"Expelliarmus!"
The spell was flying at Mimi even before she fully crossed the threshold between timelines, and they were close enough to each other that she barely had time to pull her own wand (Dru hadn't been sure, but it had seemed like a good idea to keep it in its holster, just in case being taken Outside did something to the enchantments like being taken openly through the floo) and deflect it with a point-shield, even though she had been expecting the wizard she could see through the portal as it opened, sitting in her counterpart's kitchen, guarded and determined, to throw something at her.
She assumed he lived here, since he was alone in the kitchen at five in the morning. It had already been mid-afternoon in her timeline by the time they'd gotten everyone together for the distraction/trap and done the ritual to deflect attention from Dru, but she'd managed to convince the older witch to drop her here in the morning, so she could have the whole day to work on establishing herself.
The bloke looked like Uncle James, thinner and darker-haired than her cousin Henry, and the shape of his mind was a bit different, but he had to be Henry's counterpart — Uncle James and Aunt Tiffany's next oldest boy was only...thirteen? Maybe fourteen. (When was Charlie's birthday again? Not important, focus Black!) This bloke had to be at least sixteen or seventeen, so he had to be Henry. Unless Betty was a boy in this universe, maybe? Henry was a few months older than Mimi, and Betty almost exactly a year younger, but they both looked like bloody adults when she'd seen them at Henry's birthday party, back in April. (Mimi herself still looked like she was about fifteen, which Bella said was normal for the House of Black, but that didn't make it less annoying having to use mind magic to make undergrads think she was old enough to shag.) She was pretty sure Mister Expelliarmus was sixteen or seventeen (not...fourteen?), but she couldn't possibly guess which.
Okay, so maybe he wasn't Henry's counterpart, but he was definitely one of Uncle James's kids, which meant it would make sense for Sirius to be his godfather, and let him stay here while Mimi's counterpart was off at Miskatonic, even if he and her counterpart didn't have the same relationship she had with her Henry. (She'd offered to let him stay with her when he was home from school pretty much as soon as she'd taken over Grimmauld, because who would actually want to live with Uncle James?)
Grimmauld had been her house since she was thirteen and discovered that, after an entire lifetime of not having parents, having parents sucked. Not only had Sirius been a wanted man at the time for 'escaping' from Azkaban (read: finally agreeing to let Bella break him out when he found out Dumbledore had kept his daughter locked in a tower for the last eight years, but she'd escaped and was now in New Avalon, where Bella was free to be a bad influence on her at all times, so he'd better come keep an eye on that), but Grimmauld had been his childhood home. There were too many bad memories for him to come here just to bug her. When Lily had finally been allowed to come home, she had followed Mimi here to try to...be a mum, but that had been a short-lived experiment: Mimi didn't know how to have parents and Lily didn't know how to be a parent, and fourteen may not be the best age to suddenly show up in your daughter's life and try to get to know her and start telling her what to do and how to live her life. Especially when that daughter was as headstrong, independent, and quick-tempered as fourteen-year-old Mimi.
Suffice to say, Lily had pretty quickly gotten the message that Mimi didn't need her around (and deliberately trying to get to know someone because you thought you ought to have a relationship with them was just awkward), and moved in with Sirius instead.
It was a little weird that he'd be here on what was, she was pretty sure, the first day of lessons up at Hogwarts. All of Uncle James's kids had gone there. Though it was possible this version of whoever had been home-schooled in this universe for some reason, or even that he'd just forgotten something and floo'd down to grab it before his first lesson of his seventh year.
"Seriously?!" she snapped over the clatter of pots and pans being thrown off the wall. "You think someone's breaking into your home impersonating your god-sister and using some kind of transport spell that completely circumvented the wards—"
She was interrupted by Kreacher popping in to see what the commotion was about. The doddering old elf was quicker on the uptake than (probably) Alternate Henry, which didn't say anything good about Alt Henry, because Kreacher definitely wasn't all there. Mimi wasn't sure why. It was something to do with Regulus's death, but that was all she'd managed to wheedle out of the elf in the two and a half years that Grimmauld had been her primary residence. The wards must have tipped him off she wasn't their Mira Black, or something.
Though, come to think of it, the wards hadn't reacted at all to her arrival. The Family Magic should have at least registered her presence here, even if it didn't recognise her as the head of this particular household. She couldn't feel it at all, which was...disconcerting and slightly concerning. But not something she could or should try to do anything about immediately. At a glance, all the usual enchantments and active spells seemed to be functioning — the magical atmosphere didn't strike her as being somehow off, as it usually did when someone messed about with the wards on a space she was intimately familiar with. She might not realise immediately what they'd done, but she would realise something was different.
The elf immobilised her with a snap of his fingers and a pulse of magic that closed in on her from every direction, but he wasn't lucid enough to remember that she didn't need to physically move or speak to compel him.
Elves were much harder to read in terms of specific thoughts and memories than humans. Their emotions were easy to interpret, but they were more visceral and mercurial, and tended to give Mimi a headache when she didn't tune them out. Compelling them, on the other hand, was child's play (at least when she wasn't trying to compel them to do something against their master's explicit orders).
Go to sleep, Kreacher, she ordered him, clamping down on his mind in much the same way he had imprisoned her body. He did at least try to resist, inarticulate, difficult-to-interpret thoughts along the lines of but Master is in danger, he needs me fluttering weakly against the compulsion, but after a few seconds he succumbed to the inevitable, falling to his knees and slowly slumping over until he lay unconscious on the floor, the magic he'd cast upon her fading with his will.
She cleared her throat. "As I was saying, someone opens a portal directly into your kitchen, and you throw a fucking Disarming Charm at them? That is such an Uncle James move." Uncle James was an auror, he should know better than to throw a Disarming Charm at someone stepping out of a portal cast through the fucking Void too, but he would probably hesitate to use anything stronger on what appeared to be his god-daughter (or a random fifteen-year-old girl — she supposed it was possible her counterpart didn't look like her, either). "And you didn't even follow up!" Seriously, he should've been able to get half a dozen more spells off by now! Or, well, at least two or three, clearly he hadn't been trained as a battlemage, probably wasn't quite that quick.
She flicked the same spell at him, silent and point-cast, so he didn't have time to get through the first two syllables of protego before the spell yanked his wand out of his hand, following it with a caloris that struck just over his heart, burning a tiny hole in his faded, blue tee-shirt and scorching the skin beneath at exactly the same time she plucked his wand out of the air. She tossed it back with a smug smirk. "And you really should work on your silent casting." (In her opinion, he should also use sesapsa instead of protego, but she was aware that her style wasn't for everyone.)
He fumbled the catch, apparently completely baffled by her very predictable reaction to a contest he had initiated. "Who the— What— How—?"
"Mimi," she said flatly. When he continued to stare, uncomprehending, she added, "Siri's daughter? Or, I don't know, maybe he has a son in this timeline, or they threw my counterpart through the Veil with Lily, or something? Whatever, I'm from next May of an adjacent timeline. I'm here to warn anyone who will listen that there's going to be a major demonic invasion in about three weeks. Probably just New Avalon, honestly. I might write to my counterpart to see if she can tip off the Dean, but I don't really expect anyone else will believe me."
"What did you do to Kreacher?!" he demanded, ignoring the revelation that there were alternate timelines out there and an impending alien attack (of course), fear and anxiety sparking off of him, holding her at wandpoint, despite the fact that she could obviously take it again, just as easily as she had the first time.
"Compelled him to sleep? Obviously?"
Before Alt Henry could articulate another question, there was a clatter of feet coming down the staircase just outside the door. They managed to sound like at least five people, stampeding toward the kitchen, though there were only two. She could feel their minds approaching, completely open, projecting concern and wariness, curiosity — What was that? Where's Harry? (So this was Alt Henry, then!) Did he have another one of those dreams? He's supposed to be practising occlumency! I'll have to talk to him about it again. I hope he's okay. Did someone get in? Maybe it was Kreacher... — well before they burst into the room, their own wands drawn.
The boy, who was probably the same age as Henry — Harry in this universe, apparently — they both were, actually. But the boy — whom she couldn't think of as an adult man despite the fact that he was about a foot taller than her and there was a hint of orange fuzz around his chin and upper lip, because he was wearing pyjama trousers that were about six inches too short and a bloody Cannons jersey — looked perfectly ridiculous, and was still half-asleep. The girl, her wild curls flattened on one side, was much more awake — alarmed, when she realised there actually was an intruder (as opposed to confused, like the boy) — and much more attractive in her skimpy muggle shorts and vest (no brassiere, of course, she had been asleep). The Cannons fan agreed — apparently he had better taste in women than quidditch teams — though Harry's reaction to her appearance was so perfectly innocent, Mimi had to wonder whether he wasn't completely bent. And then if he'd told his parents yet. And then whether Uncle James had gone spare. (Focus, Black! Not on the jiggling!)
"Harry! Who is this? Where did she come from? What's going on?" she fired off — all the questions Harry had tried and failed to articulate in his shock.
Good bloody question, he projected clearly, drawing an involuntary giggle from Mimi.
"Well, apparently we're having a party. Who wants coffee?" she asked, stepping over the unconscious elf to fall into the seat at the head of the table and conjuring cups for the four of them.
"Me," Cannons Boy said firmly, apparently deciding that cute girl, wonder how old she is, what's her name, where'd she come from, wasn't too much of a threat, despite what'd she do to Kreacher, were she and Harry in a fight, how did she get in here, and coming to join her.
"Er. I'll put on the kettle," the girl said warily, which could be interpreted as an offer to boil water for the coffee (a patently silly one, since Mimi had offered), but her unspoken preference was for tea. (Bleh.)
Mimi rolled her eyes, stealing an impression of the brunette's preferred drink from the surface of her mind. "You can just say you want tasteless leaf water. I can do that just as easily as coffee." She did have to cast the tea glamour separately from the coffee glamour, but she'd have to cast separate coffee glamours anyway, since the redhead seemed to prefer slightly-coffee-flavoured warm milk over actual coffee. "Harry?" she prompted him, preparing the cups for their guests and levitating them to the appropriate places while he considered.
"Um...coffee?" He didn't like tea or coffee, apparently (Spiced cocoa it is.), but most of his hesitancy and difficulty in making the decision was due to distraction — apparently he'd never seen anyone actually make coffee before.
Not entirely surprising, it was generally considered a bit declassé to serve glamoured food, and when people did they avoided telling their guests, much less letting them watch. And most people who did glamour food (Mimi could always tell, mage-sight was cheating), just did little tweaks around the edges to make a dish taste more like they thought it should. Starting with condensed water (suspending a Pep Charm in it as it was condensed), applying a heating charm, tweaking the viscosity (for Cannons Boy's "coffee" and Harry's cocoa), and applying multisensory glamours (taste/smell, of course, but also visual — 'coffee' that still looked like water was weird) based on their conception of an ideal caffeinated drink was actually relatively complex magic. It might even be considered showing off (especially the part with the Pep Charm), by people who didn't know she'd been taught as a young child that this sort of thing — using magic for literally everything one could — was perfectly normal and expected. (Mimi had had a very odd childhood, in hindsight.)
But she sort of would have expected her counterpart to have done it in front of him at least once or twice. She had, the very first time Henry (and Neville and Winston) had broken into her part of the Castle. It was only polite to offer one's guests a drink, and she hadn't wanted the elves to rat them out to Dumbledore. (The boys had been very impressed. It was apparently one of the things that had made them think she was some sort of fae princess or something, locked up in her tower. Which was really more like all of the uninhabited parts of the Castle, Dumbledore had just kept her out of the school, but whatever.)
"Don't drink that!" the girl snapped at Cannons Boy, who startled badly.
"Blimey, Hermione! It's five in the morning! Could you, I dunno, tone it down? And why shouldn't I?"
"Are you really telling me your mother never told you that you can't eat conjured food, Ronald?" She threw a Light Globe into the air above the table, presumably to wake him up a bit.
Mimi wasn't the only one who winced at the sudden brightness. (She honestly hadn't noticed how dark it was. Colours were a bit muted, but between the Blacks' sharper-than-average senses and mage-sight, she could see perfectly well without a light charm. Though, that might also have been a contributing factor in Harry fumbling when she threw him his wand, come to think of it. Oops.) She blinked hard, forcing her eyes to adjust, taking a sip of coffee to brace herself before she opened them again. Better.
"She is," Ronald said stubbornly, nodding at Mimi.
"It's not conjured, it's condensed atmospheric water — like aguamenti — heated and glamoured. And a Pep Charm, because you all look like you could use one."
"There you go, then," the boy said smugly, taking a sip. "Oh! That's good, um..."
"Mira," she supplied. "Mira Calytrix, of the House of Black. Most people call me Mimi."
"Um. Cheers? How're you..."
"Did you say you're Sirius's daughter?" Harry asked, sounding only slightly less confused than when she'd first arrived. Especially after he tried his drink. "That's not coffee."
"But you like it, right?" she said, smirking. She knew he did. The smirk slipped from her face, though, as she met his eyes. Not because she instinctively slipped into his perspective, just a bit — she was used to that — but because his eyes were the same as her eyes. She hadn't noticed in the dim light of the low-turned lamp by the back door, but they were that same unmistakeable green she'd inherited from Lily. The exact same, she could see her own eyes through his right now, too, and— "In what universe would Lily have a kid with Uncle James? She doesn't even like him."
Of course, it was possible she'd liked him better before he'd handed Mimi over to Dumbledore (because he and Aunt Tiffany couldn't be expected to raise a tiny mind mage, especially with three other small children in the house, and giving her to Thom and Bella had been completely out of the question), and she'd come back from her thirteen-year trip running errands in other timelines and universes for Death and Fate, making her an abomination in the eyes of Britain and putting them firmly in opposite camps on the issue of New Avalon existing.
Uncle James was still very firmly opposed to it (and definitely believed Lily was an unholy abomination), and obviously Lily was fully on board, especially since Thom had stopped the terror campaign and instigating major battles in an attempt to drag Britain to the negotiating table and just taken Mann in December of Nineteen Eighty. After that, as far as she and every other sane person was concerned, the continuation of the war was on Britain, all further casualties the result of the Brits trying to retake the island.
Both Lily and Sirius had been in Dumbledore's vigilante group (Bella and Siri usually called them the Old Goat's After-School Club, though they'd actually called themselves the Order of the Phoenix), but even before Dumbledore had realised Lily was Thom's daughter and tried to confront her about that and practising black magic (and white, but somehow he never seemed to acknowledge that), and he and Siri had gotten into their duel, and Siri had Imperiused him (just to end the fight, make Dumbledore stand down — he hadn't done anything harmful with the spell, even Dumbledore would admit that), and everyone had been captured by the aurors who also happened to be part of the After-School Club (responding to a distress call from the Old Goat when he realised, oh, shite, Siri's been holding back on the battlefield in deference to my moral qualms about decent battlemagic, he was trained by Bella and might not be quite in my league power-wise, but definitely has me beat on skill and isn't going to hold back against someone trying to get the mother of his kid executed), and Lily had been thrown through the Veil and Sirius sent to Azkaban for using an Unforgivable against another human—
Before all that, they'd already had certain problems with the way Dumbledore (and Crouch, at the time) were running the war. Siri had been raised Dark and had issues with the Light's moral hypocrisy (Why fight a war you can't win and waste the lives of your people if you think their lives are inherently valuable, just because they're people? How can you say you care about rights and equality for all people, but ignore the suffering and desperate poverty of the non-humans whose existence you've essentially outlawed?) and considered Dumbledore's refusal to encourage his people to use the same tactics and degree of force as the Avalonians (Death Eaters, back then, or Knights of Walpurgis) to be a sort of betrayal of their cause, undermining it with a strategy that amounted to unilateral disarmament and therefore a betrayal of Siri's friends and comrades-in-arms, making them fight at a(n even greater) disadvantage and getting them killed by inches.
And Lily was a ritualist. The only reason she'd ended up with the Light in the first place was the idiots recruiting at Hogwarts were pushing some pureblood supremacy dragonshite that appealed to the younger sons of noble houses. Well, that and one of the main tactics they were using to antagonise the Ministry and try to force them to recognise the Avalonians as a power they had to negotiate with on even ground (i.e., recognise them as their own state), had been attacking muggles and muggleborns, who the Ministry had a responsibility to protect — the latter as citizens with no House to support them, and the former as a treaty obligation to the United Kingdom (and Ireland). Between those points and relentless Light propaganda, Lily had been under the impression when she left school that the Avalonians would want to kill her just because she was (so far as anyone knew at the time) muggleborn.
Of course, now that Sirius was an Azkaban escapee and Lily had already been 'executed' by the British Ministry once (obviously throwing a necromancer through the Veil of Death hadn't actually killed her), they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter of which side they were on. Thom had appointed them as his ambassadors to Britain a couple of years ago just to rub Britain's face in the fact that they couldn't do shite to either of them now (diplomatic privilege), so they lived in Britain and still sort of had to bridge the gap between Light and Dark, like they had until their relationship with the Light suddenly went pear-shaped, but they had both admitted to Mimi (Sirius very grudgingly — he still had a lot of unresolved issues with the way he'd been raised) that they should've been with the Dark all along.
And Uncle James was the biggest Light prat. Dumbledore was his father's godfather, basically a great-uncle, and had had a lot of influence on his sense of morality over the years. Mimi had spent the years she'd lived at Hogwarts hating him a lot more than she'd hated "Albus" (he'd insisted she call him by his given name) because he (and Aunt Tiffany) had found out that she was a mind mage (which she hadn't really realised was a special thing, because she was three at the time) and that certain Aspects had taken an interest in her as her parents' child and Thom's grandchild, so the 'imaginary' friends she'd talked about all the time weren't really imaginary, and promptly decided that this meant she couldn't be trusted not to hurt his kids, and handed her over to Dumbledore. Mostly Uncle James. Aunt Tiffany had been even more uncomfortable with her staying with them, but she'd wanted to send little Mimi to Bella and Thom, like Dru had suggested. Uncle James thought they would be a bad influence on her, so he took her to Hogwarts instead.
Mimi might have forgiven him for that, since he'd intended for her to be raised by Severus, who was her other godfather and also a mind mage, but he hadn't objected when Dumbledore decided to just keep her away from all living humans except the two of them forever and not even tell Sev she was at the school. And then he proceeded to be a manipulative arse, forcing her to feel how much it hurt him that she hated him every time he visited for the next eight years, which did not make her hate him any less.
Mimi hadn't spoken (or written) to him since she'd moved to New Avalon, when she was twelve, but she had kept in touch with Henry. He and his friends had 'rescued' her from her tower at the end of their first year at Hogwarts and smuggled her home to Henry's parents, expecting them to be fully willing to take in this weird, fae girl they'd found locked up in the abandoned part of Hogwarts, because that was just the sort of people they were — kind-hearted and helpful. Mimi had warned them that they wouldn't take kindly to him dragging her home with him, which he'd written off as her being silly and scared they wouldn't like her until they'd gotten to King's Cross and he'd seen the fear in his mother's eyes when she recognised Mimi.
Henry, to his credit, had thought his parents had been in the wrong, sending her to Dumbledore, and he'd been furious that they'd had someone mess with his mind to make him forget she existed (not an obliviation, it was more subtle than that) because he'd apparently been traumatised by seeing her sacrifice a cat to the Dark when they were three, or something. Neither of them really remembered it by then, and Mimi had only found out about all of this weeks later — she'd port-keyed away to New Avalon before that part of the argument, and so hadn't been able to steal the memory from one of the adults. The details weren't really important, anyway.
He'd also taken her side in the argument about whether she should be allowed to go to New Avalon instead of sending her back to Hogwarts and written to her while he was at school and they couldn't stop him. When they'd been fifteen, he'd floated the idea of getting married, which was sort of hilarious. They'd fooled around a bit over the summer (Mimi had been living here — at her Grimmauld — because she liked having a greater degree of independence and solitude than she had in New Avalon, and Henry had sneaked out to chill with her in London on multiple occasions), and it had been fun, but Mimi didn't think she was really the commitment type. Besides, Henry was really only asking because he knew it would drive Uncle James around the twist if she said yes. (Which was also the only reason she'd actually considered it for half a second, there.)
Nothing he'd told her about his father in the past five years (or that she'd picked up when they'd seen each other in person) had made Mimi think that Uncle James had become less of a prat. (Though, she hadn't heard from Henry in a few months, what with the invasion, so it was possible Uncle James had been eaten by a DAP. That would probably be an improvement.)
"You're Sirius and Lily's daughter?"
"Yep." Oh, shite... She'd just realised, "I guess you probably don't have a god-sister my age, then." Harry was probably her counterpart in this dimension, actually, which was just...shite. Well. There went the plan to write to her counterpart at the University and ask her to warn the Dean... "Where are they? I should probably talk to them after I finish explaining to you..."
"Er..." Anxiety and pain wafted off of him, and distinct reluctance, but I have to tell her, she deserves to know... "They're...dead. Both of them. Er. My parents died when I was a baby, and Sirius— Bellatrix cursed him and he fell through the Veil of Death, you know, down in the Department of Mysteries?" She nodded. She'd never been there, but she'd seen Sirius's memory of Lily's (temporary) execution. "Er...a little over a year ago. The May before last..." He trailed off, staring down at his cocoa, trying not to lose his composure and go on a heated rant about how life wasn't fair — they're still alive in her world?! — or confess to her it's my fault, I'm sorry...
Okay... She made a mental note to follow up on the Sirius thing later — it was entirely possible he wasn't actually dead any more than Lily had been — but for the moment, "You said Bella cursed him? And why were they even in the Department of Mysteries?" were more important questions.
"It's a long story," Hermione jumped in, concern for Harry almost overwhelmingly strong — probably thought she was protecting him from having to talk about whyever he thought he was responsible for Sirius's...current absence from the mortal realm — though both she and Ronald were now emanating suspicion because Mimi apparently didn't care that her not-father was currently dead. Oops. "But there was a mass break-out from Azkaban in January of Ninety-Six," she added, apparently under the impression that the part of that scenario that Mimi found weird was that Bella hadn't been in prison, not that she and Sirius had been duelling, apparently seriously, in the bloody Death Room.
"Wait. Why was Bella in Azkaban?" Obviously Britain would very much like to imprison her — probably even now that New Avalon was internationally recognised as its own country — but how would they catch her? And how would they keep her there? When they somehow managed to capture her, why wouldn't they have just killed her? That would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to keep her contained...
"What, there's no You Know Who in your world?" Ronald asked.
"Well, I don't know who, so..."
"Voldemort," Harry spat, with an unnerving degree of hatred. "Calls himself the Dark Lord."
"Well, he is a dark lord, in the sense that he has sworn followers and his politics are undeniably dark, but no one calls him Voldemort," she corrected him. "I'm pretty sure he came up with that name when he was about twelve. In my world, he calls himself Thom de Mort, which goes back to him strongly implying that he was a bastard of one of the French Noble Houses to give himself some degree of standing in polite society early on, when he was still working for the Malfoys. His proper style is Thom, Lord Protector of New Avalon, but most people just call him de Mort."
"So he won in your world?!" Ronald exclaimed, aghast.
"But then, wait, how're— You said Lily and Sirius are still alive!"
"Well, yeah? I mean, New Avalon's been recognised by the I.D.A. since Eighty-One, and Britain stopped trying to reconquer Mann in Eighty-Six when the I.C.W. recognised us, but they didn't formally acknowledge that we're a sovereign nation until Ninety-One."
Oh, so there's still a Britain, they just kicked the Death Eaters out? I guess that's not so bad... the redhead thought. There was a less clearly articulated underlying thought too, along the lines of if we could do that, as long as they stayed on their island, they wouldn't be our problem...sort of like the dementors, which was frankly hilarious. (Mostly because he wasn't even close to the first person to compare Thom to a dementor. In certain circles, it was almost an inside joke at this point.)
"Us?" Hermione echoed with a shrewd glare, fingering her wand under the table. "We? You're a Death Eater?"
"Not really?" She shrugged. "I was trained as a member of the Avalonian Guard, Bella certified me as a third-tier battlemage when I was fifteen." First-tier was for Bella and the other instructors, the most talented and experienced Guards. Second was essentially auror-standard training; the second-tier battlemages were full-time warriors. Third-tier was approximately the same degree of training as a British hit-wizard, and basically meant she'd been a Reserve Guard. If New Avalon had been attacked before she'd gone to the University, she would have been called on to help with the defence, but in the meanwhile, she'd been free to do whatever she liked. "But Britain hasn't attacked us since I was six, so I never saw combat as a Guard. I actually lived here, at my Grimmauld, I mean, for the entire year and change I was technically a Reserve. And then when I decided I wanted to take an apprenticeship as a Librarian, Thom transferred me to the Diplomatic Corp so I could act as an envoy to the University and legally had to be recognised internationally as an adult, even though I was still sixteen. And Guards aren't really Death Eaters, anyway. That just refers to the old Guards. You know, the ones who were involved in the terror campaigns before they took Mann."
She did have a loyalty mark, the same skull and viper sigil Thom and Bella had used since the Sixties. It was even tattooed on her left forearm, like the Death Eaters'. But these days that was just a symbol of Thom's trust and esteem, not a soul-brand like theirs. (Now that they were a legit country and not an illegal terrorist organisation attacking the legitimate government of Britain, security and loyalty wasn't quite as big a concern.) He'd offered when he promoted her to her diplomatic post, since she was meant to represent him, and, well. It was possible Mimi admired Bella a little too much (Siri and Lily certainly thought so), but she'd jumped at the chance to emulate her role model just a little more closely.
Most people who earned the mark these days got it on their right forearm or one of their shoulders, specifically to distinguish them from the old Knights of Walpurgis, sort of respecting that the Death Eaters had earned theirs in an active war, but everyone knew Mimi had been held at Hogwarts, subjected to Dumbledore's attempts to brainwash her for the better part of a decade. Even if she really could have left any time after Bella had managed to contact her when she was seven, most people seemed to consider her a victim or a sort of political hostage, unfairly held well beyond the cessation of active hostilities. No one begrudged her the implied claim to have earned it through direct conflict with Britain and the Light, even if she really only meant it as an homage to the witch who had been the most defining influence in her life since she was a small child.
"The University like...the University?" Ronald asked, alarmed.
It made a delightful contrast to Hermione's thought that well, she can't be entirely evil if she wants to be a librarian... "What university? I've heard of magical colleges, like in Paris, but I don't think I've heard any referred to as universities."
She answered both of them with a single word, "Miskatonic," before elaborating for the muggleborn (and Harry, who...also seemed not to have heard of it? How...?). "It has a certain reputation for disregarding ethical concerns in pursuit of knowledge, and serves as the primary hub of the International Dark Alliance. Most other magical universities call themselves colleges to avoid being conflated with them." Except the ones which stubbornly insisted they'd been universities long before Miskatonic was founded, much less notorious, and they'd be damned if they'd let the Americans take the term without a fight. "Though it's technically a muggle university as well, and an independent political entity on the magical side, organised on the model of a university system. The actual school of advanced magic is the College of the Arts, or 'Art and Design' when talking to muggle outsiders. Their library is one of the best in the Western world, which is saying a lot, because it's only about four-hundred years old, and it's competing with the likes of the Polish National Library and the bloody Alexandrian."
Mimi felt the girl's interest spike — she clearly wanted to know more about magical academia, which was a little adorable — but it was quickly followed by suspicion. "Are you trying to change the subject?"
She resisted the urge to give the suspicious muggleborn girl a flirtatious smoulder and ask, Would you like me to? because that really would be changing the subject, and there were more important things at the moment than seducing scantily-clad bookworms (unfortunately). "No? What's the subject, exactly?"
"Where you came from," Harry inserted quickly. "And why you're here. And how you got here."
"Alright. In exchange, I want the Quick Quotes version of the political situation in this universe, and what you know about the locations of certain key players."
"Done," he nodded. "You go first."
She smirked. "I already told you, I'm from an adjacent timeline — supposedly it diverged from this one about twenty years ago — and about eight months in the future of that timeline. I mean, assuming Dru hit the mark, but I don't think it's possible for her to do anything less than perfectly. This is the first of September of Ninety-Seven, right?" It was, a fact which produced an inexplicable degree of guilt and anxiety from the trio of native mages. She'd have to try to remember to come back to that. "I left from the tenth of May of Ninety-Eight, so, yeah, just over eight months. I got here by politely asking Druella Rosier to open an extra-temporal gate for me — which is a thing she just does because it's more comfortable than apparating and Druella is absurd — and she agreed to do it because we've been fighting an alien invasion since Mabon—" Apparently none of them were certain exactly which holiday that was. Harry didn't even know it was a holiday. What the hell? "—three weeks from now.
"It's the result of an extradimensional incursion, not the sort of thing that could be predicted by anyone, and the DAPs — Demonic Alien Presences — make dementors seem tame. Because their presence is the result of their plane intersecting with ours, the rules of magic outside of the physical realms are in flux. What we think of as Magic Itself, all the magic shaped by our expectations and experience, throughout our realm and all the other realms and alternate timelines in our plane, isn't exactly the same as the void between planes. A plane can itself be thought of as a system of magic, the laws of physics and rules of magic which govern it defining the range of possibilities for the formation of universes and planets and life, and so on. You can also think of it like the difference between sailing over a continental shelf, versus over the great valleys which are the middle of the ocean. They seem pretty much the same from our perspective, and they're clearly a continuation of each other, but one of them is relatively friendly and doesn't house fish that are fifty per cent teeth and creepy glowing lights.
"Since the DAPs opened their rifts, initiating contact between our planes, that by definition changes how magic in our plane works — I guess the mundane, physical realms have more like, momentum, sort of, so it's not hugely noticeable from our perspective, but it makes it difficult-to-impossible for memetic entities which exist only within our plane — gods, Aspects of Magic — to simply snuff them out and reverse the contact. We can't even invoke them within the mundane realm to help us kill the DAPs once they cross over, because that weakens the border between our reality and the Beyond, and makes it easier for them to tear another hole and let more of them in. So high ritual is out, don't even think about it."
Explaining how avatars were faring probably wasn't necessary, since they almost certainly didn't know any, and having an avatar throwing around god-magic against the DAPs was barely more effective than mortal sorcerers throwing mortal magic at them, honestly. They became more vulnerable to the magic of this plane when they brought themselves fully into a mundane realm, but unmaking a DAP with pure destructive energy was functionally indistinguishable from hitting it with a fucking lightning bolt, or even just a muggle taser. And avatars were still limited by the amount of magic their bodies could physically channel. Angel had sacrificed her sanity for more power when she was a teenager, and been killed and resurrected enough times by now that her channelling threshold was well above any other five-hundred-year-old sorcerer, but she couldn't just blanket the entire area around a rift with destructive energy — the things could be miles long — and even if she could leaving it sit there to just kill any DAPs that wandered into it would probably have an overall negative effect on the planar boundary, anyway.
"We managed to hold the line in our timeline fairly well. We came up with a low ritual to seal the rifts in the mundane realm — well, I say, we, it was mostly the goblins — and managed to close practically all of the DAP portals in North and Central America. I'm pretty sure Thom and Bella haven't closed theirs — one of them opened on Mann — but they also didn't let any of them escape the island to go terrorise Britain and Western Europe, and someone has to do first-hand research on how to kill them, so no one's really complaining. Except the DAPs getting tortured to death, probably. I don't know, we can't really communicate in any meaningful way. So, that's all well and good, seems like we've got it under control, right?
"The problem is, it's not just our timeline under attack. It's our whole universe. Maybe our whole multiverse, it's sort of hard to tell." Mostly because the Infernal Analysts they'd normally rely on to figure out something like that came under attack every time they reached too far out beyond the borders of the physical realm and attracted DAP attention, hence Dru's reluctance to cast the portal to get Mimi here. "But we do know that at least your timeline is also under attack, because they're trying to flank us through you, creating intraplanar portals not unlike the one I used to get here, which is sort of like the difference between being attacked by warships from across the ocean and being put under siege by companies sent overland from another more successful landing point down the coast. Point being, if they get a solid foothold here, we'll never get rid of them. Americans are, as you might imagine, very conscious of the consequences of allowing hostile colonising entities to establish themselves on their shores.
"It took a while to establish exactly what was happening, but Dru's conjecture was that one or more nations or organisations failed to hold the line here due to political differences between our timelines — it's only been twenty years, and the deviation was too slow to be the result of some cataclysmic event — and her recommendation was to send a magico-military force to aid your efforts to push the DAPs back now that they will already have broken containment. The sort of portal they'd need to do for that would be massive, and it would be a very strict one-to-one correlation between time and place, so they won't get here for...probably over a year, honestly. For some reason, some people are reluctant to invade a neighbouring timeline to help repel a demonic incursion before they're too deeply entrenched to dig out, and she just proposed it eight months from now. I came ahead so I could at least give Bella and Thom a heads up that if a giant bloody army suddenly appears on the field, don't panic, they're allies — presumably they'll be in a position to assure the other defending forces that the force from my timeline is here to help, too. And since I volunteered to be an advance party, I figured it couldn't hurt to come all the way back to now and try to warn at least a few people about the DAP invasion, too.
"There's no guarantee that the rifts will develop in the same places they did in my timeline, the other plane thing means it may not intersect different timelines in exactly the same way — and the event is completely unpredictable, even by Death Itself — but I can give the defenders the ritual we developed to close them and share the tactics we've found to be most effective against them, try to minimise the damage they'll be able to do in the absence of one or more of our major allies from the board. It won't be enough to entirely mitigate it, obviously, or it wouldn't eventually get bad enough here that we start getting bleed-through attacks in my timeline — causality is still a thing, even when you're dealing with multiple timelines — but there are worlds of difference between slowly losing ground and preserving the lives of native sentients to the greatest possible extent, and just letting them roll over you with no real resistance.
"So, who wants to start filling me in on the political situation so I can try to figure out where the weak spot is going to be?" she asked, refreshing their drinks. Their thoughts were whirling too quickly for her to casually pick out anything specific, aside from the fact that none of them were sure they believed her, but that was fine. She hadn't really expected them to. Britons, on the whole, were not exposed to nearly enough truly esoteric magic to take things like visitors from other timelines with news of impending alien invasions as seriously as, say, Bella and Thom would. Sev and Dru were also on her short-list of people who almost certainly won't think I'm insane, and her cousins Ariel and Tam. Lily and Siri obviously would have been, if they weren't dead here, for as-yet-unexplained reasons, but Bella was the only one with a bloody army at her command. (Military responses weren't really Thom's area of expertise. He had planned the overall shape of their movement and defined their goals, but Bella was the one who made things happen.)
"There's no New Avalon here," Hermione said promptly. Mimi choked on her coffee. "I don't know if there are other major differences, there probably are, but that's the most obvious one that comes to mind," she continued, babbling over Mimi's coughing and sputtering. (Not that Mimi had any room to complain about other people talking too much.)
"What?!" she finally managed to gasp.
As you may have guessed, this was a much longer scene which has been cut in two for the sake of length.
Whoever it was who commented something about Harry doing Expelliarmus, have a cookie xD