Let's Do the Time-Warp Again!
A Potion Ingredients / Kuru interlude
By Stealacandy
Disclaimer: I don't own HP, Smurfs, Gnomes and all that stuff, the usual diatribe. I hope to god I'll never have anything to do with Dolores Umbridge, and I swear, if she'll offer me money to tell her stories, I'll run as fast as my legs could carry me. Run away, that is. Anyone running towards her is either a pervert, or a sycophant called Percy Wetherby. Or he's both, in which case he is more likely called Cornelius Fudge.
A/N: This came up after reading a post that asked if Snape was related to Gargamel. I read to my cousin's son a story by Terry Pratchett that had some gnomes travelling by geese, and just had to write a Niles Holgersson adventure for Harry Potter and Co. While thinking about it, I thought about that post I mentioned, and the reply I posted to it, about adapting smurf-based potions to use garden gnomes instead. I came up with a recipe for chewing-gnome, by the way, a change from my regular Orbit menthol gum. So I thought, why not? Let Snape try it. If it won't kill him, it will make him strong. Which he will surely need when he encounters his fate in Potion Ingredients.
So the thing about the place - I took it from Terry Pratchett almost verbatim, although he wrote it about Florida, in honour of his contribution to this story.
As you can probably tell from the (sub)-title, the story is a spin-off from my Potion Ingredients and Kuru stories, which are more or less paralel and happen in the same story line, a different one then the one in which Tommy's Harem and it's pending sequels and spin-offs take place in. I still have to come around and publish them on this site, and to finish them before I publish the rest of them elsewhere, but I put them on hold in favour of Tommy. but in my eyes it is good enough to stand alone. I don't want to spoil the suprise for you, but Snape dies in an accident in one of these two stories, I'll let you guess which one.
Still, the story is understandable enough to anyone who didn't read either of these two, once you know that Snape dies. And, in my eyes, is funny enough to warrant reading, even if you'll probably have to wait a few more months before I post the others. (Well, I certainly thought at the time it warranted writing, at any rate…)
The title itself, Let's Do the Time-Warp Again, is of course a nod to Rorschch's Blot. If you have no idea what I am talking about, then shame on you. Shame on you!
As for the time-line, this story begins round about where Potion Ingredients leaves off, in mid-HBP, and ends where Kuru begins, in mid-OoTP.
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Let's Do the Time-Warp Again!
Dedicated to Ed Beccera.
December 1996, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Severus Snape hummed happily to himself as he turned to dissect the struggling gnome in front of him. A kinder soul would have put the gnome down first, or at least put him to sleep, but no one, except maybe Dumbledore, ever accused Snape of being kind. So he would cut the gnome while he was still alive, and relish his suffering. He picked up the scalpel.
He received mail from his French cousin, Gargamel Garamonde-Prince. The renowned potion master has sent him a recipe for a new potion he developed , and asked him for his opinion of it. As a sign of gratitude, Severus didn't even uses the owl to harvest ingredients. And the potion truly was fascinating. It would let a person travel into the future. His master would really appreciate it. He already paid much attention to Seers, and one such Seer made a prophecy that entangled him in that sorry business that vanquished him - for a while - and made Potter into the Wizarding world's hero of the hour. And it was all Severus fault. Now, he could present his master with an efficient, scientific method of getting a glimpse of the future - just go forwards in time and take a look for yourself. The only thing remaining was to actually brew the potion. Which presented a problem.
Severus' cousin Gargamel had used body parts from smurfs in his potion, and the were hard to come by. That is to say, in France, they were very hard to come by. His cousin always whined about wasting most of his days hunting them down, Trying to capture even a single one of the clever little blighters was nigh impossible. In England, it was impossible, as there weren't any. Which is why Severus had to resort to adapting the potion into something more available locally - common garden gnomes.
At least, Severus mussed to himself, he got some satisfaction acquiring the gnomes. In the middle of the busy Christmas season, he got the Weasley twins to leave their shop, go to that hovel they call a house, and catch a couple dozen gnomes for him. All he had to do was tell that two-shilling bint that he needed some gnomes for a potion he was brewing. "It's on Order business", he said, and that was it. Now he had a crate full of gnomes sitting in his privet lab floor, recently relocated to the DADA-teacher's privet quarters, and one gnome, a petty little thing, laying on his work-table, wallowing in pain, it's limbs pinned to the surface with sharp, pointy needles.
'I wonder what a gnomes' brains taste like?' he wondered as he started to cut.
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After Severus died in that regrettable accident on Christmas morning, the various spells, jinxes, hexes curses and enchantments he left on all sorts of things, creatures and objects alike, started to break down. And yes, charms too. Including a particular sealing charm he left on a crate full of gnomes that he placed on his laboratory floor. In the crate, the gnomes still didn't gove up hope of escaping (they were too stupid to think about their desperate situation, and were more concerned about comparing interestingly shaped warts on their feet, anyway). One of them once again jumped up, forgetting that the last two times he did that, he hit his head. It hit him in midway, but it was to late to stop, so he resigned himself to getting hurt again. Then it hit him - it never hit him! That is to say, he did hit his head on the cover of the crate, but the carton was pushed upwards and outwards and he found himself, for a brief moment, looking, for the first time in days, at the outside world. "Booga wooga!" he said, before gravity won and he started his descent. Once he was back on ground level (he wasn't on the ground per se, as he landed on the head of a sleeping gnome, who jumped up and sent him flying, crushing into and onto a few others.) "Booga walawalawala, belobelo, woogawooga!" he said to the excited gnomes inside the crate. "Woogawooga, belobelo, wabawabw," saud one of them, and they all seemed to agree. And so, the trapped gnomes made their escape, climbing out of the crate and into Snape's personal workspace. "Cheoowa!" one gnome said.
The gnomes were hungry, not having any food or drink in days. Worse, they thought of the upcoming fantastic leftovers from the traditional Weazley Christmas dinner left them all drooling, and the harsh reality of slow starvation in the ominous darkness (it would have been an ominous silence, too, but locking over twenty gnomes in a small, cramped space isn't the best way to guarantee peace and quiet.) in contrast made their plight so much worse to bare. Now, free to their own devices, the first thing some of the gnomes did, was look for food. The rest, more sensible, looked for a drink first.
"Belobelobelo. Drrrrm drrrrm belo!" cried one excitable young gnomling. She have found a drink - a whole cauldron full worth of drink, and it had so many beautiful chunks of edible-looking stuff in it! She sniffed a bit. It smelled so good, too!. She called the rest of her friends to let them know about her discovery. "Woogada woogada, Poochie coothie, belo moochie!".
Soon, all the gnomes were raising vials, toasting their freedom, the gnome who freed them, food, the gnome who fed them, warts, bruises, the gnomes who volunteered to kick them in their butts, philosophy, the great Potatious Wedgie, the gnome who came up with the deep, wise, epiphany, saying "Wooga mooch! Belobelo kaka." which translated roughly as "I eat! Therefore I shit." if anyone cared to translate it, but only gnomes and some weird French people bothered with such trivialities as philosophy, and gnomes, while being stupid, had enough presence of mind to avoid France, a country where they were likely to be looked upon as a source of fine-cuisine, so nobody ever had the opportunity to enrich the English language with this profound saying.
It is a fact many would find interesting, that few residents of France were humans. Most residents of France had six legs and spent their days flying and making annoying noises. Some had eight legs and spent their days laying in wait for the six legged creatures to stumble across their nets and webs. Others had four legs and wasted around chasing their tails, or laughing at those who did, waggling their whiskers in mirth. In fact only a minority of the French natives had two legs, and many of those didn't think they were human, they just flew around, twitted and chatted loudly and built nests. Of the rest, some were the descendents of immigrants from other countries. Most of the other Frenchmen, however, were aliens, visitors from Mars. They were mushroom-high tall, had blue skin and spend their days wooing pretty little smurfs in tiny, white miniskirts. The rest of the Frenchmen, who to all appearances looked to be mostly human, came from a much more distant place, and to the rest of humankind great dismay, liked it here and had no plans to go away.
I point that little known (if widely suspected) fact, because what no one knew, and Severus defiantly didn't get the chance to find out, was that when using common, Chinese-yellow garden gnomes in lieu of the blue smurfs found in France, he did more then adapting the potion to local conditions. He replaced the entire genome structure of a Martian with that of an Earthling, and that had dire consequences to his potion, even if he didn't have the flimsiest idea what a genome structure is. As it was, the whole mechanics of the potion were turn on their heads, and instead of sending the consumer into the future, they send the gnomes who drank it into the past. Exactly one year into the past - Well, for the sake of dramatic effect, one year plus a week into the past -into the exact same room they were in when they departed the time-space continuum, the DADA-professor privet quarters at Hogwarts school, where Dolores Umbridge was giving a temper tantrum at having Harry Potter escaping from her clutches without her having an opportunity to lay into him with malevolent pettiness.
Another thing Severus neither knew nor cared to find out, or, should he have found out, by a crazy chance of fate, would have given a whiff about, was that the potion was designed for humans. For garden gnomes it was highly toxic, and currently they were hallucinating. What they saw was a big, yellow bird in funny socks, moping around, waggling it's wings and making funny noises. Had they ever watched Sesame Street, they would have recognized it, but they lived at the Weazley's Burrow, and they didn't have cable TV. So, "Wooga Moochie! Belobelo pacapaca!" proclaimed one, in awe. "Belobeloo pachina waga!" which more or later translated into "we must have travelled in time! It's Easter now!"
Greatly disappointed at having the potion cauldron disappear in mid-drink, before they had the chance to try the tasty looking chunks within, that didn't fit into their little vials. So they were still very hungry.
Dolores Umbridg saw twenty half-breed gnomes appear in her office, all staring at her like Christmas came a week early, and lost her nerve. 'I am hallucinating!' she thought. 'Must have caught a cold in this weather.' She dosed a Pepper-Up potion to fix her nasty cold, which was a mistake, as she didn't have any, and thus started smouldering and smoking in all places, which, to the gnomes, looked like she was roasting. "Moochie belo! belobelobelo wooga boogie!" one said, lust dripping from every word. What his fellow gnomes heard, was "roast turkey!" . they didn't need any further encouragement, and soon more then twenty high gnomes charged and jumped Dolores, biting her all over with their sharp teeth, trying to eat as much as they can before their comrades would steal her away.
By now, Dolores Umbridge realized she wasn't seeing things. Or rather, she was seeing things, only they really were there. She wished they weren't. She wished harder, and harder still, but that didn't help her. She didn't believe in god anyway, the half-breed. So she gave up wishing and started laying blame. She just knew who did it. Well, it could be Hagrid, but she wasn't in the mood right then. And so-
For some unexplainable reason, dismayed shouts of "Potter!" were soon heard coming out of the DADA professor's quarters. "Potty-wee-Potter's really going to get what's coming to him this time!" said Draco, laughing evilly, to the twin monkeys Crabbe and Goyle. "Hoo-hoo!" said Crabb. Goyle just stared and scratched his armpit.
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Sometime later:
"I planned to put this niffler Fred and George left me in Umbridge's office, but I didn't have the heart, after what those gnomes did to her," said Lee.
"I wouldn't have cared," said Harry. 'The bitch has it coming.' he added mentally.
"- so I snuck it into the boy Prefects' bathroom." Lee continued. "I don't know how the twins got the password. I wish they would share the password to the other one as well, but you can't get it all, I suppose." He sighed. Then he smirked. "Did you know Draco Malfoy had his penis pierced?"
The End
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A/N:
Firat, Potatious Wedgie, the famous philosopher, asked me to add, that "Wooga chiwawa chinka winkata booga gosum." (1) I don't want to insult your stomachs, so I won't open this particular can of worms. I told him under no circumstances am I going to write it down. He said "Poocka belo wooga miko winkata." (2) and went to sharpen some knives - and that nasty fork of his.And that wasn't funny at all. Not even a bit. But ther's no arguing with gnomes. They don't understand English, anyway.
Now, onto more serious business: (I can't believe I just said that. And I can't believe I didn't make some off-colour joke about Sirius, either!)
I'm considering making it not only a time-travel potion, but a dimension-hopping one as well, and drop the men-eating gnomes into one of Tommy's Harem's sequels. I'm still debating, however, whether it will be in Tommy's Harem 2 or in Tommy's Harem 1 ¾. So stay tuned.
On a second though, why not make a poll out of it?
In Tommy's Harem 1 ¾ Draco Malfoy, the big baddie, turns into a gnome and travels around the world. That's the Niles Holgersson adventure I promised. In Tommy's Harem 2, we will see how several humanoid creatures, like elves and goblins, react to a Voldemort / Death Eater free world.
So - do I let Draco meet the ravenous gnomes and make what he can of it, or do I let them in on the power struggles of the downcast magical beings of post-Voldemort Britain?
Tell me what you think - and leave a review! (wink, wink!)
-- stealacandy
(1) In English: "A can of worms is good for gnomes."
(2) "Chicken is also good."
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Review Replies:
GinnyLover14:
Now that I come to think about it, the gnome thing comes from several sources. One is IP82 who uses a horny gnome to infilitrate the Burrow. Another is some fic I read where Harry sends a crateful of garden Gnomes to Molly Weazley as a prank. I stopped reading it a long time ago when I couldn't stand SIYE anymore. Too much fluf, GinnyLover. Another is Guliver...
Anyway, like I said, it's a prelude for some other stuff I wrote / am going to write.And, since it's not funny enough on it's own, I used it as a legitimate reason for the punch line with Draco's piercing and the niffler. Now that's a mental image I do not want to see!