Population Boom, Hogwarts Part 13

"There's something seriously wrong with your head," Draco complained as he put the cursed belt around his waist, changing into a blonde girl.

"Probably. You make a hot girl," Mist replied as he gestured at the full-length mirror next to Draco.

"That's fucking disturbing, Potter…" Draco trailed off as 'he' turned and looked at his reflection, seeing an attractive girl looking back at him.

"I'm aware," Mist replied as he reached out and poked Draco's arm, picking up a new pattern for his cloning ability. "Look, I need someone to keep an eye on your original while he's hiding from Voldemort with a bunch of bikers and I don't really feel like paying someone to keep an eye on the little shit which means I'm going to send a clone."

"Why bikers?" Draco asked.

"Because Draco has the potential to turn himself into a halfway decent person if he gets his head out of his ass and bikers, or at least this particular group of bikers are willing to beat the stupid out of people," Mist explained, glad that Hermione had managed to get a contact number for the group through one of her uncles since they were mostly respectable. "I wouldn't bother but someone is paying me a decent amount of money to make sure he survives the war and your family's stupidity."

"How in Merlin’s name did you avoid getting sorted into Slytherin?" Draco asked.

"I basically told the hat that I'd snap because of the stupid backstabbing idiots and kill everyone, it put me in Gryffindor," Mist replied with a shrug.

"That explains it," Draco replied, thinking about some of the lunatics in his house that were probably only there because none of the rest of the houses would take them. "Why send a clone?"

"Mostly because I don't really want to have to pay someone to watch him. I thought about cloning your mother and making her younger, so I could get Draco to fuck her. That way I could call him a mother fucker, but a clone would be more like his aunt and you're a pureblood, it wouldn't have the same weight."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Draco asked, wondering if he'd been dropped on his head as a child and if so how many times.

"Lots," Mist replied as he used his cloning power and created a copy of Draco's current form.

"I'm going to need clothes and cash," the female Draco stated as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, twisted back and forth so that she could see herself. "Does the biker gang have any attractive girls in it?"

"A few," Mist assured her.

"Nice," the female Draco replied, looking forward to having some fun and getting the hell away from the insanity at Hogwarts and his father's idiotic demands to spy on Harry and Mist for a while.

"That's it? Nice?" Draco asked, trying to keep from staring at his clone.

"It's the boss," the female clone replied with a shrug. "If he wanted me to fuck everyone in Slytherin, I'd bend over the table and let them fuck me. I wouldn't be happy about it, because holy fuck some of them need to learn to use soap but yeah, he's the boss, ride or die, Bitch."

Draco shook his head, wishing he could disagree and glad that he wasn't stuck babysitting his original because he'd make a pass at his clone without a second thought if he didn't know better which meant the original would as well and despite what everyone thought he wasn’t in love with himself. "Give me another belt so I can get back to the dorm before I'm missed."

Mist conjured another cursed gender flipping belt and tossed it to Draco. "Have fun and thanks for the heads up about Benard, we'll have to do something about the little shit."

"He's like six two and a seventh year, how does he count as a little shit?" Draco asked as he put the belt on and transformed back to his normal appearance.

"Figure of speech," Mist replied as he made another female clone of Draco. "On second thought, you might as well take her to the infirmary. Just tell them that she appeared out of thin air and that she must have fallen through a crack from a world where you were born a girl."

"You're a bastard," Draco complained as he headed for the door.

"At least I'll get to see the girls in the showers," the female Draco mused as she followed Draco.

"My parents were married," Mist replied with a smile.

"Do you want me to bend over so you can paddle my ass?" the first female clone asked as Draco opened the door, nearly causing him to walk into it in surprise.

Mist laughed once Draco and the other female Draco stalked out and the classroom door swung shut. "You're sadistic, you know that right?" he asked the female Draco, reasonably sure she was joking about getting paddled.

"Yeah," she agreed with amusement. "How much cash do I have to work with for the mission?"

"Talk to Twist, she'll hook you up," Mist told her as Twist appeared with a pop. "Hook her up with some clothes, a leather jacket and a bike then drop her off with Draco."

"Yes sir," Twist replied with a smile.

"Do I have any mission objectives other than keeping him alive?" Draco's female clone asked.

"Try to make sure he has a better opinion of muggles by the end of it and don't let him check on the wizarding world until he gets the stick out of his ass," Mist ordered.

"With pleasure," she replied then held her hand out for Twist.

Twist grabbed the clone's hand and vanished with a pop.

Mist smiled as he left the abandoned classroom, looking forward to the chaos that Snape and Moody's mission was going to cause. 'This is what a magic school should be, barely controlled chaos and a hell of a lot of whimsy,' he mused as he turned invisible and headed for the Great Hall to meet up with his friends.

0o0o0

"I'm going to kill him," Severus complained as they made their way toward the cabin that was missing most of the top floor.

"Drop it," Alastor replied in a harsh whisper as he glanced around to make sure no one was watching. "If this works, you'll have thirteen years to plan your revenge and if it doesn't, we'll be dead or worse."

"Easy for you to say, you didn't get turned into a girl," Severus complained as she glanced down the front of her robes at her generous bust.

"No, I just lost my magical eye," Moody complained.

"And you got your original eye back and a pair of sunglasses that can duplicate most of your eye's tricks, not to mention your leg and the rest of your nose," Severus replied as they approached the cabin that should be hidden but wasn't, thanks to Pettigrew's betrayal.

"It's not the same, I can't see behind me," Moody grumbled as he glanced behind them to make sure no one was following them.

"Use a mirror," Severus replied as they approached the partially destroyed cabin. "We're going to need a miracle to pull this off without changing the timeline."

"Don't worry, I have a plan," Moody replied as they saw a giant of a man on a bike fly out of the back yard and into the sky.

"She's going to kill us when she realizes that she's going to have to leave Harry with her sister," Severus warned him.

"Like I said, I've got a plan," Moody assured him as they headed inside and pulled a set of jumper cables out of his bag. He walked over to where James was sprawled on the ground and used the jumper cables on his chest, causing the previously dead wizard to gasp for breath as he woke up.

"Fuck!" James sputtered as he looked around, wondering if the waiting room had just been a dream of if he'd come back from the dead, as strange as that sounded. "Lily?!" he shouted as he bolted for the stairs, deciding to worry about the strangers later as they weren't wearing masks.

Severus watched James run up the stairs, knowing that he wouldn't like what he'd find but knowing that it was important that he realized that they were 'officially' dead as far as the world was concerned. He glanced at the jumper cables that Moody was holding. "Those better have more than one charge."

"We'll find out," Moody replied as he followed James up the stairs, a bit surprised that the cables had actually worked.

'We should have started with Lily,' Severus thought as he glanced down at his arm where his dark mark should have been, wishing he could have gone back a couple more years and fixed the worst of his younger self's stupidity. 'It's probably just as well the time turner burned out.'

"Fuck!" Moody exclaimed, causing Severus to rush for the stairs.

Severus rushed up the stairs and stopped when he saw the smirk on Lily's face and Moody trying to catch his breath. "What's wrong?"

"She fucking lurched at me and said, "Brains," while looking like a deranged lunatic," Moody replied with annoyance.

Severus glanced between James and Lily then focused on Moody, barely avoiding laughing at the insanity. "Constant vigilance," he replied dryly.

"Don't remind me," Moody grumbled, knowing his paranoia had been getting out of control the last couple of years… or decades.

"Sorry, I couldn't resist, we've been watching halloween movies for the last couple of days," Lily admitted. "What's going on and where is Harry?" she asked, knowing that he hadn't shown up in the waiting room in the afterlife with her and James, but feeling in her soul that he was safe.

"Complicated," Moody admitted, not sure where to start.

"He's with Hagrid," Severus told them, starting with the most important information. "We're from thirteen years in the future, you died and we're here to fix things."

Lily stared at the familiar looking girl for a couple of seconds, trying to figure out if she was telling the truth and why she seemed familiar. "Thirteen years? How did you find a time turner that could send you back thirteen years?"

"Sirius Black found it or acquired it from Mundungus, he was rather cagey about the details," Moody admitted. "I'll explain everything but we need to leave before Albus gets here and realizes that you're not dead."

"We should tell him…" James trailed off when he realized the situation they were in. "We can't tell anyone, can we?"

"Not unless you want everything to unravel," Severus warned them.

"Do you have a plan?" James asked, wanting to hear their ideas before he tracked Hagrid down since they'd managed to bring them back from the dead.

"I have a couple of doses of polyjuice and I know a couple of Death Eaters that vanished mysteriously around this time," Severus offered.

"Know?" James asked suspiciously. "You can't be more than sixteen, maybe seventeen which means you should currently be three or four."

"We're older than we look," Severus replied dryly. "Moody, see if you can convince James that this isn't one of Sirius's asinine jokes while we pack up Lily's lab, Mundungus never managed to find it while he was looting, so it shouldn't cause any problems."

Lily glanced suspiciously at Severus, hit with a feeling that she should recognize the girl. "What do you think?" she asked as she glanced at James.

"Might as well," James replied as he focused on the teenager that was claiming to be his supervisor, seeing the resemblance now that he was looking for it. "Start talking and I want details on the Jameson raid, Moody was always a bit cagey about how he managed to defeat the eight Death Eaters without backup."

"That's because I was covering for you and you were pretty cagey about the spells you used to take out their safe house," Moody replied dryly.

"That's an interesting story," James replied as Lily and the strange girl left. "Officially, I was never there, unofficially, Death Eaters should avoid squatting in muggle houses that are connected to gas stoves, it would be remarkably easy to use a levitation charm from the window and turn the gas on then light a candle from outside and run. Why did you transfigure yourself to look younger?"

"I didn't, I woke up like this," Moody grumbled as he headed for the stairs. "Let's go, we need to be gone before people start showing up."

James picked up Harry's favorite stuffed animal off the floor and followed Moody or the person pretending to be Moody, figuring no one would miss the stuffed animal. "What happened?"

"I was being an idiot and jumped out from behind a wall to scare your son as part of 'training' and he stunned me before I could react. I woke up on Black's couch in perfect health and sixteen again. That's when Black mentioned the time turner and that the transformation wasn't reversible and that I'd have to grow back up the slow way."

"How the hell did he figure out how to permanently reduce people's age?" James asked as they walked into the living room.

"Enchanted crown, when I asked where he got it, he just said operational security and that he'd tell me in thirteen years," Moody complained.

"Sounds like Sirius," James said as he walked over to a portrait on the wall and moved it, revealing a hole in the wall with a bag of galleons and the fake IDs that Lily had set up when she'd realized they might have to leave the country. "Do you have an actual plan?"

"Do you remember the smuggling ring that we busted that was using a small tropical island as a base?" Moody asked.

"Yeah," James agreed. "It was a nice place, if you ignore the traps and the mutated and charmed crocodiles that breathed fire."

Moody glanced at Lily and Severus as they walked out of the other room hauling a trunk. "It also vanished at some point between when we left and three months after the war when a team of specialists went to investigate the fire breathing crocodiles."

"Which means we'd just be closing the loop if we put the place under the fidelius," James mused.

"Do you honestly expect us to hide for thirteen years?" Lily demanded, unhappy about the fact that she'd have to leave Harry, but trusting Sirius to take care of him.

Moody shook his head. "We don't have a choice unless you want to drink a Draught of Living Death and hope that someone can wake you up after thirteen years. If we attempt to change the timeline, we get erased."

"Fine, let's go before someone notices," Lily complained, knowing that he was right even if she didn't like it.

Moody pulled out the length of rope that he'd turned into a portkey to the smuggler's island, wanting to leave before anyone found them.

0o0o0

"Just because you can duplicate the physical cup, doesn't mean you can duplicate the magic well enough to fool Albus," Percival pointed out as he studied the remarkably decent wooden chalice that Mist had created with wandless magic.

"I don't trust the ministry of magic to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel, there's a decent chance that one of the remaining Death Eaters or a ministry flunky decided to curse the Goblet while it was in storage so they could kill Harry," Mist argued as he dropped the unlit Goblet of Fire into his Enchanting page and hit the button, picking up a large collection of runes involved in sorting the prospective students.

"Or you're just being paranoid," Percival argued. "Albus checked the goblet after the ministry handed it over."

"Or I'm just being paranoid," Mist agreed as he looked at the complicated network of runes, trying to figure out which runes he'd need to copy if he wanted to create a fake cup. "Some of these runes don't make sense."

"What do you mean?" Percival asked.

"The order of the runes implies that the goblet latches onto the magic of anyone that tosses their name in the goblet. If they die or refuse to participate in the tournament, the goblet consumes their magic. They're lucky that some of the people that tossed their names into the goblet didn't drop dead from not dancing."

"The dance isn't mandatory unless you're one of the champions, so I can see where that drawback would have slipped people's notice," Percival mused.

"I'm not finding any safety clauses to prevent other people from tossing other's names into it as a means of trying to kill them."

"I'm guessing the designers assumed someone would be standing guard while the flame was active or that they didn't notice or care," Percival replied, wishing he was surprised that the original designers were careless or callous enough to create the goblet.

"Entirely possible," Mist admitted as he continued looking at the runes that he'd need to duplicate.

"Can you copy it?" Percival asked. "I need to get the Goblet back before anyone notices that it's missing."

"Yeah, give me a minute," Mist replied as he swapped the Goblet for the fake that he'd created and pushed the enchant button, creating a copy so that he could study it later. "As much as I hate to admit it, I'm not going to be able to create a safe copy in a couple of hours."

"We have enough staff thanks to the clones that we can post a watch on the Goblet and the age line that Albus is setting up should help," Percival assured him.

"That's going to have to do," Mist admitted as he pulled the 'fake' goblet out of his enchanting box and dropped it into his inventory, figuring it would be fine as long as dipshit wasn't around to confound it.

"If you can figure out how to add additional safeties to it by the end of the year, I'd be willing to swap the goblets after the tournament is over," Percival offered.

"That's probably the best that we can do," Mist admitted as he headed for the door. "Best of luck with the tournament and thank you for convincing everyone to reinstate and expand Quidditch, having the other schools toss a team together helps include everyone."

"It certainly does," Percival agreed as Mist left.

0o0o0

"Lily!" Remus blurted out when Lily walked into the drawing room with a large group of people that he only sort of recognized, most of which had died more than thirteen years ago.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," Sirius offered with a grin as he quickly stood up, wondering where James was, as he couldn't see his friend.

A black haired girl that looked to be in her teens, dashed forward, snatched a pillow off the chair and hit Sirius in the head, sending him stumbling back to the couch. "Tag!"

Remus glanced between the familiar looking girl that had just decked Sirius with a pillow and his friend who was laughing his ass off rather than looking upset. "What's going on?"

"Padfoot forgot to include a warning with the crown that turns you into a girl," the black haired girl complained, giving Sirius a rather impressive mock glare.

"James?" Sirius asked rather amused that his prank worked.

The black haired girl turned to look at Lily. "Give me one reason we can't neuter the dog."

Lily pretended to think about it for a couple of seconds then shook her head. "That's probably taking the joke a bit too far."

"I don't know, you could have waited a couple more minutes and let him sweat," James said as he stepped into the room, having been hiding around the corner.

"James?!" Remus blurted out, easily recognizing his friend since he hadn't changed.

"I think we broke him," James replied as he walked into the room with a smirk and a bounce in his steps, ecstatic that he didn't have to hide anymore.

"If this is a trick, I'm going to kill you Sirius," Remus warned his friend who often took his pranks too far.

"I'm not that much of a bastard," Sirius assured his friend.

"Dragonshit," one of the dark haired girls replied then shifted to her alternate form, revealing a green haired Severus Snape that looked to be in his late twenties rather than mid thirties. "You managed to convince Moody to lie about having a way to fix getting turned into a girl."

"I would have told you, but you said I didn't have a sense of humor," Moody replied with a shrug, causing Snape to glare at him.

Severus scowled at Moody for a couple of seconds then shook his head, having long since gotten over the prank that had caused him to get 'stuck' as a girl for a few years, if only because he'd treasure the look of horror on James' face when he'd been turned into a girl by the crown until his dying day.

"How are you alive?" Remus asked as he glanced between Lily and James.

Lily gestured at Severus and Moody. "Moody and Severus showed up with a pair of magical jumper cables that can bring the recently dead back to life and brought us back after Voldemort killed us and Hagrid took Harry and Mist. We spent the last thirteen years hiding out on a tropical island so we didn't screw things up."

"Where did you get the jumper cables?" James asked.

"Mist, he also fixed the time turner, the original was unstable," Sirius replied.

Remus turned and looked at Sirius. "How the hell did he fix a time turner?"

"No clue," Sirius admitted, figuring he found someone to fix it or he fixed it with the strange magic he'd picked up over the summer. "He takes operational security seriously. His elf dropped everything off and said that everyone coming back on the first Halloween after Voldemort's second and final death would be a great prank on the wizarding world." He glanced between the faces of people he recognized from the order then glanced over the children that he didn't recognize. "Speaking of operational security, can you introduce me to the extra people?"

Lily pointed at the black haired girl that had hit Sirius with a pillow. "The mischievous girl that hit you with a pillow is Rose Siri Potter, the twins with dark red hair are Violet Lilith and Ivy Nyx Potter and the munchkin is Holly Romola Potter."

"I'm not a munchkin, I'm eleven," Holly complained as she pulled some of her dark red hair that had escaped her scrunchy out of her eyes.

"It's good to meet you," Rose offered as she pulled her scrunchy out of her hair, causing her black hair to turn back to its dark red color that matched her sisters' hair. "We've heard a bunch of stories, I'm curious if any of them are true."

"At least half of them," Lily offered as she gestured toward the large group of red haired children. "The other redheads are Prewetts or they're victims of the crown, it has a tendency to change your hair color to one of the colors of the rainbow."

"It could be worse, at least I don't have bright pink hair," one of the women who looked to be in her early twenties offered, not seeing a problem with her fire engine red hair that had resulted from using the crown of youth as they called the magical crown that made people taller and restored their youth.

"There's nothing wrong with pink hair," the only girl with bright pink hair in the group argued as she absently flipped the other woman off.

James sighed. "I get playing a prank on everyone, but we should probably let someone know that we're back so that we can visit Harry and Mist before Lily storms Hogwarts."

"Huh… that's actually not a bad idea," Sirius mused. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked Remus.

"Probably not, what are you thinking?" Remus asked, wondering if they could slip everyone into Hogwarts and take advantage of the strange duplication effect Hogwarts was experiencing.

"If we sneak everyone into Hogwarts, they could claim to have been from a world where they didn't die," Sirius suggested, glad that he'd included a few of Mist's mental defense stamps.

"That could work but we'd need to come up with a reason that everyone was there," Remus pointed out.

Lily glanced at Severus and Moody. "I thought you said the copies were the same?"

"They are or were," Severus replied.

"It's also Halloween, the day the barriers between worlds are the weakest," Sirius replied with a smirk. "Besides, it's not like any of the experts understand what caused the effect or how it works."

"That means we get to actually take classes, right?" Holly asked hopefully, looking forward to seeing the library and meeting new people.

"That's the idea," Sirius agreed. "But Remus is right, we'd need to come up with a reason that you're there."

"That's easy enough, you were there watching a Quidditch game," Severus suggested. "There's nothing in the rules against family members coming to watch the games, most of them just don't care, but it's Halloween so I doubt anyone would question it."

"Especially if we claim that it was Slytherin versus Gryffindor," James mused.

"We obviously crushed them," Rose suggested.

"Three hundred to nothing," one of Fabian's daughters piped up.

Severus sighed. "We should probably make it a bit more believable, twenty to fifty with Gryffindor's seeker flying toward the snitch."

"Less amusing but probably better that it was a short game than something we'd have to memorize," Lily agreed.

"You'd need a reason that the children aren't familiar with Hogwarts," Remus pointed out.

"Homeschooled?" Edgar Bones asked thoughtfully from the back of the group.

"That brings us back to needing a reason to be there," Mrs. Bones pointed out.

"I like the Quidditch idea," Gideon suggested.

"You're overthinking things," Hannah Bones complained when it looked like things were going to take forever.

"What are you thinking?" Fabian asked as he turned to look at Edgar's daughter.

"We just need to tell people that we grew up on an island and that we went to a small local school and that Professor Dumbledore was nice enough to invite us to Hogwarts to see an actual Quidditch game, that way we don't have to keep a bunch of stories straight," Hannah argued.

Sirius glanced at the mob of children that were standing next to their parents, knowing that they'd probably end up slipping up if they tried to go with a complicated story. "Okay, let's just go with a version of the truth, you'd moved to the island because of the war and Dumbledore was nice enough to let the school take a field trip to see a game and take classes until the end of the Christmas holidays as a cultural exchange program, no one would expect you to know all that much about the school since you'd just gotten there."

"We'll have to figure out a couple of details but that should work," Lily agreed, looking forward to seeing her boys for the first time in thirteen years.

0o0o0

"How many clones of Fleur are you going to make?" Hermione asked in a whisper as she watched Fleur's naked clone run down the hallway, a touch surprised that he'd already made two clones since he didn't usually copy people more than once.

"At least one more," Puck suggested, not seeing a problem with copying Fleur since she was intelligent, reasonably nice and magically powerful from what she'd discovered talking to the rest of the girls from Beauxbatons after Luna had predicted that her name would come out of the goblet.

"Why?" Hermione asked her clone.

"Luna said her name was going to come out of the Goblet…" Puck trailed off as she glanced down at Harry's map once Fleur vanished around the corner and saw two of the names she'd been waiting for, along with a bunch of names that she didn't recognize walking into the entrance hall. "It looks like Mist's insane idea worked."

"Which one?" Mist asked as he used his cloning power to create another clone of Fleur.

"Putain de Britannique château," Fleur's clone muttered as she found herself naked in the hallway.

"What's wrong with the castle?" Hermione asked, having recognized the last word.

"It's cold," Fleur's clone complained, swapping to English.

Mist gestured toward the direction of the infirmary. "Just tell them you fell through a crack and they'll get you set up with the basics."

"Oui," Fleur's clone replied as she turned and started running.

"Which insane idea worked?" Mist asked Puck, making a mental note to find a magical item to translate languages.

"The one involving your parents," Puck replied as she showed him the map.

"Huh, Violet, Rose, Ivy and Holly, looks like Harry and I have sisters," Mist mused as he headed toward the other group, curious what his family was like.

"We should probably tell Harry," Hermione suggested.

"He's having sex with Ginny and Jenny on the Astronomy tower, trying to forget about the fact that it's Halloween…" Puck trailed off when she saw Harry and Ginny and her clone heading toward the entrance to the castle at what was probably a run. "Never mind, they probably spotted the group walking toward the castle."

"Nice," Mist replied with a grin, looking forward to seeing his family and figuring out how well Snape and Moody's mission went.

0o0o0