"They arrived at the meeting place to find Susan and Hanna waiting for them with twin looks of expectation on their faces." –Rorschach's Blot, "Odd Ideas"
"Well?" said the Hufflepuff girl and the 19th-Century Republican operative simultaneously.
Hermione sighed. "Well, the good news is that we can get Mr Hanna back to 1900," she said. "The bad news, though, is that there's no safe moment to reinstate him before mid-November – and, according to Flitwick's Reality Plot, his absence will inevitably render the McKinley campaign unable to defeat Bryan a second time. I know you weren't trying to alter history when you cast that spell, Susan, but…"
"What!" Hanna burst out. "You mean to say that that madman from Omaha will actually get his chance to despoil the country, the way he's been threatening to do since '96?"
"Not much of a chance, no," Luna remarked matter-of-factly. "Susan didn't do anything about Mr Czolgosz, after all, and there's no reason for Mr Bryan to stay away from the Exposition, so he'll only have a few months as president before he dies. Too bad," she added thoughtfully. "He seemed a nice man – and so much more sensible about that whole evolution business than Mr Darrow."
Hermione gave her a sidewise glance, and then shook her head and returned her attention to Susan and Hanna. "No, but that doesn't diminish the danger to history," she said, "With Adlai Stevenson succeeding to the presidency instead of Roosevelt, half a dozen things that should happen won't – the Panama Canal, most obviously – and probably a few things that shouldn't happen will. And, more generally, the whole 20th-Century attitude toward powerful leaders will lose its primary inspiration, with incalculable consequences for…"
"Wait – wait a moment," said Hanna, with a frown. "You mean to say, Miss Granger, that, if I hadn't been brought here, McKinley would have been killed, and… and Theodore Roosevelt would have become president?"
"Oh, yes," said Hermione.
At this, an extraordinary expression came over Mark Hanna's face, as of one who had narrowly escaped a fate worse than death. "Well, then, Miss Bones," he said, turning and clasping the startled Susan's hand fervently in his own, "on behalf of the American people, please accept my humble thanks for your decisive and beneficent action."
"Harry soon realized that he had the worst possible luck because, low and behold, Hermione was not the same." –Slinky-and-the-BloodyWands, "How Hogwarts Became a Nudist Colony"
As Harry dropped himself onto the common-room couch, the look on his face told Ron everything he needed to know. "So," said the latter. "I'm guessing Hermione is, in fact, allergic to griffin-fly stings?"
"Of course," said Harry dryly. "She's my friend, isn't she? Of course she's the one case in sixty-seven. I'm a jinx, I tell you – a walking cauldron of Dolor Doloris."
"Oh, it's not that bad," said Ron (though he weakened his case somewhat by unconsciously scooting away from Harry as he spoke). "I mean, at least we got her into a safe place in time, and worked out a secret signal to give before she lets anyone see her. I know it's pretty hard lines, but imagine how much worse it would be if the whole school knew about it."
Though, in fact, neither of them would need to imagine much longer. Unbeknownst to Harry, prying grey eyes had been watching as he checked up on Hermione, and the word was already going around the Slytherin common room: "Ever want to see what the Granger girl would look like with feathers and a cat's arse? Just go up to Hagrid's hut sometime, low like a heifer, and – behold!"
"They had their reasons for keeping their only daughter away from the public, she was a sire." –AimeeWeasley1, "Moony, Wormtail, Patfoot, Prongs and Hermione?"
"You're a friend of James Potter's, aren't you, Black?" said Lucius Malfoy.
"So he tells me," said Sirius.
"Well, you tell him from me," said Lucius, his face darkening into a highly unbecoming scowl, "that if that sister of his ever shows her face in decent society again, either my father or I will curse it off her, and count the time in Azkaban well spent. Nobody makes game of the House of Malfoy's hallowed traditions, not even Hermione Potter. You understand?"
"Perfectly," said Sirius. "I'll let him know."
As Lucius made a satisfied noise and walked away, Sirius reflected how right Mr and Mrs Potter had been to confine Hermione to the family manor after her little exploit had come out. He had assumed, at first, that it was just because she had fooled around with a brute animal and gotten herself pregnant at sixteen; it hadn't occurred to him that her having simultaneously become a female sire could put her in any kind of danger. In retrospect, though, it should have been obvious that the all-male pure-blood families who swore by the Rites of Mapreg might not care to be reminded that those rites cut both ways.
He shook his head. James surely had the craziest twin sister in England; imagine having the choice of the whole animal kingdom to turn into, and electing to become a slug just to prove how stupid the other people were who did so. Not only did it spoil her for full-moon adventures, it ruined the Marauder-nickname pattern; she'd stubbornly maintained that, since her real name began with the same syllable as "hermaphroditic", it was itself a perfectly serviceable indicator of her Animagus form, so she wasn't about to let herself be called anything so silly as "Prongs" or "Patfoot". "What does that even mean, anyway?" she'd demanded of Sirius once. "Did you know someone named Pat who had feet like a dog's, or what?"
"Yes," said Sirius facetiously. "Pat O'Kane, in Ravenclaw. Hairiest girl I even went out with." (In fact, his nickname was in memory of his family greyhound, Corker, who had been trained to play patty-cake with him as a baby. But there was no need for Hermione to know this.)
"The gun shot rang out like a loud canon through the silent sky as Draco unclenched his eyes." –Uzamaki-Girl, "A Monster Is Born"
"That's it, Draco!" came Pansy Parkinson's excited voice over the radio. "The muffling field is officially down! Just keep hammering away with your Harmony Gun, and the entire goblin army should be prostrate by nightfall!"
Draco acknowledged her briefly, straightened his helmet, and began firing in earnest. The baroque strains of Pachelbel's Canon reverberated thunderously through the air, and the goblins on the battlefield below began screaming and flinging themselves onto the ground, trying desperately to shield their ears from the, to them, toxic effects of human music.
"Eat your heart out, Curdie," the young aristocrat drawled.
