I didn't feel anything different. Just one minute I was taking a stupid quiz on the internet, and the next minute, I was standing somewhere cold and crowded.
"I must've fallen asleep," I mumbled, then started as I realized that this was no dream. You can tell when it's a dream. At least I can. This was no dream.
I tried to look around me. There were people milling around everywhere. It was cold out. I wildly looked up for a minute with the idea that I would check and make sure the sky was still blue. It was. And though the sun was shining brightly, it was cold. Not bitterly cold, just the cold feeling you get when it's been a long summer, and suddenly you just feel that summer is over and winter is just around the corner. There's a chill around you that doesn't come from the cool air. It comes from knowing that something good has just died, has left, and you can never get it back.
I started to go up to someone and ask what year this was. After all, isn't that what time-travelers always do in books? And yet, I wasn't sure I'd traveled through time. But then I saw it.
"Platform Nine, Platform Ten," I whispered. Yes, plastic numbers, just like in the books. I turned around completely, and saw that I had been standing next to a cart, on which suitcases… MY suitcases, ones that I knew were buried deep in the laundry room at home, were piled. And then…
A noisy family of red-heads appeared. There were five kids, two guys who looked a whole lot older than me, one guy my age, and a girl younger than me, appeared, the three youngest dragging carts just like mine.
I took in my breath. This was how most fanfics started, wasn't it? Some new character is at the station, and he or she sees Ron or Harry. That's how it always begins.
I felt the sudden sinking feeling I always feel in emergencies. Luckily, whenever I get this feeling, my first reaction is to calm down. I never, ever panic. I never panic when the emergency first presents itself to me. However, if nothing I can do alleviates the problem, THEN I panic, and nothing can stop me.
I walked through the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 with no problem. After all, I'd been expecting this, hadn't I? I knew everything about the books.
And yet, nothing prepared me for the sight of hundreds of kids in black robes, or semi-normal clothes, all loading luggage onto the gleaming scarlet Hogwarts Express, or the smell of soot and sweat burning in my nose, or the overwhelming sounds of conversation from everywhere I turned.
"Ron!" I heard a voice call out. "Hey, over here!" I turned to see that Ron had walked through the barrier behind me. And as I slowly got it into my head that yes, this WAS the real Ron Weasley, my first thought was 'He looks nothing like the actor they've got playing him in the movie.'
I was starting to feel sick. How was I going to get home? And yet, I HAD typed in that Yes, I would be happier here than in my own world, and yet…
I climbed up a step to throw my luggage into a car, and felt something poke me in the hip. I reached down to rub my sore spot, and felt something sticking out of my pocket. I pulled out…
It was about a foot long, maybe less. As thick as a pencil at one end, and about the size of a toothpick at the other, it was made of gleaming maple wood. I knew at once what it was, of course, but everything was so unbelievable that it took my brain a moment to connect with the rest of me.
A wand.
A MAGIC wand.
MY magic wand.
Whoosh! That was the sound of all desires to go home flying out the window, and not being missed.
I could go along with this adventure for a little while.
I stepped into the train, the third car from the back, and peeked into a compartment.
"Sorry, we're full up," said a boy inside.
All the other compartments in that car were full too.
I was wondering if I'd ever find a place to sit, when the realization hit me. I felt like slapping my head. Of course! With all the fanfics I'd read, I should have remembered the one simple fact that was almost always the same through all of them.
There was ALWAYS a seat in Harry's compartment.
As I nearly skipped down to the last car, it suddenly hit me. I was going to see Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron. I would actually see them.
Hermione I was looking forward to meeting. The books had never really described her well, and it would be nice to add some details to my mental picture of her.
Ron I was also not worried about. After all, he seemed the most real to me.
But Harry…
I remember telling my sister, who also read the books, "I don't like Harry. He's a one-dimensional character. Everybody else has personality. He's brave. That's it, that's all we know about him. He just sorta goes with the flow. He doesn't have a personality. I don't like him." How could I meet, and interact with, a static character?
Why was I even thinking like this? It was absurd; I was actually realistically thinking about meeting a character from a book! A series, I mentally reminded myself.
I arrived at the last compartment, in the last car, and took a deep breath. This was it. I was going to be meeting Harry Potter.
And then it hit me: Harry was a static character to everyone, interested readers and fanfic authors alike. But I was about to meet him.
I could find out what he's really like, and then write the best fanfic ever! After all, I was actually going to take part in this little adventure. All I'd have to do was take notes, add in a transfer student to replace whatever part I had in the story, and then, voila! Perfect fanfic!
I felt like slapping my head again. I was stuck in a book. A fiction book, filled with flying broomsticks and Fizzing Whizbees, and I was worrying about fanfiction.net. Of all the idiot…
I opened the compartment door to cut off any more monologues in my head.
"Hi, is there room in this compartment? All the others are full up," I quoted my character from another fanfic that I had never bothered to post.
"Sure, c'mon in." Ron had such a sweet British accent. I love accents. They're just so amazingly cute! Ron was not amazingly cute, however, though he was pretty close. He did have red hair, but it was more coppery than carrot-top. His freckles were fading as he grew older, (I assumed they were all fifteen, because I did NOT want to be in the middle of "The Goblet of Fire") and he had clear blue eyes, wide set around a nose that was rather too large. I smiled at him as I sat down, and turned my gaze upon Hermione Granger.
Hermione did have bushy brown hair. But it wasn't as bushy as… long. It was longer than mine, halfway down her back, and frizzy from her ears down. If somebody ran a straightening iron through it, it might reach her waist. She had a pug nose, set smack in the middle of a heart-shaped face, with large brown eyes and dark eyelashes. Her eyebrows were thick and bushy, and her smile was wide and very genuine.
Then, with a bit of trepidation, I turned to look at Harry.
He was watching me, and we studied each other.
His hair was long, unlike Ron's which was very short. I love guys with long hair- when my best friend got his head shaved *sob* I wanted to be sick- and Harry's hair was certainly long. I was relieved to see he didn't have the retarded look that the cover of the fourth book gave him, but he did look a bit- er, a bit dorky. His big owl-eye glasses were NOT held together with tape, but were still wrong for his face. They nearly hid his startlingly wide green eyes. My eyes traveled up his face to look for the scar- there it was. It was just a jagged red line, nearly hidden by his bangs, which really didn't look like a lightning bolt unless you studied it really hard-
"Why are you staring at me like that?" Harry asked me, his voice showing the annoyance he felt.
"Er, I just wanted to see if you really looked like what most people think.."
"So, I guess you already know who he is," Ron said sarcastically.
I glared at him. I wasn't used to glaring at people, it just wasn't natural for me. But it seemed like what one of my characters would do. "I know who all of you are." Something in me wanted to impress them. I don't really impress my friends much. My best friend has done EVERYTHING. I can't do anything he hasn't done twice as well before, plus a lot of stuff I haven't done.
"Yeah, right," Ron scoffed.
"Ronald Weasley, age fifteen, you have six siblings, five brothers who are older than you, and your younger sister Ginny, who was possessed in your second year by Tom Riddle's diary. You're jealous of all of Harry's attention and you feel guilty because you're jealous." His mouth gaped open as I turned in my seat. "Hermione Granger. Your parents are Muggle dentists. You've spent time in France. You don't really like studying as much as you profess to but you're just terrified that you'll fail and your friends will dump you."
Now her mouth was hanging open. I turned to Harry, but I just couldn't look him in the eye.
"You are brave," was the first thing I could think of to say. "Um, you live with the Dursleys, you have an invisibility cloak that your dad left you, you had a crush on Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw seeker, last year, and tried to ask her to the Yule Ball, but she was going with Cedric Diggory. You play Quiddich for Gryffindor-"
"It's Gryffin-der, nor Gryffin-door," Ron said, trying to sound scornful, but he was too awed by my omniscience to pull it off.
Harry was staring at me, his wide green eyes REALLY wide now. "How do you know all this stuff?"
I started to laugh. After all, how do you explain to a living, breathing person that he's a character from a book?
"You wouldn't believe me if I tried to explain," I said, getting control of myself. "Just know that I know every little thing that's happened to you ever since you started going to Hogwarts."
They stared at me in stony silence for a few minutes. Then, Harry spoke again. "You seem to know us pretty well, but we don't know a thing about you."
"Oh, I'm-" A dozen different names sprang to mind. Should I use my ff.net pen name, Amethyst? Should I give them the name of my character? Should I give them my real name? Why was I worried about whether they knew my name or not? "Diana Forrest," I said truthfully. "I guess you could say that I was a Muggle-born writer. Er, witch."
I'd used the phrase Muggle-born writer in all of my author's notes. The train started to move, and the three of them eyed me warily, as I conveniently found a small pad of paper and a pencil in my pocket, and started to take notes on their appearances.
"I think she's just plain looney." The sound of whispering brought my head up from my paper. Ron turned red as he realized I'd heard him.
"Oh, that's quite all right," I assured him, "I think I'm looney too." It was a line from my parody. Geez, could I stop quoting myself? Was that even possible? I wrote it down.
The compartment door banged open, and the four of us looked up.
A dream stood there, a dream with short white-blond hair, dreamy silver eyes, delicate arched eyebrows, and two lumbering bodyguards. I stared at him for a long time before realizing that my mouth was hanging open.
"So, Potter, picked up another Mudblood, have you?" He said in a tenor voice.
That's when it struck me exactly who he was. I started to talk almost without meaning to. "Bis appallare, Bis terribilis, Draco Draco!" I quoted in a whisper.
"Excuse me?" He stared down at me in comtempt.
Cassandra Claire, your Draco stories are the best thing I've ever read, but you have never, ever done this boy justice in the looks department.
"It's Latin," I explained weakly.
He gave me an odd look. I stared beyond him at the two hulks of flesh which must have been Crabbe and Goyle. Goyle had bristly hair poking out of his head, deep set brown eyes, a largish nose and a chin which made me think of nothing more than a gorilla I had seen in the zoo. Crabbe had greasy black hair that wasn't as long as Harry's, and a wide head with two large ears sticking out from either side.
I started scribbling in my notebook, while Malfoy, Ron and even Harry stared at me as if I was insane. I might have been.
The train jerked to a stop, nearly sending Malfoy flying backwards. He grabbed onto the doorframe just in time, and with a last glance at me, stalked away.
I grinned very widely. Hogwarts. I was going to go to Hogwarts.
"I must've fallen asleep," I mumbled, then started as I realized that this was no dream. You can tell when it's a dream. At least I can. This was no dream.
I tried to look around me. There were people milling around everywhere. It was cold out. I wildly looked up for a minute with the idea that I would check and make sure the sky was still blue. It was. And though the sun was shining brightly, it was cold. Not bitterly cold, just the cold feeling you get when it's been a long summer, and suddenly you just feel that summer is over and winter is just around the corner. There's a chill around you that doesn't come from the cool air. It comes from knowing that something good has just died, has left, and you can never get it back.
I started to go up to someone and ask what year this was. After all, isn't that what time-travelers always do in books? And yet, I wasn't sure I'd traveled through time. But then I saw it.
"Platform Nine, Platform Ten," I whispered. Yes, plastic numbers, just like in the books. I turned around completely, and saw that I had been standing next to a cart, on which suitcases… MY suitcases, ones that I knew were buried deep in the laundry room at home, were piled. And then…
A noisy family of red-heads appeared. There were five kids, two guys who looked a whole lot older than me, one guy my age, and a girl younger than me, appeared, the three youngest dragging carts just like mine.
I took in my breath. This was how most fanfics started, wasn't it? Some new character is at the station, and he or she sees Ron or Harry. That's how it always begins.
I felt the sudden sinking feeling I always feel in emergencies. Luckily, whenever I get this feeling, my first reaction is to calm down. I never, ever panic. I never panic when the emergency first presents itself to me. However, if nothing I can do alleviates the problem, THEN I panic, and nothing can stop me.
I walked through the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 with no problem. After all, I'd been expecting this, hadn't I? I knew everything about the books.
And yet, nothing prepared me for the sight of hundreds of kids in black robes, or semi-normal clothes, all loading luggage onto the gleaming scarlet Hogwarts Express, or the smell of soot and sweat burning in my nose, or the overwhelming sounds of conversation from everywhere I turned.
"Ron!" I heard a voice call out. "Hey, over here!" I turned to see that Ron had walked through the barrier behind me. And as I slowly got it into my head that yes, this WAS the real Ron Weasley, my first thought was 'He looks nothing like the actor they've got playing him in the movie.'
I was starting to feel sick. How was I going to get home? And yet, I HAD typed in that Yes, I would be happier here than in my own world, and yet…
I climbed up a step to throw my luggage into a car, and felt something poke me in the hip. I reached down to rub my sore spot, and felt something sticking out of my pocket. I pulled out…
It was about a foot long, maybe less. As thick as a pencil at one end, and about the size of a toothpick at the other, it was made of gleaming maple wood. I knew at once what it was, of course, but everything was so unbelievable that it took my brain a moment to connect with the rest of me.
A wand.
A MAGIC wand.
MY magic wand.
Whoosh! That was the sound of all desires to go home flying out the window, and not being missed.
I could go along with this adventure for a little while.
I stepped into the train, the third car from the back, and peeked into a compartment.
"Sorry, we're full up," said a boy inside.
All the other compartments in that car were full too.
I was wondering if I'd ever find a place to sit, when the realization hit me. I felt like slapping my head. Of course! With all the fanfics I'd read, I should have remembered the one simple fact that was almost always the same through all of them.
There was ALWAYS a seat in Harry's compartment.
As I nearly skipped down to the last car, it suddenly hit me. I was going to see Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron. I would actually see them.
Hermione I was looking forward to meeting. The books had never really described her well, and it would be nice to add some details to my mental picture of her.
Ron I was also not worried about. After all, he seemed the most real to me.
But Harry…
I remember telling my sister, who also read the books, "I don't like Harry. He's a one-dimensional character. Everybody else has personality. He's brave. That's it, that's all we know about him. He just sorta goes with the flow. He doesn't have a personality. I don't like him." How could I meet, and interact with, a static character?
Why was I even thinking like this? It was absurd; I was actually realistically thinking about meeting a character from a book! A series, I mentally reminded myself.
I arrived at the last compartment, in the last car, and took a deep breath. This was it. I was going to be meeting Harry Potter.
And then it hit me: Harry was a static character to everyone, interested readers and fanfic authors alike. But I was about to meet him.
I could find out what he's really like, and then write the best fanfic ever! After all, I was actually going to take part in this little adventure. All I'd have to do was take notes, add in a transfer student to replace whatever part I had in the story, and then, voila! Perfect fanfic!
I felt like slapping my head again. I was stuck in a book. A fiction book, filled with flying broomsticks and Fizzing Whizbees, and I was worrying about fanfiction.net. Of all the idiot…
I opened the compartment door to cut off any more monologues in my head.
"Hi, is there room in this compartment? All the others are full up," I quoted my character from another fanfic that I had never bothered to post.
"Sure, c'mon in." Ron had such a sweet British accent. I love accents. They're just so amazingly cute! Ron was not amazingly cute, however, though he was pretty close. He did have red hair, but it was more coppery than carrot-top. His freckles were fading as he grew older, (I assumed they were all fifteen, because I did NOT want to be in the middle of "The Goblet of Fire") and he had clear blue eyes, wide set around a nose that was rather too large. I smiled at him as I sat down, and turned my gaze upon Hermione Granger.
Hermione did have bushy brown hair. But it wasn't as bushy as… long. It was longer than mine, halfway down her back, and frizzy from her ears down. If somebody ran a straightening iron through it, it might reach her waist. She had a pug nose, set smack in the middle of a heart-shaped face, with large brown eyes and dark eyelashes. Her eyebrows were thick and bushy, and her smile was wide and very genuine.
Then, with a bit of trepidation, I turned to look at Harry.
He was watching me, and we studied each other.
His hair was long, unlike Ron's which was very short. I love guys with long hair- when my best friend got his head shaved *sob* I wanted to be sick- and Harry's hair was certainly long. I was relieved to see he didn't have the retarded look that the cover of the fourth book gave him, but he did look a bit- er, a bit dorky. His big owl-eye glasses were NOT held together with tape, but were still wrong for his face. They nearly hid his startlingly wide green eyes. My eyes traveled up his face to look for the scar- there it was. It was just a jagged red line, nearly hidden by his bangs, which really didn't look like a lightning bolt unless you studied it really hard-
"Why are you staring at me like that?" Harry asked me, his voice showing the annoyance he felt.
"Er, I just wanted to see if you really looked like what most people think.."
"So, I guess you already know who he is," Ron said sarcastically.
I glared at him. I wasn't used to glaring at people, it just wasn't natural for me. But it seemed like what one of my characters would do. "I know who all of you are." Something in me wanted to impress them. I don't really impress my friends much. My best friend has done EVERYTHING. I can't do anything he hasn't done twice as well before, plus a lot of stuff I haven't done.
"Yeah, right," Ron scoffed.
"Ronald Weasley, age fifteen, you have six siblings, five brothers who are older than you, and your younger sister Ginny, who was possessed in your second year by Tom Riddle's diary. You're jealous of all of Harry's attention and you feel guilty because you're jealous." His mouth gaped open as I turned in my seat. "Hermione Granger. Your parents are Muggle dentists. You've spent time in France. You don't really like studying as much as you profess to but you're just terrified that you'll fail and your friends will dump you."
Now her mouth was hanging open. I turned to Harry, but I just couldn't look him in the eye.
"You are brave," was the first thing I could think of to say. "Um, you live with the Dursleys, you have an invisibility cloak that your dad left you, you had a crush on Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw seeker, last year, and tried to ask her to the Yule Ball, but she was going with Cedric Diggory. You play Quiddich for Gryffindor-"
"It's Gryffin-der, nor Gryffin-door," Ron said, trying to sound scornful, but he was too awed by my omniscience to pull it off.
Harry was staring at me, his wide green eyes REALLY wide now. "How do you know all this stuff?"
I started to laugh. After all, how do you explain to a living, breathing person that he's a character from a book?
"You wouldn't believe me if I tried to explain," I said, getting control of myself. "Just know that I know every little thing that's happened to you ever since you started going to Hogwarts."
They stared at me in stony silence for a few minutes. Then, Harry spoke again. "You seem to know us pretty well, but we don't know a thing about you."
"Oh, I'm-" A dozen different names sprang to mind. Should I use my ff.net pen name, Amethyst? Should I give them the name of my character? Should I give them my real name? Why was I worried about whether they knew my name or not? "Diana Forrest," I said truthfully. "I guess you could say that I was a Muggle-born writer. Er, witch."
I'd used the phrase Muggle-born writer in all of my author's notes. The train started to move, and the three of them eyed me warily, as I conveniently found a small pad of paper and a pencil in my pocket, and started to take notes on their appearances.
"I think she's just plain looney." The sound of whispering brought my head up from my paper. Ron turned red as he realized I'd heard him.
"Oh, that's quite all right," I assured him, "I think I'm looney too." It was a line from my parody. Geez, could I stop quoting myself? Was that even possible? I wrote it down.
The compartment door banged open, and the four of us looked up.
A dream stood there, a dream with short white-blond hair, dreamy silver eyes, delicate arched eyebrows, and two lumbering bodyguards. I stared at him for a long time before realizing that my mouth was hanging open.
"So, Potter, picked up another Mudblood, have you?" He said in a tenor voice.
That's when it struck me exactly who he was. I started to talk almost without meaning to. "Bis appallare, Bis terribilis, Draco Draco!" I quoted in a whisper.
"Excuse me?" He stared down at me in comtempt.
Cassandra Claire, your Draco stories are the best thing I've ever read, but you have never, ever done this boy justice in the looks department.
"It's Latin," I explained weakly.
He gave me an odd look. I stared beyond him at the two hulks of flesh which must have been Crabbe and Goyle. Goyle had bristly hair poking out of his head, deep set brown eyes, a largish nose and a chin which made me think of nothing more than a gorilla I had seen in the zoo. Crabbe had greasy black hair that wasn't as long as Harry's, and a wide head with two large ears sticking out from either side.
I started scribbling in my notebook, while Malfoy, Ron and even Harry stared at me as if I was insane. I might have been.
The train jerked to a stop, nearly sending Malfoy flying backwards. He grabbed onto the doorframe just in time, and with a last glance at me, stalked away.
I grinned very widely. Hogwarts. I was going to go to Hogwarts.