When Ally woke up, she was sitting on her own bed, thinking about the term paper that she had due the following week. Scratching her head blearily, she blinked. Hadn’t she just... Where was... How did she get...

It was the weirdest thing that Ally had ever felt. She could remember the past year quite clearly: going to the junior prom with Dan Smithson, just barely passing her SATs, even sitting at lunch with Macy, her best friend.

But she could also remember the past year at HFA. She could remember getting Sorted, glomped, and the lessons on the world of Harry Potter. She could remember the great Battle of the Canon, and her sadness at having to leave.

Her head was pounding as she walked downstairs. A covered dish was waiting on the stove, with a small note on it, saying that her mother had gone to work early, and that she had better go to school “or else.” Uncovering the plate, Ally had a weird shock when she saw that her mother had left her eggs and not Tantaflaf.

School passed without event, though Ally felt more and more as if she was simply a spectator, not really involved in her own life. In fact it was only when Macy (whom Ally really tried not to call “Redfire“) cornered her at lunch that she first talked to someone in the Real World.

“Been really quiet today, haven’t ya, Ally,” said the girl, sliding a lunch tray across the table with practiced ease. It is said by the author that there are two sorts of things that one learns at school: math, science, and learning stuff, and how to do stupid little things like opening milk cartons and cutting a fruit dish without getting splattered with mashed kumquat.

“Err, yes. I suppose,” said Ally, caught off guard.

“Dan looked really good in gym class today, didn’t he?” asked Macy, prodding Ally with the butt of her fork.

“Dan?” asked Ally. “Oh, Dan. Right. Yeah.”

“You are out of it, Ally,” said Macy. “Go bug the nurse; you can get out of English class. I know that’s your worst subject.”

“It is?” asked Ally. Suddenly her memory jolted back into existence and she remembered getting a D+ in English for the past two years. Ally really didn’t think that she felt that bad, physically. Just rather... confused.

The next major shock Ally received was when her English teacher passed back an essay that she had apparently written just last week. Ally was overcome with an odd post-HFA case of nerves, especially when she saw that her first sentence happened to be “Shakespeare’s storys is bout guys who love eachother and die cause of it.”

Ally was completely miserable when she drove home from school, resulting a minor catastrophe in which Ally forgot how to drive. It was rather like coming home to find that your sister, whom you had thought like yourself in every way imaginable, trashing your house and messing up your reputation.

Popping some leftovers in the microwave (how Ally loved that device), she settled down at the computer, almost scared to see what she would find. There on her hard drive, winking at her like some Suvian spawn of Voldemort, were four stories. One concerned an Avatar (that now appeared to Ally as a flaming Vambiolato) falling in love with Harry Potter. Another was about Ron and Hermione doing some sort of soap opera with badly written Shakespearean prose. The last two were short hundred-word point-of-view stories about Harry Potter and Sirius Black.

“Those two couldses be salvageds,” whispered a soft voice in her left ear. Ally spun quickly to see Harie, the Mini-Aragog that she had adopted (or rather been adopted by), leaning over her shoulder.

“How did you get here?” asked Ally, feeling her heart sink slightly. Her parents wouldn’t even let her have a goldfish when she was eight; how would they react to a large, vicious spider living in her room?

“Harie has beenses with you all dayses,” said Harie softly. With a click of his pincers he melted away into the back wall. Then Ally heard another click and the Mini-Aragog had appeared once again, this time perched on top of her computer.

“Too weird.” She paused, thinking about this, then came to the conclusion that even at HFA the Mini-Aragogs hadn’t gone around teleporting. “Definitely too weird.”

“So, about these storieses...” started Harie, looking down at the computer. “Time for a rewrites, correctses?”

Ally nodded, her fingers tapping the keys quickly as she revised her work. The point-of-view fanfiction seemed to be a recent work, written just after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Then her memory jogged and she remembered writing it.

“Harry felt cold, as if he would never feel happy again,” said Ally aloud as she typed the words. “He didn’t belong at Hogwarts, he belonged with Sirius. Harry didn’t know where he was supposed to be, but anywhere would feel better than this cold, terrible ache. A piece of him had died with Sirius, the large, happy part. Now more than ever he wanted to go back... Go back...”

“Oh, schist, Harie! I want to go back!” sobbed Ally suddenly. “I really, really want to go back...”

*********

Meir Brin concentrated on the little cards, then picked up the seven of clubs and placed it atop the eight of diamonds. It was hard to believe that only two weeks had passed since the fanwriters had left. HFA was incredibly quiet, except for the occasional loud bang when the Weasley twins wrought even more retribution on Professor Umbridge.

Indeed, without the fanwriters to watch over, HFA had become positively boring (or as boring as anyplace with the denizens of Potterverse could be). Still, Meir Brin had accomplished something that she had been looking forward to all term. She had finally gotten around to obtaining magical powers (the paperwork still gave her nightmares) and had taken that Kwikspell course. And with a little help from the Catalog of Magical Powers, she now had a wand. That would do for the present, until Meir Brin could save up for the Flaming Elemental Deluxe packet.

“We have agreed with all of the appointees,” said Professor Snape curtly, depositing a stack of parchment over the coordinator’s game of Solitaire. “They will do for the Order of the Sphinx.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now? And I had so grown attached to ECG.”

“Which is?”

“Emergency Canon Guard.”

“I see,” finished the Potions master, sweeping away in his trademark black robes. Snape was still getting used to having a tortured childhood, yet as the Canon update’s notion of this had been considerably vague, even Snape wasn’t sure about how traumatized he was.

“I had best get this over with, then,” said Meir Brin, looking over at Lockheart and Elessor. The two Minis nodded, then went back to playing Diamond Web Round, a Mini-Aragog game similar to Cat’s Cradle.

“First on our list... Ah, Miss White.”

Minutes later, Meir Brin was striding out of a fireplace in a small suburban house in western Oregon, courtesy of Foo Powder. There was a family sitting there, watching television. A few choice spells and the room had ceased to move, except for the fanwriter sitting with her nails dug into the arm of a sofa at the far end of the room.

“W-what is it?” sputtered the girl, and Meir Brin could just identify the mingling of hope, fear, and fear that one’s hope will end in fear.

“This is the residence of one Ally White?” asked Meir Brin mildly, happily twirling her wand between long fingers (she had long since discovered how much fun it was to do that). A few sparks shot out, singing the edge of her “Kwikspell Magic Worked for Me” T-shirt.

“Yes, I’m Ally White,” said the fanwriter, looking slightly faint. “I’m not hallucinating, am I? Because I did that, two days ago. I thought that my Chem teacher was Professor McGonagall, and it was... unpleasant.”

“No, I assure you that this is real. I’m here with a job offer.”

“A what?!” sputtered Ally, looking stunned.

“Job offer. HFA’s recruiting for the newly created Order of the Sphinx. After what happened four weeks ago, we’re looking to create a guard of sorts, to protect our Canon.”

“This involves me, somehow?”

“Yep. We want you to lead it.”

“You’re joking.”

“Really? News to me.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Ally, jumping to her feet as if she had just stuck her finger in an electric socket.

“I now have the opportunity to make a very bad Sirius pun, but I will refrain. I am saying that HFA would like you to head the new Order, though,” said Meir Brin calmly, still twirling her wand.

Ally cast her eyes to the floor and looked depressed. “I can’t, though. I really shouldn’t, it’s not right, it’s not right that I should leave my family again. I mean, they are my family.”

Meir Brin looked at her amusedly, and then tossed her a necklace that seemed to have a gold galleon as its main piece. “That’s a deus ex machina that we picked up from one of the Vambiolatos; Arthur Weasley was most helpful in modifying it. Now it’s a sort of Portkey. If we need you, you’ll be transported directly to HFA and costumed for battle. Lovely things, deus ex machinas.”

She turned to go, but Ally then piped up with something that seemed to have been on the fanwriter’s mind for a while. “Why are you picking me?” she asked. “I’m really not that great, and if it hadn’t been for that Switch thingy I wouldn’t have been any good in the Battle of the Canon. It was really luck, then, wasn’t it? And shouldn’t you not be made a leader based on luck?”

Meir Brin sighed and rubbed her temples. “I don’t know what to say to that; I’m not Dumbledore and I won’t pretend to be. When you speak of luck, you speak of a chance. You took the Switch and took that chance. And you succeeded. If luck presents an opportunity and you succeed, don’t shortchange yourself for that just because of the nature of the opportunity.” She grinned awkwardly. “That was pretty good, wasn’t it? I must write that down...”

Ally appeared pensive, then without hesitation slipped the necklace over her head, starting as the sickening feeling of the deus ex machina settled in. “Will it always feel so weird?” she asked, indicating the necklace.

“No, Mr. Weasley tells me that will wear off after a while. I will probably be seeing you soon,” said Meir Brin, stepping back to the grate. “I have the rest of your Order to recruit.”

Ally sat back down on the sofa as her family started to move once again. She felt the coin slide into place at the base of her neck, then jumped to her feet. “Oh, schist, I forgot to say ‘thank you’!”