"Those wild and crazy scientific guys, I love 'em!"
In a small private-study room in Ravenclaw Tower, Harry JPEG Compression Verruca was hitting himself in the head with a brick.
Hermione was watching him do it.
Harry had explained sciencing to Hermione using the example of hitting people over the head with red (or green) truncheons to find out which color of truncheon they preferred, stressing how you should experiment properly when hitting people over the head with red (or green) truncheons, i.e., automate the hitting to eliminate hitter-based biases, make sure the victims are not color-blind, and get signed release forms before starting.
"Also," he'd added, "if the green truncheons turn red, you're hitting too hard."
Hermione had stared at him. "Harry," she'd said hesitantly, "have you done that experiment yourself?"
"Of course!"
"What did you learn?"
"...I really like hitting people over the head with truncheons."
And then they had done science, and he hadn't gotten a result he expected, so he was hitting himself in the head with a brick.
"Bad brain! Bad!" he cried. Whack! Whack! Whack!
"Harry, you really worry me sometimes," said Hermione.
It was problematic, he had to admit, because he'd hit himself so hard he no longer remembered what his hypothesis was, and according to his mostly-blank notebook he had neglected to write it down.
Probably it had something to do with the Carrot Machine, the one that Elmer Fudd had built to satisfy Bugs Bunny's endless demands for carrots. (There was a carrot template, and if you fed the machine the right ingredients it would produce a carrot, and if you gave it the wrong ones it would approximate the carrot — green carrots, cubical carrots, that sort of thing.) That would explain the cloud of variously malformed bats overhead and the spell-book in front of him opened to the bat-making spell page. Then again perhaps he was making a Lönnrot inference, irrationally letting his own psychology guide him straight into doom. Rationalization wasn't all was cracked up to be, and neither was his skull. Perhaps he should put down the brick. Yes, that seemed likely. He tossed it over his shoulder. A cat yowled in pain.
He looked at his notebook. At the bottom of the page was the notation "Safe word: ANTWERP."
"Antwerp?" he said.
Hermione promptly explained his experimental protocol, premises and goals.
"Oh," he said. "Pass me a fresh brick, Hermione?"
Whack! Whack! Whack!
In the dungeons of Slytherin, the second, and, as it happened, final, meeting of the Q was in session.
"Science!" said Harry.
"Killing my dad?" said Darko hopefully.
"Soon, soon! I wish first to ridicule purebloodism."
"Not so loud, we're in the dungeons of Slytherin."
"What sense does purebloodism even make?" demanded Harry. "I mean, really, by traditional British royal blood analogy, commoners would occasionally pop out royalty."
"They could call it striking earl," said the Bloody Baron, who was passing through the room. Harry and Darko watched him leave.
"The point is," said Harry, "it's no skin off your nose where wizards come from."
"Well," said Darko, "the general idea is that wizards are losing their collective puissance by individuals breeding with muggles."
"And they know this how?"
"Cos we can't awesome the way they used to awesome in the Good Old Days."
"The Good Old Days back before isolationism due to the statute of secrecy?"
"What's your point?"
"That there's probably less muggle interbreeding now than there used to be?"
Darko gasped. "Are you suggesting I question my premises? It's not done, old boy, simply not done! My head was filled with truth and nailed shut a long time ago."
"But you're a Slytherin. How can you be an effective infiltrator without simulating a belief system?"
"Oh, I can do that," said Darko.
"Aha!" cried Harry. "So okay. You've infiltrated the —" Society for the Preservation of English Wizardry? No, not sciencey enough — "Society for Tupping English Muggles at the behest of the revived Lord Voldemort. I am a purebloodist. I say to you, in public, Wizards are losing their puissance because of interbreeding, and you say?"
"No they're not."
"And I say Why and you say?"
"Because."
"And you'll be thrown out of the Society if you say that again and Lord Voldemort hates it when that sort of thing happens. I say Why and you say?"
"Uh...there are alternative explanations."
"And I say, like what?"
"—We're just using up the world's magic!"
"There you go, you've just conceived of an alternate explanation. Having developed an alternative, you can work out means of testing these two hypotheses against each other, and as a good undercover agent you'll have to go through the motions. And they'll have to be plausible motions. Lord Voldemort commands you!"
"But I don't actually believe it," said Darko. "And the fact that there are other explanations doesn't mean my belief is untrue."
"Well, maybe not, but doubt will worm its way into your heart over time. ...I was sort of hoping you'd have a stunned look of horror on your face at this point, but — baby steps!"
There was a cough.
"Who coughed?" cried Harry.
An invisibility cloak dropped to the floor. "Me," said Harry₂, sheepishly fiddling with his time turner. "I was waiting for you to say stunned look of horror."
"Why?" said Harry₁ suspiciously.
"Oh, you'll laugh when I tell you this," said Harry₂, "but after you leave here you find a copy of THE BIG BOOK OF HORCRUXES in your bed, and, um, well, basically it's a sort of immortality conditional on splitting your soul through murder."
"And you're here to warn me not to split my nonexistent soul through murder?"
"No, I'm here to tell you that just for yucks you're going to try the process backwards, like Albert in the Discworld books did with the Death-Summoning Rite of Ashk'Ente."
"Meaning...?" said Harry₁ as a stunned look of horror appeared on his face.
"Meaning we cast sectumspectrumsempra maxima on my soul and now everyone on Earth is dead," said Harry₂. "Except Hermione, cos we're soul-bonded."
"Imagine that," said Hermione, dropping her invisibility cloak.
"And Draco because he's a horcrux," said Harry₂.
"Yay," said Draco.
"And Cedric Diggory," said Hermione, pulling Cedric Diggory from her mokeskin pouc, "Because things in a mokeskin pouc have a quantum probability of zero."
"And," continued Harry₂, "according to a marginal note in my own handwriting, children of two horcruxy people are born immortal because magic is Lamarckian. So basically every human ever, um, born from now on will live forever."
Harry₁ looked at Harry₂. "MAXIMUM AWESOME!" they cried in unison, and high-fived. Unexpectedly the Blinovitch Limitation Effect caused Cedric Diggory to become immortal.
"My goodness," said Hermione. "Two mildly concussed Harry Potters, Draco Malfoy, Cedric Diggory and little old me. Tee hee! AND ALL OUR CHILDREN SHALL BE IMMORTALL AND SHALL RULE THE SEVAGRAM!"
"It's just a shame we lost Professor Quirrel," said Harry₁.
Unexpectedly, Professor Quirrel erupted from Harry's scar. "Remember...the dark side of rationalization will be with you...always," he said, and went back inside with a cuckoo noise.
"Hahaaaa!" laughed Harry₁.
"See, told you," said Harry₂.
"Wait a minute, Granger," said the Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy, having recovered from his earlier exertion. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting," said Hermione, "that another hundred chapters is too long to wait for Harry's next big nude scene."
Hermione looked at her boys, smirked, led them upstairs to the late Professor Quirrel's really comfortable couch...
...and they sat down and waited until they were 18, you pervs, THE END.
ONE THOUSAND AND NINETEEN YEARS LATER
A large green spaceship landed atop Ravenclaw tower, destroying most of it, and a silver robot emerged.
"Yo," he said around his cigar, "I got a consignment of an infinite number of monkey's paws here — who's gonna sign for it?"
