In which evidence regarding Hindenburg's second infiltration of Hogwarts is revealed, Lily claims that if you can dodge a textbook you can dodge a spell, and Wizard Lenin reminds us that he and Hindenburg aren't so different at the heart of things.

Before her somewhat loyal work in progress defaultian peers, at a time far too early in the morning for any of them to really appreciate what was going on (except for Rabbit who didn't really appear to appreciate or comprehend anything), Lily almost hesitated.

After all, it'd always been Lily against the world. Or, rather, it'd been Lily against the things that the world ignored, tolerated, or pretended didn't exist. The idea of letting people in on anything, on preparing them for the worst, on… well, letting them see the world she saw and comprehend the things she understood, it was more than a little bizarre. It was… unnerving.

Wizard Lenin, Death, and even Rabbit had never really counted because in a way they were all more or less removed from the place. They got it but only because they were only faking at being human and were more or less removed from the physical plane. They were like the audience to a great play that was her life and she could make the occasional aside to them but… But none of them were truly there.

And even now, looking at her peers staring back with dull glazed eyes, only a hint of anxiety in their expressions Lily couldn't help but feel that they just wouldn't get it. They could continue, after all, to leech onto what seemed to be the natural conclusion that Lily was behind all of this.

Lily was either intentionally or unintentionally behind of most things like this, she'd admit it. Half of last year's ridiculousness had been more or less her fault, either intentionally or unintentionally. But this wasn't always true, events just… revolved around her, outside of her control, but centering on her as if she was some unwitting sun in the center of everything.

That's what Eleanor Lily Potter really was about, after all.

And it was comforting for them to think this was simply something that Lily was responsible for, blood on the walls, dead chickens, petrified cats. It was a lot less ominous if it was just the usual cracking apart of the universe that seemed to take place on a biweekly basis than something maliciously planned.

In some other world perhaps Lily really would have been behind this. Writing something a lot cooler on the walls, probably something from T.S. Eliot since she seemed to be in that sort of mood, and then going on to wreak havoc on the castle with the giant evil chickens she stored in her secret chamber. But that wasn't the world they lived in, they lived in some other world than that, and Lily wasn't responsible.

The fact was that it was only the morning after she and Hermione had played hooky, restored Hermione's parents' memories, this Chamber of Secrets had supposedly been opened, and already Lily was beginning to feel prickles of dread in the bottoms of her feet.

A tingling sensation associated with the oncoming storm.

"Bloody hell, Ellie, it's three." And there was Blaise, good old disrespectful Blaise, rubbing at his eyes and glaring at her, "Are you really just going to stare at us after forcing us all to get up?"

Her eyes drifted over them, transforming them inside of her head into chess pieces, or no not quite chess pieces… It was a game of strategy, but it wasn't chess, and if it was then Lily had collected a batch of very poor pieces when it came to Default.

There was Blaise Zabini, alright in the best of times, and his partner Daphne who had abandoned Slytherin for some unspoken political reason and joined up with Default. There was nothing particularly special about them, Daphne was a little prettier than average and Blaise a little more Italian, but even among the old pureblood families they had been known for being hopelessly neutral and therefore more or less boring.

(Although, according to Wizard Lenin, Blaise's mom was some dastardly combination of Elizabeth Taylor and Ted Bundy and had disposed of no less than seven husbands without anyone saying a word about it.

Wizard Lenin, surprisingly, was actually quite impressed by Mrs. Zabini and Lily felt that said more than enough about that situation.)

Then there was Luna.

Lily liked Luna, she reminded her of a younger more naïve less cinema inclined version of herself, but that being said there was nothing hard in Luna. Luna was all dreamy wandering softness, questioning the universe and receiving unsatisfactory answers, nothing seemed to touch her but then nothing had really tried either. Luna seemed… Happy. Happy with friends, happy even to babysit Rabbit, happy in Default.

The idea of Luna being where Hermione had been last December was…

Lily didn't like it.

And Hermione… It'd really only been a day since Hermione Granger's world was put back together, and she was still in this odd state of transition, probably not quite sure of what she should do now that her problem had been solved. Give her time and she still might drift back to her old bossy nagging ways and insist on teaching Rabbit passable English. Or perhaps, she'd maintain her newer harsher demeanor and become downright terrifying. The fact was though, that Hermione didn't have time to prepare herself, if there ever was a way to prepare yourself for this sort of thing.

Another confrontation with Quirrell could very well break Hermione Jean Granger.

Which brought Lily to the real issue, that this wasn't really about Lily.

Well, it was, but at the same time it wasn't.

The reason Wizard Lenin always won at chess wasn't because he knew the rules better, had memorized all the tricks, and actually cared about the game enough to think two or three moves ahead at a time (although that did certainly help). It was that he was able to acknowledge that you couldn't rely on the king or even the queen alone. Every slain pawn could lead to the death of an empire.

And that was what you did in games of strategy, you went for the pawns first.

"I'm afraid, comrades, that I have some good news and some bad news." Lily started, clapping her hands together, and looking intently at her fellow Default members.

"At three?" Blaise asked, eyebrows raised, and in response Lily summoned one of Gilderoy Lockhart's books from a nearby table and threw it at his head.

Blaise Zabini, at three in the morning, appeared to have pitiful reaction times (this wasn't a good sign), "Bloody hell!"

"What's the good news, captain?" Luna asked, standing at attention, hand in a salute, and of all of them the only one who was taking this moment seriously. Luna was slowly but surely becoming Lily's favorite, she was probably due for a promotion from all the Rabbit sitting anyways.

"The good news, is that in the few hours that comrade Hermione and I were outside of the castle…" Lily started only for Blaise to stop rubbing at his head and interrupt without thought.

"When the hell did you leave the castle?"

Lily through another Lockhart book at his head, "Dammit, Potter, where do you keep finding these things?!"

And Lily continued as if she hadn't been interrupted in the first place, "It seems Rabbit didn't eat anything important during the mass panic of the petrified cat incident. So… good job team on mitigating world ending catastrophes in our absence!"

"Yes." Rabbit responded with a slight incline of his head, taking all of the credit for not eating anything of importance, and just for equal measure Lily threw a text book at his head too.

For a moment it seemed as if Rabbit too would be brained by Gilderoy Lockhart's ridiculously thick required reading, but at the last minute he was suddenly ducking and it was whizzing over his head.

"That… That is bullshit, Rabbitson." Blaise said, rubbing at the second bruise forming on his forehead and muttering about Albanian war refugees and their crazy reaction times.

"Physics." Rabbit responded, cocking his head to the side and staring at Blaise like… well Rabbit didn't really have expressions when he stared at people but if you looked at him long enough you could imagine some expression was there, something that questioned Blaise's sanity, "It is physics."

And the idea that Rabbit could make… puns? Was that a pun? Could one call that a pun? Was frankly horrifying and Lily, as always, just didn't even want to go there.

"And the bad news?" Hermione prompted, eyes narrowed, but not really feeling the impatience or the anger as she had in the past few weeks. Already, her parents back and she was softer than she was, that Wizard Lenin impersonation was dripping from her because Wizard Lenin had never and could never be soft. That also wasn't a good sign.

The bad news, it always came down to the bad news, the bad news that Lily herself wasn't quite sure she wanted to face and that Wizard Lenin had all but insisted she leave to herself.

The bad news that she knew not one of these people was prepared for.

Earlier that night, after following the herd of whispering and nervous students up the stairs, confronted with the occasional question of, "Hey, Potter, it wasn't you, was it?"

Neville looking at her, desperately in the crowd, grabbing her arm and asking, "Ellie, are you… Are you sure that it's…"

Only for him to be pulled away by his prefect before Lily could call after him or give him an answer.

After all of that and more as they'd had brief discussions of secrets and heirs and probably just Ellie Potter again, Lily had descended down through the trap door into Wizard Lenin's domain with that unspoken nervousness only beginning to rouse itself inside of her head.

And he was there, reading through the latest prophet with terrifying scrutiny, barely even acknowledging the sound of her footsteps as she walked down the stairs. At the sight of her the other Lily in the room looked up with raised eyebrows, collected herself, and silently walked up and out of the room and crawled back into bed until it was time to use the time machine again.

The other Lily didn't ask what had happened, having been that Lily before, Lily remembered the expression on the face she wore now. Tight at the corners, pretending to be casual, but coming off a little tenser because of that pretense.

And Lenin still hadn't looked up.

For a moment she just stood there, on the bottom step, just observing him quietly and waiting for something to happen. Eventually, perhaps just out of that uncertainty, she blurted out, "So, I restored Hermione's parents' memories. It wasn't all that hard, really, like flipping a switch. Then there was a lot of hugging and crying and…"

And uncomfortable flashbacks to Dudders and the rest of the Dursley clan that Lily really didn't come down here to talk or even think about. Although, really, it hadn't been worth even thinking about. Who cared about the Dursleys? She hadn't even seen them for over a year, really.

Finally Wizard Lenin appeared to take interest, he lowered the paper and raised his eyebrows, observing her for a moment, and then asked, "And, you weren't caught?"

With his attention on her, Lily let out a relieved breath she didn't know she was holding in, and did her best to swagger inside of the room. She jumped onto the desk so she could sit on it properly, kicking her legs back and forth while Wizard Lenin just watched her antics with raised eyebrows.

"Nope, I left during the middle of our quidditch game… We lost, disqualified, quidditch turns out to be very stingy about its rules and very boring because of it. But anyway, with a few wards and things nobody really noticed. Besides, I think they were all too busy noticing…" Lily trailed off, staring forward, and superimposed over the room were those words written in the blood of dead chickens.

"Noticing…" Wizard Lenin prompted, with more of an amused lilt to his voice than anything else, like this really was one of Lily's daily antics that he suffered through on a daily basis.

And perhaps it could have been except for that feeling that it wasn't.

"Hey, Lenin, do you know what the Chamber of Secrets is?"

And suddenly it was like the room had gotten ten degrees colder. Apparently, Lily thought to herself, Lenin knew exactly what the Chamber of Secrets was.

"Where did you hear that?" He asked, quietly, his eyes narrowed and Lily could already tell that he knew she hadn't heard it from an innocuous source like Hermione's favorite "Hogwarts a History".

"Outside the Great Hall, written in blood, it says 'The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir beware." Once again, in those simple plain words she could hear many more ominous ones being written, ones that promised fear and dust and death all in a single line.

For a moment she wondered if Wizard Lenin would ask if she'd done it, if she thought this was a joke, but he'd known her too long and too well and so he was the first person (and maybe the only one) who would take her at her word. He sat down in the chair by the desk, his eyes distant, searching far into his own past and his face paler than it should have been.

"What else was there, besides the words?" He asked.

"Dead roosters, feathers, a petrified cat…" And that last detail seemed to strike home, more even than the other ones did.

"Why would he come back here?" He mumbled and somehow that alone was enough for her to start putting the pieces together. He didn't even have to say it, she didn't have to ask, she'd just looked at the words and in a bizarre way been reminded of Quirrell.

"I, Lily, am the last heir of Slytherin." He said slowly, and somewhere deep in her mind she filed this information she hadn't known about him away where she could think about it later, "The last parseltongue in existence. If the Chamber of Secrets has been opened, then I am the only one who could have done it."

"So that means…"

Lenin finished for her, "That Voldemort has returned to Hogwarts."

Something in him seemed to snap and that quiet dread was replaced by a scorching anger and drive to do something, "He'll be after the stone, he knows you have it, it's the only thing worth infiltrating Hogwarts for a second time."

Tapping his fingers on the wood of the desk he considered her for a moment, then said, "I'll need your wand."

"My wand?" Lily had almost forgotten she even had one.

"It's not like you use it." Wizard Lenin scoffed, adding, "Our wands are brother wands, chances are that I'll be able to use yours. And chances are that we will need it. If he discovers I'm here… Realizes that I exist, am autonomous, then I will need it… And I am in no condition to fight him off right now."

Wizard Lenin leaned back, considering her again, but not as a person but instead something with strengths and weaknesses which must be taken into account, "I don't make the same mistake twice, Lily. Twice now he's seen you conquer death without batting an eyelash whatever he's planning… If it was me, then I would play a very different game then the one I played as Quirrell."

"Oh, that's… not good." Lily finally settled on this severe understating of current affairs causing Wizard Lenin's eyebrows to raise.

Of course, the stone had turned out to be mostly useless but… But all the same she didn't want him to have it.

(A year before, before everything had fallen into place, when Dumbledore's treasure didn't have a name associated with it and was only this thing hidden in that corridor.

"That stone has no right to exist, it will only attract violence and death as it is doing at this very moment. It must be destroyed."

Death had once hinted that should Wizard Lenin break ties with her then worlds would burn for it…

"You cannot give it to him, Lily." )

The idea of simply letting Hindenburg have the stone, have the stone that she herself supposedly created, to let him regain a body and use it for his own nefarious purposes. Whether that was killing his rival, Wizard Lenin, or simply conquering Britain, was unthinkable.

Not to mention that Hindenburg would probably want more than the stone. He'd want… not revenge but something close to it, vindication maybe. He'd want assurance that Eleanor Lily Potter wasn't really an obstacle that she was at best an illusion. He'd been defeated by her twice now, he'd want to make sure that it couldn't happen a third time.

And to do that…

"So… Hypothetically, if it was you, I mean it is but you know what I mean." Lily started waving her hands about and then redirecting her thoughts, "If it was you, what would you do?"

"I wouldn't open the bloody Chamber of Secrets." Wizard Lenin said, almost like it was a joke, one that she couldn't quite get a feel for without the context.

Seeing this he attempted to explain, "It's a bit… dramatic for someone trying to infiltrate Hogwarts. Last time it turned the place into a circus not to mention it spiraled completely out of control. Thank god for Hagrid, if it wasn't for him and his man-eating spider who knows what would have happened."

There were a lot of questions she could ask about that, like what he meant by the last time, or Hagrid (who Lily was pretty damn sure Wizard Lenin didn't even like), or any of that but instead she was caught on what he'd said before all of that, "So if it was you then you wouldn't do what you're currently doing."

There was a moment of silence where they both considered that rather contradictory statement.

"He must be very desperate." Wizard Lenin offered as explanation although judging by his expression he found it lacking too.

"Right, well, what do you think he's up to then."

"…Apparently releasing a basilisk on the more or less unwitting student population. Recreating a drama and mystery from fifty years ago, one that was never truly solved… Unless you count Hagrid." Wizard Lenin explained, waving off Hagrid with a sigh and a small hand motion, as if this admission somewhat pained him.

"A basilisk?" Lily asked, "You mean like a giant snake… There was one of those inside Hogwarts?"

She couldn't imagine why they thought having a giant snake inside the castle was a good idea. But then it went along with the troll logic she supposed, and the giant spiders in the woods, and having Snape for a professor… Actually, with that reasoning in mind, it was a wonder that anyone was really alarmed by this.

Giant snake attacking students, it must be Tuesday.

"Technically yes." Wizard Lenin responded, eyes narrowed in that way that he knew exactly what she was thinking and didn't agree with any of it. He probably didn't have a good enough argument to dissuade her though because he didn't add anything more to that.

"It does fit in with the whole snake theme, I guess. It'd actually be somewhat surprising if there wasn't a giant man eating snake beneath the castle. What if it was a giant chicken instead, or Rabbit? It'd just ruin Slytherin's whole snake complex." Lily said, feeling strangely elated at having puzzled out Hogwartsian logic, even with the idea of Hindenburg's return for the stone.

He was on the verge of a rant about how idiotic her logic was, she could tell, it was in the twitching of his dark eyebrows. But with visible effort he restrained himself and said instead, "That's not important."

"It's not?" Lily asked and he grimaced thinly, very clearly unamused.

"No, it's not." He replied tersely then leaned forward and with deathly seriousness said, "More important is what face he's chosen to wear."

"I imagine he's using a similar method as before, hiding behind a seemingly innocuous face, waiting for the chaos to unfold before he strikes… All while letting Dumbledore know he's inside the castle by practically spray painting his name on the wall."

"Like Squirrel?" Lily asked, although she would have noticed the headaches and the stuttering, if it was anything like last time.

"No, not like Quirrell, that would be too obvious now. No, it will be something very different this time, I'm sure." Wizard Lenin said, waving this suggestion off, and then quietly he said, "I need to think."

Thinking required a few minutes of silence, where he just stared into space, trying to outthink himself or discover what he would have planned if he was a bodiless wraith doomed to stutter for all eternity.

If Lily was a bodiless wraith doomed to stutter for all of eternity she might resort to graffiti too… Except, no, she wouldn't go back to Hogwarts. Because why would anyone ever go back to Hogwarts unless they had absolutely no choice in the matter? Plus, as Wizard Lenin had pointed out, he'd already been there and done that and it hadn't gone…

It was at that point that the idea of the chess board dawned on Lily, and, more importantly the idea of pieces. Lily didn't necessarily see the world that way, that was more of Wizard Lenin thought process, she'd always seen the world as…

As an empty stage filled with bizarre, colorful, enchanting, and distracting props. A place of wonder, superficiality, where actors walked in and back out again rarely staying for more than a few moments.

Quirrell didn't see it that way though, he saw the game, he saw the chess board and on it he saw Lily's pawns. Her mortal, young, inexperienced, and frighteningly fragile pawns.

"Lenin, you don't think… You don't think he'll do the same thing last time, I mean with Hermione and…" She trailed off when Lenin looked up at her, and for a moment she could almost feel his voice and thoughts inside her head again, like he'd never left in the first place.

"Hermione Jean Granger and those like her are inconsequential."

(December 25, 1991.

"That, is hardly fair."

He watched her through eyes that were at once a stranger's and frighteningly familiar. She'd known those eyes for most of her life. Those eyes lived in her.

"I was originally going to get Neville Longbottom, when I realized you might need some extra motivation. But as the heir of a noble and ancient house, as well as other reasons, it was easier for me if I just went for the mudblood instead."

In memory she couldn't see his face, Quirrell's face, but instead Hermione Granger superimposed over those haunting words in Wizard Lenin's voice.

"You see, I didn't think that you'd necessarily come to me, but I thought I might as well wrap everything up tonight all the same. I thought about killing you, but then I will admit that in your own way you are clever, clever enough to make it very inconvenient to search for it. That and, well, we all remember what happened the last time I tried to kill you. I thought about torturing you, but I can't picture you as someone who breaks easily, somehow I think that it would be very hard to get you to say anything you didn't wish to. But then I remembered we had a conversation about the merits of friendship and being close enough."

And instead of her hands, this time it was a knife against the girl's neck, blood welling…

"Well, Eleanor Potter, are you close enough?")

"I think it would be best, Lily, if you focus on finding him and neutralizing his vessel sooner rather than later." He said instead, and then, added, "Focusing on people like Hermione Granger or Neville Longbottom will only give him the opening he's looking for."

And in that moment she remembered, really remembered, exactly what Wizard Lenin was. On Christmas he'd stood against Quirell, agreed to dispose of him but… But they had once been the same person and they looked at the world through the same eyes. When they looked at people like Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, and Neville Longbottom they saw the same thing.

An inconvenient means to an end.

In the present moment, in the Default commonroom surrounded by these inconsequential people, Lily closed her eyes and felt herself grow cold and sober, "The bad news is that we are at war."

She opened her eyes, watching the shadows dance from the firelight, took in each of the pale exhausted and naïve faces of those who had no idea what could lurk inside of Hogwarts. Then Hermione, who knew, yet somehow still seemed so woefully unprepared for it, "Someone in Hogwarts is most likely going to try to destroy you. Not merely kill you or dispose of you but destroy you completely and utterly until there's nothing left of what you were before. In other words, you will become a point to prove."

"I don't know what they look like, how old they are, or if they're even a boy or a girl. I just know that if we don't start training now, if we don't find them, then you might very well die."

They didn't seem to believe her, Blaise and Daphne at least, having placed Lily in the role of the girl who cried "Rabbit" a year ago. Luna faltered, grew uncertain, but it didn't seem to click. Even Hermione, who of all people should know best, while she hesitated and her face grew pale didn't truly understand.

Because she'd just gotten everything back, how could it possibly slip through her fingers a second time?

"And you?" Strangely enough, it was Rabbit who asked, staring at her with those empty somehow not empty eyes. Like if she stared into them long enough she could find the light that had been sucked in ages ago.

"Well, I suppose I'll abide."

(And for good measure she threw another text book at Rabbit's head which somehow infuriatingly managed to miss once again.)

Author's Note: Bear with me, this will be a long author's note.

For those of you interested in side fics new in the world of Lily crossovers with random universes is "Under the Shadow of the Clock Tower" featuring Majora's Mask and "The Labor of Light Yagami" featuring Death Note. Neither, as you can guess, are canon.

In regards to the chapter. Yes I did reference both "Dodgeball" and chapter 25 of this fic in this chapter. In my defense, chapter 25 was great. And also, I just really loved that one line from Dodgeball, "If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball." Also, I planned for A-team guerilla training sessions here but blame Wizard Lenin and Lily having a giant conversation where they realize Voldemort's made his grand return... with snakes. So that and more will have to wait until next chapter.

Which brings us to just random things I want to make clear in regards to this story. I've said it before, and no one's really complained about this, but I keep seeing words like hilarious and crack being brought up in regards to the story. And, it's not really crack, not at its heart. Basically what I want to warn is that funniness isn't really the point and that things may get real, for a little while at least.

Now, if you're still reading at this point I have various things I want to ask you as my loyal audience (if you're 38 chapters in you must be dedicated). One, I hate the summary. Someone recently pointed out that it is awful and I agree. I've agreed that it was awful since chapter 3. So, now that we're... still ultimately in the beginning of the fic but further in than the very beginning, I'd like to see if any of you can come up with something better. Come up with a summary, if you win your prize is... your summary summarizing this fic! Because, really, it is terrible and if someone can do better than I can that would be much appreciated.

On another, me musing about future plans, note. I've been thinking about fanfiction and publishing real world things and thinking about transforming "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" into an actual book. A lot would need to change to take it away from its Harry Potter origins but that being said... Does anyone have any idea what they'd like to see in something like this? I'm not promising to do it, at least not for a while, but if I did... Ideas?

Thanks to readers and reviewers, you guys are great, reviews are always much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter