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“Sadly, I have to advise you that Mr. Harry Potter is unable to attend due to copyright restrictions…”
Senator Jobsworth, First Among Sequels
I pulled out my footnoterphone. “Hello?”[1]
“Are you sure? I thought the series was self-policing.” [2]
Thursday5 looked at me with interest. I tried to ignore her; the last thing I needed was to have her whip out her autograph book and screw up the narrative.
“I get your point. Do you want me to take my cadet?”
There was a long silence; I knew Bradshaw was thinking the same thing I was. While the Harry Potter series wasn’t strict first person, like Jane Eyre or even my own series, it was narrated from Harry’s perspective. If Harry saw anyone while he was in the story, it could cause some serious textual disruption.
Bradshaw’s reply surprised me.[3]
“Are you sure?”[4]
I took a deep breath. “All right.” I turned to Thursday5. “We’re jumping into one of the Harry Potter books. Order of the Phoenix, to be exact.”
Thursday5’s eyes lit up.
“And if you even think of taking out that autograph book, I’ll text you. We’re not going to see Harry, talk to him, anything.”
Her face fell ever so slightly.
“If you don’t think you can…”
“No!” She brightened. “I won’t look at him.”
“Then jump me to just in front of 12 Grimmauld Place, the beginning of Chapter Eleven.”
She took my arm. A minute later, we were standing in front of two houses: 11 and 13 Grimmauld Place.
“But…” Thursday5’s voice trailed off. “If the house is Unplottable, how do we get in?”
A moment later, a wide-eyed girl with long, unkempt blonde hair and dangling radish earrings appeared. She looked from me to Thursday5 and back again with an expression of mild interest.
“I’ve never seen identical characters before,” she said. “But you’re too well-drawn to be from fanfiction, both of you. Does your novel have alternate-universe stories in it?”
Thursday5’s mouth was wide open. “You’re—”
“Luna Lovegood,” I said, recognizing her instantly. She seemed an odd choice for Jurisfiction, but I’d seen weirder. “Are you the Jurisfiction agent here?”
“The most senior one,” she said. “There are quite a lot of us here, really.”
“But – you’re in Chapter Eleven,” I realized.
“Yes,” she agreed, seemingly unbothered by this. “But I don’t speak. Harry just sees me in passing from across the Great Hall. I’m using a C-3 generic for the scene; it shouldn’t be a problem.”
I decided to get the introduction done with quickly. I knew Luna was interested in odd things, and an Outlander in the BookWorld is about as odd as you can get. “I’m Agent Thursday Next. This is Thursday5, from my series; I’m an Outlander.”
She stared at me with that odd, unblinking stare. “That’s interesting. I’ve never met an Outlander before.” She turned to her side; I hadn’t noticed that she had a messenger bag slung over one shoulder.
A moment later, I found myself presented with a piece of parchment and a freshly-inked quill. “Would you mind?”
I narrowed my eyes; I could feel Thursday5 looking at me with a hurt expression. I sighed; usually, fictional characters asked me to bring me things from the real world. I should have known Luna would be different.
I scrawled my name quickly. “We should get down to business.”
Luna nodded. “There have been rumors.” She looked at me with interest. “Is it true that the Council of Genres has been breeding an army of conjuGators?”
“Of what?”
“ConjuGators. Vicious predators that look like alligators that will conjugate any character in the BookWorld on the Council’s orders?”
“I’ve never heard of them.” I looked cautiously at Luna, wondering who had trained her. “But the Council does have a small army of Danverclones at their service.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “That’s rather worse, isn’t it?”
“There’s worse. There’s a serial killer on the loose. He – or she – has already killed Sherlock Holmes and Good Soldier Svejk, and attempted to kill both Temperance Brennan and myself.”
“You?”
“My books—” I jerked a thumb at Thursday5, “are based on what I do in the real world. Without me, there aren’t any more sequels.”
“Oh.” Luna looked from me to Thursday5 and back again. I knew the effect could be startling: Thursday5 was an identical clone of me, albeit dressed in Birkenstocks and all-natural organic fibers. “You don’t seem very much alike.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.
“Here,” Luna said. She thrust out a scrap of paper at us: I saw the familiar words “The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number 12, Grimmauld Place, London.”
I blinked.
“As long as you’re within the book, you’re bound by its rules,” Luna chimed. “You’ve never worked in fantasy before, have you?”
I shook my head. Most of the larger fantasy novels were self-policing, particularly the well-read series; Lord of the Rings was the best example. I knew Arwen Undomiel and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins were the Jurisfiction agents for those books, and that they made one hell of a pairing, if a bit proprietary regarding their personal domain; I’d once heard from Emperor Zhark that Lobelia had given him a sound beating with her umbrella for chasing the Minotaur into one of the Appendices. Word was that after dealing with Arwen and Lobelia, the Minotaur didn’t dare go back, either.
As soon as I’d read the paper, 12 Grimmauld Place appeared: a slightly blurry façade, coated in filth. It had the grimy windows and general look of disrepair that had been described, but otherwise possessed little detail. Like every setting in the BookWorld, it had just enough description to be recognizable as such.
The only part of the house that stood out was the door, which had been described in detail. Its flaking black paint, the silver serpent knocker, and lack of keyhole or letterbox were all quite vivid.
“We use it as a headquarters when Harry’s not around. We have to evict for Harry’s stay here over the summer holidays and before Christmas, and for parts of Half-Blood Prince and all of Deathly Hallows, so it’s not entirely convenient, but it was the first place we could think of when we were looking for headquarters – after all, that’s what it does in the book, so we knew it worked well. The rest of the time, we’re out of Ted and Andromeda Tonks’s house, upstairs – Harry’s not there for long, so it’s much better. We’ve also got Spinner’s End; Harry never goes there, and the narration is strict third-person for that chapter, so it’s probably the best place of all.”
“All of you? How many people does Jurisfiction have in here?” I was glad to know Luna wasn’t the only one.
“Oh, I don’t know. Quite a lot, I think,” she said breezily. I was rather worried about this; she was the head of the Jurisfiction division in the Harry Potter series and she didn’t even know how many agents she had?
“Come in,” she urged. “I do have to be back at Hogwarts before Harry sees me coming out of Herbology in Chapter Thirteen.”
I entered; Thursday5 followed me. “Be quiet,” she told us before she pushed the door open. “That portrait’s quite unpleasant, I really don’t want to have to listen to it. It’s rather sad that they have to keep her covered up, but she disturbs everything.”
We entered; I was careful to keep Thursday5 from exclaiming over the utter injustice of the house-elves’ mounted heads or the troll-foot umbrella stand as we went back into the kitchen.
I blinked. The table was lined with characters from the various books: Mad-Eye Moody, Ron Weasley, Marietta Edgecombe, Draco Malfoy, and Kingsley Shacklebolt were all there, along with a turquoise-haired young man I didn’t recognize.
Luna looked around. “Where’s Hermione?”
“Still undercover,” Kingsley said in his deep, slow voice.
“She’s been gone for quite a while. Do you think we ought to send someone in after her?”
“I’ll go,” Ron said, shooting to his feet.
Kingsley shook his head. “She’s always been capable of handling these things on her own. She’s the most talented at dealing with fanfiction.”
Luna looked around. “And Lily and—”
“They’re dealing with a grammasite that got into Chamber of Secrets.”
“And Dolores is in this chapter, so she can’t leave.”
“Dolores? Umbridge?” Thursday5 sputtered.
Luna nodded. “She’s not very pleasant, is she?”
“You – she’s Jurisfiction?”
I interrupted Thursday5. “Miss Havisham trained me. And, if I’ll remind you, one of my closest friends in Jurisfiction is Emperor Zhark, whose goal is fictional domination and who’s been responsible for the deaths of billions of fictional alien peoples.”
“We can’t help it. I don’t mean to turn the D.A. over, I didn’t want to, I swear it—” Marietta broke in. Her face wasn’t yet covered in purple pustules, but I knew that it was only a matter of chapters before that happened. Looking at her, I felt a trace of pity.
“It’s how you’re written,” I said soothingly. “Of course you can’t help it.” I looked over at Thursday5 sharply. “You’ve met with Zhark before; you’ve never had this problem.”
“But – not in—”
I sighed. “If you want to get to know a person, you do it outside their novel. Inside, they’re bound by what the plot says they have to do.”
“Lord Voldemort was one of our best agents,” Luna volunteered. “The first one, of course.” She sighed. “He lost his life a few years ago during the great Epilogue Debacle. The replacement they sent us – he’s just not the same.”
“The Epilogue Debacle?” I hadn’t heard of it.
“The Council hushed it up. It took a major rewrite of books five through seven to get everything back into a semblance of readability,” the turquoise-haired man said resentfully. “They said that I should consider myself lucky that they didn’t put me up for recycling, since they didn’t need my character for anything.”
“Teddy—” Luna began, but Thursday5 cut in.
“Teddy Lupin?” Thursday looked both delighted and astonished; it took a moment for me to register the name.
The man nodded.
“But – you shouldn’t be a fully realized character,” I said. “You’re only mentioned—”
“Now,” he said. “Before the Great Epilogue Debacle, I was a full character – along with Victoire, half the characters in the epilogue, and Caradoc Dearborn.”
“You’re not the only one who was upset, boy,” Mad-Eye said. “Peter Pettigrew actually took a complaint to the Council of Genres about having most of his scenes cut out of the series—and most of us had better death scenes—”
“Quite a lot was different before the debacle,” Professor Flitwick squeaked. “Arthur Weasley died in this book, during the snake attack, and Nymphadora Tonks and Remus Lupin both survived the end of Deathly Hallows. Sirius came back, too – there was quite a bit of a part with the Veil in the Ministry, and—”
“Are they—“
“Oh, they’re still alive,” Luna said. “And they don’t really die in the book, either. All they do is lay there and act like they’re sleeping, then stay hidden in the backstory through the ending. The hard part is making sure Harry doesn’t see or realize they’re still alive before the epilogue itself.”
“But – Lupin’s ghost—”
“Oh, anyone can do that,” Kingsley Shacklebolt said. “It’s just a cheap-grade effect from the Well – though don’t tell the plotsmiths I said that.”
“That’s why Harry doesn’t see either of them die,” Luna said, continuing with the explanation as if there’d never been an interruption. “That’s why Sirius’s death is so ambiguous, too, since he was meant to come back from the Veil. That’s why most people have to read it quite a few times before they realize he’s gone for good.”
“The Council of Genres didn’t want to cause any more trouble by actually having any of them die definitively in front of Harry – they weren’t sure what textual repercussions it might create.” She smiled at Teddy. “That’s how we convinced them not to recycle Teddy, Victoire, Scorpius, and Fred Weasley—”
“They were going to recycle Fred?” I broke in. I couldn’t imagine the Harry Potter series without both Weasley twins.
“Not George’s brother. His son,” Luna explained. She smiled. “It was a bit of a success, given that Fred doesn’t even make it into the new epilogue.”
I nodded; to have a high-grade character, probably a B-grade, in a story where they no longer appeared was unheard of.
“I think it was because they were happy we managed to salvage the novels,” Luna said. “We never realized how much of a danger outside influence could be until then.”
I thought of the proCaths in Wuthering Heights, the Bowdlerizers’ attacks on Shakespeare, and the Little Women Beth-death revisionists and nodded.
“We couldn’t get all the textual anomalies out, no matter how hard we tried,” Marietta said. “There are some parts of the books that don’t seem as good – or that make people wonder. Inconsistencies or things that don’t seem to have any fruitful end within the story – why impostor Moody makes that cryptic comment about Ron’s father knowing about the Imperius Curse in Goblet of Fire, why that old Potions book had to be Professor Snape’s in Half-Blood Prince, how Hermione suddenly got really good at lying between Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows, why Harry, Ron, and Hermione think it’s so necessary to put on that cursed locket in Deathly Hallows–”
“We borrowed that from Lord of the Rings to fix a worse plot hole that the fake Ron created. Arwen wanted to kill us,” Luna interrupted dreamily.
“–that mention of Caradoc Dearborn – he tried illegal PageRunning when they knocked him out of the series, Havisham herself texted him to bits–” Marietta continued; several people bowed their heads as his name was mentioned, though she didn’t seem to notice, “—problems with the Priori Incantatem scene in Goblet of Fire – haven’t you ever wondered why Harry doesn’t see the reverse-Horcrux spell come out of the wand, if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named made him a Horcrux when Frank Bryce died?”
I hadn’t, actually, but maybe I hadn’t read the series carefully. I wasn’t a die-hard fan, after all, although I knew Tuesday had enjoyed the books. Friday had stopped reading after Prisoner of Azkaban, complaining that the Time-Turner scenes weren’t at all like how real time traveling would work.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why I’m not in the epilogue?” Luna asked.
“You didn’t die originally, did you?”
She laughed. “No. But my part had to be excised; there wasn’t a good place for it any more. The epilogue’s the place where all the seams are – where the patch jobs we did from books five through seven really come together. It’s not as satisfying as the rest of the series, but it holds them together, so we don’t dare touch it.”
I nodded. “We really ought to get down to business. There’s a serial killer at large in the BookWorld, and Jurisfiction is worried that they’ll go after Harry Potter. No Harry, no book.”
“A serial killer?” A new voice had entered the room; I whirled to see a new presence standing there. But, while she looked like I should have known who she was, I couldn’t tell. “That is really serious – we should get Harry into Spinner’s End or one of the chapters with strict third-person narration and tell him!”
I still couldn’t tell who the woman was. She reminded me of a combination of Thursday1-4 and the Potterverse’s Bellatrix Lestrange: clad completely in leather and a slashed, low-cut jumpsuit that was incredibly form-fitting. She looked embarrassed to be seen in it, and I was reminded of how I felt about Thursday1-4 myself.
Immediately, Mad-Eye’s wand was out, pointing directly at her.
“Mad-Eye!” Luna exclaimed, but Moody wasn’t deterred.
“CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” he shouted.
Luna sighed. “She’s too well-realized, Mad-Eye—”
“Do you want to take the chance that this one might be a better-than-average imitation?” Mad-Eye bellowed.
“Mad-Eye’s had a bit too much experience with impostors, I’m afraid,” Luna whispered. To the leather-clad woman, she said pleasantly, “You’re going to have to prove it, I think.”
“Ron, stand up,” the woman said impatiently. Ron Weasley was eyeing the woman rather conspicuously, and I thought that it was a fairly good thing that Hermione Granger apparently didn’t belong to this Jurisfiction department. She walked over to him, kissed him passionately, then flushed crimson. “Are you happy, Mad-Eye?”
Moody nodded.
“Hermione’s been doing work undercover in fanfiction,” Luna explained. I stared in disbelief. “She’s been doing it since the Great Epilogue Debacle; we decided we needed someone to police all the fics out there.”
“An impostor Hermione from a Draco/Hermione fanfic wouldn’t be able to kiss Weasley there,” Moody explained. “They’re all too disgusted.”
Ron made a face, but couldn’t say anything; the sentence was apparently true.
“Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion does this,” Hermione said, gesturing to her flat, sleek hair, “and – well – this is—Ron, would you stop staring?”
Ron guiltily pulled his eyes up to Hermione’s face; Luna went on as if Hermione had never spoken. “She’s been masquerading as Dark!Hermione in Draco/Hermione fanfics for some time – ever since the fanfic people managed to insert a strong piece of Draco/Hermione subtext into Goblet of Fire at the Quidditch World Cup.”
“Draco’s warning to Hermione,” I remembered.
“Keep that big bushy head down,” Draco sneered, repeating his earlier words. “I would’ve told her to run towards them – would’ve been worth a laugh or two—”
“Oh, shut up, Draco. Or I’ll aim for your teeth the next time we do a reading of Prisoner of Azkaban.”
Draco did fall silent.
“Girl’s got a mind that works well in fanfiction,” Moody said. “Best undercover agent we’ve got.”
“If I have to listen to anyone calling me ‘Mione one more time…” Hermione said through gritted teeth. “Or have to snog an Angsty!Good!Draco, for that matter…or worse…”
Ron flushed with anger. “You snogged—”
“For heavens’ sake, Ron, it’s undercover work.” She turned to me. “You’re Thursday Next, from the Outland. And you’re Thursday5, from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. “
“I’ve heard that book wasn’t very good,” Luna said, but no one seemed to notice.
Before either Thursday5 or I could reply, Kingsley Shacklebolt interrupted. “We’ve been having trouble with the Draco/Hermione fanfics lately. It used to be more from the Harry/Hermione stories…they kept trying to get into Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. The whole Epilogue Fiasco came from a very good Ron impostor who started that relationship with Lavender Brown – and not breaking up with her. They also had a fake Ginny there; she told Harry she hated him and didn’t want to date him. That pair almost unraveled quite a bit of the books before we managed to stop them.” Kingsley looked to Hermione. “Hermione realized it first. She reduced the impostors to text and rescued the real Ron and Ginny from the fanfic where they were trapped.”
“After that, I started going undercover in Harry/Hermione fanfic,” Hermione said. “If there’s one thing worse than snogging a fanfic version of Draco, it’s snogging CAPSLOCK!Harry. The ones set during Order of the Phoenix are the worst – it’s hard enough to like Harry in this book as it is, but to have to snog a pale, angry fanfic version of him—” She shuddered. “And after I settled that, I had to get to work in a Hermione/Snape fic. Hermione/Draco is much more pleasant than that – at least, comparatively. Usually, fanfic versions of Draco are more like Spike from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer books – I’ve been working with him, trying to get traces of his character out of the fanfictional Dracos. But the Hermione/Snape stories are usually better-written: Snape is always a fairly realistic version of Snape, and snogging him—” She made a face. “It’s disgusting.”
“I would agree,” a low voice said from in the doorway. I turned once more to see a man with dark, greasy hair sweep into the room, accompanied by a startlingly pretty young woman with red hair and vivid green eyes.
“Did you handle the grammasite?” Moody growled.
“Quite easily,” Snape said dismissively.
Hermione was still brick-red. “Professor Snape, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”
“No offense taken. Do you think that I would relish the thought of snogging one of my own students – and one I have never liked, at that?” Involuntarily, he darted a glance over at Lily – whether she was using the surname Evans or Potter outside her story, I didn’t know, but I knew that it was who it was. It was clear to everyone in the room that the only person Severus Snape wanted to snog was Lily.
Lily didn’t seem to notice it; I wasn’t sure if she was used to it or not. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a serial killer on the loose in the BookWorld,” I said. “There’s a good possibility that they’ll target Harry.”
“We’re going to need to double our efforts to protect him.”
“Get Harry into Spinner’s End as soon as possible,” Lily said. “We’re going to need to go over arrangements with him – he’ll have to be careful.”
“We could go to him now, if we have to,” Marietta suggested. “He can always pass it off as another one of those dreams.”
“Which is part of the reason why we work out of Order of the Phoenix quite a lot,” Luna explained to me. “Harry’s dreams are a good way to contact him without unduly interrupting the narrative, although we’ve got to be creative about how we do it.”
“But I don’t think there’s a reason to interrupt the story yet,” Hermione said. “If we do our jobs—”
“We’ll have to arrange details. Hermione, you’re off fanfiction. You and Ron are with Harry for most of the narrative, so you’re on bodyguard duty.”
“Are you sure? I’ve heard the Draco/Hermione Fanfiction Coalition is trying to get their hands on a dirty bomb. I don’t want it contaminating our series, particularly not if they put a Draco/Hermione slant on it.”
“Draco—”
“I’ll do it,” the narrow-faced boy said, shooting to his feet. “It’ll be bad enough to have to go undercover with fanfiction versions of her, but if they set off a dirty bomb, I’d actually have to snog the Mudbl—”
Snape and Ron pulled their wands at the same time. “You will not use that word in my presence!” Snape snarled, at the same time Ron said, “Take that back!”
“Sev,” Lily said gently, “put that away. I’m touched, but you can’t change what’s already been written—”
Snape looked miserable as he lowered the wand. “I know,” he said. “But—”
“We’re partners. Not anything else. You know it already makes James furious.”
That seemed to make Snape happier, and he did as Lily said, although he did mutter, “Protecting Harry Potter. It’s all I spend my existence – in-story and out – doing.”
“Ron,” Hermione interrupted, “you too.” She looked to Draco. “You’ve done undercover work before. Live with it – especially if you don’t want a dirty bomb going off in the middle of Deathly Hallows.”
“I don’t think the epilogue could withstand a revision that big,” Luna commented. Both Draco and Hermione walked out the door.
“The rest of you – we’ve got work to do,” Kingsley said. “We’ll start doling out assignments ASAP. Marietta, if you’ll get back to Hogwarts and tell Dolores as soon as Harry’s out of detention…”
Luna walked over to us. “I think we’ve got it covered,” she told us, steering us towards the door. “We’ll do our best. Where do you think you’ll go next?”
“The Vampire Chronicles. We ought to warn Lestat,” I said. “Things with first-person, single-narrator narratives are highest priority, and if the serial killer decides to go for someone high-profile—”
“We’ll take care of Harry,” Luna promised. “Security’s been much better since the Great Epilogue Debacle. You’ll look out for him while he’s out in the rest of the BookWorld, won’t you?”
“We will,” I promised, “although I can’t look after him myself – copyright restrictions, you know.”
Luna nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe we can find a way around that. I like you – both.”
It seemed to be the opening Thursday5 was waiting for. She thrust the autograph book at Luna. “Could I?”
Luna blinked. It startled me: it was the first time I had seen her blink in the entire time of our meeting. Then, she smiled. “Certainly. And if you see a conjuGator, you’ll let me know?”
Thursday5 smiled back. “I promise.”
“Come back sometime. I’ll have the entire Jurisfiction department sign your book, if you want.” To me, Luna added, “And we’ll take care of Harry. Don’t worry.”
I nodded and turned to Thursday5. “Do you want to take us into Interview with the Vampire?”
She nodded, and the world of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix disappeared around us.