Author’s Note: *... shuffles in... looks around... shuffles out.* Umm. Enjoy?

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Fender clutched at his seat as the ground whorled around him. Time seemed to slow down, yet the canon characters all around him moved incredibly fast, their bodies becoming blurs as they zoomed to each other, bouncing from floor to ceiling. He followed Ginny’s trajectory, notable due to her bright red hair, as she sped from her mother, her father, to Harry’s blur, which stood stationary at the center. Then she ricocheted away and he lost her within a mill of students.

Fender liked to imagine that he had seen a great deal of the world in his short lifespan. He had seen the gritty underbelly of the world and crawled along its gut, seen the scruffy five o’clock shadow of a burnt-out populace and scraped its edge, been at the heart of the decaying planet and watched it die. He had once seen a snake get run over by a truck. But at that moment, in Aerobics Lair, Fender saw the Story. In its purest form, he saw characters weaving together, back and forth, looping and colliding with each other with the grace of swans and the power of charging rhinoceroses. He watched characters burst apart and reform, then saw new ones coalesce out of the ether. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, lovely in its intricacy, brazen in its delicacy.

Then it was over. The characters slowed in their paths and eased to a halt, falling limply to the ground. For a moment, he thought, Oh, shit, she really did kill them all off! Then there was a groan, and Professor McGonagall pushed herself to her feet. She rubbed her back gingerly, patted herself down, then looked around at the canon characters strewn around in mass nap-time.

If Fender had looked, he would have seen the characters picking themselves up and shuffling away to their rooms. However, he was presently occupied with vomiting over the arm of his chair. A terrible feeling, especially with his arms still manacled in place.

A nagging thought poked at his mind. He glanced to his right. Phayn was gone. Not that he was concerned about that. Not at all.

The Order of the Sphinx was back. Several looked as if they had seen action, mostly along the lines of scorch marks and odd crops of warts. Miss Brin tottered after them, looking aged and losing her footing as if she had been asleep for a long time. Fender called out, “Oi! You! Over here!” but was drowned out by the sudden wails of canon characters.

One of the Weasley twins was crouched over the other; Fender could not tell them apart. Sirius Black and James Potter were holding Lupin sadly, while Lily hurried to the Aerobics Lair Apothecary. She elbowed a crowd of Death Eaters out of the way, all of whom were carrying some form of Lord Voldemort.

“Resuscitations please go to the Whinging Scab, everyone else out; we need another check of the grounds to make sure we haven’t missed any plotholes. If you see a suspicious person, stun first; we’ll sort them all out later,” McGonagall was saying. “Everyone please look after your Canon-shift partner and report to the Madam Pomfrey for emergencies.”

There was a sudden jerk on Fender’s manacles, and he looked up to see Pineapple Queen unfastening him from his chair. “Okay, back to your dormitory. You didn’t splinch yourself with one of the canons, so consider yourself lucky.”

Fender tottered to his feet. “What about my license? I still haven’t gotten that, and I found Snape for you!”

Dethryl prodded Fender in the back. “There are two hundred copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in each common room. Do you want to read it now, or do you want to stay here and worry about your license?”

Fender’s mouth twitched. But between fighting the herd for a book and being a distinguished individual with the only fanfiction license in the school, he would have to go for being distinguished. He dug his heels into the ground. “I want my license.”

Dethryl sighed. “I’m going to murder Slughorn for making promises. Fine. You want your license? You’ll get it once this is sorted out. Go help Madam Pomfrey with the resuscitations and we’ll get you a license soon enough.”

Fender was about to protest when he saw Miss Brin making a beeline for him and the two Order members. “Fine. But you’ve promised me.”

Dethryl let out a bark of laughter and shooed Fender away.

Helping with the resuscitations was worse than Fender would have thought. For one thing, it took him an hour and three bruised ribs to get to Madam Pomfrey and explain what he was going to do (being backhanded by Hagrid leaves a mark). Then, there was the matter of the resuscitations themselves. There was watching a dead person come back to life, which was fine when it was Lupin, only dead for a few days. Less fine when it was Scrimgeour, dead for a year.

“Farewell, LVJ, we hardly knew ye,” muttered Ginny Weasley, who had decided to help out as well. She was in charge of the Essence of Deus Ex, the only known element able to revive a dead character. At present, Fender was helping her out with the Voldemort co-op.

Fender was fortunate that he had already lost his breakfast after the Canon shift; otherwise he surely would have seeing the Lords Voldemort collectively, who, upon being unified as characters, were now in the process of grafting themselves into a singular body.

Ginny assigned Fender the unfulfilling task of watching the Voldemorts while they re-spawned, and went off in search of Harry. Fender grimaced, pulling the Voldemorts apart if they looked to be formulating into something unnatural. (Fender had asked Ginny what she meant by “unnatural,” and had been rewarded with a series of flashcards smacking him on the head with pictures of “Good = person,” “Bad = mutated man-thing with too many limbs.”) He grumbled as he pried an errant forearm away from the shin of Little Orphan Tommy, then let it sink into Lord Voldemort Sr.’s forearm.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I wonder if he’ll imprint on me when he wakes up.” The bizarre thought of Lord Voldemort thinking Fender to be his mother was just disturbing enough to outweigh its benefits and prevent Fender from trying it, though.

Just as he was working on downsizing some skulls, though, a peculiar thread of conversation drifted past.

“We’ve found three Snapes in total, Miss Brin,” Neville was saying. “Two dead, and half-melded together, that’s a good thing. But the one of them looked... it was a fanficto-reality Snape. And it was carrying this.”

“It looks like a radio.”

“It’s like no wireless I’ve ever seen. And it’s been beeping ever since I got it off of him.”

“... Off of him?”

A quick glance over his shoulder saw Neville producing some rather disturbing motions with the sword of Godric Gryffindor. Fender shuddered and turned back to setting the Voldemorts’ thumbs correctly.

“Give me that,” said Miss Brin quickly. There was a smash, and Fender risked another peek to see her grinding the wireless into the ground with her boot.

“You know liking Celestina Warbeck’s not a crime, don’t you?”

“You really got some character development, didn’t you, Neville?”

“It’s a bit of a rush, to be frank.”

“I destroyed it because it was transmitting. We’ll figure out where it comes from later.”

“You want to get some reading done?”

“Yes, before my brain draws any more conclusions from the list of resuscitations.”

At that moment, Lord Voldemort kicked Fender in the gut. He had a sudden perception of curtains and glass as he went sailing through the window. Apparently the Voldemort co-op was still operating under the strength of seven men.

“Got to hand it to him. The boy really wants his license,” said Dethryl.

“Oh, is that why he’s still here,” said Miss Brin. “Aaaand... why he’s now in the lake.”

“We should give the girl a license, too, I suppose.”

“The girl?”

“The other girl who brought in Snape.”

“Are you joking? That was Phayn Knarm-Doots.”

On their cot, the two halves of Snape that were melding together, the good!Snape and evil!Snape, gave a synchronous shudder.

“My point exactly.”

In the lake, Fender floundered. The school robes the fanwriters wore took on water annoyingly fast, and he found himself shivering, cursing, and dog-paddling his way to shore a lot slower than he would have liked. At last he was out of the lake, wringing out his clothes and thanking whatever power there was in HFA that had made summer the time for his impromptu swim instead of winter.

“What is it, Fang? You’ve found something?”

Fender looked up to see Hannah Abbott, wand out, rushing toward him. “Oh, great.”

“Identify yourself!” she cried, reining in Hagrid’s boarhound.

Fender raised his hands above his head, wincing as his wet clothing stuck to him. “I’m a student.”

“At Hogwarts?” said Hannah.

Fender rolled his eyes. “At HFA.”

“You look like a Gary Stu to me. Very broody.”

“I’m not—”

“Can’t be taking chances! Stupefy!”

As Fender hit the ground, the last thought in his mind was this: I need to get a new fandom.