Author's Note: There are a lot of characters in Harry Potter. There are a lot of characters in Worm, too, but thankfully I was able to leave most of them behind due to the premise. Even one world's worth of characters is a lot to juggle. Some got left out or made extremely brief background appearances, ostensibly for plot reasons, but also because there's only so much of a cast I can handle!

But where are they? What have they been doing? Why didn't they get involved?

Here is a humorous take on the absence of a few characters, from their perspectives. Specifically, some of the ones I don't plan to do anything else with. (Hence why Umbridge isn't on the list, or the Dursleys, or Lockhart). The tone is going to be irreverent and tongue-in-cheek at best, so I'm not labeling this as canon, but the basic idea behind each snip is the canon reason we don't see them in-story. Enjoy!

Dobby

'As it turns out, his moral code was very specific.'

Somewhere in Malfoy Manor, not long after the end of Draco Malfoy's first school year, an elf named Dobby lingered by a candlestick, snapping away each fresh drop of wax as it beaded up from the lit candle. The other elves passed him by in their chores, sparing him pitying glances.

"Yes, this is truly the smartest possible way to cause politically-motivated chaos, death, and destruction," Lucius Malfoy said loudly as he paced back and forth in the adjacent room. "I can foresee no possible way this will ever backfire on me, certainly not in some random, unexpected magical interaction that happens to imbue a child of my hated foes with the magical knowledge of my former master. This random dark object I know only the barest minimum about is a wonderful tool of destruction, and that is all I need to know!"

Dobby the elf continued snapping the wax away, while stepping on the toes of his left foot with the heel of his right to punish himself for inefficient cleaning. The bad master was plotting.

"Even better, this will surely catch that dratted Potter child in the crossfire, as he goes to Hogwarts," Lucius continued. "Yes, my only son will be perfectly unharmed, while the Mudbloods and Half-breeds will die in spades, with absolutely no indiscriminate killing. The Dark Lord gave me this artifact in between torturing his own followers, it will surely only kill the deserving."

Harry Potter was to be in danger? Harry Potter was the opposite of the bad masters! Dobby would have to do something. Something tricksy, something clever–

"Lucius, you're monologuing again!" Narcissa, the mistress of the house, yelled from upstairs.

"I am practicing my oratory prowess, Narcissa!" the bad master yelled back.

"Read Draco's letters, Harry Potter doesn't even go to Hogwarts!" Narcissa retorted.

Harry Potter was not in danger? It was only the many, many other innocent children at the wizarding school? Not the one Dobby knew by name?

"I'm still doing it!" Something crashed near the bad master. Something expensive and frightfully hard to clean up, no doubt. "Muggleborn children will die in droves! I will make the Weasley hellspawn my weapon of unwitting destruction! This summer, I will go to Diagon Alley and give him our Lord's dark artifact!"

"The youngest and least likely to notice something is wrong is a girl, and at least do it when nobody is looking," Narcissa conceded, her voice drawing closer as she walked down the stairs. "Also, read Draco's letters before he tells you about his school year, so you're prepared. Or drink. Heavily. That's what I did."

Dobby was not hearing of any danger to Harry Potter.

"I am certain my son was the perfect Slytherin and put all of the inferior children in their place," Lucius said.

Dobby continued to not care about children not named Harry Potter.

Such was the state of affairs in the Malfoy household for years to come, until an unfortunate bout of unexpected magical mushrooms and poor decisions at a brothel led to Lucius Malfoy accidentally freeing his very particular house elf. Dobby went on to not care about anyone not named Harry Potter in different places, while wearing colorful hats and socks.

Slytherin's Monster

'Doing exactly what was ordered and nothing more since the 1600s!'

Waiting.

The Speaker would call soon. Any second now, the passage would open. It would be time to attack once again. To kill, or only to petrify, as the Speaker ordered.

Any second now…

The Speaker would call for it if the Speaker needed assistance. The distant sounds of fighting meant nothing.

Sooner or later, the Speaker would come.

Or maybe not.

Oh well. Hibernation was as good a way to pass the centuries as any.

Frank Bryce

'He still doesn't know that he was originally fated to be killed by an evil demon baby.'

An old man gardened.

"I have the strangest feeling I should be in some sort of mortal peril right now," he said to himself as he pulled a weed out of the ground.

The old man continued to garden.

Stan Shunpike

'His bus service could really have benefited from a sign or something.'

Stan had seen all types. The Knight Bus served anyone with shoes, a shirt, and the fare for the ride. Sometimes one of those three was optional, if they looked to be in a bad spot. The events of the world outside came in dribs and drabs of talk from his many passengers.

One day, a woman with tattooed arms called the bus. "How long have you been in operation?" she demanded from the curb.

"Thirty years, almost to the day!" he said proudly.

"You've always come to any witch or wizard who raises their wand, even if they don't know what they're doing," she continued.

"Yup, helps with all the drunks we cart around," he said. "Where do you want to go?"

"You can take me to Hogsmeade?" she asked.

"Sure can! You'll be there within the hour." He didn't understand why her frown was getting more and more severe. "Is something the matter?"

She raised one tattooed arm threateningly, then rubbed at her face. "Just… For Merlin's sake, advertise better!"

She walked away, muttering angrily. He caught the phrases 'going to die laughing' and 'so much trouble', but not much else.

Stan had other passengers to take places, so he set off for his next destination. He never saw the witch with tattooed arms again.

Nagini

'Despite all her rage, still just one dead snake in a room full of dead snakes.'

"Say, Bob," one Ministry worker said to the other as they cleaned up the crime scene.

"Yeah, Joe?" the other replied in between vanishing piles of snake corpses.

"This was a big one," Joe said, lifting the corpse of a much larger snake. It was a different breed, too.

"Yeah, it was," Bob agreed. "Died like the rest, though."

Neither noticed or cared about the various dark enchantments still woven into the snake's body, blasted to shreds by some sort of magical backlash.

It vanished just as easily as the other snake corpses.

Griphook (and the Goblin Nation)

'Who?'

Deep below and within Gringotts, goblins did goblin things. Nobody bothered them, and they bothered nobody except with vaguely exploitative banking practices and animal cruelty that was par for the course in the magical world.

One day, a wizard came in and requested to search a vault that was not his own. They said no.

The next week, a witch came in and requested to visit her own personal vault. She was supposed to be in Azkaban, but so were Sirius Black and Barty Crouch Junior, so they verified her identity with their laxest security measures and let her through. She took the cup and nothing else, putting paid to their hopes of someone cleaning out or using that particular old vault. They continued to take 2% in annual fees to maintain it, following through with the plan that would have it emptied by the mid-twenties of the next century.

Nobody bothered the goblins, and they bothered nobody in return. Especially not with surprise inheritances, secret vaults, secret wills, secretly tampered-with wills, secret embezzlement by trusted authority figures, goblin national politics, goblin assassins, goblin investment brokers, or anything else that might turn a random wizard or witch's life into something out of a power or revenge fantasy.

There was no money in that.

Sybill Trelawney

'For an expert in Divination, she really wasn't very good at thinking outside the box when it came to interpretations of her craft.'

One day early in the summer of 1991, tea leaves told Sybill Trelawney that this would be a good decade to spend in her tower, never leaving it.

Sybill was not one to question the portents, especially when she actually got something out of them, but she had to ask for clarification, because that sounded absolutely dreadful. One dead cat and messy entrail-divining later, she got a follow-up. Ill fortune would come for those who saw the future if they did not keep to their domain. That could mean many things, from great humiliation to personal loss to death… But really, it was always death.

This was worrying, and again a much clearer result than she usually got, so she took out a crystal ball and stared into it. Visions were often much more abstract, being a visual medium with many more ways to convey the same meaning, or many possible meanings.

Within the crystal ball, she saw herself, running screaming from a nameless terror, one that stopped at the base of her classroom and personal quarters, unwilling to venture up into the tower. When she, in the vision, carelessly stepped back down to go back to what she was doing, it leaped upon her, clawed her head open, chitinous limbs greedily scooping out her mind. Then it shoved it all back and leaped away, leaving her on the ground. That she sat up and shakily went back to her tower after did nothing to diminish the terror she felt at witnessing such a thing.

Three times a warning shouldn't be ignored. She would have to stock up on Sherry. Something was a danger specifically to her if she left her tower. Ah well. Not like she had anything scheduled for this decade, anyway.