICK.
"Stupid boy, falling for my tricks as usual..." Voldemort let Harry Potter's limp body fall into the vortex, and then he threw his head back and laughed coldly. "I've won! Ha ha ha! No one can stop me now!" In his euphoria, he forgot, briefly, that he was about to be sucked into a void of nothing. "The Prophecy has been fulfilled, and now I can -"
With a slurping sound, Voldemort vanished into nonexistence.
The very last person to disappear was Lucius Malfoy. He'd been weathering it out in Malfoy Manor, but that had fallen apart in either 1917 or 1462, along with the rest of the earth itself, and now he was being sucked into the void after Potter and Voldemort. However, Lucius managed to jam one of his encyclopedias into the mouth of the vortex (the increasingly unrealistic deformation of reality had made it big enough to do this) and he clung to it for dear life.
For a long time, Lucius was able to hang on, and although most of his very expensive designer clothes were ripped off and he was left all but naked, it was all right because he kept in shape and was, therefore, extremely easy upon the eyes - but then something terrible happened: his hair started getting messed up from the suction.
"No!" shrieked Lucius. One of his hands flew to his head immediately, and he nearly fell into the vortex, but it was worth it to smooth his hair back into its proper perfection. "Much better -"
Just as he grasped the encyclopedia with both hands again, Lucius saw something come hurtling toward him out of what remained of reality. It was very small, but it was moving extremely quickly thanks to the suction of the vortex below. If it kept going the way it was going, it would hit him right in the head and likely do horrible things to his perfect hair.
He threw up one arm to protect himself and his expensively gelled hair, but the object was too small to easily block, and he missed. Fortunately, it hit him in the forehead instead of in the hair. Unfortunately, it hurt, and he yelled and put both hands up to the throbbing injury on his forehead. When he did this, he let go of the encyclopedia and fell backward into the void.
"Noooooooooo!"
The last thing Lucius ever saw was a glimpse, an up-close glimpse, of the object that had hit him. It was a pack of gum with the word SPEARMINT on the front.
Then the void sucked in the rest of the existing universe and closed in on itself, leaving a vacuum of cold, empty nothingness.
The world had ended.
And it was all because Lucius Malfoy wanted to sell encyclopedias to Muggles.
...?
In some very distant corner of nowhere, there was something. A very small, very insignificant, very distinctly dotty something. The only something left in the universe, in fact.
The only thing that remained in the entire universe was Luna Lovegood.
She floated, or fell, whichever it was, through the endless nothing with her eyes closed and her hands behind her head, relaxing and swinging her foot to various beats, unconcerned by the fact that all of reality had been completely annihilated around her, and that she was essentially existing in a state of unreality, falling through an infinitely deep abyss of nothingness.
Really... people ought not to be so narrow-minded as to assume reality is real, she thought as she made up a brand-new song about Vincent Crabbe's socks. Or that unreality is unreal. Or that infinity is infinite, or finity is finite, or fins are finny, or realty is real... Hum. Daddy always says realty is never real with goblins. But I think that's a bit of a generalization, don't you...?
Don't break the fourth wall, Luna, she chastised herself. She was trying to think all of her thoughts in the third person, because it was just fun to do.
Oh dear. I'm very sorry. It's just, the walls are rather crumbly in here right now.
"Crumbly, crumbly, crumbly, crumbly, crumbly..." She paused her song to repeat the word a couple of times, because it was such a delightful word to say. "Crumbly, crumbly, crumbly, crumbly, crumbly..."
Maybe, when she got to wherever she was going, she'd be able to find a replacement for the missing book in the four hundred and twenty seven volume set of encyclopedias she'd bought from the army of Draco Malfoys that had appeared outside her house that one time. She was sure they didn't mean to give her an incomplete set. But seeing as she'd read all the other four hundred and twenty six volumes, the knowledge felt incomplete without the last book.
And Luna continued to drift through the nothingness, once again crooning her ballad about the tragic lives of Crabbe's poor socks, which had been forced to come in contact with his smelly feet.
She wondered if, perhaps, the Dracos would give her a free pack of spearmint gum to make it up to her.
Probably not, but Luna was an optimist, so she was going to hope for the free gum anyway.
Well, have you?
Author's notes: Only you can prevent forests from becoming encyclopedias.