A Cold Reception

Gerald Abbot snuck quietly through his house. Minutes before, an elf had informed him that the children were still awake despite being sent to bed over an hour ago.

It had been a lovely evening with Harry Potter, Lyra Black, and the abnormally large demiguise - Whispers. The creature was just as well behaved as the children, saying please and thank you at meals and not making a mess even while eating with his hands. He carried around a small kneazel kitten wherever he went, and the adorable animal seemed to be soaking up information and behaviors from the larger creature.

Hannah hadn't told him, but it was obvious that she had a crush on the Potter boy. It was also obvious to him that she had told her mother as his sneaky wife was trying to push them together in subtle ways all through the evening. Gerald suffered no illusions of playing matchmaker as his family had done away with arranged marriages three generations before. He hadn't married Cynthia until his late forties, so he wasn't about to pressure his daughter to marry young, either. Kids should have crushes and fun when they are kids.

Regardless of that, hearing that the children were all together after their bedtime in the lounge in Hannah's wing of the house set off alarm bells reminding him of when he was a teenager at Hogwarts. He arrived at the door to the room and was about to open it when he heard a small "Shtthhh" from right next to him.

Almost drawing his wand, he turned to see the elf, Dexter, whom Steward Black had left to watch after the children, standing beside him. The creepy elf's gray-black skin blended into the hallway, making him nearly invisible in the near darkness. None of them had seen the elf since he had been dropped off to watch after Harry and Lyra. The shushing was even more creepy as the elf did it with his mouth half open, revealing that he was missing many teeth and part of his tongue was severed. Stunned for a moment at the sight, Gerald watched as the elf wiggled spidery fingers toward the door, and it became transparent.

Sitting inside the room were the three children and one demiguise sitting together on a couch, cuddled with a book open in front of them. Harry and Hannah were holding their stuffed unicorns while the Black heiress clutched Whispers, who in turn was holding his kitten. An orange feather floated in the air above them, emitting orange light around the room to allow them to read. Each of them had a lollipop in their mouth as they huddled together.

After watching them for a minute, a soft snapping of fingers turned him back towards Dexter, who had a look on his face as if to say, "Are you satisfied?"

Gerald took a deep breath and walked back to his wife and bedroom. On the way, he called for Hannah's personal elf to add an extra set of eyes on the children in addition to the creepy Black family elf.

When the children came down to breakfast, they all had rings under their eyes from lack of sleep and started into their pancakes like hungry zombies. Even the demiguise looked a little out of sorts as he shoveled strawberries into his mouth without the decorum he displayed at dinner the previous night. The elf, Dexter, appeared for a moment to deliver a bowl of food for the silver kitten before vanishing again.

Cynthia had been briefed by her husband about their late-night reading and asked them playfully, "You all look like you didn't sleep a wink. What were you doing last night?"

They all looked back and forth between them before Hannah replied, "Just reading, Mum."

She pressed for more with a smile, "It must have been a good book if you chose it over sleep."

"We didn't choose to stay awake," Lyra grumbled.

Now Gerald spoke up, "What were you reading?"

"Lockhart's new book," Harry admitted.

"More sensationalist stories about vampires?" Cynthia asked them with a raised eyebrow.

Hannah lowered her voice and said quietly, "This chapter was about dementors."

After a bit of silence, Gerald asked them with a serious tone, "That's why you couldn't sleep?" Getting nods from the children, he told Harry, "Please bring me your book when you are done with breakfast and before you get ready for the train."

After a silent meal, the children left to pack, and Whispers scampered back to the kitchen to deliver the book to Cynthia and Gerald. To Cynthia, the cover looked like Lockhart's usual adventure stories. They opened the book to flip through to the chapter on dementors and noticed the strange situation that everything after that chapter was completely blank. In order to estimate the damage that had been done to the kids, they began to read the chapter.

Chapter 2

Tootsie Pops

As I spoke of in my introduction, Eastern European Vampires seem to enjoy the slow and methodical destruction of their victims' independence to get to the sweet center beyond that. However, sometimes it's challenging to keep one's self from getting to that sweet center. To illustrate that, I give you a delightful muggle confection - the Tootsie Pop.

Below the paragraph was an illustration of a wand tapping a circle on the page. Hesitantly, Gerald drew his wand and tapped the spot on the page. In a puff of smoke, a small popsicle lay on the page. Cynthia picked it up as Gerald tapped the page to conjure another, then continued to read.

Go ahead! Open it up! Inside this sweet candy popsicle is a delicious toffee. Try to count how many licks it takes to get to the center. When you finish counting, say that number aloud, and the story will continue.

As the children had already been through this section, the book had more writing below this paragraph.

Well, that didn't take very long for you just to bite down and break the shell. I'm sure it was worth it, as the toffee is delicious. Should you have an appetite later, you still have another six four uses of this spell remaining. It is a real lollipop, hidden with magic inside this book; as most of you know that conjuring real food is impossible.

There exists in this world the foulest and darkest creature that lives only off the shores of Magical Britain. A creature that can't be killed with magic and can only be starved to death in very rare circumstances. Instead of permanently dealing with them, my government uses them as a war deterrent and as guards for our prison of Azkaban.

I am, of course, speaking of the Dementors.

Long ago, there lived a Dark Lord by the name of Ekrizdis. He did not seek to conquer like Grindelwald or subjugate like You-Know-Who. It is not known exactly what his goals were, just that he was the one to build the fortress of Azkaban, and he was the one to create Dementors. These monsters drain the magic from the air around them, degrading enchantments and rapidly depleting the heat from their environments, turning water to ice and killing plant life.

They are ideal prison guards because wandless criminals cannot use magic around them. Not wandless, accidental, runic, nor most forms of blood magic. Without a wand, a wizard is as defenseless as a squib before them. If all of that wasn't terrible enough, a dementor doesn't feed on magic and heat; it feeds on happiness and despair.

It seems strange that a creature could want such diametrically opposed emotions, but the reason becomes clear when you look at a Tootsie Pop. Happiness is the candy shell, while despair is the sweet toffee within. They may feed on happiness for as long as possible, but hunger for the despair encased within when the joy is gone. Like you who bit through the candy shell minutes before, they also desire to crush the happiness of their victims and feed on the despair within.

Both Gerald and Cynthia took the candy out of their mouths and shared a look of disgust before throwing away the candy.

Now, while this is all totally horrible, it gets worse. Most of us know that the true horror of a dementor is their kiss. For those who don't know, it's when they suck your soul out through your mouth.

"Children should not be reading this," Cynthia told her husband gravely. He nodded, and they continued.

That is the explanation that I and everyone else has been told on what the dementor's kiss is. I don't believe that this is the truth. It just doesn't make sense to me. The body cannot live without the soul, and the soul cannot stay in this world without a body. The killing curse immediately kills the body, and the soul vanishes from this plane of existence. So if the soul is sucked out completely by the dementor, the body should die.

It does not.

Instead, the body lives on without any personality. Oftentimes, it will stop having any desire to eat or drink and waste away. Other times it will seek sustenance but nothing else. Nothing of the person who used to inhabit it will remain. This is important because Azkaban prisoners aren't released when they've been kissed. They must serve the remainder of their sentence or waste away before the bodies are released. Their cells are opened, and they are allowed to meander around the prison aimlessly as they no longer want to escape… Or to do anything else.

There is one defense to these horrid creatures, known as the Patronus Charm. It is fueled by pure happiness and is one of the most difficult spells to cast and even harder to master. The origins of the spell are unknown except that it is a branch of light elemental magic, and it predates the existence of dementors as it is used to fight against numerous dark creatures that existed naturally before the Dark Lord Ekrizdis created dementors.

I have heard someone say once that it sounds ridiculous for a spell powered by happiness to be used to fight a creature that feeds on it. Their exact words were, "It would be like trying to fight off a nundu with a fat kid."

If you have any Tootsie Pop left, try hitting someone with it. The candy shell is still a shell, and without a tongue, it could hurt when hitting someone. If the shell is big and hard enough, a candy shell could do real damage. Happiness can be very powerful when used correctly.

Just as pure independence is a deterrent for Vampires, pure happiness can defend against a dementor and other dark creatures. While many creatures feed on your emotions, they may also be used as weapons and ways to protect yourself from them.

"Damn," Gerald stated simply.

"At least it ended on a positive note," Cynthia added.

After another moment of silence, they started getting ready to take the kids to Kings Cross.

The children were more or less silent until they popped through the floo directly onto Platform 9 and 3⁄4. However, as soon as they arrived, the dementor-induced attitude from their reading vanished, and they ran off together to greet all their friends.

Before they got too far away, Gerald handed back Lockhart's book to Lyra and consoled her that she wouldn't need to deal with dementors at any time in the future and should focus on studying and having fun.

Boarding the train, they rushed to the very back to claim the last car as their own. After helping Hannah to levitate her trunk onto the racks, Lyra popped open her trunk to the cavern level where she had a mango tree growing and let Whispers and Silvy to jump in while picking one of the fruits from the top of the tree and started carving it up.

The seats felt warm and relaxing like the train had been waiting all summer for them to return. After lounging for a minute, Harry jumped back up.

"I'm going to find people and explore," he declared.

Lyra and Hannah didn't seem to have gotten enough time lounging in their seats and stayed sitting. Leaving his shrunken trunk on his seat, Harry left the compartment and started to walk down the corridor.

There weren't many people on the train, mostly older students in their close-knit circles of friends and keeping to themselves. Near the front of the train, one compartment was occupied by a familiar-looking adult with short brown hair, sleeping and surrounded by luggage. One of the other seats was occupied by a large barrel, and all of the racks above contained large trunks, with one of them locked securely with iron chains wrapped around it. The seat next to him contained a ratty old briefcase which contrasted heavily with the high quality of all the other luggage.

He could only see half the man's face as he slept, so Harry couldn't figure out why he looked familiar, though he was more interested in the man's robes. They were made of jet-black, luxurious silk, with a high collar, and bore a single rune on the chest that Harry recognized from the garments of a druid he had met last year, Glen Albanwr, whose robes were white. As all but one of the seats were covered with his belongings, it did not look like he wanted company. So Harry exited the train to the platform.

Just off the train, Harry bumped into his oldest student-friend, Hayden Colton. He had met the Slytherin boy last year at the Hufflepuff party he had been invited to. The boy was an aspiring wandmaker and was focusing his studies to that end. After the basilisk had been killed, he had bribed his way into visiting the Usurper with Harry's other Slytherin friends and was going to be given two basilisk fangs to work with for wandcraft.

After polite hellos, Harry brought up that he wanted to see Hayden take apart the wand Brandt had shown him.

"Destroying a wand is almost sacrilege," he told Harry with a grimace. "Where did you get it?"

He told the older boy about Brandt winning it in a duel and wanted to see the process as well.

"After being lost in such a violent fashion, I doubt it would ever work properly for its original owner." He still looked a bit conflicted over the idea of destroying it but then smiled, "I had a visit from Professor Snape this summer and he presented me with two of the smaller basilisk fangs after he drained the venom from them. I'm still trying to find a good wood to bind them. If you really want to take apart a wand, we need something that cuts through the magic keeping the wandmaker's secrets inside. Basilisk venom won't work as it will destroy what it comes in contact with, so I'll have to figure something else out. If you find anything, let me know."

Harry shelved that bit of info away, and they split ways. He saw a few more people and exchanged greetings before a swan flew in front of him and shifted back into Gemma Fawley in her school rooms and her prefect badge polished to a high shine.

"Did you have a good summer, Harry?" she asked with a smile.

Harry nodded and asked how she got to the station as a bird.

"There's a gargoyle on the roof that used to direct people flying on brooms into the station. You can't fly brooms around London anymore, but it still works for flying wizards, whatever form."

She then went on about just flying around the whole summer and just relaxing in lakes at various parks around the country. Harry listened closely as he didn't think he had ever had even a quarter of that much time to relax in his entire life. When she saw the shock on his face, Gemma tried to figure out why.

After a few moments, it came to her, "You don't do nothing, do you? I bet you fought vampires and slayed dragons this summer, didn't you?"

"About half right," Harry considered his summer. "I didn't slay a dragon, though we did visit with them."

"Never a dull moment?" she smiled while it went right over her head that Harry admitted to fighting vampires as the half of her question was correct (with four legs, but still). Seeing some friends, she waved and ran off.

Harry was close to the barrier entrance, so he turned around to watch all the students on the platform running around with their families. Still having plenty of time before the train would come, he watched them scurry around the platform with no need to worry about larger things. They wouldn't need to kill a giant snake, hunt down a criminal syndicate, or deal with Dark Lords. He would prefer just to go back to the island, but with the Usurper still under Hogwarts, he needed to check on them and try to become stronger than this great guardian and fast.

He was snapped out of his thoughts by a woman behind him saying his name. He spun around quickly to be standing right in front of Lyra's mother, Narcissa Black. His hand reflexively went towards his pouch to grab his staff when he saw Draco Malfoy standing behind her. That small action had Narcissa stand closer and Draco duck and turn around with a peep. Harry relaxed considerably at the blonde boy's frightened reaction.

"He is no threat to you," the mother told Harry.

"Really, I'm not!" Draco stood back up. He raised a hand, wearing a silk glove in dark silver. That hand had a black mark that Lord Black had given him as a punishment for allowing Tom Riddle to possess him, attack the school, and try to kill Harry.

"I'm not!" he repeated. "If I do anything to you, Uncle Arcturus's curse will kill me!"

"Go see your friends, Draco," Narcissa told her son. Draco started walking in a large half-circle around Harry before running off. "I would like to talk to you for a moment, Mr. Potter," she gestured to a bench to sit.

Harry followed cautiously and watched as she drew her wand slowly and cast a small silencing charm around the two of them as they sat.

Still on his toes, Harry asked, "What do you need to tell me?"

"I wanted to apprise you of the progress I've made on your assignment for me. After I spoke to you, I took your advice and thought the best place to learn what you wanted was to go to the orphanage Lyra was supposed to go to…."

"I know," Harry cut her off, to her great shock.

"How?" she sputtered.

"Lyra and I were at the meeting where you spoke," he replied.

A few tears rolled down her face, "She was there, and she still chose not to speak to me?"

"She was crying," Harry told her. "I think they were happy tears, and we took off when you were done speaking."

"So there's still a chance?" Lyra's mother asked with hope.

Harry wasn't sure what to say but remembered how fishy Tonks had thought her plan had sounded about the orphanage and school.

"When you get your school up and running, let me know, and we will pay a visit," he decided. He wanted to make sure she was serious about her plans.

"Thank you! It will be amazing!" she went to hug Harry, but he flinched backward, causing her to stop short. "I'm sorry! I'll make sure it is ready soon!"

She stood up and broke the silencing field, walking away quickly.

When the two-minute warning whistle was blown, Harry reboarded the train. He wasn't looking for anyone yet but still passed many compartments where people stopped and stared at him, some fearfully, others with wonder. It felt weird to have that kind of attention and would have started running, except a door opened, and a girl he didn't know popped out and thanked him for pointing out that students could carry weapons other than their wands. Gesturing inside, she led him to two boys that opened their outer robes to show long swords attached to their belts. The girl opened a case to reveal archery equipment, but the bow had all sorts of gears and extra strings he didn't recognize from anything he had seen before. After another moment, he thanked them for the praise and continued along his way while the departure whistle blew and the train began to move. It took another ten minutes to return to his compartment, where he found Lyra, Hannah, Colin, and Meli. Melliandra had started shuffling a deck of tarot cards to give Lyra a reading.

Harry snuck in quietly and climbed behind Meli, where Colin was sitting with Hannah and Whispers, eating a mango. Whispers ripped out a chunk and passed it to Harry as he joined them.

"Good timing Harry," Meli told him. "We are just about to start." Looking toward Lyra, "I'm going to ask you to put your magic into the deck. Push it through my hands and into the cards, and I will read your fortune," she added dramatically.

Lyra smiled as Meli reached out with the deck clasped between both hands on the top and bottom. However, just as Lyra's hands touched hers, there was a stampede of people running further down the car that drew their attention. Harry jumped up and opened the door to hear someone yell.

"Fight! Gryffindor fight!" Compartments opened, and their occupants emptied towards the front of the train.

Not wanting to be the last one to arrive, Harry jumped up above the beams that ran along the ceiling of the corridor and scurried over the crush of students who had formed in the hallway, dropping to the floor where the connection to the next car was. Harry repeated this process until he got to the front and looked into the compartment with the action. There was Percy Weasley getting wailed on by Oliver Wood. Both of their wands were stuck in the walls, and even though he was losing, he must have gotten in a few bruisers before now on Oliver.

"You're pathetic!" he yelled at Percy and took a breather. "How did you manage to knock out a monster hunter with a punch like that? I think you staged the whole thing!"

Percy responded with a punch straight to Oliver's gut, making the boy double over as he himself fell back down. People had packed in around the entrance to the compartment while they fought. Both boys jumped to their feet and yelled as they tried to grapple with each other. Instead, they both collided with a glowing blue wall that appeared from nowhere, then disappeared after they fell back down.

"What's going on here?" an adult voice asked from across the hallway. Everyone watching turned around to see the man Harry had seen earlier. He looked scary as he stood in his high collared black robes.

"It was a fight!" someone yelled, "Why did you stop it?"

The man walked through the students to arrive in front of the two boys. Brandishing his wand, a small runestone zipped from the floor from where Oliver and Percy sat, splashing against his robe like it was water, and vanishing from sight. It was a very captivating effect.

"You are a prefect," he told Percy, "and you the quidditch captain," he told Oliver as a bunch of people started to leave. "I'm guessing neither of you wants a detention on your record?"

Both of them shook their heads. "Then tell me what happened." Many of the students walking away stopped and came back, having incorrectly thought that it wouldn't be fun to watch a punishment.

"It's private!" Percy whispered.

He turned around and asked the students gathered, "And you both made this public. So speak or get detentions scraping barnacles off the giant squid."

As he turned to look for the reactions to his threat on the other spectators, Harry saw the man's full face. It was the same one as one of the two other boys he always saw in the pictures from his parents' photo album. The scar that ran down his hairline and neck was exactly the same as when he was a teenager. This was Remus Lupin. As Harry stared, his parents' old friend looked back to Oliver and Percy and prompted them to speak.

They both stared at their rival, daring the other to speak first. Percy finally took the opening and blurted out, "He's trying to steal my girlfriend!"

Wood rolled his eyes, "Not exactly. I want your girlfriend, but I'm certainly not going to try and steal her."

"Of course, it's about a girl," Lupin smiled.

"No, it's about him being a braggart and a moron. I was here, minding my business, when you wanted to come and extoll the details of your summer with her, even trying to say you spent the night with her."

"But you did!" a Weasley twin called out, who was wearing a large blue pirate hat that had written on it, I'm probably Fred.

"We saw you two in the morning!" the other twin popped up with a black headband with it written, Figure it out.

Oliver looked furious. As Percy smirked and looked like Oliver was about to rush him again, Harry blurted out, "They were having a studying contest!"

Everyone was stunned, and they looked toward Harry, who added, "I was there too. They forced themselves to stay up all night studying and then fell asleep in the morning."

Small giggles were heard around the corridor as Oliver just burst out laughing. "That was it?" He coughed out as Percy looked embarrassed at being caught in his half-lie. "Well, congrats to you! A studying contest? That's gotta be like Third Base for you."

"Mr. Weasley," Lupin said sternly. "You will not antagonize your romantic rival. You probably did more damage to your cause by trying to show off." Percy lowered his gaze. Mr…" he trailed off towards Oliver.

"Wood," he said quickly.

"Mr. Wood, if you want to come out of this rivalry in the lead, you can't let little things under your skin. No woman likes a man who can't control his temper."

"Yes, sir," he replied as if the man were teaching him.

"Weasley, go to the other end of the train for the rest of the trip. No detention now, but it will be twice as bad if I hear about anything again. I will be one of your new teachers this year."

"Are you teaching Defense or History?" someone asked.

"There are actually three new teachers," he smiled as he returned to his compartment among students demanding answers. "Look at Fred Weasley over there. His bandana has my answer - Figure it out."

"How did he know who I am?" Fred asked, taking off his bandana.

"He is a wizard," Harry walked up to the twins. "Maybe he cast a spell."

"Are you ready to officiate another fight?" George asked, still wearing his I'm probably Fred hat.

Harry looked confused until Fred clarified, "The chess match between our little brother and Hermione. We like to rag on the little runt, but he is one hell of a chess strategist."

Harry told them he would need to find Hermione and see when she wanted to do it. As he turned to leave, Harry saw a brief moment as Lupin looked directly at him from his section. So the man did know who he was. He would wait a few weeks for the man to introduce himself first. He started to walk back again to the back of the train. He was waylaid again by another girl he didn't know, though this one was younger than him. She had fluffy auburn hair and a look of determination hidden behind curiosity in her eyes.

"I was told to look for you! My brother told me all about you. I'm Rachel Nevitt!"

So this was Tristan's little sister that he had told them about. Harry smiled and let the girl pull him into a room with seven other kids, all probably first-year students. They all stared at him as Rachel stood there proudly.

"I told you I know Harry Potter!" she grinned widely. Harry smiled, as this was Tristan's little sister. Lyra might have been barely younger than him, but she was also a little sister.

"Her brother is a good friend," Harry declared. "He asked me to look out for you while you're here." All the other students looked at her with awe.

He spent the next few minutes asking questions about all the things he had done in his life, though most of them were from the Harry Potter kids' books, and he could only admit to killing shadow vampire creatures and helping to kill a basilisk. The little kids were still sufficiently awed and chattered on as he went to continue looking for Hermione. Along the way, he arrived at a room with black smoke obscuring the windows.

Knocking, he called out, "Lyra, is that you in there?"

The door opened, and a small arm reached out and pulled him through the smoke. On the other side, he saw the arm belonged to Lyra, and there were Penny and Hermione surrounded by about a dozen helmets that were painted black and yellow, like a bee.

Answering his unspoken question, Penny told him, "We got our first order after the Harpies for new helmets. They want them next week!"

"You fixed the thing that makes them explode?" Harry asked.

"Before school was even out," Hermione chimed in as she used the inscription tool on her prosthetic hand to carve runes from a schematic next to her. "We made new ones for the Harpies, then oversaw the production for Hogwarts. Now other people are interested… but a week? We won't have time to finish while having classes! And those idiot twins must have missed the train!"

"They're here," Harry told her. Realizing that neither of them had been at the front of the train, he asked, "So you've been inside here the whole time?"

Penny growled and ripped a page out of her notebook, scribbling a message before charming the note to turn into a scary-looking paper dragon, which took off as the door opened and vanished into the smoke.

Harry told Hermione about the twins reminding him about the chess duel with Ron and wanted to know what she thought about it.

She grew the same sneer as her mentor, "If they want to ferry the message back. Tell him that we can do it any time in the study lounge on the sixth floor."

Not having anything else to do, Harry continued on back to see Hannah talking to Whispers quietly. Finally, she leaned back and asked, just as Harry entered, "So, what do you think?"

Whispers just shrugged and looked up towards Harry at the door, "What do you think about what?" Harry asked as Hannah peeped and blushed when she saw it was him.

"J-j-j-j just something I want to do this year! That's all!"

"Well, I hope you get what you want!" he told her and motioned for Whispers to come after him. The silver creature bounded over to Harry and tried to jump in his arms, but Harry just sidestepped the jump. "You're too big for that now," he told Whispers as they left Hannah in the compartment and wandered off.

On his next walkthrough of the train, he was once again grabbed by a girl passing by their compartment. This time, he saw who it was in advance and let himself be dragged in by Parvati Patil. The compartment contained Lavender Brown, Sally Roper, and two girls that looked like they might be first years. Whispers saw his friends and ignored the frightened shrieks of the younger girls to run over and play with Lavender's hair.

"You're all over the end of summer edition, you know!" Parvati told Harry while thrusting a magazine into his face.

Sitting down and squeezing between Whispers and Sally, Harry looked through the offered magazine. The entire section of the gossip magazine was filled with pictures and stories about all the things that various members of the wizarding society had been doing over the summer. Harry immediately found three pictures of himself. The first was meeting with the Minister of Magic for an 'undisclosed meeting at the Abbot's Tea House.' The second was a single shot someone had taken of him at the wedding with Lyra and Whispers, with a caption about their outfits and makeup. The last was him dancing with 'Brooke' and naming her the 'Polyjuiced future wife of Brandt Black.'

Sally leaned over while he was reading and told him, "What made you get your eyes done? Not many blokes would like that kind of thing."

Before he could answer, Lavender chimed in, "Maybe it's because they would."

Harry didn't understand, so he explained, "We were at a friend's spa, and Lyra had gotten her face done, so I thought I'd do something too."

"I think it looks good," one of the younger girls with jet-black hair said confidently.

As they continued to look through the tabloid, Harry was introduced to the two younger girls, Romilda and Yani. They saw pictures from the start of Alessandra Zabini's honeymoon, which featured a moving picture of the couple trying out muggle skydiving. There was a short blurb of the Weasleys taking a vacation in Egypt, along with a family photo, minus Charlie, who had been on the dragon reserve at the time. He also spied pictures of the Holyhead Harpies vacationing in Ibiza and shared his stories of meeting them.

For the rest of the trip, the two of them explored the train, saying hi to as many people as they could. He didn't recognize the two aurors he saw along his walk, but they didn't seem to be paying attention to anything more than the card game they were playing. A couple of people had taken advantage of a new rule allowing students to bring snakes and asked Harry to translate for their pets. They were shocked when nearly everything he told them was insults and demands for more and better food from their pets.

The nicest thing one of them said was, §Your comfortable body heat is the only thing keeping me from devouring you while you sleep.§ It was way too small to eat more than a finger of the girl who brought it.

When they arrived at the Hogsmeade station, the students began to depart and pool out and towards the carriages. Hagrid showed up and directed the first years to follow him toward the lake. Harry and Lyra took out their brooms to fly above the Thestrals, that hated Harry so much. However, as they tried to kick off their brooms, they didn't rise more than a few feet before shaking and dropping back to the ground. After another failed attempt, they started toward and around the waiting carriages, vowing to check on it later as there was nothing to do about it here and now. As they got closer to the gates of Hogwarts, smoke shot down from the sky four times, and four individuals in tattered robes appeared in front of them. They had pale faces and vacant expressions in their eyes as they stood there, unmoving.

Harry was unsure what to do but still drew his staff in the presence of the strange people that appeared before them. Lyra drew her wand and took a step in their direction. As soon as she moved, the others mirrored her steps and started towards her. When she stopped, they stopped. When she advanced, they advanced. However, when she took a step back, they did not move at all.

Harry watched her play with them for a minute before he took her by the arm and said, "Let's get a perfect."

Lyra nodded, even if she also looked a bit disappointed. The two of them walked back to the waiting carriages that were just getting underway, only to stop when the thestrals pulling them spotted Harry.

"We need a perfect!" he announced to them.

"Some weird people are blocking the gates, and our brooms don't work," Lyra clarified.

"Weeeeeird," Whispers added.

A few students climbed out and joined them towards the gates. The prefects yelled at the strange people guarding the gates, but they didn't respond. Eventually, Gemma joined them and cast a stunner at one of the people, to no effect. When that didn't work, an older perfect drew his wand and fired a flare into the air that exploded in fireworks with a large letter A.

More students had exited the carriage and joined them, standing in front of the ghoulish figures by the time the Aurors who had been guarding the train arrived. They got the story from the perfect before approaching the strange people. As soon as they did, they were approached in mirrored movements, the same way Harry and Lyra had.

"Holy hell!" one of the Aurors exclaimed, pointing to one of the people. "That's Magnus Cowley! He was given the kiss in Azkaban two years ago!"

The other Auror must have been in the Alastor Moody School of "Shoot first, shoot second, keep shooting, and maybe when things quiet down; you can ask some questions while they eat through a tube." Upon hearing that at least one of them had been in Azkaban, she threw a flurry of spells at the two closest of the people, most of them doing absolutely nothing, but a few causing them to stagger. Her partner quickly joined the fight as the prefects started to push all the students back.

Harry watched closely as the Aurors tried to incapacitate whoever these people were, who seemed immune to most magic cast at them. Finally, the auror who had cast first changed tactics to attacking the landscape and soon had the four of them buried up to their necks in the dirt, and then her partner transfigured everything around them to stone. They still just stared blankly at everyone around them, with no reaction at all to being attacked or confined. A scattering of applause rose up from around the students at the swift conclusion of whatever just happened.

As the Aurors seemed to be fiddling with some sort of gadget, yelling at it for assistance, a boy beside Harry leaned on him and said, "I'm getting cold."

Harry exhaled and could see his own breath as he shivered as well. The effect washed over the other students standing there as they all started complaining about the cold. The heads sticking up from the ground looked up in unison, which had Harry follow their eye line.

Up in the sky was a small mass of writhing shadows, slowly sinking to the ground. Many other students shrieked or started crying as despair washed over them. He could feel something probing his thoughts and memories, looking for something, but he had no idea what. As the shadows touched down, he saw that it was in the form of a hooded person, face concealed, arms and legs totally covered.

Both Aurors drew their wands and incanted together, "Expecto Patronum!"

Two large white shields appeared before them, though they were thin, and the light fluctuated heavily. The woman stepped forward slightly and yelled.

"Dementor! Take these prisoners back to the island, now!"

Even if it wasn't a purposeful lie, Lyra still felt betrayed by Gerald Abbot, who had said that they would not have to deal with dementors any time soon.

The dementor didn't reply immediately but reached out with its right arm, a skeletal hand emerging from its sleeve. The sight elicited many screams from the students. It reached out toward one of the prisoners buried in the ground, and they turned into black smoke, resolidifying with their neck in the grasp of the dementor.

The man held by the dementor opened his mouth and cried out as if his life depended on it, "Give us Black!"

There was silence across the students before the man yelled again, more forcefully, "Give us Black. Now!"

Harry flinched as someone grabbed Lyra, saying, "Take her! Leave us alone!"

Lyra immediately burst into flames catching the boy who grabbed her on fire at his sleeves. He screamed as Harry shoved him out of the way and drew his knife, tapping his staff to create a small bubble around them.

"Next person who touches her will die," he told the assembled students in a tone that had people backing off immediately.

Any further attempts were distracted by a screeching noise as the dementor shrieked, causing people to cover their ears and scream themselves. The fire covering Lyra went out like a blown candle, and Harry's shield popped like a soap bubble as the sound washed over them. The dark creature withdrew its other bony hand from its other sleeve and clawed at the shields in front of it, the residual energy swirling into the darkness under its hood. It only took two more swipes to shatter the shields in front of him, driving the aurors to their knees, breathless.

"Give us Black!" the man in the dementor's grasp yelled again.

Just as it started to advance, there was a snapping of apparation, and Tristan Nevitt appeared next to the other Aurors. He was still out of uniform and in street clothes from when they saw him at the station. It took him half a second to appraise the situation before brandishing his wand dramatically and bellowing, "Expecto Patronum!"

Instead of a shield, as the others had made, his spell made a mass of white mist that quickly coalesced into a glowing white poodle. The canine growled at the hooded creature, and it retreated slightly before charging at the spectral dog. The two fought, slashing and biting for two minutes until the poodle fell to the ground, flickering.

A small girl broke the line of students, who Harry identified as Tristan's little sister, Rachel. She lay on the fallen guardian as Tristan yelled at her to get back, but she just yelled, "I need to save Mimi!"

At her declaration, the poodle seemed to get a second wind and regained its brightness. As Rachel rejoined the other students, the poodle patronus lunged toward the dementor again. Just as the fight resumed, it was joined by another, a large spectral wolf, attacking from the side and making the monster drop the prisoner it was holding. All the students looked around and saw the man in black, that Harry knew to be Remus Lupin, conducting the large white wolf masterfully, pulling it away to dodge attacks and taking advantage of openings to push the dementor back further.

Suddenly, the dementor rose into the air and screamed, white light coming out from its hood in four streams that entered the mouths of the ghoulish people who arrived before it. The ones in the ground turned to black smoke and resolidified, standing next to the dementor, while the fourth just stood up. With a surge of power, all four charged the wizards conducting the guardian canines. The first of them reached Tristan first, and he kicked the person straight in the gut and knocked them back, but he also cried out in pain and started hopping on one foot.

"Don't touch them!" he called out to Lupin as the older man was about to punch one in the face and withdrew his attack, rolling out of the way.

Seeing his friend in trouble, Harry broke the line of students and ran to Tristan's aid, shooting off a large pulse of magic from his staff, knocking back the two ghoulish men attacking him. His actions seemed to galvanize the rest of the students, with the older ones and prefects leading the charge. They attacked and quickly imprisoned the strange people in various types of confinement. Two got submerged into the earth, one was wrapped in colorful ribbons like a flamboyant mummy, and the last had each limb pulled taught by a plant with purple tentacles and green suction cups that erupted from the ground.

Moments after, a cacophony of pops were heard as two dozen Aurors appeared. Seven more patronuses were summoned and corralled the dementor against the gates of Hogwarts, with a sparrow and a pterodactyl keeping it from escaping into the sky.

There was a lot of yelling between the Aurors and the dementor, who said nothing until it summoned one of the imprisoned people to its hand in the form of smoke, and when it had solidified again, it spoke through the puppet.

"Give us Black."

The Senior Auror in the group cursed. "That's why you're here? That's why you attacked children?"

"Give us…"

"Shut up," he interrupted. "Get the students up to the school," he told the prefects as they pushed the dementor away from the gates.

Harry stayed with Tristan as Lyra, Whispers, and Rachel joined him. Tristan sat on the ground and winced as he vanished his boot to reveal that his foot was broken in several places.

Despite the pain, he looked at his sister and demanded, "The family portrait showed you were in trouble! What are you doing here? Why aren't you with the first years in the boats?"

She looked a bit ashamed but took a deep breath and countered, "You're lucky I was here, or that dementor would have eaten you and Mimi!"

"Meeemee?" Whispers asked.

Turning to the demiguise, Harry, and Lyra, Tristan explained, "Our family dog is a poodle named Mimi. She's also the form of my patronus. Speaking of which, who was that other guy in the black robes?"

"New professor, I think," Lyra replied in a guessing tone.

"His name is Remus Lupin," Harry replied with a stern expression. "He was friends with my parents and hasn't spoken a word to me."

Tristan shared Harry's unhappy look, then added, "With that kind of skill, he has to be taking the defense position."

Any further conversation was halted as a healer came over to check on Tristan's foot. They also shooed off the children towards the school, with Rachel giving her older brother a quick hug before following Harry, Lyra, and Whispers. They had to jog a bit to catch up with the other students and were met at the castle by Filch.

"Get inside, the lot of you," he growled at the entire student body.

Most students seemed to just walk by him as if he weren't there. When Rachel passed by, he reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

"You aren't supposed to be here," he said in a scary tone.

Harry was about to draw his wand when she pulled her arm free and told him in a haughty tone, "Then lead the way to where I'm supposed to be." He looked stunned for a moment, so she added, "I haven't got all day."

Not knowing what else to say, he turned and led her through a side door into the castle. As soon as he was gone, Lyra burst into laughter, with Harry joining her a second later. They joked about how Filch would have her hands full with that girl in the coming years as they entered the great castle of Hogwarts.

I used a bit of creative freedom to change dementors and how they operate. I never thought they were scary enough in cannon. They will be terrifying in this story.

Fancasting:

Remus Lupin - Robert Pattinson, I think at his current age and acting career, he would be perfect for the role.