A/N: This just kind of came to me this morning when I was running out to carpool to school, because I was running really late. I know that I need to work on my other fics, too, and I am working on them, but oh, well. Please R/R!
Disclaimer: As much as I wish that I owned them, J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter and K. A. Applegate owns Animorphs.
The American Animagi
Harry Potter, a fifteen-year-old wizard raised his wand at the pincushion he was supposed to be transfiguring into a porcupine. Hermione, one of his best friends who had already changed her pincushion into a porcupine and back, watched him and a tall, gangly boy with a shock of red hair try to complete their assignments.
"Damn it!" the red-headed boy yelled. His pincushion had finally changed, but his hand had been in the way. There were three sharp needles sticking into his hand.
"Ron!" Hermione exclaimed, looking at the boy. "Watch your mouth!"
Harry rolled his, eyes, sick of his two best friends' fighting. He knew that they were completely and totally in love with each other, but were too dense to realize it.
"Okay, I'm going to try again," Harry announced before Hermione and Ron's argument could progress any farther. A look of concentration washed over his face, and he flicked his wrist. A line of sparks shot out of his wand, and suddenly, the pincushion was not on the table anymore.
In its place was a large spaceship.
All the sounds in the room stopped, and everybody stared at the spaceship in the center of the room, their eyes slowly moving to Harry, who was looking dumbstruck at the hunk of metal in front of him.
"Mr. Potter!" Harry's teacher, Professor McGonagall exclaimed. "What is that?"
Ron, who was rubbing his wounded hand, dropped his mouth open, amazed. "Harry, you never told me you could do that!"
Harry said nothing, his eyes transfixed on the ship.
"Professor McGonagall only said to transfigure it into a porcupine, Harry," Hermione scolded.
"Harry? How do you explain yourself?" Professor McGonagall demanded, now angry with him for his silence.
"I– I don't know…" Harry stuttered.
Just then, there was a magnificent clanking sound, and a door on the side of the ship started creaking open. The children gasped, and Professor McGonagall gaped for a second before hurrying out the door to go find the headmaster of the school, Albus Dumbledore.
The door to the classroom slammed open, and little Professor Flitwick stormed in, saying, "What's all this noise? You're disturbing my fourth year stu–" He stopped as soon as he saw the spaceship opening, and fell into a dead faint.
However, none of the students took note of the tiny teacher on the floor. They were too busy looking at the amazing site in front of them.
A screeching, angry bird shot out of the ship and started flying around the room. It finally landed on the table near Harry, Hermione, and Ron. It glared at them, its feathers puffed out and its eyes angry.
"Hedwig?" Harry asked stupidly. The bird looked at him and fluffed his feathers even more.
Also coming out of the ship, following the bird, were two guys that looked to be about sixteen. One was slightly shorter than average, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a dark complexion. The other was tall, strongly built, and had paler brown hair and haunted brown eyes. There were both looking around in confusion.
Wondering where their teacher was, some of the fourth year students from next door wandered into the room. Among them was Ginny, Ron's younger sister, who also had hair the color of flame.
"Ron? What's that?" she asked, her voice faint and disbelieving.
"Menderash?" the shorter boy asked, calling inside the spaceship. "What happened? Where are we? Did we die? I didn't feel any impact."
"We're not dead," the taller boy answered. "Rachel and Tom aren't here."
The shorter boy looked at the other one sadly, and then stepped back. "Dude! Jake! You're young!"
"I wish," Harry heard the one called Jake mutter. Then, more loudly, Jake said, "Well, I would hope so… I am only nineteen."
Ron started snorting, trying to hide his giggles. The boys could not have been older than seventeen.
"No, man, I mean you look young. Like you did during the war."
"Huh?" Jake looked down and yelped. He took a closer look at the other boy, too.
"Marco, for once you're right… What the heck is happening?" he exclaimed.
"They're Americans," Hermione whispered to Harry, Ron, and Ginny. "Aren't their accents funny?"
Where are we? What happened to me? Why is my body not as old anymore?
The room became silent. There had been a voice, but no one had actually heard it. It was almost like it had just sounded inside their heads. Unconsciously, Ginny crept backwards, nearer to Harry. Ron put a hand on Hermione's shoulder.
"What was that?" Neville Longbottom, another student in the disrupted Transfigurations class, asked, his voice quavering.
Marco shook his head. "Would you look at that, Tobias, they don't know who we are! I mean, you're the only talking red-tailed hawk around, right? What far corner of the earth are we on?"
Two more people walked out of the ship, leaning on each other for support. They both looked to be in their mid-twenties. One was a surprisingly beautiful woman, the other a very fit man.
"Why aren't we dead?" the woman asked, her French accent very noticeable.
"Why, she must have gone to Beauxbatons!" Ron exclaimed. "I wonder if she knows Fleur…"
Hermione turned around and slapped him.
"Blimey, Hermione, what was that for?"
Marco started giggling. "Blimey? Blimey?! Alright, I think that answers my question. We're in England. And England is not in the middle of nowhere. Therefore, they must know about us. Yes, we've been gone for six months, but still… We're in the history books. And I have my own television show!" Marco stopped, beaming at his own words. "So, why don't they know who we are?"
"What's telebijon?" Ron questioned.
Gee, Marco, maybe it's because some people actually have lives that don't revolve around worshipping world heroes and catching the latest episode of your show.
"There's that voice again," Harry muttered, trying to make sense of it. Ron scratched his head nearby.
"Hey, you!" Marco said, looking at Harry. "Where exactly are we, and why don't you guys know who we are?"
"They're bloody insane!" Ron whispered under his breath, earning a glare from Hermione. "They belong in St. Mungo's! Harry is the only one here that's in any history books."
Harry stared at him, puzzled. Finally, he said, "You're at Hogwarts School of Wizardry. I've never heard of you before in my life."
See? They don't care, Marco, the voice-that-was-not-a-voice said again, a bit of sarcastic triumph touching the grief in it.
The older woman spoke again. "This makes no sense."
"Damn right," the man said, speaking for the first time.
"What do you mean, 'School of Wizardry'?" Jake asked, his face tired.
"They're Muggles," Ginny whispered. "They don't know about us!"
Then, two things happened at once. Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of the school, strode through the door, Professor McGonagall following quickly behind him. At the same time, something that was definitely not human stepped off the ship.
Ron, still clueless, asked, "Since when were there such things as blue centaurs?"
"It's obviously not a centaur," Hermione explained, her voice becoming slightly bossy. "For one, there is no such thing as a blue centaur. Also, centaurs have the tails of horses, not of scorpions, and centaurs only have one set of eyes."
What she said was true: The thing that had just stepped off the ship had the same basic shape as a centaur, but had a long tail with a wicked blade on the end, blue fur covering its entire body, no mouth, too many fingers, and a pair of eyes on top of its head on swiveling stalks.
Jake, I seem to have recovered my Andalite body, a new voice said. Once again, the Hogwarts students could not hear it as they normally would, but instead heard it inside their heads. The humans that had come off of the ship did not seem to care in the slightest. However, they seemed just as amazed by the not-a-centaur as the students were.
"Menderash?" Jake asked.
Yes, it is me. I do not know what happened. The ship is not working. We were not going at such a velocity that we could have entered Z-space and exited again so quickly. There was no way that we could have arrive here on earth so quickly. According to physics, we could not have without coming here to find that this planet had aged years. We also could not have gone this quickly without dying. Also, we would have hit the Blade ship. The curvature of space…
Harry felt his eyes glazing over. He looked around, and everybody else, including the two called Jake and Marco, seemed to be falling asleep as well. Only Hermione gazed raptly at the blue thing, nodding in understanding.
"Well, of course your ship is not working," she said. "Electricity doesn't work on Hogwarts grounds."
"Who are you, and how did you get here?" Dumbledore finally broke the silence and the voice's monologue. Harry decided that the voiceless voice was coming from the centaur-thing.
"That's what we're trying to find out," Jake said, stepping forward. Harry could not help but notice how sad he looked. "My name is Jake Berenson." He stopped, obviously waiting for some sort of reaction.
No one said anything. Dumbledore just looked at him thoughtfully.
"Jake Berenson… You know, leader of the Animorphs?" Marco suggested brightly. "And I'm Marco, by the way. The smart, funny, cute Animorph…" he said, at first grinning at Parvati and Lavender, who were two of Harry's classmates, but trailing off when there was no reaction.
"Animorph is not a word," Hermione said.
"I agree with her on that one!" Ron said, nodding earnestly.
Marco looked around incredulously. Jake's sad face seemed to have lifted, and now he just looked confused. Finally, he said, "Tobias, would you like to show them what an Animorph is? They don't look dangerous…"
Fine, the first soundless voice said bitterly. The great bird hopped off Harry's table and fluttered to the ground by Jake, Marco, the other two humans, and the blue thing's feet.
Surprisingly, it started to stretch upwards. Its feathers started sucking into its body, until it looked like a plucked chicken.
"Somebody get Madam Pomfrey!" Ginny wailed. All of the students were making sounds of horror and disgust. Only Professor Dumbledore kept calm.
"He's almost like an Animagi, Minerva," Dumbledore commented to the horrified Professor McGonagall. "His transformations are just slightly… more disturbing."
Professor McGonagall ran out of the room, her face green and her hands holding her mouth shut.
The bird finally stopped changing, and looked to be a boy about Marco and Jake's age. "Hey!" he said, now very confused. "I'm older in this body. I'm usually only thirteen when I morph human, because that's how old I was when I acquired me."
Everybody, spaceship people and students, exchanged confused looks.
"He's an Animagi!" Hermione said. "But that couldn't be possible, because there have only been six registered Animagi this century… Professor McGonagall and five others. And then Rita Skeeter was an unregistered Animagi… And– Oh!"
Harry had elbowed her and Ron had covered her mouth before she could disclose the secret that there were also three unregistered Animagi: Harry's father James Potter, James' best friend Sirius Black, and James' betrayer Peter Pettigrew.
"Animagi?" the older man asked. "By the way, I'm Sergeant Santorelli."
"Oh, yes, and I'm Jeanne Gerard," the woman said.
"Tobias," the bird-human offered.
The blue things said, Menderash.
"Yes, an Animagi," Hermione repeated, sounding exasperated. "You can turn into animals, therefore you are an Animagi.
Dumbledore's twinkling blue eyes darkened in confusion. These people obviously had no idea about magic; they were Muggles. However, one of them was an Animagi.
There was a popping noise, and standing next to the people from the spaceship was a short African girl, also about sixteen. Her face was twisted in anger.
"–away from me, Ronnie you stupid jerk!" she yelled. She slapped the air in front of her. She had obviously been in the middle of a fight when she appeared in the middle of the room.
"I didn't do anything!" Ron said, turning red and running his hand through his red hair. "Honestly! I didn't!"
"You can't Apparate into Hogwarts." Hermione said flatly.
Jake opened his mouth, closed it again, and then took a deep breath. "Cassie?" he asked.
Her eyes went wide. "Jake? What are you doing here? Where am I? What happened? I can't believe–"
She was cut off by three more consecutive pops, followed by utter chaos.
With the first pop, a tall girl with long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes appeared in front Tobias. His eyes popped open, and he only said one word. "Rachel?" he asked.
She turned around, grinned, and threw herself into his arms. He brought his mouth to hers, and they started kissing in front of everybody. Not that anyone really noticed, however. They were too busy being astonished by the next few happenings.
The second pop caused a boy that looked like Jake, but slightly different and ten years older to show up. "I will be free!" were his first words.
Conflicting emotions ran over Jake's face.
"Yeerk," Marco hissed. His shoulders started bulking up, and his face turned rubbery. He was changing shapes.
"I'm not dead?" the new man asked. "I'm not dead!" He turned around and saw Jake there, looking back and forth from the blonde girl called Rachel to the new man. "Hey, Midget," the man said.
"Tom!" Jake exclaimed, and fell into a dead faint on the floor.
Cassie ran to Jake's side, checking for his pulse and holding his head.
The third pop placed a handsome eighteen-year-old boy in front of all the Hogwarts students. He was shaking like a leaf. "V-V-V-Voldemort!" he stuttered.
The students shrieked.
"Don't say the name!" Ron bellowed.
The terrified boy looked around, and stopped quivering. "But… Triwizard Cup… Portkey… He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named… Cemetery… Unforgivable Curse…"
Harry's face became white and he fell to the floor near Jake, also out cold.
A translucent head pushed up from the floor, soon followed by a body. The Fat Friar, one of the Hogwarts ghosts, had just entered the room to see all the commotion. "Oh!" he said. "Has young Cedric come back to haunt Hogwarts with the rest of us ghosts? I'll willingly share the Hufflepuff tower with you!" He floated forward through many of the students until he reached the new boy called Cedric.
"No… I think I'm alive…" Cedric said, his voice faint. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he, too, fell in a heap on the floor.
"Enough!" Dumbledore exclaimed. He raised his wand into the air and water started falling in the room. The cool wetness on their faces woke Jake, Harry, and Cedric up.
"We need to figure out what has happened," Dumbledore said firmly. The three boys rubbed their eyes and sat up, dazed.
"Wait," Jake commanded. "If Cassie, Rachel, Marco, Tobias, and I are here, then where is Ax?"
"Yeah, what was with him and The One?" Tobias questioned, having finally removed his lips from Rachel's.
"He's not dead," Rachel stated. "I never saw him."
"Huh?" Marco asked.
"Ellimist let me be special and see everybody who died. He never died. Tom and that guy did, though," she answered, pointing first at Tom, then at Cedric.
"Then I will repeat," Jake said, "where is Ax?"
There was another pop, louder than before, and smoke swirled through the room. When it finally cleared, there was a short, fifteen-year-old girl wearing jeans and a plain pink T-shirt standing in the center of the room. She had long gold hair, green eyes, and was holding a laptop. Marco leered at her. She smiled at everyone in the room.
"Me?" she said, still smiling. "I'm right here."