Chapter One
Sneaky Boots

"Now where is that blasted thing?"

"There's no time to find it now, Minerva." said Professor Dumbledore. His voice was stern without being unkind. Professor McGonagall, hearing the urgency in his voice, quit her search of the office and followed him out the door.

As the door shut, it carried a breeze in from the window, lifting the drapes to expose a pair of worn boots. The office was cool and still for several moments before the boots stirred.

These boots belonged to Theodore Nott, a tall, thin lad of the same year as the famous Mr. Potter. Theo and Harry Potter hardly knew one another and wouldn't look twice if one came into the room where the other was studying, for instance. They knew of one another, though. But their acquaintance carried neither hostility nor friendship.

But this is not the matter here.

Here, we need only to begin with the boots.

Theo wasn't entirely convinced that the boots really were magic. His father gave them to him as a gift two Christmases ago. At the time, they were several sizes too large and although the younger Theo enjoyed stomping around in them that morning, they quickly found a home in the back of his closet, where they sat undisturbed for more than a year.

That is, they remained there until the beginning of this school year - Theo's fourth - when they inexplicably turned up in Theo's school trunk. Neither of his parents admitted to putting them there, but his father did tell him, on the way to the train station in London, that they were not ordinary boots. They had been his own boots from when he was in school at the Durmstrang Institute. He claimed that they were enchanted and called them Loki's loafers - but quickly assured him that in addition to not being loafers, they also had no connection whatsoever to the demigod. What they were, was a leather so soft that they felt like going barefoot. And even though they did have heels and soles, these too we so soft that they padded gently across the floor making no sound at all.

His father had gone on and on about other powers. Invisibility. Silence. Confidence. They imparted everything, if his father was to be believed. But unlike every other magical artifact Theo put his hands on, he chose never to investigate the claims his father made about the boots. It was simpler this way. It assured him that he would not have to contradict his dad, which was either unwise or futile.

Nevertheless, here he was, standing in Loki's Loafers, alone in Professor McGonagall's office and completely without her knowledge. He had slipped in earlier in the evening while the professor was holding office hours for her students. He arranged it with a younger boy from his house,Vlad Rodick, to cause a distraction for him without letting the boyish oaf know just why he needed it done. Despite not being good for much else, Vlad was, at least capable of tumbling a teacup at the right moment and making a mess of helping to recover it. Besides, Vlad was a fun kid and it brightened him to be involved with anything that one of the older boys devised.

Once he was in, Theo moved behind the drapes and only had to be still and quiet until she closed up shop about an hour later leaving him alone and unattended.

Still, he stood, listening, in his magical boots.

The door closed noisily and locked from the outside. He could hear the keychain clank against the door once before the lock engaged. Then he waited some more. A second time he heard a much softer click - then a pause - then another click. It sounded like the lock's tumblers, but he couldn't be sure. It was accompanied by no other sounds, and when he finally dared to peek around the drapes, there was nothing but the empty room.

He knew McGonagall had a time turner hidden somewhere. He had seen Hermione with it last year and then used his father's position at the Ministry to get some information from there as well. McGonagall had requisitioned the device from the Ministry for use by a star student for the duration of last year. He also knew that it had yet to be returned and the Ministry was growing concerned.

What he didn't know was how it worked. Time travel was generally a no-no. There were no spells that could do it (that he knew of) and there were precious few artifacts that had the power. Theo knew this because it was something he was keenly interested in. He had heard of time turners before and several legends of their misuse, but wanted - no, needed, to get his hands on one himself.

He needed to get one to help him with an extracurricular project he was working on without the knowledge of the school. He wished to extend his thoughts on the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, which asserts that 'if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" in the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero.' That's what the textbooks said. But that was only because Novikov had said that in the textbooks.

Novikov was a muggle though. And the time paradoxes he speculated about were quantum phenomenon of the sort Albert Einstein had introduced to the muggle world early in the 20th century. However strange the world of quantum physics was, it was not magic. So, Novikov could think all he wanted about paradoxes, but Theo could test it.

Theo was a scientist among wizards and this was his chance to get his hands on something that no one else had ever attempted before. Or, at least, never written about it very convincingly.

But there he was, with the McGonagall's time turner somewhere in this office just waiting for him to get ahold of it. Rather than fumbling around the office as McGonagall had, he brought out his wand and spoke, "Qua es cos, time turner?"

A green light shone from the tip of his wand to a book on the shelf beside him. This was not what he had expected, but he went over and took down the old, graying volume. As he did, the pages fell open to reveal a small wooden compartment nested inside the book.

When he popped the (unmagical) latch, the little lid sprung open. Inside was the time turner, a small amulet consisting of three rings and an inner hourglass. There was no time to study it now though, so he dropped it into his pocket, closed and latched the wooden compartment, and returned the book to the shelf. All he had left to do was to sneak out. Undetected.

He went to the window, but his broom was nowhere to be found.

"Accio, broom." he said while struggling with the window.

Once he managed to get the old thing open, he looked around again, but there was no sign of it.

"Accio, broom" he repeated - more sternly this time - as if the broom had been misbehaving.
Again, he waited.

But it was no good. Something was holding it up. He imagined it knocking against a closed window or door somewhere making a racket and released the spell.

By the door, he found a second key to the door so he could let himself out, but there was still the matter of McGonagall's office being in the same hall as several other Professor's rooms and having no sure way of knowing what was going on beyond the door. He could hear an occasional voice but not clearly enough to tell him what he might find.

"Boots," he whispered to his feet directly, "if you are magic, now's the time to prove it."

He was just inserting the key into the door when he remembered what he had in his pocket.

It wasn't the way he had planned it, but there was something appropriate about escaping from this situation using the very object he had come to steal.

He only needed to choose the correct place to hide and the correct moment to revisit. He couldn't very well hide in the same place that his past self would be. But there were other places - and one right beside the door, in the cloak cupboard. There was a moment too. It was about a half hour earlier. He had considered trying to sneak out at the time, but all he knew at that time was that McGonagall had left the office - not when she would return. Now he knew that he had at least that half hour.

#
Back in his room in the Slytherin dungeon, while his roommates slept, Theo inspected the small, golden amulet. It didn't look magic so much as ornamental. But, then again, his boots were hardly even that. It was pretty though. A small glass hourglass was suspended between independent rings of gold set up as gimbals so it could twist in any direction. Although he was tempted to turn it there and then, he checked himself and recalled his plan. He had already used it once in a pinch and felt lucky that it worked without incident.

Quietly, he slipped his stockinged feet into the boots by his bedside and secreted out of the room. He was off to a special room of which no one else seemed to known. In there, he knew he would be safe from prying eyes, and it was there that he had his laboratory workspace.

As far as he knew, no other students currently at Hogwarts knew of this room, and he wanted to keep it that way. Unlike most of the other students in his school, Theo never shared his secrets with the other members of his house in general. About the only thing Slytherin house was good for, in his opinion, was that most of the other students left him alone. None of the other houses trusted anyone from Slytherin - and rightly so. His was a house of good for nothing liars, cheats, and thieves. The last Slytherin to be worth his salt was Snape, and Tom Riddle prior to him. They were both intelligent men with strong independent streaks. Following that, Theo was not among the blind followers of Voldemort, although he was occasionally known to pay it lip service when it was needed. His father had a similarly complicated relationship with Voldemort not wanting to get involved, but also not wanting to miss out on the benefit that his followers group could sometimes provide. He was pretty sure that Snape felt the same way.

The room he was looking for was on the seventh floor. He stalked through the shadows as lightly as he could until he came to a ridiculous tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. This poor fool was either a moron or made a particularly legacy-killing enemy in a tapestry weaver.

He turned his back to the tapestry, closed his eyes, and concentrated on his need. A place to work. A place to study and plan. A place where he wouldn't be found. When he opened them, a doorway stood where previously there was only blank wall. The halls of the seventh floor were quiet aside from the Barmy fool behind him dancing about clumsily as he hurried inside and shut the door silently behind him.

#
"Lumos"
Light shone from a golden source at the tip of his wand illuminating a portion of the large room. Stepping inside, he muttered "Fugato," and flicked the tip of his wand in the direction of a lantern and pair of candles on his workbench. The golden light jumped from one wick to the next sparking a flame on each until his bench was an island of light in the darkness.

From his pocket he pulled out the long chain holding the time turner. It was a beautiful piece. He had read about it, seen it in several drawings, and twice caught a glimpse of it in Hermione's possession, he had even used it once to escape McGonnagal's office, but this was the first time he really studied it.

He laid the turner and its chain out on his bench top and turned to a cauldron that had been stewing for the past week, slowly fermenting. The cauldron was small - a typical benchtop variety, but he had it resting in a ring stand of the kind that was more commonly found in chemistry labs than a wizard's workshop. Under it, he placed a small tin of Sterno that he had purchased in a muggle shop in London over the Christmas break. Sterno is what is sometimes called 'Canned Heat' - basically a jellied alcohol that burns as a steady flame. He lit it with one of the bench top candles and positioned it under the cauldron for the best heat. Why re-invent the wheel? his grandfather had always said.

While the flame from the Sterno warmed the cauldron, Theo took out a library book called 'Time Alterations and Other Bad Ideas,' edited by Hannah Nygaard. The book was organized in three sections. The first was Spells and Enchantments Affecting Space-Time by Miles Norgoth, the second was Causality, Paradoxes and The Principle of Non-Contradiction by Jules Whitehead and the last was How Messing with Time will Get You Killed by Jean Paul Sartre (who knew he was a wizard?) .

Honestly, he didn't know where to start. It all sounded fascinating. The real meat of it seemed to be the second section on causality. At least it was what he was most interested in. And it was the section where he intended to explore the most using the time turner.

He opened the book to that section and glanced through the table of contents...
1. How do we know that one thing causes another?
2. How does time travel undo our notions of causality?
3. If not causality - chaos?

and then, Aha! what he was looking for:
4. Playing pool with Professor Hawkings and other models of causal connections.

He glanced to his side and saw that the cauldron was starting to ooze a heavy mist that boiled over the edges and floated down from the ring stand and across the table. He pivoted the cauldron away from the canned heat to a position directly over the chain and pendant.

It would take a few minutes for the mist to penetrate the pendant, so he shifted his attention back to the tome. Pool with Hawkings...

The pages were filled with arcane drawings and representative equations describing the logic of what occurred in each experiment. Frankly, the experiments were easier to decipher than the explanations.

Theo had just a few questions that he was hoping to address. The most basic was the classic paradox of using time travel to go back and prevent a thing from happening in a way that would prevent the initial time traveling event to happen in the first place. More simply, 'If I go back in time and kill my father in his own childhood, then I will never be born. If I am not born, how will I go back in time and kill my father?'
Physicists like to use pool balls in their examples. Almost every example in the chapter was translated into an interaction of pool balls knocking against one another on a table infested with singularities, worm holes, and quantum machines. Interestingly, most of these models were little more than straight physics. Magic hardly entered into many of the problems at all. They were all theoretical. Even wizards rarely traveled in time because of the dangers it presented - look at Professor Hawkings for one - he taught three years at Hogwarts studying real paradoxes before staying too long in the past with the time turner and contracting what muggles called ALS, but wizards knew as 'Paradoxical Paralysis.' The poor man had to retire to Cambridge to live amongst the muggles and spend the rest of his life just thinking about experiments that Theo was now in a position to really perform.

So...what first?

#
He couldn't help himself, he decided to just go back ten minutes. He would know it worked because that was when he set the Sterno beneath the cauldron. The mist was starting to envelop the artifact now, but wouldn't be then.

In McGonagall's office, he had turned back time quickly and anxiously, needing to effect an escape. In truth, the only thing he really remembered was that it had worked. He had watched McGonagall leave the office a second time, and had even spied his own boots under the drapes by the window - they certainly hadn't made him invisible. The he snuck out quickly and quietly before his other self ever stirred from his hiding place.

Thinking back now, he remembered the second set of clicks from the office door and realized that it was himself.

So, you could detect yourself. He had seen his own boots as a time traveler, and he had heard himself unlock the door while in his 'true time.'
It had happened all at once. He was there, in the same room, as two people, separated in time - or perhaps, one person, together with himself in time.

Playing with it now would slow down his first investigation into the nature and extent of the thing's magic, but he just couldn't wait. He picked up the pendant and looked at it carefully. It had words inscribed on the rings. 'I mark the hours ...'

If he did it again, here, alone, would he appear beside himself - with that thought he moved over a step before starting.

Impatiently, he held the piece in his hand and turned the hourglass about while watching the world around him for hints (how could he forget to bring a clock?! - Oh, there's one.)

Nothing was happening.

He turned it again. Still nothing.

He was vexed.

After sitting and staring at the thing for several minutes in complete silence he replaced it on the bench beneath the cauldron and turned to the first section of the book.

There were lists and lists of artifacts that could supposedly affect space-time - many had notes beside them saying that they did not, in fact, do any magic of the kind. Eventually, he found the time turner and opened to those pages.

But, alas. They were missing!

Three whole pages were torn away leaving nothing about the time turner. He sat several minutes trying to remember - hadn't he looked up the time turner in this very book while in the library before he had checked it out?

#
He glanced again at his cauldron and saw that the mist had enveloped the time turner and that the whole thing was glowing in different colors. Even the chain was glowing green - that was unexpected. He never suspected that the chain itself was magical.

His notebook contained the list of colors and their meanings. It was his spell, but sometimes even he forgot exactly how it worked. Which is why every scientist keeps a notebook.

Green...green...green. Ah, here, '#3: Green signifies the boundaries within which the spell will work' It had never occurred to him that this was important. When going back in time, what goes? The person holding the pendant? Anyone touching that person (in the same manner that portkeys worked)?

Thinking back, he had wrapped the chain around his wrist to keep it from hanging during his first use yesterday. But he had simply held it the second time, here in his workroom. The chain had been dangling onto his workbench.

He recorded his observations in the notebook. This was especially important now that the pages were missing from Nygaard's text. He was reminded of why he should be a bit more patient about using a magical artifact until he knew how it operated.

When he was done making his notes, he started mapping out a handful of simple experiments. And when he decided that he was going to need a pool table in order to do some of these in just the way that they were proposed ...

- wahddayaknow? He thought. A pool table! - Right next to him, waiting to be used.