Ally’s hands were numb. Very numb. She stared down at the vat of laundry, wondering if there really was such thing as “House-Elf Appreciation Day.” In any case, her detainment in the hospital wing didn’t seem to be going as badly as it had last time. There were no disgusting potion ingredients, or overbearing Potions masters. Scrubbing the white linen bed sheets against the old-fashioned washboard, Ally allowed herself to entertain as small glimmer of hope. June had already begun, and soon it would be time for the fanwriters to leave HFA.

Ally smiled. She would be leaving; leaving the torments, the “kill the fanwriter” attitudes, and the aversion to any sentence that began with “I know we’re not allowed to...” Yes, thought Ally happily. Soon she would be leaving the whole lot of it.

It was kind of sad, really.

Before Ally could ponder this any longer, the sound of running feet filled the infirmary. Stampede? thought Ally confusedly, turning from her alcove to look at the doorway. She had thought that the stampedes were over, and that most of the fanwriters had gotten used to the “look, don’t even THINK about touching” rule.

And then they came into the hospital wing. At least twenty of them, all with long dresses and long hair, and long, sad, angsty faces. Ally smelled the mingling of expensive perfume, with names like “Eau du cheval” and “Le grosse canard.” Ally really needed to work on her French.

Over the sound of the stamping of expensive footwear came the voice of the only Canon Character stubborn enough to resist the lure of these fatal fanfiction females: Argus Filch. “Get up, there! Go, get in, I want your hands where I can see them, you miserable blighters! I’ll cut out your livers and make gravy out of you if you take one wrong step!”

Ally dried off her hands, wondering what was going on. It looked as if Filch had corralled himself a herd of Mary Sues. But this many? That was just... unusual, even for HFA and the present circumstance of Canon shifting.

“Now, I am going to take role, and I want you to all sit down on the floor... Miss, I am not Draco, so you can just bugger off... You, get away from the windows!”

A Vambiolato giggled and smiled at Filch in a way that would have been very suggestive had, well, had he not been Filch. “Where’s my dear Sirius? I want my escaped convict lover!”

Filch rolled his eyes. “On the moon; now stay there...”

The girl’s beautiful eyes widened. “The moon? Ooooo...” she said, looking at the ceiling.

Ally tentatively walked over to Filch, glancing at the clipboard that he was carrying. “Beg pardon, sir. What are these doing here? Who are they?”

Filch was too preoccupied to swear at her properly. “About a quarter of Lusterbuff House. Stupid giggly morons... Gave themselves Vambiolaria, and now we don’t have any Kuswort to fix them up. Most troubling, most troubling...”

*********

“I really don’t care if you just tie them up and leave them there under quarantine. We can’t have Suvian students running about all over the place. Just find out where they got the disease from and plug up the hole,” said Meir Brin, slumping in her chair.

Sirius Black glanced at Filch, then at Klose. “We’ll do it, but I don’t know if it will work. What does one plug a hole in reality with?”

Meir Brin blinked, then snapped back to the present. “... Yes, do that. What? Oh, I don’t know. Glue, maybe? Or one of the Jelly-monsters. And put the rest of Lusterbuff House down for buffer-duty. There’s a substitute MAPLE game day after next; that should give them ample time to think about what happened.”

The three Sue patrollers walked out of Meir Brin’s office, followed by Mrs. Norris. After the disappearance of the Mini-Aragogs, Filch had become the third member of the Sue-dispatching crew, and had five to his credit already. Meir Brin sighed and drank some more of her tea, trying to get through the mound of paperwork covering her desk.

About a week ago she had filed a request with the PPC to bring a team of agents in for full-time protection of the Harry Potter Canon. And they had sent her back a mound of paperwork, including forms, Breathalyzer tests, and propaganda leaflets (“What can you do for your Parent Continuum?”). It actually wouldn’t have been too bad if it hadn’t been written in Pig Latin.

“PC-Pay oesn’t-day ake-tay esponsibility-ray or-fay...” Meir Brin read out loud. You really need one of those decoder rings for this, she thought.

Then the door was blown to pieces, and in walked the angriest Lucius Malfoy that Meir Brin had ever seen, even worse than the time Doom Song had left a monument to Peter Pettigrew outside of the Aerobics Lair corridor and Mr. Malfoy had tripped over it, falling into the Weasely Jelly-monster. And even angrier than the time when Colin Creevy had developed the pictures of him doing it.

“I will maim them!” he shrieked, his normally sleek hair falling all over his face. “I will tear them into little, tiny pieces and feed them to Norbert! I will personally inscribe my initials into their feeble foreheads and make them think twice about disgracing the Malfoy name so! I will—”

“—Not trip over that, please... Too late,” said Meir Brin, wincing as he fell over Hermione8meg’s confiscated broomstick.

The elder Malfoy began to pick himself up, still shaking with rage. “They have gone too far this time, farther than even the most devious Vambiolato ever dared to go. They have written incest stories about my son and I!”

Meir Brin nodded, pointing at the empty wall in the back corner. It was a very hard wall, with what looked like small craters in it, as if many things had been banged into it. “Knock yourself out,” she said.

Lucius Malfoy went over and slammed his head into the wall, explaining the existence of the crash marks. “They have dared to write such unrecognizable stuff! I fail to see any resemblance with my own son, or with myself, and this is therefore a defamation of my family’s name,” he said, pounding away. After a few minutes of extreme frustration, he stopped and turned around. “Can we not do something about this?”

Meir Brin shook her head. “No, it’s not possible. They’re the authors, and when there’s no Canon to disprove it, we can’t give them a tablet of stone showing why it’s impossible. You know the doctrine on slash and the like; why are you asking me?”

Lucius Malfoy grumbled quietly to himself. “I fail to see what this preoccupation of theirs with it is, though,” he said. “What compels them to write about such perverse topics?”

“A mystery of the universe? We’ll never know. Have you considered talking with Narcissa about this?” asked Meir Brin.

He waved this aside. “She spends too much time with that Petunia Dursley creature. For a Muggle, the two of them seem to share a lot of ideals.”

Meir Brin shrugged and dipped her quill back into the inkwell. If there was one thing she still had trouble with, it was the concept of refilling a quill. It reminded her of trying to drink ice cream with a straw: difficult and ultimately unproductive. After five minutes of trying to write her name on the line, she realized that Mr. Malfoy was still watching her. “Look, I can’t do anything about it directly. Do you want to round up a group of students and run them through the Forbidden Forest? That helps clear the mind sometime.”

Lucius Malfoy tapped his psychological cane against the floor, pondering this. “It was amusing last time we did it. And seeing Dana Dancer and Melony fall into Aragog’s web did relieve a good bit of stress...” He stood up briskly, and walked out of the office, mumbling to himself.

“Enjoy,” said Meir Brin absentmindedly, looking back at her quill. I must look into getting magical powers before the start of next term, she thought. “‘Umber-nay oo-fay ents-agay eeded-nay?’ I don’t think this is even proper Pig Latin...” she muttered, flipping through the stack of papers.

Someone knocked on the wall next to her door, and Meir Brin leaned back to see Professor Binns and Madame Maxime standing in the broken threshold.

“Come in; what can I do for you?” asked the course coordinator.

“We have come to see about the possibility of installing a bowling alley in the Canon bunker,” said Binns nasally. “Professor Dumbledore has agreed to make room by cutting off part of the sauna that we had planned next to the statue.”

Meir Brin shook her head. “Whatever you want, as long as there is still room to put the bracing against the walls.” The two turned to go, but Meir Brin called after them, on a second thought. “Why didn’t you just owl me up about that?” she asked.

“Ze students, zey ’ave put up a net next to ze entrance to zis wing. Even after Monsieur Crouch sent zem to work plastering ze ’alls with ze Slash Repellent,” explained Madame Maxime. “And whenever we get close enough, zey run away! I wonder why zat would be...” she said, a glint of mischief in her dark eyes.

“Why are they intercepting the mail?” asked Meir Brin, reaching for her Switch.

“Zey want to collect ze signatures of zeir lust-objects,” she said. “As if zere was not already enough to worry about...”

Meir Brin was halfway down the halls when she spotted the small encampment of fanwriters, among them Europa and Belphegor. “All right, what do you think you are doing?” she called, startling a couple girls.

Then there was the sound of pounding feet, and a cloud of smoke came into view at the end of the corridor. Belphegor clambered to her feet, followed by Kellie Owens. They ran to the left. Then a herd of fanwriters followed them, comprised of Wantingmors, Lusterbuffs, Canonlaws, and Slasherings alike, all wearing identical expressions of panic.

And then, bearing quickly down from the right came the enormous forequarters of a dragon, Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback, as a matter of fact. Riding on top of the Canon dragon (who had acquired a degree of intelligence from his time at HFA, and now spent the evenings having long chats with Hagrid about dragons and other dangerous creatures) was Lucius Malfoy, grinning like the Evil Emperor of Hyenas.

“Go on, there, fanwriters! We’ll see how you like the nasty Malfoys after a romp around the Whomping Willow!”