Disclaimer: I don't own the amazing world of Harry Potter and some of the stuff I write might be unconsciously stolen from good books that I read.

Chapter 3: Diagon Alley

Puellae:

"Girls, you will need to do the spell casting since my magic doesn't work. Just put one hand each on my wand and hold hands, then point the wand at the sofa and say, 'Portus' Think about this." Mcgonagall said, showing us a picture of something that looked a bit like the Great Hall from the Harry Potter movies, but it had noticeable differences. "You three sit on the sofa." she then instructed to Bella and our parents.

"But isn't it really hard to cast a portkey?" I told Perdie to say.

"No, it just takes a lot of power, which I'm sure you two have plenty of." Mcgonagall answered looking pointedly at both of us. "And you need to go around the house and turn everything into portkeys that go to the great hall. You will be fine on your own, won't you? I have some business to attend to. Hold on to the last portkey and Professor Flitwick will be there to take to your new home, where I'll be visiting in a week, to take you to Diagon Alley." She touched the sofa and all four of them disappeared.

We ran around the house, making sure that everything was in a container (and finding some interesting stuff in our parent's room such as wine glasses and bottles and a book our mum refused to buy us) and that the containers were on/in a piece of furniture and then turning the furniture into portkeys using Mcgonagall's wand until there was only our parents' bed left.

-: Get on the bed and mind the things on it: we both know how clumsy you are and those wine glasses are breakable. Hang on, why are there wine glasses on the edge? Why are all the breakables near the edge? :- I asked after having a look around to make sure there were no more breakables near the edge and instead seeing the bed lined with them. Perdita looked at me with no trace of guilt in her expression or feelings, at all.

-: I only wanted to see what it looked like when someone repaired something with magic. :- We sat on the bed (once I'd made Perdie move all the breakables into the middle of the bed so they didn't fall off and break) and turned it into a portkey. The sensation was just like the books described.

-: I knew it! :- I shouted so loud that Perdie clutched her head in pain, while jumping off the bed and looking at Professor Flitwick.

-: Sorry. :- I winced, feeling a bit of her pain, -: Ask Professor Flitwick what year it is. :- Perdie frowned at me but, after ten and a half years of living with my craziness/weird form of intelligence, she did it anyway.

"Err- what year is it?" Flitwick looked at her as if confused.

"Minerva did warn me that you were psychic twins and very odd ones at that, but not that you regularly have private conversations in front of people. The year is 1971. Why do you ask?" But I was too shocked to answer and only capable of gaping at him. Perdie answered for me.

"Sorry but Puell doesn't like speaking that much so she gets me to speak for her and, not to be rude but, we expected you to be a lot older than you look. Almost fifty years older in fact. In our Universe, the year is two thousand and fifteen!"

The week following the move was spent settling into our new house, that Dumbledore had provided for us, and hunting out all the secret passageways in it. Perdie and I found the first one when we were first exploring the house (It was massive; only a bit smaller than what you would imagine Malfoy manner to look like) and had come across a trunk in an upstairs room at the front of the house. We had been trying to open it for ages when eventually Perdie managed to prise it open using a crowbar that had appeared out of nowhere, although she said that she had found it down the back of the trunk.

Perdie said that she wanted us to get inside since 'it looked like a good place for undisturbed reading' and she 'wanted to see if we would both fit', If I remember her words correctly, but I think she wanted to see if we would both fit for hide and seek, for if we have friends over. Before I could remind her of the magical tongs that tried to pull mum's nose off, because she had tried to use them by hand and tell her to be careful, she jumped in head first and didn't hit the bottom but kept on going until she was out of sight. She was only screaming for a second because of the shock and the screams soon turned into whoops of joy so I figured that the trunk must lead to a secret passageway or room. I jumped in after Perdie (but feet first because I was always the more sensible one) and found a huge stone slide that led to a secret garden, that we hadn't seen before, with loads of trees and magical plants and a door that led to the normal garden but then disappeared when you shut it. After that, we made it our duty to find all the secret passageways and not tell our parents or Bella, who was now living with us properly, about them.

We found quite a few, including one in the library that led to a cosy little room that we could read in for hours without hearing anything that was going on outside and the candles had been charmed so they turned red when someone was calling us (although it did take us a while to figure out why they were going red).

A week after we moved, Mcgonagall came to our house with two Hogwarts letters and apparated me and Perdie to The Leaky Cauldron. Our parents couldn't come because our mum was busy getting a new job and our dad was restarting the carpenter's shop; Bella couldn't come because she was on a 'secret' trip for Dumbledore that we weren't supposed to know about and Mcgonagall said that she had to meet someone which made us suspect that she was also going on a secret mission for Dumbledore.

"I trust that you can look after your sister and make sure that both of you will get your school supplies carefully. Here is a map of Diagon Alley and please be sensible." Mcgonagall said, pressing a bit of pap- no parchment (We still need to get used to calling it that) into my hand. She then left.

"Um... please can you help us get into Diagon Alley." I hear and I feel a rush of embarrassment through the connection. Knowing that Perdie always gets embarrassed when she has to ask for help, I walked over to her and looked up but saw that her hair was a pink-y orange. Realisation hit me like a brick wall. No wonder Perdie physically showed a lot of emotion and had a stronger connection to me than I had to her.

-: You're a metamorphmagus too! :- I mentally shrieked at her. She clutched her head again, frowned at me and said,

"Not so loud, please." aloud, leaving Tom looking very confused.

-: You knew and you didn't tell me! :- I said accusingly and at the exact same volume and pitch to Perdie, leaving her clutching her head again. -: How could you! :- This was an ultimate betrayal of trust. Not much would be able to redeem her...

"I didn't want to hurt you. I knew that with us being twins we should've had the same powers but since I didn't see you metamorphing, I didn't want you to get upset over it. You must've seen it a few times because it's very hard to control, but you must've thought that it was a trick of the light. Anyway, you didn't tell me either."

…But she was able to redeem herself. Tom was still standing behind the bar but he now had an expression that told me that he thought Perdie belonged in the mental ward at St Mungo's. I was always much better at reading facial expressions than Perdie and she hadn't figured out what Tom's meant yet so I told her. Her hair went, if possible, even pinker.

"We can talk psychically." She explained, directing her attention towards Tom. He nodded.

"Follow me and I'll open the door that leads onto the street. You know where to go from there?"

"Yes, thank-you." Said Perdie, suddenly so polite that Mcgonagall would have been even more shocked than Harry would have been if Vernon Dursley had strolled into the bar, wearing wizard clothing and asking for a job as a dracologist (okay maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but she would've been very surprised). By now Perdie had managed to get her hair to look like a young Remus Lupin's and her eyes were amber to go with it. I rolled my eyes at her, wondering if she would ever grow and I got an answer when she flicked a rude hand gesture at me for rolling my eyes at her.

-: First stop: Gringotts, to get this changed. :- I announced, jangling my pocket with the money bag in. The map that Mcgonagall had given me was easy to read and acted just like a muggle one. As we walked down the street, having located Gringotts on the map, I spotted a familiar head of fiery red hair next to a head of straight blonde hair with two taller people escorting them, heading in the opposite direction to us and instantly said to Perdie

-: Quickly, change your appearance and make sure it isn't marauder style. :- While pulling a beanie over my own messy black hair, hoping not to mess up James' already terrible chances with Lily, since I know how silly Perdie can be, even in public.

When we got to the bank, we were left in the waiting room by a rather grouchy looking goblin. I looked around and saw one other family that was being led into the waiting room, but they were only vaguely familiar and I couldn't remember where from. The only child (a girl with long, dirty, blonde hair) was walking over to us. Mentally I groaned while on the outside pretended not to notice that she was approaching us. Perdie looked down (she was staring at the ceiling) at my groan and recognised her although I still didn't know who she was.

"Hi, I'm Pandora but you can call me Dora for short." she said in a dreamy but straight forward kind of voice. Now I knew who she was.

"Hi," my sister replied, "I'm Perdita, Perdie for short, and this is my sister, Puellae, Puell for short, but she doesn't like speaking much." I wondered how my sister could keep her voice so calm but, at the same time be shaking with nerves on the inside. For the first time since I saw Pandora walking towards us, I looked up and saw two Pandoras looking at me but then realised that my sister must've given herself Pandora's hair.

"Nice hair," she commented.

"Thanks. I had inspiration." Replied Perdie modestly.

"What do you mean inspiration? Surely you don't know any spells yet." asked Dora curiously.

"No, we haven't even got wands yet, but I'm a metamorphmagus. I assume you know what that means. This is my original form." Perdie answered, while showing off and changing her features back to resemble mine.

"Next!" came the cry of a rather dry throated goblin, that had just come from inside the main room of the bank and we went in. Perdie looked back and shouted

"Bye. Nice meeting you."

We gave the goblins our money bag and stare around in awe at the fabulous architecture as they replaced the pounds and pennies with knuts, sickles and galleons.

After checking our map, we went to Ollivander's to get our wands. It took a couple of tries (and reparo spells) but eventually he sold me a birch and unicorn hair one and Perdie got given my wand's sister that was also made out of birch.

When we left the musty smell of the shop, it was like taking my first breath again and I'm pretty sure that my sister felt like that as well. We decide to get robes now, at Madame Malkin's robes for all occasions, which also took a while since she had to fit three pairs of robes and one winter cloak each for us and then we also have to buy matching hats as part of the uniform requirement. There was an old and crotchety woman running the store, instead of the young and kind woman that Harry meets which, I think, also made it take longer.

We then visited the sorcerer's equipment store where we bought two sets of scales, two cauldrons, two sets of crystal phials, two telescopes and two pairs of dragon-hide gloves.

"This is amazing!" I exclaimed excitedly, while examining my dragon hide gloves in the book store that we're now in, and it caused us to get a dirty look from a haughty old woman with a little, black haired boy with grey eyes that matched mine and Perdie's, when she wasn't using her powers.

-: Is that... :- Began Perdie before I cut her off with

-: No that's Regulus, Sirius must've snuck away to go to Zonko's: look at his expression. :- But, in spite of my tone, she must've sensed how upset I was because she said

-: The horrible, prejudiced git, that hates everyone because she's a so-called pureblood and thinks she's better than everyone else. :- but in a comforting tone that had me struggling to not laugh because, usually, most of the words she just said were accompanied by a tone of anger even if it was sometimes fake. My attempts at trying not to laugh were starting to fail and they made Perdie burst out laughing. It seemed to be contagious because I was now howling with laughter as well. When we eventually looked up, gasping for breath, we saw Walburga Black approaching and my face instantly paled. Perdie had her back to Walburga, but understanding what this meant, and being a very quick thinker in times of trouble (even if she wasn't at any other time), she metamorphed herself into James Potter, knowing that Walburga has at least some respect for all pureblood families. I looked down so she would notice me less and Perdie must've turned around due to the fact that Walburga's footsteps stopped.

"Potter! What are you doing here without your coddling parents?" I slowly backed away, towards the shelves and collected two of every book on the lists that Mcgonagall had given us, then bought them and rushed outside. Perdie was waiting for me just outside the door.

-: How did you get the glasses? And I thought you said that you couldn't control your abilities. :- I accused.

-: It seems that body parts aren't the only thing that I can change. And I can't control them properly unless I am completely calm and even then, it's extremely hard. And it's harder the further away you are. :- She admitted while taking the books off of me and putting them into the bag that Mcgonagall had charmed to be weightless.

-: Quick thinking. What did you say to her? :- I asked, impressed.

-: I said: where's your own coddled little Reggie and then ran out of the shop. :-

-: That's brilliant. :- I said. Someone else must've thought so too, because the door opened and a male voice said

"That was brilliant Potter." with pure laughter in it.

"Thanks, but I'm not Potter." Perdie said while changing back to our usual form.

"Cool! You're a metamorphmagus. So how are you related to the Potters, then? If this is your usual form, then you have the Potter's hair." asked Sirius Black.

"We're not: we're muggleborn and we have the traditional Black eyes, as well as pointy faces from the Malfoys and Weasley freckles, or did you just forget about all the pureblood culture lessons that your mum made you take?"

"You seem to know a lot about and look a lot like purebloods for a muggleborn. And what do you mean 'we'?"

"Us" Perdie and I chorused.

"Am I seeing things, or is there now two of you?" Sirius questioned.

"Sirius Black, you wretched excuse for a pureblood, get here right this instant!" Screeched a horrible voice.

Gotta go girls: the wretched excuse for a witch calls." and with a wink he disappeared back into the shop.

-: Lily's right. He is arrogant and I'm willing to bet that she was right about James too. :- I said, but with a smile on my face, which kind of ruined the whole exasperated attitude that I was trying to create.

-: Give them a chance: they're only eleven and you know how they'll turn out. It'll be easier for when we're at school, as well. :- laughed Perdie, -: Anyway, we've got to finish our shopping and we're getting weird looks because we're just standing around and it doesn't even look like we're talking."

"Oh, hi again." Said Pandora, who had just come to the book store, "Are you buying any extra books? It'd be wise to get one about were-wolves and dark creatures..." But she never got a chance to finish because Perdie interrupted her.

"What on earth are you talking about?" Shouted Perdie, suddenly very angry. "Were-wolves are normal people. There're good and bad ones, just like good and bad people, but they feel even more strongly about what they believe because they know the worst evils that humanity has to offer! They are people! They have one little accident and their whole lives become miserable, because people go: 'oh look, there's someone that gets tortured once a month, how about we make their lives even worse than they already are!"

Pandora looked at her strangely, but what neither of them noticed was a small, tawny haired boy wearing winter clothes that covered his whole body even in this sweltering weather, staring at them with shock, hope and wonder in his large, amber eyes and two people next to him, one of them looking as if he would rather be with anyone else but the boy he was with and the other also looking at us, but with happiness in his eyes.

"Sorry Dora. I just get really touchy when people talk about were-wolves." Apologised Perdie, after taking a minute to calm down.

"No, you're right. People shouldn't treat were-wolves like they are some sort of abomination to society. It's horrible how prejudiced people can be when faced with something they don't understand, but I was going to say 'before people start telling you lies about them' and recommend a book for you to read, but it seems that no one is going to be able to corrupt you anyway." Stated Dora, very calmly.

"Sorry." Repeated Perdie, her hair going pink for the second time today which was proof of her not being able to control it very well, since she once confessed to me about her putting all the pink stuff in the house in the fire place and setting it alight. When we were three.

"Sweetie, you go ahead: Tunie wants to have a look in the magical stationary shop, OK? We'll meet you in the pub that we came in through in two hours. Oh, and here's some money for the pet that we promised we would let you have now that you're responsible enough to look after one, but please don't get anything too eccentric." Said a loud voice while Dora went into the book store with her parents.

"Ok mum." answered Lily and then she started heading in the direction that we needed to go.

"Why does your mum need two hours to look in a shop?" asked Perdie curiously, after bounding up to Lily. I smacked my forehead. Why did Perdie always have to be so friendly?

"Who are you?" Asked Lily, turning around cautiously.

"I'm Perdie and this is my sister, Puell. We'll be in the same year at Hogwarts and I think that we'll be in the same house as you as well, so you'll have to get used to us. Also, I can be very annoying." Lily stared at her for a while, while we were walking, as if sizing her up and then glanced at me and seemed to decide that she was telling the truth from my awkward expression and half resigned look that I got whenever Perdie was doing something that I had warned her against or that she knew I would, but hadn't had the chance.

"I'm Lily, and I couldn't possibly tell that you are annoying on my own. In answer to your earlier question, she doesn't. She just likes leaving me alone with other girls my age so that I'll make some friends because I don't have any apart from Tunie, who I have started falling out with a lot lately, and Sev, who she doesn't approve of. Turn left."

We walked into the pet shop that was to our left, because we had been walking while talking, and all of us gasped! There were animals everywhere: running around, trying to get the others back into their cages and just causing general mayhem and chaos. But the instant they noticed that we were here, they all fell into straight lines and began marching on the spot in front of the shop owner, apart from one little ginger kitten with a squashed face, that was very cute and was trying to march on the spot, but couldn't stay on its back paws for long enough and one owlet that fluttered on to my shoulder, nuzzled against my head and said

"Please take me."

"Your owls can talk!" Perdie and I both exclaimed. Lily stared at me in confusion, but the shopkeeper stared in amazement.

"You're whisperers." she said, quietly.

" Whats?" I told Perdie to ask.

"Whisperers: people that can speak to animals. The only whisperers I've ever heard of, apart from parseltounges, come from the Abbots, and even then, only every three generations at most and although you do look like a Pureblood, you don't look like an Abbot, so you must be... No! I can't tell you! I'd be in so much trouble. You shouldn't be in here. Get the owls and go before someone finds out and reports you."

An owl flew on to Perdie's shoulder, but, before an owl could land on Lily's, the ginger kitten launched itself at her. We paid the woman, who blatantly refuses to answer any more questions about whisperers, and left the shop.

-: Well, that was weird, so don't tell anyone about our newfound power and, before you protest, I won't tell anyone about it either. We can ask someone like Mcgonagall about it though. :- Perdie said. "Anyway, Lily, have you heard of Zonkos or Honeydukes. I'm pretty sure that I saw them on the map."

-: I'm not letting you into Zonkos, you mad delinquent, and if you get let into Honeydukes, mum and dad will never forgive me, since I'm supposed to look after you or did you forget that I got an hour-long lecture last time we went out and I let you go into the joke shop. :- I said while Lily backed away saying

"No and I've got to go because..."

But I was only half listening after I reprimanded Perdie because I couldn't help thinking about the things that the owner of the pet shop had said. Who did she think we were? And why did she look at Perdie and then back at me again? Was it to confirm who we were?

I actually took a wand test to see what their wands would be and even though I put different answers, they got the same thing.