Work Text:
Where: Department of Mysteries
Who: Hermione Granger
Why: For science!
Shenanigan number: 3
By all parameters, it should have been an easy experiment. A veteran of three trips through the multiverse, Hermione Granger, Unspeakable Number One, was beginning to get the feel for traversing other worlds. So far they had been comprehensible and full of humans, with maybe a mutant or cat person thrown in for good measure, and she fully expected any further trips to produce more or less the same ratio. Every universe had had magic too, although not the sort of magic she was used to, and she had yet to encounter any alternate reality versions of herself or her friends. She had even learnt to reproduce the conditions that led to her first trip through the walls of What Is and What Could Be.
“Did you feel like staying in either of those universes you ended up in?” asks one of her colleagues, Unspeakable Number Two, a woman the size and shape of a police box. Like most Unspeakables, she too possesses an unshakable dedication to curiosity balanced by too little common sense. It is only this ratio that allows promotion up the Department, after all. The women are sitting in the Department cafeteria, a room like a planetarium, where they are enjoying a nice glass of iced pumpkin juice.
Hermione taps a beat on the invisible table with her unpainted nails, her mind struggling to be present for this breaktime tête-à-tête. “Not really. Of course I would have liked to discover all there was to discover about those worlds, but there's scarcely enough time to discover all there is to know about this one. Besides, Clavicus Vile’s little jest impressed a point - we can never know nor understand very much. Certainly not enough to satisfy. It's enough for me to catalogue the existence of these realities.”
The beadiness of the other woman’s eyes increases as she regards her superior over the rim of her frosted glass. Above her head whirls a magically powered solar system, starlight making her appear much softer featured than she is. “Hermione Granger, satisfied with not knowing? You sure?”
The witch so named sighs, and takes a sip of her own drink. “I have to be, don't I? I'm not God.”
“Well, good luck on your next trip. I hope it's boring.”
The next trip is due that afternoon. Having experienced how deprived another world csn be (cough, cough, Washington DC, cough) Hermione makes sure to pack her old expandable purse with as much food and water as possible. Aside from that she has a range of instruments on her, as well as copious parchment and various magical trinkets, not to mention - books. Not so much for sourcing solutions to problems as for entertainment. The Fallout universe had been woefully lacking in both books and entertainment, and she was not going to risk experiencing such poverty again. The Elder Scrolls universe, meanwhile, had provided her and the Department with so many hoary old tomes that certain employee's only job consisted of reading them. Envious of those people Hermione was, but sadly her competence meant she has graduated above the rank of Professional Nerd.
Once she's done checking her inventory, she says her goodbyes, relays her instructions, enters the Thingy and steps up to the Whatsit that sends her Someplace. With a flash of rainbow light, she's gone.
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When next she opens her eyes, she opens them on two suns. Two suns reigning over a desolate desert paradise. Being from England, Hermione has never seen a desert before (aside from that one in Iran, where she met a handsome devil) and so she takes a few minutes to gaze around at the unfamiliar, and dangerous landscape. It's dawn, by the looks of it, the suns just hefting their globular brightness above the horizon. With a start she realises she's breathing, and not suffocating to death in a vacuum. Granules of sand and pebbles drift around her sensible shoes. Before her lies white sand, from horizon to horizon. It's the sort of desert with few to no plants, the worst sort of desert. Oh well, lifting her notebook from her purse, she begins taking preliminary impressions. Getting good. No more is she going to be caught off guard by zombies, or ‘ghouls’, as the residents of Rivet City explained. No more is she going to be duped into doing a handsome dog demon's busy work.
Finishing up filling in her handy dandy ‘Where are you?’ cheat sheet, Hermione replaces her notebook in her bag and sets off walking, but not before checking that magic still works in this universe. It does. And it begins sending her information in the form of feelings. Coming to a stop after only a couple steps, she prods the new sensation within. Something like energy is pooling within her cells, creating a feeling like static. That static is discharged when instinct urges her to ‘send’ it outwards, like echolocation. It returns with an impression of numerous tiny creatures going about their little lives all around her. Insects and lizards and other things stranger still…curious. She makes another note, than sets off again, all the while investigating the strange feeling. It's a great…force.
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Innumerable hours later, unmistakable structures appear on the horizon. Buildings. Dwellings. Commerce? Since aliens and enemies are clearly possible, given that she's obviously no longer on earth, the intrepid adventurer keeps her wand in hand. And indeed, her new sense points out a dozen weird shapes moving about on the edge of what is more and more likely a town. Some settlement for sure. She steps past the outskirts, immediately cheered by the presence of two legged beings roughly cast in the shape of people. Quickly she casts a translation charm specially developed by her department for use on languages not found in what has come to be called around the office the ‘Good Guy Winners’ reality, or GGW for short, to differentiate it from all others, but especially from realities where Voldemort won.
A gigantic lizard waddles past her while she's staring at a group of robed humanoids in goggles.
“Oooh!” Leaping back, Hermione ‘Hair Trigger’ Granger does as she did in Megaton, and sets fire to the poor beast. However, unlike in Megaton, nothing happens to it. Her flames immediately burn themselves out on its tough, desert adapted skin.
“Oh. Sorry.” she says to the beast.
But attempted vandalism cannot go unpunished, and a nearby man dressed in what looks to be a plastic skeleton suit, swings away from a stall selling spacefruit, Lego-like gun raised. “Hey! What are you doing?!” calls the Imperial Stormtrooper.
“Oops.” Casting a disillusionment charm, Hermione hurriedly makes her way away from the scene of the crime. Having become a wanted criminal, again, but remaining female, she takes refuge in the first shop adjacent establishment, an establishment which just so happens to be a pawnbroker slash slave market run by a pudgy alien fly-pig creature.
“What's this, my pretty?” It, he, says as soon as the witch's charm wears off and he notices the presence of a pale humanoid in weird clothes who he's never seen before.
It takes a moment for Hermione to answer, given that the thing is garbling its own language and she's distracted by doohickeys and knick-knacks of a science fiction bent. Being muggleborn, she is able to make analogies to real life objects that a pureblood investigator would not be able to. Just another way she's the best.
“Sorry, what were you saying?” she asks the flyman.
“You're my slave now, stranger!”
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In the interests of learning more about how this society operates, Hermione allows herself to be enslaved, but she's barely a slave for ten minutes before Draco Malfoy resumes his old role of being a thorn in her side. However, this time she's glad to see him. It's not really Draco Malfoy of course. Well, it is, but he doesn't know it.
“Shopkeeper, show me you wares. I'm here to thrift.” says Draco Malfoy in Monk Robes, as Hermione comes to think of him. He's her age, and wafting through the junk store in long brown robes underneath which he is sporting a beautiful cream retro-futuristic Asian style suit of some sort. As back in school, he has a pair of lackeys with him, except they're robots. His hair remains white blond and his face retains its hardness and sharpness.
“Yes, Master Jedi, sir,” the wretched fly-pig bows in mid air, thus performing a noxious flip.
Jedi? This word is not translated for the foreign listener where she stands, dusting crap with a dusty feather duster. It sounds like a form of spaceretardation.
“Hmm. Mmm,” muses the fancy man as he wanders down corridors formed by piles of garbage. Near the end of one, he comes upon Hermione, still clad in the outfit she arrived in, but with the addition of a swish iron ankle cuff. “What's this? A pretty slave? Why do I feel…odd?” Draco crosses his eyes as quizzes the Force on what has gone wrong with him.
“Morning, Draco. It's good to see you have a job in this world.” says Hermione. Little does she know that ‘jedi’ is not a job, but a tax deductible religion.
Draco closes his eyes and begins practising some sort of woo-woo, woo-woo which chiefly consists of humming. “Oooh. Aaaah. Wooo.”
“I see Hogwarts doesn't exist in this dimension. Or perhaps Professor Trelawney is Headmistress.” comments Hermione. Behind Draco his droids stare off into the distance while the flyman filches their battery packs and copper wiring.
Five minutes later Draco emerges from his trance, his pale eyes blinking in the harsh light. “The Force has declared that you're to be my padawan, she-slave. Be grateful, I rarely take apprentices. Daddy hates paying for new lightsabers.”
So begins Hermione's third new life in a galaxy far, far away. First she was some desert rat, the she was a slave, and now she's a jedi's apprentice, whatever that means. Draco in Monk Robes mindrapes the flyman into setting her free for no money, and then she, Draco, and the droids are piling into his sleek spaceship, which greatly resembles a muggle Porsche.
Draco chuckles and rubs his hands together menacingly as his robots fly his ship for him. “Set course for Coruscant. The time has come to dab on Potter.”
Sitting forward, Hermione rests her head between the pair of plush leather spaceseats her new ‘master’ is taking up. “Potter? Harry Potter?” she decides not to reveal her own name, in case a version of her is known to the man. She needn't worry, as Draco doesn't ask for it.
“You know him, padawan? Huh. Of course you do. Who doesn't know Saint Potter? He of the ten billion midichlorians. I would have ten billion midichlorians too, if midichlorians were for sale. Daddy buys me anything I want, because I'm just that good.” While the spacecar zooms down the milky lanes between the stars, Draco rattles off some more about the joys of being an only child.
Some time later, the ship exits hyperspace, seeming to narrowly miss colliding with a pink moon taking up the majority of the black void of 'sky'. In reality it's still a thousand miles away.
Draco screeches. “Woah, men! I don't pay you to navigate like blind rats in a maze!”
“You don't pay us at all, Sir.” reply the burly droids, in cute robot voices.
Crisis averted (and never threatening to begin with) Draco resumes drawling arrogantly, just after lighting a spacecigar with his (green) lightsaber. “Anyway, padawan, you're probably wondering what that thing was just now, being a Tatooine peasant. That's the Pink Star. It's the Empire's greatest weapon.”
“What does it do?”
“It's the shell for a planet shattering love laser. If it strikes a civilisation, everyone begins making out endlessly till they die of exhaustion. Extremely gruesome, extremely feared.”
“Can we explore it?”
“Are you mad? That's where Darth Lavender lives. Also, Emperor Ronald, but no one cares about him since he lost his looks to high stakes gambling.”
“Ronald? Ronald Weasley?!”
“The very same. Saint Potter's precious apprentice. He went bad when his brothers pranked him by burying him neck deep in sand. Hilarious. Some quality training Potter's providing.”
“And Darth Lavender?”
“Oh, she was always on the pink side.”
Eschewing suicide bombings and small scale infiltrations, the spacePorsche carries its passengers towards Coruscant, a planet covered by a single, monumental city. Really, it should be called ‘Hell’.
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Hermione receives a tour of the Jedi Temple without discovering what in fact a Jedi is. They appear to be people who wear robes and wave glow sticks around a lot. At the end of it, Draco offers her a choice of glow stick. She picks all of them and then shows off the greatest technique for waving them, that is, she levitates them and sends them whirling about herself in a gorgeously deadly display.
Opposite her on the training floor, her master's eyes widen and his mean little mouth makes an ‘O’. “Welp, time for a promotion. Come on, padawan. I thought it would be several years before I could dab Potter into the ground, but I was mistaken. What a bargain.”
Draco leads her to the Jedi Council Chamber, where a bunch of men in nice boots sit around in a circle. Immediately she spots Harry, because he's one of only two Jedi with dirty boots and an epic scar. The other is a drunk snoring in a seat a couple down from him.
As boyish as he used to before he received his first tattoo back in Hermione's world, Draco drops his posh butt into a posh seat. “Hey, losers. I bought a talented padawan on a sale and I need her promoted to jedi master.”
An old green Snape the size of a gnome, sighs. “Promote to master instantly, we do not.”
As if he anticipated this reaction, Draco glances aside at his still standing apprentice. “Perform your lightsaber juggling trick.”
So Hermione does. Halfway through, she realises he meant for her to levitate her glow sticks, but she's already been voted in as a new master. But then, on the peak of victory, Draco receives a nasty surprise.
“Defeat Darth Lavender, we need you to. Toss down a garbage chute, the emperor you can.”
“Why? What have they done?” asks the lone woman in the room.
“....” Jedi exchange glances, confused glances. Eventually a fishman pipes up.
“They turn entire planets into hippy communes.”
Alright. But even worse, Harry, who is some manner of monk general, is assigned to assist Draco and Hermione in this task.
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So far Hermione is having a lot of fun in this new world, it must be said. Both Draco and Harry are much less emo than back home, and Ron has apparently achieved importance. And Lavender's alive.
“They're trying to get rid of us by sending us on this suicide mission, I know it. Just wait till I spacecall Daddy and spacecry into his ear!” barks Draco into the comms system as the Porsche slingshots round a black hole, a manoeuvre Hermione watches with her face glued to a window. Since Draco and his rival cannot be inside the same vehicle at the same time, they're travelling to the Pink Star separately.
Harry's voice fills the cabin. “Trying to get rid of you, maybe, Malfoy. Everyone's tired of you bragging about your thrift hauls.”
The massive false moon begins to overtake the infinite horizon of space. So much pink at first bouys a viewer up, and then acts as a nervous system depressant. One recalls the poverty and sadness and lack of women in one's life when staring at it for too long. The males with Hermione grow quieter and quieter the closer they approach to it.
Docking is easy. There are no toll booths or customs to go through, and the three jedi are initially able to navigate quite far into the maze of pastel pink corridors. At least until Hermione sets a janitor on fire, whereupon the entire army comes down on them.
“Juggle, padawan! Juggle!”
So Hermione levitates her glow sticks, deflecting enemy energy bolts left and right and cutting down men in plastic armour by the dozens.
“This is all your fault, Potter!” Draco whines.
After a detour in a trash compactor, the trio find themselves in the control room. Before them, on a savage pink dais stands Lavender Brown, but Lavender Brown as never seen before. Clad in hot pink armour, complete with sci-fi computer panel attached to her amble chest (for fragrance control and misting facilities) she grins at the intruders. Behind her, slumped in a pink throne, sits Emperor Ronald. He gazes at her lovingly. Aside from that, he may as well be unconscious. Or a plush toy.
“So, the chosen one approaches, at long last. The one who is prophesied to bring balance to the force.” Lavender intones, each hand wrapped around a pink glow stick. Above and around her spin more.
Harry steps forward. “Yeah, yeah-”
“Not you, dolt! Her!” a gorgeously manicured hand points a pretty pink fingernail at Hermione. “Come to the pink side, jedi. We have lipstick.” Lavender smiles sweetly.
It's an extremely compelling argument, an extremely tempting offer. In the interests of (magical) science! Hermione agrees, deciding to spend at most a year cataloguing an entire galaxy. A new age dawns for Star Wars, one full of love and makeup. As for Draco and Harry, the former embarks on his true career - Antiques roadshows - and Harry reconnects with his long lost apprentice, the two of them living the high life of doing little to nothing while more competent females run the show.