Double Time Trouble
Chapter Nine

by Skysaber

OoOoO

James silently blessed his wayward mind and oft-misspent youth. It had been mere weeks after the Order had reformed and already the tide of the war had turned completely! They'd heard of Death Eaters cowering in their homes, afraid to go out lest they be captured and interrogated and their plans and allegiances made known to all, or fearing they'd simply disappear on raids as so many of their fellows had done.

Bravery was not a dominant trait in most of the Dark Idiot's followers. The attacks had almost stopped completely, thanks in large degree to a few pranking geniuses set free of their previous constraints to actually show what they could do!

Oh, they'd mastered the official material taught at Hogwarts. How could they not? The basic skills could fuel so many interesting tangents! But the standard education, for the Marauders, was the starting point, the foundation to bigger and better things.

Take, for example, the portkey: wizarding transportation anywhere you wanted at the touch of a trigger mechanism. Only that trigger could be *anything* you wanted! Even the portkey itself could be nearly anything at all. The fun to be had from that item of magic alone was nearly unimaginable, such as the year when the toilet paper on the Hogwarts train was enchanted as portkeys to drop students into the middle of Hogsmead, most often with their pants down around their ankles. The trick had been in placement, as they hadn't wanted to involve any innocents in these little games.

The Marauders had very specifically and deliberately targeted their pranks on supporters of the current Dark Lord. Hey, if they wanted to run around killing people for having the wrong parents, or loudly admiring the people who did, they were fair game for a touch of embarrassment!

The portkey toilet paper had been a fun gag, but the Marauders had fun dropping their mortal enemies into any number of embarrassing situations. However, all of that childish mischief using regular portkeys had gotten topped for all time when Sirius worked out a method of creating a limited portkey, one based on some of the many disastrous failures in developing the common use version.

Standard portkeys were safe, fast and efficient. The Marauder Special Edition portkey was all of that, it just didn't transport a person's clothes. It only worked on living tissue. Many of their fellow students laughed themselves sick at the antics they got up to with that version, embarrassing Death Eater spawn in a wide variety of humiliating and amusing ways.

One of the muggleborns, a guy named Cameron, said he had a muggle cousin back in Hollywood who loved the concept and wanted to make a film out of it.

And the special portkey saved so much effort in crashing pureblood parties so you could sneak into their bathrooms to enchant the soap as a portkey to achieve nearly the same effect. Of course, that didn't stop the Marauders from sneaking into some purebloods' showers to plant other pranks, but it made things less predictable.

Snape never did figure out they'd had Peter slip into the luggage compartment of the train over Christmas break in fifth year to steal his underwear so they could enchant it so that it would randomly drop him naked into a drift whenever he got within a mile of snow.

And he'd been taking a holiday in Sweden that year.

Pity about his bits freezing off, but without a wand you can't cast warming charms. Rumor had it he'd had a replacement set made almost twice as large - three and a half inches.

But now that misspent youth was going towards good purposes, as Lily had proposed they use muggle air-powered dart pistols and enchant the darts as those special portkeys, dropping Death Eaters naked (it must be understood that includes no wands, armor, or other special tricks or devices) into cells they'd prepared, whereupon those Death Eaters could be stunned, dosed with Veritaserum, questioned, and then executed for their crimes.

Heck, they could automate the stunning part using the right rune set.

Their letter writer had suggested they confirm Death Eater identities, after all, and they were doing so. This was just their imaginative way of doing that. Although Athena had been right, the crimes these scum admitted to were fully worthy and deserving of death in all cases. You couldn't get a dark mark without being at least guilty of cold-blooded murder, and more often rape and prolonged torture too.

Better still, the air guns were nearly silent and could be used from cover, without any of the telltale incantations or balls of light you'd get from a speeding spell. So they gave less warning to the ambushee. Often one or two members of a Death Eater strike group could vanish and it would be seconds before their fellows would even notice they were gone!

Seconds that could and often were used to capture more of them, and to spring other traps on them, also in keeping with their mysterious benefactors suggestions. And, since they'd begun capturing so many of the enemy's agents, they had begun to learn plans for raids in the future, so had some warning to get the victims out of there and even set up more traps!

No, at the moment it was a bad idea to be a Dung Eater. But life was great for members of the reborn Order of the Phoenix. The current forces of the Dark Idiot were running scared, and their leader didn't know how to rally them!

Torture only gets you so far as a motivational tool, and he hadn't any others save for the promise of rape and pillage - promises that were turning up a little empty now.

Contrariwise, things were working out well for the previously beleaguered Order. Harry had been born right on schedule, at the end of July just hours after the Longbottoms had their boy. Lily was ecstatic over having her healthy boy, and so far they hadn't lost anyone since the Order had been reformed, while inflicting scores of losses on the enemy!

The old Order, under Dumbledore, had never inflicted any real harm upon their enemy, not once, and now they could take down a dozen of Voldy's agents in a single good night. It was driving the Dung Eaters and their snake fetish master frantic!

If he'd had any sense at all Voldemort would've called a stop to his raids until he'd learned how to counter their intelligence and stop being ambushed. But he couldn't do that and save face. Besides, it was vital to his plans to keep the momentum up, hoping to build up a crescendo of fear that would topple everything right into his lap. Plus, he just couldn't pay his followers without the right to torture, loot, pillage and rape.

Those were the reasons most of his followers had signed up for in the first place, and he couldn't keep recruiting new ones if his old crowd were grousing over his failure to deliver.

Of course, being afraid to go out on raids was impacting those benefits a bit. Currently the Order was so busy processing Death Eaters they'd captured they hadn't even had time to make use of that invitation to Malfoy Manor yet!

In keeping with their pen-pal's suggestion that they loot their foes, Sirius had even modified his already modified portkey design and had it drop all non-living tissue that the subject was carrying: their wands, galleons, clothes, etc, into a separate holding area so they could go through it (often with tongs) searching for the worthy bits of loot.

It had been, uh, surprising how lucrative this process was. Their oracle had been right, the Dung Eaters carried all sorts of devices of use in this war, and often great amounts of cash. That last James suspected was because some wealthy purebloods couldn't even imagine going out of the house without a comfortable wad of galleons. It was how they lived.

No, James knew many good, respectable people laboring at honest employment who would not make as much money in their lives as the Marauders had already bagged using that former prank item on murderers.

It was funny how the world worked sometimes.

OoOoO

Narcissa Malfoy was practicing sexy poses nude before the mirror in her bedroom when the door came open.

"Look, mommy. Look at Mr Stibbons!"

Narcissa glanced over at one of those annoying daughters, who was standing in the door holding a snake, a peculiar snake wearing a tie, a hat and an oversize pair of glasses.

By the time she had realized that snake was a basilisk she'd already turned to stone.

"Oh my!" Hermione Tina declared playfully. "However did that happen?" She turned the snake's face to her, speaking to it nose to nose. "Do you think she didn't prepare herself with the ritual that makes a person immune to a basilisk's gaze?" She forced the snake's head to nod for her, and acted concerned. "Oh, dear. Well, it's a good thing I put glasses on you so no one could be accidentally hurt by your gaze!"

She paused to giggle. "Hey! I know what we can do! We can play another game! It's called, 'How Long Will It Take Lucius To Notice?' and again, house elves can't tell, 'cause that would be cheating! And mommy is being so nice to play with me, too! Now where did I leave that white paint? Oh, Dobby!"

When Lucius came home he noted with annoyance that the statues had all been rearranged again, and as if her constant nagging weren't enough, Narcissa had obviously transfigured half of the sculptures into undraped women who looked just like her, all in lewd poses.

How tiresome.

Lucius Malfoy was a proud pureblood who took most of his meals alone in his suite. He had a wife and son, neither of whom he could stand. He also had three daughters whom he didn't think much of. He'd decided their futures and whom they would marry on the day he'd acquired them, and never seriously considered the girls since, aside from that kidnapping attempt. In his mind they simply weren't deserving of any more attention than that.

Like most purebloods Lucius had married to fulfill the need to sire an heir to his family name, then did so remotely, via magic. It was an arranged marriage and, while his wife was well bred, she was weak willed and useless. The boy was little better, and the girls didn't matter in the slightest. He graced this family with his presence only at dinner and then only as often as he could stomach them. But the bitch had an annoying tendency to act out like this in futile attempts to try to gain his affections.

Angrily, Lucius transfigured them all back to the forms of male athletes and virile animals he found so pleasing. Honestly, couldn't that infernal woman take a hint? He stormed off to his office, his good mood from a day of subverting the Ministry ruined. But he did not dwell on this annoyance for long, however. He had plenty of plots to occupy his attention.

Hermione Tina skipped down the steps, once he was safely gone, and placed a headset on one of the statues. "Here," she whispered, as she put it on a now-male carving. "I know from the time I was petrified that you can still hear some of what goes on around you. So I programmed this Wizarding Wireless recorder to play all of my favorite showtunes in a never-ending loop!"

Then she attached it with a permanent sticking charm.

Ever-careful, she Obliviated that statue of that admission, before skipping off, the headset blaring to a single audience behind her, "... there's so much that we share that it's time we're aware it's a small world after all..."

Shortly after, Lucius became aware that by refusing to rise to her little hint he must have finally offended Narcissa enough to get the bitch off his back for a while, as ever after that she began avoiding him around the estate at every opportunity. He knew she hadn't left, the wards would've alerted him, and every time he asked what she was doing the house elves would reply that she was playing with the children, so it was just peevishness on her part, trying to punish him by granting that which he'd always wanted of her: her absence.

Well, he certainly wasn't about to disabuse her of the notion that he was suffering for lack of her, when in actuality he'd have paid her to leave him alone. He had more important things to be attending to in any case. The war for pureblood supremacy had taken a disturbing turn for the worse, and his master needed more successes to counterbalance that.

Lucius would, however, have one statue moved to the basement, annoyed at the noise.

OoOoO

Hermione Jane was humming happily, busy at her chosen calling.

She'd just had her subjects complete their second end-of-experiment exams, and as the third set of tests came in it pretty much proved that those muggle acclimation kit candies did exactly what they said they did - no more, no less. They neither added nor removed any knowledge of muggle fashion sense or culture, which had been the big scare, and the little magic candies didn't seem to addle the brain either.

She'd been worried, especially over how Dumbledore guzzled lemon drops, and wondered if there was any connection. But it seemed not.

The first tests had set the baseline, what these girls knew without those candies. A second had tested those results a week later. Now this third follow up test a week after that, to see if the results were stable and no added side effects cropped up, provided clear evidence it should be safe to use these on herself and her sisters, because if the magic could stay stable that long there wasn't anything to be concerned about. In magic, things like this tended either to go bad right away or not at all. So the third set of tests was almost entirely paranoia on her part.

The muggle acclimation candies were safe.

Although there came some unexpected benefits, most of that was stuff she felt sure the halfblood who'd been explaining them to her simply left out of his short descriptions. The 'cook and prepare walrus and reindeer' candy had not only covered roasting, preserving and salting the meat, that was cooking, but also tanning and sewing the leather into garments and tools. Apparently that was counted as preparing.

Leatherworking was an *extremely* useful skill all on its own. Already she could think of a half dozen things she could do with that ability: custom tailor her own protective gear so it fit her body better, add features like secret inner pockets and so on she didn't want any shop keeper knowing about, putting covers on important books, and so on.

Hermione also had a frugal side, and given a supply of material (like the stash of dragonhide in the Malfoy basement) making things for yourself was often cheaper than buying them, to say nothing of the fact that skills improved with practice and the more she did the better she could eventually become.

Actually, these skills came VERY good to start with! The skills had to have been gathered from someone quite knowledgeable to be as complete as they were, and whoever it was they had been copied from had to have been far more competent than the average wizard, because the abilities were quite solid and flexible - the sort of thing you'd expect from experts, people who had been doing this their entire lives.

Hermione could easily imagine wizards having crept up on unsuspecting muggles to steal these skills, just like Lockhart had done to wizards for their memories for his stories. And being arrogant, the wizards would have only chosen the best they knew of to steal from.

Of course, there were only so many expert walrus cookers in the world, and that number had been shrinking for centuries, so Jane rather suspected that whoever made the candies had done the dirty deed long ago and was somehow copying an original set of stolen skills into mass produced candy as often as they liked. She had no idea HOW it was done specifically, but her suspicions as to the broad outline of the process were rather accurate.

Anyway, Hermione was VERY pleased with the skills. While walrus and reindeer were not exactly common food animals nowadays, the basic principles of how to cook and prepare different kinds meat were not exactly so far apart that one couldn't learn new types, and the added leatherworking ability came as an unexpected yet VERY welcome bonus!

Also, she'd forgotten how backward wizarding culture was. Cooking was still very much a girl's job over there, when it wasn't the house elf's responsibility. So the 'cook and prepare' skill candy was the girl side of a two-candy set. They'd never offered her the male one, but it was on how to track, catch, domesticate, and train reindeer. And she'd seen no reason not to acquire that one when she'd seen it on her shopping trips, and test it as well.

After all, that same principle of adaptation did apply. For if you knew how to domesticate and train reindeer you already had the vital basics covered for domesticating and training any animal, all that were lacking was specifics, and those could be read about!

And where the female skill candy came with leatherworking as an aside, the male one also came with sled driving. Which, Hermione couldn't say she could ever see a use for that, but it was nice to have all the same.

Maybe it would help her get her driver's license later on?

The 'Walrus and Reindeer' set wasn't the only one to have a male and a female offering, either. That other cooking one... well, to pause and stop for a moment, that cooking one was all about Scandinavian Pastry Cooking, and she'd been AMAZED!! She'd never seen so many cakes, pies and pastries anyplace in her LIFE!! Not even in bakeries or candy shops! Those Scandinavians sure knew how to throw a party! And the sheer variety of treats they had come up with to bake during holidays and other occasions simply blew her mind! You'd be eating leftovers for a *week*! And they all looked so yummy she didn't think she would object in the slightest.

Anyway, the Pastry Chef one also had a male counterpart in Woodworking, and once more she'd been amazed when one of her classmates simply carved a working wooden cuckoo clock, complete with so much added detail that it was like looking at wooden lace! It was like one of those storybook houses that had every part decorated to an amazing degree, and was breathtakingly amazing completely without considering the mechanical clockwork inside or the puppets that came out to perform on the hour!

That ability to shape wood so intricately HAD to have tons of utility!

Those were the biggest surprises. The ability to play accordion and alpenhorn, ski and ice skate went all pretty much as advertised. The ability to identify nonmagical plants seemed to focus entirely on ones found in northern Europe about fifty years ago. So it was a little out of date, but not terribly. The one on Lapidary (the making of jewelry), must have been taken from the Swiss because it included the ability to make accurate watches as well as other highly detail oriented work.

No wonder that one was unpopular among wizards!

The last two surprises, while not as big as the first ones, had one good and one bad. The good one came as quite a shock to her. Hermione couldn't picture anything more useless than Bowling Ball Stacking, although she'd given that candy to a student all the same, just to see. And what a result it had!

Those STUPID wizards! Stacking bowling balls was the *least* of all the skills that candy included! It was all on sleight of hand and STAGE MAGIC!!

She could almost see a spark of genius in the wizard who'd made these - thinking that if he were to get caught by muggles doing some magic, rather than obliviate their poor minds, doing some stage tricks that any muggle could learn to convince them he was a MUGGLE sort of magician! The guys wearing top hats doing acts in front of audiences, cutting show girls in half and dozens of other things involving trickery and deceit, and No Real Magic!

That would have been a BRILLIANT cover! You just saw me summon something to my hand? Well, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! Most muggles were skeptics at heart, do one or two lame tricks and get caught at it, and they'd assume ALL of the things you did were like that! They could cover So Much real stuff up by pretending to be fakes!!

You didn't even have to get caught, just do tricks they knew and were familiar with. Ask them to pick a card, or pull a string of handkerchiefs out of their ear. They'd seen all those tricks done before, and were thoroughly jaded to them, so they'd assume all you did was along those same lines.

Well executed, with an excuse like that you'd hardly need to obliviate anyone!

That wizards on the whole did not take that lozenge as part of their regular education was criminal. At least for the ones who had to have any sort of normal dealings with muggles it ought to have been required!

It had amazing possibilities!

The bad shock was that the muggle primary education candy that she'd placed so much hope on for her uneducated fellow St Trinian's students turned out to be something of a disappointment. Not only was the material fifty years out of date (although she'd somewhat expected that), but it left out math and language skills entirely.

You'd never pass any modern test without either of those. Although it did surprise her in how complete the other aspects of the education were. Being fifty years out of date, it did not consider World War Two history, back then that was current events. And so the history portion dealt with entirely different things, and Hermione had never realized before how much of her own education had been focused on the comparatively recent past. I mean, on one hand it was understandable, the second world war shaped the world we now lived in, but despite all of her reading she'd never truly been introduced to just how much else there was to cover in history, and this candy got to some of that.

It was actually making her quite eager to eat one to find out some of those things. Also, she never would have guessed how much the curriculum had drifted from covering material and learning how to think over to the indoctrination and obedience it was now. But the girl who'd taken that candy had gotten a surprising amount of knowledge, and now knew more about some things, art and geography, how to measure carefully and the like, than Hermione did! And Hermione KNEW how hard she'd worked to expand her education!

That only made her doubly sure to be eating one of those for herself, and soon!

But she was curious about the lack of language and math skills. She knew Ann had some time, so called her up to talk about the subject.

"Well," Ann huffed. "I'm hardly surprised. If you'd only think about it, the muggle relations team mentioned something called Language Lozenges when they were telling us what our muggle acclimation kits were and contained. So I thought I'd look it up. I did, and just about every world language is available in candy form, including English. So I thought that would be how they'd cover at least the language portion of those studies."

Jane was nodding, then pursed her lips in thought, "You're right, that does make sense."

Ann narrowed her eyes at her sister. "What are you planning?"

Jane shrugged. "Nothing much, or nothing firm at any rate. But you know, these girls have no chance of obtaining a decent education on their mother tongue any *other* way, so why not buy them some lozenges on English? Besides, I was already wondering about giving in to the urge to buy them capsules on French. This way at least they'd have two courses no one would flunk on."

Ann's face filled with outrage. "Wacky Jackie!! You are NOT just going to evolve those girls from common thugs, into amoral SOBS with high skills and knowledge! The *last* thing we need is to add a bunch of Kingpins to the rest of our problems! They need morals and direction or they'll just use whatever skills you give them to cause more of the same problems we're dealing with now!"

"Okay!" Jane winced, flinching at her double's tone. "You're right! I wasn't thinking!"

"Clearly not," Ann huffed indignantly, then frowned. "Oh, look, I have chemistry class to go to. But you and I are *not* done with this conversation!"

Jane sighed as she closed the connection. Ann was right. The last thing they needed was to create a population of super-criminals running about complicating everything. But how do you describe having just gotten caught up in helping people and lost track of where you were and what you were doing?

She couldn't just leave people to die, and that had launched her into crisis mode fixing things. Hermione Jane had been picking up more of trauma medicine than she'd ever expected to know, more than she'd even thought existed! Only now she could understand Harry always being willing to rush off and be the hero. Saving people had gotten addictive.

Now she felt doubly guilty over chiding him for having 'a saving people thing'. In the first place, you don't say that to someone because it discourages him from saving people, and she and all the people she knew needed saving from something only he could save them from. And in the second place, now she'd gotten it too.

She felt like a real heroine acting as Chief Medical Officer of St Trinian's. It was something at which she excelled, and they truly needed her! On top of all of the blunt force trauma from hockey sticks, there were injuries from swords, halberds, maces, spears and battle axes, not to forget the ever-popular gunshot wounds.

She'd gotten a real sense of value out of making people get better from those things. But Hermione had no sooner hung up on her sister and begun feeling guilty when a girl was brought in with a ruptured spleen, and Hermione knew none of her spells would address the problem. Nor would ambulances come to St. Trinian's after so many ambushes where the paramedics were assaulted and their cars, equipment and drugs stolen, so there was no way to transfer her to a major hospital for surgery.

Hermione didn't even think, just launched into action. It being the only way to save the girl's life, she whipped out her cauldron and began to autocratically order the students around her to bring her some eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog.

Shakespeare couldn't have *not* known about the magical world, at least a little bit, seeing as how he'd gotten half the recipe to one of the most powerful healing potions in existence right in that play of his. The other half he hadn't stated, but it was all readily available to her.

In forty minutes, the girl who had been dying in agony was up and about, feeling fine and ready to go play.

That was when Hermione's wits returned to her, dropping out of crisis mode to look at all of the stunned faces around her.

"We knew, you know," Rachel told her, offering sympathy.

Her cousin Kate added, "It's all over school, you being a witch. Has been for ages."

"We didn't think that kind of thing existed, but..." Rachel shrugged at her helplessly.

Kim Novak stopped sucking on the ends of her hair. "It's kind of obvious when you go about chanting spells in Latin, pulling vials of bubbling froth out of your sleeves, and waving your wand when you don't think anyone's looking to affect your cures. Most of those girls have been injured before, and know they shouldn't have gotten better as fast as they did."

Kim now leaned forward eagerly. "Now, tell me, it's to resolve a bet. Have you really got a pointed hat and broom, or do the tales make those up?"

"And have you got a cat, and is it black?" Kate now piped up eagerly.

"You've got money riding on this?" Jane found her worldview shattering. She'd been so careful!

"Of course!" was the answer she was given.

"Ever since that fight on the bus, when you fought off those evil witches with bolts of light," Kim bragged. "Some may have forgotten, but I sure didn't."

They were also criminals, and criminals spied on things, hoping to gain information that could be used to their advantage. Of course they lied about it, but it was pretty hard to miss her conducting experiments, giving those other girls skills.

Jane looked guilty, thinking back, but answered honestly. "Well, the hat was part of our school supplies, only nobody I know ever wears them. But I've still got mine at home in my closet. And we have got brooms, only I'm pants at riding them and barely made it through my first flying lesson; although my sisters and I recently decided they were too useful *not* to know and so had some catch-up practice scheduled, so yes. I do own a broom. And my cat was ginger and sort of squash-faced, but I lost him a while ago."

Well, left behind fifteen years in the future, but they didn't need to know that.

The bushy-haired girl noticed that Rachel was making notes for the school newspaper, and her lips grew firm. "Now, just so you know, it's illegal for non-magical people to know about the magical world. We prefer being myths, to be honest. It causes less hassle. And if the Ministry of Magic discovers you've found me out they'll be quite cross and come out and fix all of your memories so you don't recall a thing!"

"You mean *you* won't get in trouble?" Kim was nonplused, having been sure she'd had blackmail material over the witch.

"Not at all." Hermione shook her head. "Oh, they'll give me a fine for violating the Statute of Secrecy, but that's only seven sickles per muggle, that's you non-magical types, up to a maximum of five galleons, that's a coin we use for currency. And that amount hasn't changed in almost four hundred years, so it's about as much as you'd spend on a good lunch today. You, on the other hand, get to have your memories erased. They're quite good at it. They only rarely leave people in a vegetative state - although I saw that happen once."

Hermione finished quite smugly, thinking back on Lockhart.

Her three friends were suddenly huddled, terrified. But Hermione's eyes got drawn up to the door opening and Sharon Scott, the St Trinian's Head Girl, standing in the doorway to the clinic, arms folded, leaning against the frame to ask, "How will they find out?"

The look on the girls face was a direct challenge, asking, 'Will *you* tell them?'

Hermione's mind was abuzz, wondering how the girl knew what their conversation had been, until Rachel pulled an old style PA microphone out from under a pillow she had hidden on the bed they'd all been using as a bench. She glanced up at the speaker and saw that volume here in the nurse's office had been shut off, and with how loud and rowdy the school was generally she'd never noticed.

Jane raised her chin in response to that challenge. "Honestly? I don't know. I know they track wand magic. That's why I use an illegal, unregistered wand, and only use it sparingly or not at all when I can avoid it. I also know they have underaged magic detectors, but I'm also not familiar with how those work, and that might just be traces put on wands sold to school age children like me, which is again why I avoid wand magic as much as possible."

Those statements seemed to relax the Head Girl, who released her hold on the pistol grip she'd been hiding under her crossed arms, letting her jacket fall to cover the holster as she smirked, taunting, "So, what are you hiding from, little witch?"

Not even bothering to correct her deduction, which was mostly accurate in any case, Jane supplied, "Right now there is a war going on in the magical world. The old-line purebloods, people who have been magical for countless generations, have decided to purge the world of first generation witches like me, and have gone on killing sprees. Dumbledore, the supposed 'Leader of the Light' just got revealed as a pureblood sympathizer, and the fate of being caught by the bad witches and wizards is almost too terrible to imagine."

Sharon stood up straighter, gazing down on the young witch. "So those people attacking our bus on the way in..?"

"Were wearing Death Eater costumes, so on the pureblood side," Hermione confirmed.

"They were after you?" Kate breathed in awe.

"No, that was a random raid." Jane disagreed heartily, and so genuinely that although she didn't know she'd been about to be blamed for that attack, she dodged that bullet nicely. "Purebloods hate anyone nonmagical, and use you as... well, like animals. They hold parties where they torture people like you or me for fun. Killing people like us is a sport, although I would be viewed as potentially dangerous, so treated with some degree of caution. You, on the other hand... well, it's best not to go there. All of the vampires and werewolves and giants and things are on the pureblood side, at the moment. So that makes things worse."

"All those things are real?" Rachel wondered, wide-eyed.

Hermione nodded. "Oh yes! Although I knew a werewolf once who wasn't so bad. Once he transformed, however, he still tried to kill me. But the Dark Lord has to keep his vampires fed, and that means human victims, and nonmagical types are easy to catch, so they use them like cattle. But that's not the worst of it. He has something called Dementors on his side, and those are like the ring-wraiths out of Lord of the Rings. They can suck your soul out, and are truly quite miserable to be around. They're used as worse than a death sentence in our world, and nonmagical types can't even see them. Luckily no one is using dragons... well, yet, at any rate. Although I suppose it's possible one side will start."

She scowled, thinking over the possibilities.

Sharon, the head girl, tilted her head to look at Hermione. "So what's to stop somebody from putting a bullet between the eyes of this dark lord?"

"Two things," Jane answered honestly, still absently considering the dragon conundrum. "Anti-bullet shields have been around since the Battle of Agincourt, and most people who deal with muggles wear some sort of device that has one constantly on. You could empty a machinegun on him and it wouldn't even stir his hair. Also, worse than the first problem is that the man is a liche - he's spent some time with dark rituals cutting his soul into little bits and hiding them all over, and so long as even one of those are around he can't truly die. If you got lucky you could destroy his current body, but he'd just possess one or make himself another. Besides, the boy who is destined to defeat him only got born at the end of July. So we have a little while to wait before this war can be resolved in our favor."

Although Hermione didn't notice, still thinking about dragons, she'd managed to shock and impress all of the girls around her.

Sharon Scott pulled out a chair and sat down on it, leaning forward to address the much smaller girl, "Okay, little witch. How do we defend ourselves? Or do you need to do it for us? And, if so, what do you need?"

In a school like St Trinian's, you don't get to be Head Girl without becoming VERY predatory, and people like that don't like being prey. The Head Girl had been willing to kill Hermione if she was a stoolie, an informer, but she'd passed that test without even being aware she was under it. Instead, she'd accidentally convinced the girl she was just like the rest of them - a girl on the run from something, with authority that was out to get her.

That made her one of them, just as much so as any of the other girls of St Trinian's. That put them on common ground - she was somebody they could understand and work with. Or so they believed.

Also the PA speakers had been running the whole time, and the school had gotten very quiet. Hermione had never seen the girls of St Trinian's facing an outside challenge. But it was a scary concept that had already retired more than one police chief.

The "I'm out for Number One" impulse so common to criminals was previously oriented in as many different directions as there were girls. Thus creating a more or less self-canceling chaos. Now it had a common purpose, a common foe, and that got those girls oriented the same way and united in facing the same challenges like probably nothing else could.

Working together towards a purpose, the girls of St Trinian's were frightening.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

And the plot thickens. I have to admit, Mr Stibbons was my favorite part of this chapter.