For notes, please see chapter 1.

The Emperor's New Clo(se-to-Bonkers)thes

"You know what I really miss?" Ron said as he stared up at the ceiling of the tent glumly.

"Yes," Hermione answered without stopping her knitting and giving him an annoyed look. "So far today you've mentioned steak and kidney pie, apple tart, Fizzing Whizbees, strawberry ice cream, sultanas, marmalade, and cheddar. As none of us have a way of getting any of those, just shut it, will you?"

Silently, from his spot on what had become his designated chair, Harry agreed with her. It wasn't like the rest of them were any less hungry.

"No, it's not food," Ron said, looking at the pair of them. "I miss Quidditch."

"Quidditch?" Harry said, then snorted in laughter.

"What?" Ron asked.

"It's just… I love Quidditch more than most people, and I haven't even thought about it in at least a month, not even a dream," Harry said.

"Seriously?" Ron said, blatantly shocked. "That's just wrong, mate."

"Well, don't look at me," Hermione said, going back to knitting a dark grey sock to replace one Harry had worn to a collection of holes. "I'm with Harry on this one. There are more important things going on than what team's just caught the Quaffle."

"Yeah, okay, you're not obsessed with Quidditch, but how much do you miss the Hogwarts library?" Ron said.

Hermione looked up abruptly with an expression just as guilty as if she'd been caught stealing.

"But the books in the library would at least be useful in an emergency! There are really all sorts of things we could look up in them to help us in the search, so it's not entirely frivolous," Hermione said defensively.

"Uh-huh, and I suppose I could throw a pair of Bludgers at old No Nose and knock him silly, so it's not entirely frivolous to think about Quidditch either," Ron said with a decisive nod.

Harry stared at him.

"You do realize I'm now picturing that Bludger that Dobby enchanted in second year trailing around after Volde—," Harry began.

"No!" Ron yelled at him, and Harry stopped. Ron's mood had entirely changed to one of nervous fear. "Please, just don't say the name right now, all right? You know how much it bothers me."

"Oh, fine," Harry said, though secretly he thought Dumbledore's idea that fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself had a lot of merit to it. "Anyway, maybe Dobby can save us all with another Bludger. Just hit You-Know-Who in the nose and that should fix things."

"I miss Dobby, too," Ron said. "He's a good bloke. A little weird, yeah, but he's loyal as the day is long."

"Yes," Hermione said. "I miss Professor McGonagall."

"Yeah," Ron agreed. "I don't miss all her homework, mind, but she's like Gryffindor Tower incarnate or something."

"I know what you mean," Harry said. "It's like if she's there, nothing too terrible can happen, kind of like with Dumbledore. I miss Nearly Headless Nick."

"I wonder how the ghosts are taking the changes at Hogwarts," Ron said darkly. "I can't imagine even Snape bullying around the Bloody Baron."

"Not that he'd need to as they're from the same house," Hermione said, "but at this point I'm so homesick for Hogwarts that I'd take kindly to running into Moaning Myrtle."

"You really are homesick then," Ron said, then added with a wistful expression, "do you think things will ever go back to the way they were?"

"No," Harry said immediately.

"No need to be so optimistic there, mate," Ron said with a forced grin.

"He's right though," Hermione said quietly. "Too much has happened for us to ever go back to the way things used to be before all this began. But that doesn't mean that the world has to be a terrible place forever. Maybe it can even be better somehow."

"I wouldn't count on it," Ron said.

Hermione sighed deeply and said, "Nor would I. But it's a nice thought."

"Do you think if Fudge had believed Dumbledore and Harry from the beginning that maybe this wouldn't have happened?" Ron asked, and Harry noticed that Ron really seemed to believe Hermione would be able to answer the question.

"I don't know," Hermione said carefully. "Maybe. Dumbledore thought so."

"I think Fudge knew we were telling the truth, but he didn't want to know that he knew, if that makes sense," Harry said.

"An ostrich with its head in the sand, which just makes matters worse," Hermione said, nodding in agreement. "Typical. He really was a horrible Minister of Magic."

"There've been worse," Ron said. "Gunderman Poddingport, for example."

"Who?" Harry and Hermione said together, and Harry turned to Hermione in surprise.

"I'd have thought you'd know every Minister of Magic in history," Harry said.

"So did I, but not that one," Hermione said. "I've never heard of him."

"You do realize my universe is unraveling over that revelation, right?" Harry said.

"Nah, that's really not that unusual," Ron said. "He did so little that most of the history books skip him because he's boring. The main thing he's known for is sitting around and eating bonbons while the goblin forces attacked a Muggle village in the Cotswolds during the sixteenth century."

"And you know this how?" Hermione asked, still seeming a little affronted that Ron knew more than she did on a topic that was pretty much directly out of a textbook.

"My ten-times great-grandfather Ronaldus was one of the wizards who went in to clean up the mess and do Memory Charms on the Muggles," Ron said. "I'm sort of named after him, so I paid a bit more attention to that story than the rest of the family did when my Great-Aunt Tessie went on about it one Christmas after pudding."

"I miss pudding," Hermione said forlornly, then grimaced. "Wonderful. Now I'm doing it."

"Okay, so you miss something superficial, useless, and fun. That proves you're human," Harry said.

"I suppose so," Hermione said with a sheepish grin.

"Say, do you know any stories about completely terrible or stupid kings?" Ron said.

"Have I ever actually told a story about a king who wasn't either terrible or stupid in some way?" Hermione asked.

Ron and Harry both squinted slightly as they mentally ran through lists of fairy tales.

"The father in Pajamabelle's story wasn't all that bad," Ron finally said. "He didn't marry an evil sorceress or offer up his daughter in exchange for salad or threaten to kill anybody for not being able to spin straw into gold anyway."

"That's a fair point," Hermione said, tipping her head to one side. "While his choice of guest list to his daughter's christening might have been a poor decision, it was at least understandable and logical."

Ron beamed as though he'd gotten five points for Gryffindor from Snape.

"But I do know one story about an emperor who was really just completely hopeless," Hermione said.

"Then let's hear it and immediately picture Fudge in the leading role," Ron said.

"You might regret that decision," Hermione said mysteriously, "but we may as well have a story before bed. Once upon…"

"… a time," Ron finished, and Harry noted that Hermione had actually paused slightly to let him say the rest of the opening on his own.

"Quite," Hermione said primly, but Harry suspected she wasn't really angry at all, particularly since the corners of her mouth were playing into a smile. "In a far off country there lived an emperor who was completely obsessed with clothes."

"Clothes?" Ron repeated, sounding confused. "Seriously?"

"Yes," Hermione said. "More than war or laws or anything else, he loved wearing the very finest clothes in all the empire and showing them off at grand parties, which was the only reason balls and parades were held."

"Fudge always did seem rather fond of that lime green bowler hat," Harry said.

"It made him stand out," Ron said. "I suppose being Minister of Magic wasn't enough to insure he had everyone's attention all the time. He needed to wear a hat the color of rancid citrus fruit to draw everybody's eye."

"That or he was color-blind," Harry said. "That thing was atrocious."

"Agreed," Hermione said, shuddering, "but in this case the emperor completely ignored the empire, the army, and the people in favor of his wardrobe. The great capital city was overrun with criminals and thieves, and the borders were threatened with invading forces, yet all the emperor thought of were fashionable trousers and waistcoats."

"You're sure he's not a girl?" Ron said, grinning, then at Hermione's withering look, Harry could tell he immediately regretted his choice of words.

"Despite the cultural expectation that females tend to be preoccupied with fashion and the transient qualities of beauty, though goodness knows men refuse to notice a female's existence unless she conforms to the current and often ridiculously impossible concepts of attractiveness so females do have legitimate reasons for their concern, there are plenty of males who are at least as concerned about their own appearance, as increases over the last thirty years in cosmetic charms for men shows to great effect," Hermione said coldly.

"Um, okay," Ron said, smiling hopefully. "So he's not a girl. Go on, the empire's falling to ruin and Emperor Pretty Britches is still out shopping. What happens?"

"Emperor Pretty Britches?" Hermione said, giving Ron a look of deepest exasperation. Harry also noticed that Ron had succeeded in completely distracting her from his faux pas. "Oh, fine then. Two charlatans arrived in town, claiming to be the world's most wonderful tailors and offering their services to the emperor himself to create for him the best suit of clothing anyone had ever seen."

"I'm guessing that he jumped at that one," Harry said.

"Like a trout for particularly plump bait," Hermione said. "He had the two men brought before him and asked them what was so special about their skills."

"Which was?" Harry asked.

"They said that the cloth they wove was incomparable to any other fabric in richness and quality and vibrancy of color, but more than that, only the wise could see it. If someone was unfit for his or her office or was foolish, then the fabric would be invisible to that person, showing his or her shameful inadequacy," Hermione said, unable to suppress a smile.

Ron and Harry looked at each other.

"So there's really no fabric at all, right?" Ron said.

"You've figured it out," Hermione said.

"Okay, but let's say I was thick enough to believe these two. If the fabric is invisible to anyone who's stupid or in a job that they aren't qualified for, wouldn't the wearer basically be walking about naked in front of a bunch of incompetent idiots?" Ron said.

"That's the general idea, yes," Hermione said.

"And that's a selling point?" Ron said, wrinkling his nose.

"When you put it that way, it does seem like something of a drawback," Hermione said, frowning, "but then I never said the emperor was all that bright to begin with."

"Or all that averse to parading around naked apparently," Harry added.

"In any case, he hired the two men to make him a supremely wonderful suit of clothes, and at once they locked themselves away with a great loom and began banging it back and forth so that the noise carried throughout the palace. Every day or so they would call for more golden or silver thread or other very costly supplies, none of which was used at all but popped directly into their bags," Hermione said.

"Why is this reminding me of the one about the girl who could spin straw into gold?" Ron asked.

"Oh, locked room, highly impressive task based on a lie, someone claiming to be able to do something impossible involving fiber arts, though in that case it was the father making the brag and not the poor girl," Hermione said, counting the similarities off on her fingers.

"What is it with Muggles and this apparent obsession with stuff that makes cloth? Throw in the one who wound up in a coma from a spinning wheel splinter, and you've got some seriously strange issues there," Ron said.

Hermione tilted her head to one side, considering.

"Well, if the production of textiles is related to the concept of human superiority over animal species as well as the product of a more domesticated civilization, then perhaps the inherent desire to attribute magical abilities to the production of woven or knit materials deals with the subconscious realization of the nearly-magical change wrought by the textile industry upon human history," Hermione said, shrugging.

"Oh," Ron said, then as Hermione took a moment to put her knitting needles back into her beaded evening bag, he whispered to Harry, "How much of that did you get?"

"I got lost somewhere around 'human superiority over animal species,'" he whispered back.

"Uh-huh, me too," Ron said. "That and 'wrought.' Did she really read the whole dictionary? And if so, is she trying to use all of it?"

Harry stifled a laugh as Hermione brought her attention back to them.

"So, as I was saying before the two of you apparently thought I'd gone temporarily deaf, the whole castle was a-buzz with gossip about the cloth that would be visible only to the wise and worthy, and all wondered aloud if their neighbors would see nothing at all while wondering silently if they themselves would be able to see it at all," Hermione said.

"And nobody even considered the possibility that the weavers might not be telling the truth," Harry said.

"Possibly they did," Hermione said, "but think of how it would sound. People could assume the doubters were only saying that because they knew they wouldn't be able to see the cloth and wanted some excuse."

"I suppose," Ron said. "The con men are basically using everybody's own insecurities against them."

"Exactly," Hermione said, beaming at him. "After a while, the emperor's self-doubt did indeed begin to surface, and he worried that he was either a fool or unfit for his office, or possibly both."

"Which in his case was completely justified," Harry said.

"Entirely," Hermione said, "but he wasn't completely stupid. He had a minister who was very wise, and the emperor asked him to go and check on the weavers to see how the suit of clothes was progressing and to bring back details on their work."

"Now that is smart," Ron said. "What happened?"

"The minister went to the locked room and demanded entrance in the name of the emperor, and when the door was opened, the two supposed weavers appeared delighted to show him the fruits of their labor, which were obviously hanging from the loom at that moment," Hermione said.

"So, nothing," Ron said.

"Right again. The minister stared at the completely vacant loom and began to panic while the men went on about the vibrant embroidery and the intricate patterns they were creating in honor of the emperor, and the minister thought that it must be he was a fool or unfit, but of course he didn't want to admit this," Hermione said.

"I can't help feeling sorry for the poor fellow," Harry said. "He probably really was a good minister, but part of him didn't think he was good enough."

"Yes," Hermione said. "Still, he went back to the emperor and lied left and right, reciting every detail about the fabric that the charlatans had told him exactly as if he'd really seen it, and the emperor made note of each one, just in case he shouldn't be able to see it himself."

"This is not going to end well," Ron said.

"The emperor wasn't entirely convinced, though," Hermione said.

"He really is a bit brighter than I thought," Harry said.

"He must have been, for he sent his best general in to look at the fabric again a few days later, and once again the general saw nothing at all but came back with a glowing report on the weavers' work," Hermione said.

"Do you think there's a chance these two just couldn't stand the incompetent emperor and wanted him to get a dose of public humiliation?" Ron said.

"You know, that really is possible," Hermione said slowly. "The story does explicitly state that the two of them were concerned about others thinking they were fools, but there could be a subtext of revenge in there as well, particularly with the general as the story also mentions that the emperor was very lax about his military duties."

Ron looked a little proud of himself, and even Harry had to admit Ron's ability to come up with interesting points about the stories was definitely impressive at times. Hermione was giving him a rather complimentary appraising look as well, which Harry knew was probably Ron's motivation in the first place.

"Finally, the day dawned for the unveiling of the suit of clothes, which consisted of a set of trousers, a mantle with a great train, and a coat with long sleeves, or so the two men informed him as they carefully held up absolutely nothing for him to inspect," Hermione said.

"And I'm going to guess the emperor said how great their work was," Harry said.

"Oh yes, he complimented them to the sky and back on their work, all the while inwardly shuddering at the proof of his inadequacy," Hermione said. "Of course, all the other members of the court were present too, and they too said that it was the finest, richest, and most splendid suit of clothes they had ever seen, not wanting to be thought fools."

"This is really snowballing," Ron said. "Then what?"

"To celebrate this phenomenal achievement, a parade was arranged, and the tailors themselves helped the emperor into his new suit of clothes, which they said was so finely made that it was as light as a breeze and could barely be felt on the skin at all," Hermione said.

"Because he's starkers," Ron said. "Was he at least wearing pants?"

"Possibly. Underclothes in their current form, at least for men, were in existence for the upper classes by about the 1200s, so assuming this is set after that, there's a chance," Hermione said.

"Okay," Ron said. "But I'm guessing that's not exactly how the story goes?"

"No," Hermione said. "The story states that the emperor goes out in the procession completely naked, and the common people, having heard tales of the cloth that appeared invisible to fools, all cheered and cried out how wonderful the clothes were. Each one was afraid of what others would think if they pointed out the obvious."

"And what happened to the tailors?" Ron asked.

"I believe they fled pretty much as soon as they were given their extremely large fee," Hermione said.

"So nobody said anything?" Harry asked.

"Not quite. At long last, one little boy who was too young to know better called out repeatedly, 'The emperor is naked!' laughing all the while despite his parents trying to quiet him so the others wouldn't think their son a fool," Hermione said.

"Did anyone listen?" Ron asked.

"It depends on the version of the story," Hermione said. "In one, the boy's comments are completely ignored and the emperor continues to parade naked through the town while the people pretend they can see the non-existent clothes, proving once and for all how foolish they all are, which is a fairly bleak ending really."

"I hope he doesn't wear that to the next battle," Harry said. "What's the other ending?"

"In that one, the people start to realize that the boy is telling the truth, and they all begin to laugh until at last the emperor realizes what a dreadful mistake he's made and runs back to the castle in disgrace, a humbler but wiser man," Hermione said.

"I've had nightmares like that," Ron said, "showing up for Herbology and forgetting my robes."

"Everyone gets those," Hermione said. "For me it's usually Potions. What about you, Harry?"

"You have nightmares about showing up for class naked?" Harry said, looking at the two of them as though they'd grown extra heads.

"Well, yes, doesn't—doesn't everybody?" Hermione said, sounding rather disturbed.

"No," Harry said simply. "At least I don't."

Ron and Hermione looked at each other and then immediately away again.

"Thanks, mate," Ron said. "I feel like a right pervert now."

Hermione turned a very deep shade of red, cleared her throat, and continued gamely on.

"The two tailors were never caught in either version, though, and while perhaps no one lived happily ever after in this one, the little boy who spoke the truth was actually the wisest of them all," Hermione said.

"Okay, but what I want to know is what nutter came up with this one?" Ron asked.

"Oh, right, I forgot to mention. This is another of Andersen's," Hermione said.

"Wait, did the tailors make him socks or shoes or anything?" Ron asked.

"It's not mentioned specifically," Hermione said.

"Then either this is the first time Andersen hasn't thrown foot mutilation into one of his stories, or we can assume that the emperor was walking barefoot down a cobblestone road, probably bruising his toes and bleeding all over the place like that poor mermaid girl," Ron said.

"Whichever you prefer," Hermione said, looking a bit ill.

"I'm just trying to get the image of Fudge walking down Diagon Alley starkers out of my head," Harry said, and the other two shuddered.

"In my head, he's still wearing the bowler hat, though," Ron said. "It won't come off. Do you suppose he bathes with that thing on?"

"No idea," Harry said, then frowned.

"What?" Hermione asked.

"No, it's just I'm wondering what my Invisibility Cloak looked like when it was being woven. Wouldn't it have seemed to be, well, nothing at all?" Harry asked.

Hermione raised her eyebrows and said, "I suppose it would have at that."

"So whoever actually ordered it made in the first place had to trust that the weaver really was making something and not just putting one over on him," Harry said.

"When you put it that way, I can see where it would parallel the story somewhat, except of course that the cloak itself isn't just invisible but makes the wearer invisible too, which is obvious proof to everyone," Hermione said.

"Yeah, but what if the emperor thought he wasn't getting invisible clothes but clothes that made him invisible," Ron said.

"I suppose the story could have been a bit twisted in the telling," Hermione said. "In that case, it would seem to be a tale of Muggle baiting, making the emperor believe he was getting something magical when in fact he was just being humiliated, and perhaps the comments on his stupidity and ineptitude are actually pureblood diatribes against Muggles."

She looked quite disturbed at this, and Harry had to admit it made the rather funny story suddenly seem decidedly ominous and vindictive.

"Or it's just a story about a stupid emperor who goes walking through town naked," Ron said.

"Or that," Hermione said, sighing. "Anyway, I think I'll turn in. We should probably pack up early tomorrow and try to find another spot to set up the tent. Any ideas?"

Harry shook his head. Before coming to Hogwarts, he really hadn't been much of anywhere aside from the infamous Hut-on-the-Rock, and that didn't sound like a good place to spend a cold November night. Ron only shrugged.

"You pick," he said. "Anywhere's as good as anywhere else, I guess."

"All right then," she said. "I'll sleep on it. Good night."

After she had retired to her spot in the tent and could be heard breathing deeply, Ron turned to Harry and said, "Seriously, you've never had a nightmare about going to class naked?"

"Nope," Harry said.

"Oh," Ron said, looking crestfallen.

"No, it's usually Madame Puddifoot's instead," Harry said.

Harry was laughing so hard that he never saw the Jelly-Legs Jinx coming, but it was strong enough that he was still weak-kneed the next morning.