2
Harry and his two bestest buds, Ron and Hermione, were enjoying lunch at the 'Wizards Only No Muggles, Please' Diner in the worst part of SoHo. Most people don't know this, but SoHo is, like, the Tijuana of the wizarding world. They had just got back from a 'Unicorn Show', and needed some nice diner food to stop their uncontrollable vomiting fits.
"What'll it be, kids?" Asked the waitress, whose nametag read 'Claire'. She had a very nice figure, which was curious considering how fat the name Claire is.
"I'll have a turkey club with chips, please." Harry said, handing his menu to the waitress.
"A salad and dry toast, please." Hermione smiled and did the same. The waitress then looked over to Ron, whose brow was as furrowed as that of a retard on Special Retard Math Test Day.
"Um, to start I'll have the My-Nuh-Strown and a Kay-Nish, please." He said, pointing to the big words and also to the smaller, more confusing words.
"That's minestrone," Hermione corrected him.
"And 'Nish', dumbass." Harry cackled. "The K is silent."
"Anything else?" The waitress asked, trying not to laugh at this feeble-minded ginger's foolhardy attempts to pronounce big boy words.
"Can I have a quickie?" He asked. Hermione and Harry stared on in disbelief. "Why's everyone staring? I just want a quickie. Are you going to give me a quickie or not?" The waitress slapped him, yanked his menu out of his hands and walked away.
After everyone in the diner stopped staring at his red-headed friend, Harry spoke up.
"It's pronounced 'Quiche'."
Just then, the door was kicked down, splinters of cheaply painted and termite-ravaged particle board flying into the faces of the terrified and weak-bladdered old people who were senile enough to think that sitting in front of a door was a good idea. As they rolled backwards onto their brittle and saggy asses, blue light poured into the diner, as well as a howling wind, whose fevered pitch and intense volume was reserved for either God whistling or Satan farting.
Suddenly, as the wind died down and the light faded, there appeared a young man of average height with brown hair in a bowl cut and glasses. He wore a brown tunic and a maroon and yellow striped sweater. He stepped forward, over the bodies of the now screaming and BM-ing old bastards and/or bitches, until he stood over Harry, staring him down as though he were Butch Cassidy, and Harry his lover Sundance.
"Are you my bizarre clone?" Harry asked, standing up. Indeed, now that they stood nose to nose, it was impossible not to notice that both young men were identical in every way.
"I'm seeing double," Ron said, rubbing his eyes like a stupefied cartoon character. "Four Harry's?"
"I'm not Harry Potter," said the one who had just entered the scene. "My name is Artemis Fowl. And you, Harry, are going to die today."
"What, is this like, a crossover with The One, or something?" Harry asked. "Why is my duplicate trying to kill me?"
"I'm not your duplicate." The Other Har—I'm sorry, 'Artemis' said. "I'm Artemis Fowl, and I'm completely different from you in every way. But the biggest difference between us is that I'm going to be the Scion of Books, and not you. You've made enough money for one Young Person's Fantasy Character. It's time for people to start reading my books."
"Oh, right." Hermione nodded her head as she suddenly realized who this other Harry was. "You just had a book put out about you, right? You're supposed to be a bard or something."
"I'm not Beetle the Bard either! I'm Artemis Fowl! Haven't you people ever heard of me?"
The diner was silent.
"I'm an international thief. I kidnap people and hold them for ransom. That's definitely cooler than being a sissy wizard and being in high school for eight years."
"My nine-picture move deal seems to disagree." Harry deadpanned. Instantly the diner sprang to life with patrons who wanted nothing more than to high five Harry for thinking up such a dry, cool line at such an important moment. Those who were granted said high fives felt like Gods.
"That's it, Potter." Artemis threw his tunic and scarf off, revealing a body suit decorated with all sorts of gadgets, gizmos, whoozits and whatzits. And also guns. Lots and lots of guns. "You're fucking dead!"
Artemis held his left hand out rigidly, flexing his bicep to throw a blast of concussive energy out of his Wrist-Blaster and at Harry, who was thrown clear across the room and into a floor-to-ceiling wine rack. Several of the bottlenecks cracked and stabbed at Harry's young body through the thick protection of his gray-blue Cardigan, pocking the back of it with black stains as he fell to the tile floor with a sickening slap. If you want to know what it sounded like, take some raw chicken, get it wet, and slap it across your kitchen counter. Ugh, doesn't that sound painful?
"Suck on that, Richie Rich!" Artemis cried, removing a large laser cannon from a holster attached to his thigh. "And for the record, I have a movie in the works, too. It's going to have Fred Savage in it. And Smash Mouth is doing the soundtrack!"
"People haven't liked Smash Mouth in years…" Harry groaned, pulling the glass shards out of his back with the rarely seen Glass-Get-Out-Of-Back spell. "And Fred Savage was nowhere near as talented as his much better looking brother!" And with that scientific fact, Harry threw a wave of bats out of his wand; the standard Bats-Get-Out-Of-Wand ploy.
"Help me!" Artemis screamed like a Saudi Arabian bombing an Israeli bus station. Or maybe it's the other way, I don't know. "It was revealed in book two that I hate bats!"
"Yeah? Well it was revealed in book four that you're going down like a passenger on Flight 93!"
The diner went silent again. This time, everyone stared at Harry.
"Too soon?" Harry asked meekly, just as Artemis punched him in the face, shattering his glasses.
"My image!" He cried, fumbling for his fractured frames like a three-year-old struggling to cram a fork into a toaster. Artemis responded with a roundhouse kick that would have snapped Harry's neck if this wasn't a fan fiction. He then grabbed the boy wizard by his collar and proceeded to strangle him, his own grubby mitts wrapping like small, pink Anacondas around a neck-shaped goat.
"You know what I'm gonna do after I kill you?" Artemis spat into Harry's face. Harry shook his head side to side; 'No', in case you're from the South. "I'm gonna edit your Wikipedia page."
"Never!" Harry cried out. "I know the webmaster!" Harry then drove his skull straight into Artemis' nose, shattering it like the window of a synagogue on Kristallnacht. Blood flew from the boy's nostrils, writing a roadmap in red down his face, and he went reeling backward into a barrel of egg soakings.
Standing up, Harry dusted himself off before turning to address the crowd.
"Worry not, my beloved fans." He began, not noticing that Artemis was lifting himself out of the egg brine, one hand wrapped around the barrel of a laser cannon. "My trademark sweater from the third one remains only mildly damaged."
Harry's attempts to assuage any fan girls that might've snuck into the wizards-only diner were cut off by the sound of a laser cannon blasting him in the back. He cried out in pain, but it was only momentary. A second passed him by like an eternity, and he fell to the floor, unconscious.
"I win!" Artemis shouted, holding his laser cannon high in the air, kicking his legs like a Russian dancer working at a sleazy club but only on the weekends to pay for her Mother's dialysis. "Finally, I can die knowing that my greatest achievement was not beating 'Hangar 18' on Expert difficulty."
"Way to go, Harry." Ron said, patting Artemis on the back. "Way to teach that imposter a lesson."
"I'm not Harry Fucking Potter!" Artemis screamed just before he was incinerated by a blast of pure magical energy, flung from the tip of Harry's wand.
"No," Harry said, standing over the pile of dust that once was a completely unheard of Young Person's Fantasy character. "I am."
"So you were the real Harry all along?" Ron asked, his face twisted by the face-twisting grasp of quizzicality.
"I wonder what he was talking about," Hermione thought aloud, staring down at the heap of ashes on the floor. "The Scion of Books and all that."
"I wonder when you'll shut up and make us dinner." Harry cracked, snapping his fingers in the air, forming an invisible H. Translation: hey-hey-hey!
"Oh snap!" Ron cried, covering his mouth in a deadly cocktail of amusement and fear. Amusement at Harry's near-perfect imitation of the lead black woman from Room 222, and Fear for what Hermione would undoubtedly put into their dinners once she actually got around to making them.
After signing a few twelve-year-old's boobs, Harry and his friends left, ignoring the small, plastic calling card that was adrift in the pile of ashes. It was bright orange with a green stripe, and read: "FIND THE SCION, FULFILL THE PROPHECY."
