A/N: So... yeah. This is a thing now.
"So, you see my boy, I did it all for the greater good," Professor Dumbledore said, a slight twinkle in his eyes as he drawled out in his antique, kindly old accent.
Harry, of course, had a hard time understanding why Dumbledore had taken literally every last galleon he owned, and how giving it all to the Weasleys was part of the greater good. Ever since Voldemort's return this past summer, he felt like his whole world was collapsing in around him—and no one was telling him the truth about anything! When he finally went out to get answers himself, he learned the horrible truth: that Dumbledore had made him poorest student at Hogwarts.
But he couldn't grow despondent. Perhaps the Professor was right, after all. The Ministry were the true villains of the present, denying Voldemort's return while simultaneously putting a toad in charge of overseeing Hogwarts. They nearly expelled him after a dementor tried to suck his soul out. To make matters worse, they were forcing him to marry Daphne Greengrass, or Milicent Buttstrode, or Tracy Davis, or any other number of women Harry was pretty sure didn't actually exist, all part of a 'marriage law' which he had never heard of until this summer and was pretty sure came out of nowhere.
"I think I understand," Harry said. "You took all of my money, to defeat Voldemort."
Dumbledore's eye twinkled at that. "Ahh, my boy, I did it for the greater good."
"You already said that."
"Mmm yes, the greater good."
"Which is to defeat Voldemort?"
"Mmm," Dumbledore said, before reaching into his pockets and pulling out a little yellow candy. "Lemon drop?"
As Harry reached out to grab the candy, a greyish-black streak of light hit the Professor square in the chest. Dumbledore, his hand still outstretched, carrying the little lemon drop immediately started to age more—his wrinkles became more pronounced, his hair grew out, his teeth fell out. Harry watched in horror as the Professor's eyes bulged out and disintegrated, followed quickly by the remainder of his skin. Now a skeleton, the once mighty wizard started to crumble into dust and ashes, floating away with the slightest breeze.
Harry couldn't help but inhale some of Dumbledore; he had only just realized his mouth had been open the whole time. His first thought went to Voldemort, that he had finally quashed his old nemesis. But then, he considered the Ministry, and how much they hated Dumbledore. He looked behind slowly, towards the door leading up to Dumbledore's office. Standing in the doorway was Dumbledore himself, albeit a Dumbledore with a shorter beard and crazier hair and no glasses. Harry looked back at the now naked robes that once contained the former Professor. Yep, it was still there.
"What?" Harry asked as his mind raced into a million pieces.
The other Dumbledore burped, walking past him as he did, before reaching down and grabbing the lemon drop originally offered to Harry. With a swish of his wand, the other Dumbledore vanished the original Dumbledore, and with that job done, took a swig out of a flask of what appeared to be a bottle of Skele-Gro. With another burp, he turned back to Harry.
"Who are you?" Harry asked.
"Geez Harry," he said, burping out the word Harry. "I knew you weren't the brightest kid in school, but I thought you were smarter than that."
"You're Dumbledore?" Harry asked.
"Duh, who else would I be?" Harry's mind raced to Voldemort. The new Dumbledore bit into the lemon drop he reclaimed from his other deceased self, before spitting it out. "Actual candy. Can, can you believe that old codger, Harry? Here Harry, try this." Dumbledore reached into his pockets, pulled out a plastic baggy, and retracted a single yellow rock.
"Wha, what is this?" Harry asked as he bit cautiously into the odd-looking lemon drop.
"It's Goblin crack," Dumbledore said. "Let this be a lesson to you kid. Don't—" he stopped to burp, "accept candy from old men."
"Crack, you mean like drugs?" Harry asked as his eyes widened and he felt a slight tingling in his extremities.
"Keep up, Harry," Dumbledore said, taking a handful of the rocks and shoving them down his own gullet. "Yes, drugs."
"Oh man, Professor, I can't be doing drugs at school."
Before Dumbledore could respond, Harry noticed he was falling into a world filled with naked Cho Changs and fully-clothed Hermiones. Voldemort was there too, singing about long lost loves and the beauty of the world. Harry fell further, into the wide-open mouth of a hem-hemming Umbridge, inside of which he found Santa's workshop, with the elves replaced by mini-Hagrids. Together, they made beautiful dragon babies and used them to claw out Snape's eyes. Then, they spelled the words out, 'THE GREATER GOOD', before disintegrating into ash.
"Harry, wake up," a voice said. Something hit him across the face, and he was suddenly back in Dumbledore's office, lying on the floor in the fetal position. This strange, new Dumbledore was still there, the old Dumbledore lost to memory.
"Wha-what happened?" he asked.
"Goblin crack, Harry," Dumbledore said. "Looks like it was your first time. You were out for a whole day."
"A whole day?" Harry asked. "But what about my classes?" If Hermione ever found out about this…
"Kid," Dumbledore burped. "These classes, school, it's all pointless. Which is why you're going to help me."
"Help you do what?"
"Everything. I need a new assistant. Last one got squanched up."
"But what happened to the other Dumbledore? And what about Voldemort? And Hogwarts?" Harry asked, each question raising his own anxiety.
"What Harry, you think that Dumbledorp was the real deal? Harry, that was a parasitic fae that fed off your life forces."
"Really?" Harry asked. "How'd it get inside the castle?"
"I let it inside, Harry. I needed someone to take my place while I did actually important stuff."
"Wait, you let that thing inside the castle? What the hell, Professor?"
"Well, first, Harry, I'm not a Professor. Haven't been once since the 40s." Dumbledore stopped to take another shot of Skele-Gro. "Second, Harry, I've had several doppelgangers, clones, or alternate reality versions of me take over this headmaster gig for a while now."
"Wait, so this is the first time I'm meeting you? The real you?"
"Yep, life's a real bitch, isn't it Harry? You thought I was the Yoda to your parents' Obi-Wan, turns out, the Yoda to your parents was actually an intelligent life-sucking force, like my ex-wife."
"You were married?"
"Three times, though that business with Grindelwald doesn't count. Now, c'mon Harry, we've spent too much time tripping balls. We need to find another replacement me to do this dumb job."
"But what about Voldemort? And the Ministry?"
"Spoiler alert, Voldemort dies and the Ministry doesn't do jack shit, Harry."
"How do you know he'll be defeated?" Harry asked.
"Ugh, c'mon Harry, it's the basic arc of storytelling. Bad guy does bad things, good guys do Goblin crack, and eventually, these things sort of sort themselves out." Dumbledore made a circle with his wand, opening up a clear portal to an entirely different place. "Now, c'mon, my order should be about done."
Curiosity drove Harry to follow Dumbledore into the portal. He really didn't trust this new Dumbledore, and wasn't even sure if he was having some sort of rabid hallucination or lucid dream. As he passed through the breach, he was surprised not to feel anything. He'd heard of first-time apparition, how most people suffered through nausea or at least some form of discomforting turndown. But, Harry felt nothing; yet, he saw he was in a marvelous new place: tall buildings surrounded him, complete with green gardens between them and countless strange looking creatures walking about on glass-paved roads. Above, he saw a domed ceiling colored a lightish blue, and beyond that, the planet Earth, with its tell-oceans and continents. It was clear to Harry then: they were on the Moon.
"Woah, did we just apparate here?" Harry asked, and noticing Dumbledore was already striding forward without him, hurried to catch up.
"We didn't apparate, Harry," Dumbledore said. "You know how," he stopped to burp, nearly vomiting this time but stopping himself before he could truly lurch, "dangerous apparition is? Harry, it's like rubbing your face in fecal smallpox, only the smallpox is sick with the black plague. Look Harry, I know this is a lot to take in, but apparition involves shrinking yourself down to a near atomic level, and then using your tinier mass to propel yourself forward at post-Newtonian speeds. Take it from me, portals are safer."
"Then why does everyone do it?" Harry asked.
"People, wizards especially, are dumb, Harry. You ever look in the mirror? That's about as great as wizarding society is going to get."
"Are we on the moon?" Harry asked, looking back to the planet Earth, not noticing or not caring about the delivered insult.
"Keep up, Harry," Dumbledore said. "Yes, we're on the moon, yes, aliens are real, and yes, that is a three-boobed alien." Harry hadn't even been paying attention when he nearly slammed head-first into the aforementioned alien. Dodging the swinging mammaries, he noticed that she had no face nor head.
"Professor, this is all so crazy. I mean, one second, I'm in your office, and then bam! I'm on the moon."
"You're not even the first wizard to be on the moon," Dumbledore said. "Yep, Harry, humanity's been part of the galactic community for a while. Did you know that the current President of the United States is a lizard man from a neighboring galaxy? You know Harry, it's kind of odd that America claims it's so progressive, and sure, it elects a lizard to be their President, but they haven't even elected a black man yet to be President. That's like, speciest against your own species."
"I didn't even know he was a lizard," Harry said, trying to imagine the American President's puffy face and a lizard behind it.
"Most people don't," Dumbledore said with a burp. "On his world, his people take lot longer to mature, so while we humans, we go through phases of 'I wanna be a firefighter' or 'I wanna be President', their phases last for a couple dozen years. He's just one lizard man, living up his lizard-child dream, while still being a lizard-child."
Harry was about to ask a follow-up question when he noticed a large, several meter-long snake slithering down the sidewalk. It looked familiar, like he had seen it before. When his eyes hovered to the black sash around its eyes, obscuring them entirely, his worst fear since second year crept up from their near-repressed state.
"Is that a basilisk?" he asked, his voice little more than a whimper.
Dumbledore burped. "It's rude to point, Harry," he said, pulling Harry's arm down—not that Harry had even noticed he was pointing. "And it's even ruder to ask if someone's a certain species. I mean, Harry, does anyone ever go to you and ask if you're a human? I mean, I bet some have, since you're such a piss poor representation of our entire species. They must go, 'wow, this must be one of them chia-humans or something, no way this is the real deal'. Right Harry?"
"Uhh…" Harry said, his mind still focused on the giant behemoth, whose venom killed with a single drop and whose glare could petrify. "Is it… is it safe to be around?"
"Of course not Harry," Dumbledore said. "Nothing in this world is safe. We give little eleven year old kids magical death sticks which they then can use to literally end the world. We have them make potions that can either change your hair color or be used to make nerve gas, depending on how many drops of talcum powder you put in it. Prison guards are run by immortal soul-sucking creatures. Even muggles can get deadly when you give them a few atoms of uranium or a few too many beers on a Friday night. Or both." At that, he took yet another swig from his flask of Skele-Gro. Harry was beginning to assume that the not-Professor had a drinking problem.
"In terms of actual deadliness, Basilisks are on the lower scale," Dumbledore continued. "You're more likely to die of a heart attack, or drowning in your bathtub, though, from what I've seen of you so far, I'm guessing the latter. You know who the only person to die to a Basilisk in the past thousand years was Harry? I mean in our entire universe. Moaning Myrtle. It's so bad that disappointing Basilisks, the Neville Longbottoms of their world, they're called Myrtles. Do you get it Harry? Death by Basilisk is such a joke, that the Basilisks invented a whole new insult for it."
"Well, I almost died back in second year," Harry said.
"Yeah, and if my other fae me didn't think to send in the Deus ex Phoenix, the Basilisks would have a new insult for regretful hatchlings."
They entered a large interior structure, with high ceilings and long rows stacked with goods. Aliens came and went, carrying large bags. It took more than a few seconds for Harry to realize it, but this was probably a supermarket. Dumbledore said nothing, apparently having been here before, as he grabbed a few random items off the shelves. Harry struggled to keep up, still wondering if this was a dream or not.
Seemingly satisfied with his selected items, Dumbledore led them back up to the counter, where a large, insectoid cashier swiped his various goods. Once all items were swiped, Dumbledore, who until then had been chugging his drink, leaned up to the counter as the alien said something like, "Waggle flaga baga?"
"No waggle on my flagas this time, Glam," Dumbledore said. "I do need to use your humanizer."
"Dagka," the cashier probably named Glam said, swiping Dumbledore's credit card as the old man handed it to him.
"This all so seems so very…" Harry started.
"Human? Harry, if you stopped for a sec to consider that maybe you're the alien, and Glam over here is just an innocent worker, you'd maybe realize that maybe what you consider to be human inventions are actually alien."
"I was going to say muggle."
"Well if wizards are dumb, what does that make muggles Harry? You know what, don't answer that Harry. Don't want to fry your brain power too early."
"Well, hey, not all wizards are dumb," Harry said as Dumbledore got his groceries and his card back, before he started walking again, this time to a shaded backroom.
"Oh yeah? Name one smart wizard. That's not me, of course, because duh."
"Well…" Harry thought for a minute. He had pretty ok marks, all things considered. But he knew that there were others who far surpassed him. "Voldemort."
"What, Harry, you mean Mr Noseless? The same guy who horcruxed," he stopped to burp the word horcrux, "his soul into seven little pieces? That's like taking a hammer to your hand to fix a papercut."
Harry, filing away to ask what the hell a horcrux was later, immediately followed up with, "Hermione." He could feel Dumbledore's eyeroll from where he was.
"Harry, she's the definition of book smarts. You know many books in the Hogwarts library there are on the moon markets? Zero. In fact, if I brought her up here, she would deny this existed, because she hadn't read about it first. Real smarts you get and learn in life, not in the library."
"Professor McGonagall."
"The coolest thing all her life she's done is make herself a household cat. Which, to some cat cultures, would be considered cultural appropriation. Not cool. Beyond that, she's little more than a tenured public school teacher."
"Snape?"
"Maybe if he stopped wanking to pictures of your dead mom he'd be smarter, but no, that's all he does all day."
Harry didn't even want to think about that last part. "Err… Merlin?"
"Sure, why not name Einstein while you're at it? I'm talking about living people, Harry, not people who were dumb enough to die."
Before Harry could think up another person to run by Dumbledore's impenetrable purity test, they arrived at a smoky, dense room filled with a row of giant green globs. From the nearest one, an egg hatched, which was instantly carted away deeper into the room. Dumbledore walked up to the one next to that, and handed the worker bee (an actual, literal bee) a slip of paper, which the bee then punched into a computer.
"So, yeah, get me humanized," Dumbledore said.
A bright green light flashed, similar to the killing curse, only Dumbledore didn't seem phased by it. Mere seconds later, and after a few beeps and boops from the machine, the giant blob birthed out a single egg, which Dumbledore levitated with his wand and cracked open. Out from it emerged a butt-naked copy of the Dumbledore Harry used to know. "Hello?" the new Dumbledore asked before being smacked with what looked like a stupefy from the other Dumbledore.
"Woah," was all Harry could manage.
"That's nothing Harry," Dumbledore said as he shot another blue stream of light into the newborn Dumbledore's head. "I just filled up his head with memories, a purpose in life, and a few different mental tics. The last fae guy you had, he got stuck in a bit of 'Greater Good' loop. Always ranting and raving about it while actually being little more than a cartoon villain with little actual magical power. What a dweeb."
"He also stole my money," Harry said, reminding himself of the conversation that started this whole mess.
"No, Harry, I did."
"You did? Why?"
"Harry," he said, putting his arm on Harry's shoulder. "Let me just say the story involves one part Space Vegas, one part Hangover, and three parts memory wipes. Needless to say, worth it."
"But that was my whole vault! Gone! My entirely family's net worth!"
"Harry, those were Earth galleons. You can only use them up here as tokens for slot machines. Don't worry, you and me, we're gonna do great things, we're gonna make the world a better place, and you're gonna be rich. Yep. We're gonna be rich. I'm gonna be rich."
"Wait, didn't the Weasleys get the money too?" Harry asked.
"Duh, why do you think I said three parts memory wipes? Take it from me, kid, Percy knows how to party. We got so messed up, I think we destroyed an entire star system."
"An entire star system?"
"Yes, Harry, but that's neither here nor there. In fact, I don't even think it exists anymore in this universe, so, no harm no foul," he shrugged.
"This is heavy," Harry said, looking down at the still sleeping Dumbledore.
"Now, I should probably portal this baby back down to Hogwarts, and meanwhile, you and I have things to take care of Gronian Nine."
As Dumbledore whipped out his wand to open a new portal, Harry held up his arms. "Wait, won't people notice I'm missing? I don't want to fail Snape's class, or any of my classes."
"Hmm, good point Harry. People might think you were kidnapped or something. You're kind of their Wizard Jesus down there. Not that you mind, you must be slaying all kinds of mad pus-say, am I right?" Dumbledore asked, putting away his wand and moving to high five Harry.
Harry could only mumble and look down further at the ground. He didn't want to admit he was a virgin.
"Oh, geez kid, I'm sorry. If it's any consolation, Ron has only slept with the third hottest female in the galaxy. Now, as for the case of the missing Harry Potter—BEE MAN!" he yelled at the bee person. "Yeah, can I get this kid humanized? Oh, and his parents too. Put it on my account. Thanks."
Harry was still processing the fact that Ron had apparently slept with the third hottest woman—in the whole galaxy—when he noticed that the big blob had birthed out another three eggs. From the first one emerged a mirror copy of himself, complete with all the same bits and pieces only with slightly redder hair. From the other two emerged specters he hadn't seen since his duel with Voldemort a few months back.
"Mom? Dad?" Harry said, stepping forward ever so slightly. They looked so real, so much like the Lily and James he had seen in spectral form during his duel with the Dark Lord. Beyond the fact they were as naked as the other Harry was, Harry could feel the tears welling in his eyes. He could finally have it, he could finally have what the Erised mirror showed him all the way back in first year. He'd no longer have to live with smelly Petunia or idiot Vernon. He'd be back home, with his real parents.
"Harry, meet Danny Potter, the real boy who lived," Dumbledore said with a tiny burp.
"What?" Harry asked, stirred from his reverie at last.
"Check it out," he zapped each of them with similar blue lights. "So, James and Lily Potter had a set of twins, you and Danny over here. When Voldemort got told the prophecy, he went after you four, but didn't realize, he was going after a set of decoys. Only, James, Lily, and you were in a safe place, away from Godric's, with Danny here, left behind as bait. Whompa-lompa-lomp-do, and the decoys died, but the female decoy sacrificed herself to save Danny, making him the boy who lived. As his life was still in danger, as well as his parents', I gave you the fake scar you have now, and pulled you off as the boy who lived to keep them safe.
"They've been living a normal life away from everyone, but with Voldemort's return, they've decided that enough's enough, and now they're out of hiding. Danny's going to start attending Hogwarts. Oh, and your brother and parents hate you, think you stole the limelight and think you're as bad as Voldemort."
"But…" Harry said, seeing his dream crushed before him.
"Relax Harry, these aren't your real parents. These are slug-birthed quasi-humans. See, watch," Dumbledore said. Harry didn't even notice the gun being conjured as Dumbledore put it up against Mom's head and pulled the trigger. Harry couldn't help but squeal. "Harry, relax. Look, look at the brain matter." When Harry didn't look, he felt a pressure at the back of his neck forcing him to look. "See Harry? It's green stuff. Human brain matter is pink. BEE-MAN! Another of the woman, same account, thanks."
"How does this fix me missing school?" Harry said, still horrified.
"It doesn't Harry, but at least Wizard Jesus doesn't fail Potions, am I right?" With a swish and flick, the four blob bodies were clothed, including his fake blob mother, recently rebirthed. Dumbledore then pushed the four into a portal, sending them hurtling back to Earth, before opening another portal to another place. "C'mon Harry, Gronian awaits." Realizing that he'd be stranded on the moon without Dumbledore to help, he followed him through the portal, wishing that he'd wake up from this nightmare.