Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition
Round Seven: Muggle me this
Team: Pride of Portree
Chaser 3: Write about a witch or wizard attempting to smuggle (one or more) Muggle technology into Hogwarts.
Optional Prompts:
3.(action) charging an electronic device
7.(word) confusion
13.(word) batteries
Author's Note: Dedicated to Emily.
Also that's how I wanted to have the book's title.
Word Count (Excluding Author Note): 1,844
Betaed by Tee,Aethra, Morna, Jessica and Oni. Thank you so much!
Snapshots of Yesteryear
"Lyra," her father had said, "please remember that I love you; I always have and always will."
One lonely tear left her eye. Those had been her father's last words to her before his death, years ago.
She clutched her mobile phone harder. One would think that the daughter of Draco Malfoy wouldn't be familiar with any Muggle technology, but Lyra was different. She knew much more about it than the average Muggle. She was a technological genius. Her phone was actually one of her own creations, and it wasn't the only thing she had invented. She and her friend, Ariana, had recreated many Muggle devices with a magical twist.
Lyra and Ariana made an incredibly powerful duo. They were the self-proclaimed Technology Experts of Hogwarts. But what else could you expect from the daughter of Astoria and Draco Malfoy and the daughter of Hermione and Severus Snape?
The two girls couldn't be more different, even if they tried; but that hadn't stopped them from becoming best friends.
Lyra was a Slytherin through and through while Ariana was a true Gryffindor. The former had blonde hair and grey-blue eyes, and the latter was the spitting image of her mother. Even their personalities were completely opposite; what both shared were their big hearts and the fierce loyalty they had towards their family and friends.
Lyra's phone was special. It had been her first; a gift from her father, bought in Muggle London. She had modified it, both with magic and using Muggle technology, and she had made it into what she was calling an intelligent phone.
"Ari?"
"Yes?" The girl answered, not looking at her friend. She was too busy preparing for school. Tomorrow was the first of September and they were going to ride the Express to Hogwarts together.
"I have some new pictures on my phone."
Ariana chuckled.
"You always have new pictures on there. That isn't anything new. Every summer you take extra photos to make up for lost time while we're at school. Now, put the phone down and go pack your things. We'll be late again if you don't do it now. You never have time in the morning!"
Lyra frowned.
"You don't understand. These aren't pictures taken by me. I don't know half of the people here! Look! I have one with your father! I couldn't have taken that, he's been dead for almost sixteen years."
Ariana scrambled over to her friend's side.
"My Dad? Where? Show me!" she demanded.
Lyra showed her the picture and Ariana gasped. It really was her father, standing with Lyra and smiling! How was it possible?!
"Lyra? What's going on?"
The girl shook her head.
"I don't know, Ari, but I intend to find out," she said, a determined look on her face. "I'll take this to Hogwarts and I'll search in the Magical Photography section. There must be something there. I'll check the Muggle Technology section too. There must be something that can explain this phenomenon. You and I know better than anyone else how large the library is and how many books there really are,"said Lyra. 'More than ten times the number of books visible to the naked eye,' she thought.
Ariana widened her eyes.
"You can't do that! It's forbidden to bring Muggle devices into Hogwarts; you know what the headmistress said: the magic interferes with the way they are made and that makes them behave weirdly. Remember the car Ronald Weasley and Harry Potter took to Hogwarts? Mum told us about it," Ariana said with a sad smile. Her mother liked to tell them about her best friends and the adventures they had had when they were children. But the stories always made her melancholic and Ariana knew why. Harry and Ron had been her friends, and they had died right in front of her; a horrifying picture forever printed in her mind. Maybe that was the reason she told so many stories, to try to bring the good memories to the fore and keep the bad ones away.
Lyra sighed.
"Yes, I know the story, Ariana. But what do you want me to do? Go to Headmistress McGonagall and ask her to make an exception for me? To let me bring my phone with me? That's not gonna happen. The first thing that will happen is your mother finding out and then my aunt. And I don't fancy Aunt Daphne finding out that I'm a Muggle technology genius and that I have built a partially magical phone. My life would become even more complicated than it already is. You know how my aunt is."
Ariana did know; Daphne Greengrass, nicknamed the 'Ice Queen of Slytherin' in school, had fully embraced her frosty nature as an adult. Ever since her sister, Lyra's mother, had died during Lyra's birth in a Muggle hospital, she had hated Muggles and everything Muggle-related with a passion. Which included Lyra.
Astoria should have gone to St. Mungo's, but she had been away on holiday at the time and there hadn't been any magical hospitals nearby. Lyra had decided to enter the world two months earlier than planned and so a Muggle hospital had been the only option.
Her father hadn't blamed anyone for her mother's death, least of all his daughter. But, after her father had died from unknown causes and she had to move in with her aunt, everything changed for young Lyra.
She couldn't understand how her aunt could change so drastically from being neutral towards blood status to hating Muggles and Lyra often blamed herself for her change, despite the fact that Ariana and her mother often told her that it wasn't her fault.
"Lyra," said Ariana, putting a hand on her shoulder, "that's not going to happen okay? I won't tell the headmistress anything. I'll even help you smuggle it into Hogwarts," she finished and Lyra's face broke into a huge smile.
The two had some hard work before them, since it was nearly impossible to smuggle contraband items into Hogwarts. The headmistress's enforced ban on Muggle technology and Zonko novelty products was severely more stringent than the late Headmaster Dumbledore's bans had been from their parents' time. This was due to a prank that had gone wrong six years earlier, which had resulted in many wounded and one dead. The girls had no idea who had done it, or why, or what exactly had happened after. What they did know was that now that it was nearly impossible to sneak certain objects past the front gates of Hogwarts.
Ariana had the mission to distract the very old Mr. Filch and his new assistant, Miss Gray. It seemed that she was the only student they liked, while they detested Lyra for her nature and general disrespect of the rules.
Lyra had put her phone in her bra, just like she had seen in the Muggle spy movies Ariana had taken her to watch. She was confident that Filch wouldn't check her there, and with Ari distracting Miss Gray, Lyra was positive she could get past that part of the checkpoint. They only needed a way to pass the magical sensors and they could both breathe easily again.
Ari had stayed up all night figuring out how the sensors worked and collaborated with Lyra on how best to modify the phone to make it invisible to them.
They were exhausted, but their hard work payed off when the two of them passed with the phone right through the sensors and nothing happened.
They had succeeded! Now all they had to do was to keep the phone well hidden and hopefully, not get caught while they searched in the stacks of the Restricted Section, where the books on Muggle technology had been relegated.
Many days passed normally; no one could tell that the two girls had a secret.
"Lyra! What are you doing with the phone out?" hissed Ariana.
The girl in question shrugged. "There's no one here. They're all at the Quidditch game, and I need to charge it."
"And where are you going to do that?"
Lyra smirked.
"I came prepared. I bought an emergency charger that only requires regular batteries, which I took from your house before we left for Kings Cross. They have to last until I go home for Christmas, though. I do hope we'll find something better before then," she said with a small cringe at the word 'home.' Life wasn't pleasant when one lived with Daphne Greengrass.
And, after a few weeks, they did find something in the library, but at first they thought it was too fantastic to be true even in their magical world.
The idea that there were many alternate future universes was well established in the Wizarding World. Many magical researchers used various methods to search for them. The idea of there being just one inconsistent universe that existed in a continuing state of flux and could change without warning was one the girls hadn't heard before, however.
'The past was set in stone. You make your own future' was the saying. There was no confusion as to what that meant; no changing the past.
And yet, the books they had read, and after having talked via owl with the author of one of them, "Universes Change: The Future is the Past, With Photos," they had reached one conclusion: the idea was more than just highly probable, it was actually true. It had to be. How could they explain the pictures otherwise? How could the phone hold pictures of Lyra and Ariana's fathers smiling at the camera or Ariana and her parents together for their tenth anniversary? Their universe was the past of the one they had seen in the pictures. It wasn't a different universe, it was the history of the other one. Because the phone was a Muggle object despite of all the magical modifications, it captured the actual present along with the events that led to it. Lyra decided that she had to use it to take pictures; pictures that would show them the way to the future they had glimpsed. It was a future they both needed to reach.
It didn't take long before both of them were ready to do it. It only took looking at the picture that showed Lyra with her grandparents looking lovingly at her, with both parents on either side of her, and the picture with Ariana in the middle of the Golden trio, whole and alive, with her father on the right. If they could make the pictures happen in real life, it would make every risk worth it.
They still didn't know how they were going to do it. They still had a lot to learn; books to read and people to ask, but they weren't going to give up. It had taken them just six months to create a phone that showed them a future they both couldn't live without. All that was left was to reach that future, and make their families whole again.