Disclaimer: Pel and Tel do not own Buffy or Harry Potter. Which they are very sad about.

Welcome to the second chapter! You can count on us updating about once a week, as we both have Tuesdays and Wednesdays usually available. Updates may come sooner than that if we are particularly inspired. We appreciate the traffic coming our way, but would love to hear from some readers. How is our characterization? Anything confusing? Give us the good, the bad, and the ugly. We value your opinion.


The tinkling bell over The Magic Box shop front door rang out in welcome. From the back room, Rupert Giles straightened over the box of miscellaneous occult objects he was unloading from a shipping box. His brow furrowed. Strange, he thought. Generally the Sunnydale locale got enough of the supernatural just simply existing so near the Hellmouth. They rarely sought it out. And when they did, Buffy usually ended up having to repair the damage.

Giles made his way to the front of the store. When he got close enough, he was able hear a sound he'd gotten all too used to of late.

"I don't bloody care if you're from Mercury's second sun. Fact is we're closed. Come back tomorrow," Spike, decidedly Giles' least favorite creature in all of existence, was saying to four rather frightened-looking travelers.

"Er-Spike," Giles cut in. "What are you doing?"

"I'm helpin', ain't I? We don't have the time to get these ninnies back to their dimension," Spike replied, rather like a cocker spaniel, Giles mused, begging for a biscuit after some inane trick. "We got enough on our increasingly smaller plates as is, eh?"

Giles ignored him with difficulty and addressed the new-comers.

"So sorry about him. What is it you were looking for?"

"We're not sure at all, unfortunately. We don't even know where we are. Are we in Lichfield?" One of the men, a tall handsome chap with glasses and black hair pondered, almost to himself.

"W-w-what? Er-no. This is Sunnydale." At their puzzled expressions, he elaborated. "California?" Their expressions didn't change.

"I'll call Buffy," Spike volunteered.

Greetings and introductions were exchanged easily once the Slayer and the rest of the Scoobies arrived. They learned the tales of their travelers and Buffy easily reported the biggest events of hers, following some unspoken inexplicable trust she felt for the strangers. There was an easy comfort about the little shop that had been absent from Sunnydale for far too long now.

Buffy listened contentedly to the conversations passing through the room. She was surprised to see Willow speaking quietly, intently, to the withdrawn man called Remus.

"I can do magic. Pretty impressive stuff. I got good at it, but I also kinda can harness all that is evil and bend it to my every will," she said it as a warning, as a confession, and Buffy sensed relief in her voice. Remus was the first outsider that Willow had really connected with since she and Tara had split up, and Buffy was glad to see her start recovering. "I'm also a lesbian." She said it loudly. Loudly enough 

to break off the other conversations in the room, and she reddened to the shade of her hair as they all stared at her. "Wow. Heh. That was pretty poor timing…" she finished.

The traveler called Sirius had just unwrapped some sort of sweet, a Chocolate Frog, according to the wrapper. It remained frozen, halfway between the wrapper and his mouth, in some sort of morbid digestion limbo. "Wow!" He said, breaking from his reverie and shoving the candy into his mouth. "We've never met anyone who was gay before,"

"Oh, look!" Remus said eagerly, snatching an oddly-shaped playing card with a wizened old man depicted on the front out of the foil candy wrapper on Sirius' lap. "You've got Dumbledore!"

After a long evening of intense conversation with the travelers, the Marauders, Buffy suddenly sensed an urgency to the situation. The woman, Lily, had divulged that she was pregnant, and a war sat heavily on the wizarding people of their world.

"So first off, we need to figure out what we need to get you back to your dimension, or world, or whatever. From there, we can see what can be done about this Dark Lord guy," Buffy announced.

"You mean to align yourself with us?" Remus asked in a voice that conveyed neither trust nor disgust very clearly.

"Well, yeah. I mean, I'm the Slayer. Sort of in the mission statement."

"Now there's something we never considered. A mission statement," Xander joked. "Helping to save your ass and the asses of your loved ones since 1999. And again from then to 2005. And from then—"

"Anyway. You were saying," Spike cut in, gesturing to Buffy. Xander glowered at the bleached vampire, who then poked his tongue out for only his foe to see. Xander made enraged gasping noises, ignored by the group.

"Of course I want to help. I'm sure you'd do the same for us if circumstances were different, " Buffy was standing now, and the people who knew her well prepared themselves to be inspired by a motivating speech. But then,

"Right, let yourself believe that, girlie," Sirius goaded. "Besides, what could you possibly do for us? You're not exactly the most intimidating monster slayer ever. In fact, you're almost…adorable." He feigned an apologetic grimace. Buffy, in turn, sputtered in wordless fury.

"Well, you—I—You—Ugh! Nevermind," she turned to the other Marauders. "You're all welcome to stay with me. Even you." She shot a glare in Sirius' direction, who actually threw his head back in shoulder-shaking laughter. Buffy huffed once and with that, the meeting was adjourned.


"Anything?" Jonathon asked eagerly, his eyes brightening.

"Absolutely everything. Unlimited wishes. And super hot," Warren assured him, almost manic to get his cohort on board.

Jonathon looked left to Warren, a sheen of eager sweat forming on his brow, and right to Andrew, who looked nervous but had, as usual, been easily swayed by Warren's manipulative speeches. He nodded once, feeling like a hardened criminal giving the go-ahead to a fellow inmate about to stick it to some common foe. The others returned his nod, and Andrew got to work.

Andrew folded his legs underneath of him as he sat down in the center of a large pentagram that had been chalked onto the hard cement basement floor. He gathered various grasses and herbs, set them ablaze, and placed them carefully into the individual points of the star, muttering prayers in unintelligible tongues.

Warren had been increasingly glad of late that he had decided to keep Andrew around a little longer. He had planned to let one of the Rwasundi demons take him the night he'd killed Katrina, but damn it if the little dweeb hadn't proven his worth. For now.

There was a sharp popping sound and the smell of sulfur pervaded the room. They collectively coughed and waved away the angry air around them, wondering what had gone wrong. After a minute to clear their lungs, Andrew sighed deeply and with a tone far too serious for him, uttered seven words that carried with them a foreboding that went altogether beyond chilling:

"I sense a disturbance in the force."