13

I was feeling rather good about myself. Due to the find the children had made this week in tracking down the former instructors of Harry's parents, we had accumulated a good chunk of their school years, at least as far as classes go. The only subjects were we really missing were Herbology and Defense Against the Dark Arts, plus a few electives outside of the almost universally taken Care of Magical Creatures.

The DADA course, involving as it did so many different teachers, would be almost impossible to track down from a professor's standpoint. Fortunately for us, by now we knew virtually all of the classmates of Harry's parents, so it might be possible to get our missing bits from one of them.

Almost incidentally, we'd picked up a nearly complete Hogwarts education just in our quest to get to know Harry's parents better, only lacking a few years on a couple of subjects.

And Bagshot's History of Magic classes were an absolute hoot! She'd made that the most interesting subject at the school, bar none! Not even Quidditch was more fun, to most students, than listening to that old woman spin tales.

Such a gifted storyteller... it was crime that she couldn't teach any more!

Anyway, having realized I had no time to do the research myself, I scribed a quick letter to send off to the Flamels explaining certain muggle treatments on eye problems and their theories of what was wrong in each case, asking if they wouldn't be so good as to research cures for me.

Because, perhaps, if we could cure Bathilda's cataracts, she could go back to teaching!

Also, we could cure Harry's dependence on eyeglasses, and that would be a good thing all by itself, as any material dependence was a weakness that could potentially be exploited by an enemy.

Sending that off by owl, and feeling pretty good about myself, we apparated to Ottery St. Catchpole and began to walk out of town in search of the Burrow, on our way passing an electronics store with some televisions going in the big plate glass window.

The volume was up and a crowd had formed, listening to the news.

"In other news," the lady was saying. "The city has received a ransom note, saying that we must pay his thirty four pounds and eleven pence in parking fees, or he will nuke the city again. A fund has been made available, so if the person involved would send information identifying which fees those are..."

"Wait a moment, Stacy." Her co-anchor interrupted. "How do we know our mysterious note-sender is male? I've read a copy of that letter, and nothing in it shows one way or the other..."

The lady newsie tapped her papers together on the desk to interrupt, then spoke, "Our psychologists have identified the deranged cackling within as written in a male pattern. Although, if the ransom-holder is female, we will still be glad to oblige her in paying any..."

I turned away, torn between feeling sick or amusement.

Behind me I found Gomez and his family, applauding me. "Bravo! Old chap, Bravo!" Gomez came forward and shook my hand. "Frightfully stylish. I wish I had thought of it first. Any chance you could let us in on your next one?"

I stood, paralyzed with... something, and gave him a sickly grin in return. "Well... I was thinking of violating a grave later..."

"Excellent!" Gomez clapped me on a shoulder. "Don't forget to drop us a line! Now do excuse us, we hear they've got a meat packing plant nearby and we were going to drop by and ask if they could process Pugsley. Cheers!"

"He's been asking for it as a late birthday present." Morticia added, before turning to follow right behind her husband.

With a jaunty wave, the Addams family departed.

"Gilderoy," Hermione ground out, "Was that an Addams?"

"Yes," I nodded, still too stunned for a complete response.

She nodded too. "Would you mind explaining how you came to be friends with one of the darkest of all magical families in the history of our world?"

The rest of her family seemed fascinated by this question as well.

"It was kind of an accident," I returned, still watching where that family had departed.

"How do you accidentally make friends with the Addams family?" She asked again, supported by nods from her mother and sister, who also wanted to know the answer to that question.

"I dressed up as one of them to pull off a caper that helped me search out several of those soul anchors I destroyed." I shrugged. "And they sought me out to tell me how impressed they were and..." I swallowed, loosening my suddenly too-tight collar which had always fit perfectly before. "Well, after showing they knew about what I'd done, they... sort of adopted me."

I gave the girl and her family a sickly grin.

Their eyes were wide.

"That's sort of, like, accidentally becoming the Minister of Magic, only in a dark way," Hermione observed. "They're among the richest and oldest of all families, and they're so powerful they'd probably be ruling England by now if they hadn't chosen to emigrate to the United States so long ago."

"What can I say? They were impressed." I tossed off the comment, on recovering some of my panache. Then I changed the subject. "But enough of that for now! What's say we all go find ourselves some Weasleys?"

They gave me some guarded nods, showing that this discussion wasn't over yet, but they all agreed and it wasn't too long before we stopped in at the Burrow.

The kids ran off together, abandoning us adults to talk to each other. Molly was all excited that Dumbledore had asked her to join the Hogwarts staff this year as teacher of their new elective on Household Magic - and Harry was quick to point out that I'd been the one to suggest for him to do it.

This got me a Weasley mother squeeze that caught me quite off guard and had me seeing spots before my eyes before she rushed off to the kitchen for a round of celebratory baking.

It wasn't ten minutes into our visit however that Ron got into a terrible row with the kids we'd brought with us.

The youngest Weasley boy (the girl, having come down stairs to see Harry was visiting, had just as quickly gone back up to vanish into her room), Ron, had made one of his typical thoughtless comments and this time instead of just Hermione leaping in to correct him, it was her plus Harry and Moria.

Ron had responded as usual, and instead of launching a bickering argument with just her alone, it was him against the three of them. I'd guess they'd all rubbed off on each other more than I'd supposed.

Anyway, I was just concluding a deal with the twins to fund their joke shop in a silent partnership that contained a proviso that we got to be taught some of the secrets of magic they'd uncovered, when Ron, who had started off with an insensitive comment or two that rapidly escalated up to the usual argumentativeness he had with Hermione, realized that not only was Harry NOT backing him, he was taking her side.

Well, that was the final straw for Ron Weasley, who made a cutting remark or two about how if Harry didn't want any friends, he could hang around with Granger all he liked. Then he ran upstairs to hide in his room.

And that was the end of the trio. I should have seen it coming.

Soon I had three children by my side, looking up at me to do something. I gave a sad sigh, so they voiced it in words. "Can't you do something?"

I shook my head. "I am not going to change who Ron Weasley is. And this is, sadly, VERY typical of him."

"Could you please explain? It doesn't seem like him at all." Harry observed in very Hermione-like tones.

"Very well," I nodded then sat on a stool to get down to their level. "At his heart and core, Ron is a very jealous person. It's not that he doesn't want to be good, or have a hint of gold hidden inside, but mostly as the youngest boy he feels very squashed flat by the shadow of his brothers. He feels that it is next to impossible for him to outshine them. After all, they've been Head Boy and prefects before him, a Quidditch Captain, and then of course Fred and George are both innovative and popular. So Ron feels that every important slot he could reach for has been filled before he got there. That leaves him feeling very much shut out of success by the victories they've had before him."

I looked to Harry and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Then he met you, Harry, and for the first time in his life he felt he could be something they hadn't done before him. He could be the friend of the Boy Who Lived. The trouble there was, he'd never given up on the jealousy that made him want to outshine his brothers in the first place. So he started to apply that jealousy to you. After all, you had fame and were rich, a good Quidditch player... no, he began to see you as a rival to be beaten as much as a friend. Then, of course, there is Hermione, who excels at everything, and makes his small accomplishments seem very tame by comparison. Now, all of a sudden, he sees you and Hermione being close and sharing traits, each of you being even more accomplished than before, and his jealousy can't take it. Now he's not only being outshone by his brothers, but by his friends." I sighed ducking my head. "Of course this has nothing to do with how he has a middle name that means anger and peevishness." I mumbled aloud, thinking Rowling COULDN'T be telegraphing anything with that move. No, not ever!

"How can we make it up to him?" Moria asked.

"I'm sure that's such a good idea," I clucked.

"But we've got to!" both former friend of Ron's chorused.

I gave a very apprehensive shake of my head, looking up the stairs in the direction Ron had gone. "It might be best just to let him go."

Harry's gaze matched Hermione's, in that both were level and serious. "You know something else, don't you? Tell us!"

I heaved a sigh. "Yes, well, according to the Seer I told you about, Ron later gets into jealous fits and turns his back on your friendship more than once, but worst of all was later he gets hold of a book on how to magically control girls, and soon thereafter he is having sex with Hermione - in spite of never having been even slightly decent to her before or said one kind remark to her in all his years of knowing her."

There came a crash from behind me, and we all turned around to find that Molly had dropped a bowl she'd been mixing batter in, and that she, plus Fred and George, who'd been there all along, were now white-faced.

Oh dear. Had they been listening all this time? Yes, I could see they were. I raised both of my hands in a placating gesture. "Now, there's no reason to say he still would... it's just, so far that seer hasn't been wrong before. So..." my mind halted and I ran out of comforting statements.

"RONALD BILIUS WEASLEY!" Molly went storming upstairs in a fiery temper.

"He's going to be grounded..." one of the twins muttered.

"...til he's an old greybeard." the other finished for his brother.

I gave a slight shrug. "I wonder what your mother would do to the pair of you if I told her that, according that same seer, it was the two of you that got that book to him?"

The twins shared a terrified look of fright, and I chuckled to take the sting out of it. Let them think my words had been a prank.

Then Molly's shouting began and I felt a pang of guilt. Okay, Ron had been a complete waste case those last few books, and he hadn't contributed much in the middle, but toward the end of her books Rowling hadn't had ANY heroes left to her series! She'd tarnished them all to the point that by the end there wasn't one you could honestly respect. And, well, that destroyed all of the enjoyment many of her fans had in her universe.

So, since I was doing my best to steer Harry and Hermione away from their own destructions, why not Ron as well?

Getting an idea, I jogged up the stairs, following the sounds of Molly's shouts until I found Ron's room. The poor boy, already angry at his friends, had been ambushed by his mother and was now being well and truly scolded on what was right and wrong about how to treat girls.

I knocked lightly on the doorframe to let Molly know I was there.

"I was thinking I might have an answer to your problem, or part of it anyway," I jauntily waved my cane as I walking in to the room. Smiling, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the put-upon boy. "I'll let your mother teach you proper morals and treatment of women. I'm just up here to offer you a possible solution to feeling overshadowed by your brothers. What do you say to putting in an application to transfer to Beubaxtons? All of your older brothers have been Hogwarts students, so if you are looking for a way to break free of the paths they've tred, that might be your answer. A place to be yourself, with none of the reputations they've left behind to struggle against. It's something to think about." I gave him a cheerful grin. "But if you do agree to try I'll make a personal plea to Madam Maxine, the Headmistress there, to accept you. I'll even fund your change of school supplies, all new equipment and only the best, eh?"

Standing up, starting for the door (and finding it full of children of both families, crowded in and listening), I turned back around to face Ron. "Oh, and one more thing," I told him with disarming charm.

Driving a hand into one of my pouches, I pulled forth a shrunken, paralyzed spider and threw it into a corner of the room, unshrinking it to its full size, whereupon it filled the room. "This is the acromantula I'll feed you to if you EVER molest or magically control Hermione," I told him with a friendly grin.

Ron turned yellow, blubbered, and wet himself.

I reshrunk my spider, put it back in my pouch, and left with a jaunty wave, pausing in the doorway just long enough to say, "Oh, and of course that applies to Moria, too. She'll be joining us at Hogwarts this year, you know."

Molly's loud voiced scolding resumed as I left the two behind.

OoOoO

Having recently lost family, and now the whole issue with Ron, I felt it was about time for us to distract ourselves from such situations, and the best way to do that I knew of was to film something!

So we headed out to the States, where there was cheap land to be had and a few contacts who could help us.

Spinning back a week, I made sure to drop by Hogwarts to pick up my bottles of carefully preserved acromantula pieces, empty out the DADA office and teachers quarters so I could go through Quirrel's stuff in my down times to see what he'd left us, and picked up a small case of memories from Albus, who'd prepared them for the upcoming History course.

I immediately drank down his duel with Grindelwald, as that was one of the best wizard on wizard battles in recorded history and I needed those skills! The rest of Gilderoy's combat collection focused more on battling creatures, which, while still tremendously useful, wasn't all that could be learned. Plus, they focused on entirely different principles!

Then I sent off a note to Dumbledore asking if he couldn't replace that vial, saying it had gotten damaged while being moved (and I had drunk it while on my way out), and while he was at it could he fill in some gaps I'd noticed?

Him taking his OWL and NEWT tests for one, to sate my scholastic curiosity.

Granted, me and the former Granger family had near complete Hogwarts educations from what we'd learned hunting down the Marauder's time there, and as several geniuses working together we were already doing an excellent job of piecing together bits and extrapolating on others, still we'd only just viewed everything and didn't have the sheer amount of TIME required to think things through to their maximal extent and come up with new ideas.

So if Albus was actually trusting or vain enough to show us copies of his OWL and NEWT tests, on which he'd done simply amazing things according to one of his former test moderators, I could then absorb those, gain those skills, and pass them on to the former Grangers; which would give us a substantial leg up, a head start I, for one, intended to use to its fullest in my continuing efforts at reeducation to make up for the original Gilderoy's lazy attitude!

And, well, the wizard I was most worried about being attacked by was Albus, so if I had some small portion of his skill, then at least I'd have a better chance to survive until I could scurry away with my tail between my legs.

Note sent, then we were off to our much needed vacation!

I laid down several options, filming or not filming, what to film if they wanted to, etc, and what they selected to do was film Star Trek, the original series, one of my personal favorites. Okay, so the effects sucked compared to later versions. What did that matter? After all, wasn't that one of those things it was easy enough for us to fix?

Being a metamorph, I would be both Kirk and Scotty, as those were the most fun and rarely enough shared screen time so I could fudge the rest. Miranda would be our Spock because she really was nearly that smart, and we could use a charm to aid her on the emotionlessness. The kids got to divide up the bridge crew slots among themselves, and did so with great gusto (and a drop of two of aging potion while on screen), while Dora got stuck as the most emotional role, which was also the easiest to play, and so became Bones, aka Dr. McCoy (plus a bunch of short skirted ensigns and alien princesses in exotic costumes, as required).

We rewrote alot of the scripts to eliminate plot holes and continuity errors, played a bit with the setting, and eliminated some stupid stuff that really could have been done better. We also borrowed extensively from fandom and thought through many of the aspects of the show that had never been properly developed for one reason or another.

Basically, we learned from their mistakes on our remake of it. Hey, I even let the kids write their own episodes! And if those happened to turn out better than some of the stuff done by guest directors the first time through, how could that be called my fault?

More than a few aliens who strangely shrunk our bridge crew down to kids got encountered along the way. But that only showed our youngsters were getting into it. So our efforts had already served their true purpose.

Since Larry Niven had never existed (or I should not say existed, he'd never WRITTEN anything) here, I could take selected portions of his Known Space material like the Man-Kzin wars, and Ringworld, and just roll that into our version of Star Trek, once we'd suitably altered them to suit our tastes and match backgrounds, of course.

Since we were short on actors, not wanting to include too many other people in what was to be for us simply a non-stress, downtime activity, aliens were actually better suited to our scripts than other humans were, and there was no need whatsoever for actors in alien costumes as we could do animated transfigurations of statues into the appropriate roles.

They were even remarkably good about following directions, too. And the very awkwardness of them having no natural mannerisms or reactions of their own could be made to play up their essential alienness. For robot, machine or cyborg type baddies, we'd leave them with few instructions for that and let their very blankness serve as part of the role.

For other aliens? Well, it wasn't too difficult to get transfigured Kzinti to act like cats or our Gorn like lizards. And, whichever ones of us weren't currently serving as the crew of the Enterprise could switch costumes to be Romulans or Klingon. A touch of magical makeup or disguises and you'd never know.

Drawing on several generations of cell phone designs, we made our communicators much more realistic. And, owing to a statement made by Ollivander in the last book, I knew it WAS possible to have magical foci that were not wands. So using some of my many memories I was able to track down a person able to make such a device, and got us all special rings to serve us in that purpose.

This also made faking our phasors really easy. With charms on our rings so they didn't show, we simply held our toy phasors and wordlessly cast stun spells. This was great practice for us and the kids, as none of us had any ability at wordless casting but it was an excellent thing to learn and this gave us a perfect excuse to work on eliminating words and gestures, using a very simple and basic spell to practice on.

Until we got it right, we'd just cut out of the film any words or gestures we made, splicing together the 'point' with the 'shoot'.

And, for things we hit on 'disintegrate' power we'd use stunt doubles made of stacks of methane bubbles and covered with an illusion to seem real. One hit with a very minor flame spell and they'd disintegrate quite nicely and realistically, writhing as they did so.

Although we did introduce body armor and other things that was not subject to the cascading reaction of a phasor or disrupter set to disintegrate, just to avoid having too many plot holes or easy solutions.

Before we'd started filming, though, I went to my case of stolen memories and did a little looking over the collection, as I knew I had plenty of time to be absorbing some. But I was surprised at how thin the selection had become!

Aside from Death Eater memories I'd collected myself (Pettigrew and a post grad Tom Riddle among them - although Bellatrix' attempt to get the mind of the old Tom Riddle segment removed from Harry had been botched, and she'd gotten the frog's mind instead), and Lockhart's selection of musicians and artists whose work he'd admired (and wanted to see for free), there wasn't much left in there that I hadn't already absorbed.

There was a team of six that he'd all Obliviated at once, hoping to steal their joint accomplishments to make a book, but that had turned out to be not a viable idea as there was too much interpersonal activity as part of the story. Lockhart had even forgotten what story he'd wanted to copy from them, so I didn't even get what they'd done in my download of his original memories.

Then there was one set of life experiences that had curdled somewhat, and he hadn't been able to view properly in a pensieve, like a television with too much static. There had been staticy moments in many of the rest of his set, but those had all been fairly brief glitches. Often enough they'd been enough to stop him from copying those stories into book form, but had made sense when I put them into my brain, so I was fairly confident that I could take a small sample and figure out what the whole meant, but at present I didn't know what that set of memories even was, so was loathe to try it.

Only two were left. One was a thief who had accosted my predecessor on his one trip to Africa (trying to find material for a book that had never happened - Near Miss With A Nundu, trying to inflate his reputation by having survived a close encounter with a near invincible beast that wiped out whole villages. His trouble there had been finding an actual survivor who had anything even slightly heroic to say about the encounter, as it wouldn't help Lockhart's reputation any to have a book that amounted to 'I shrieked like a little girl and ran away'... which is what those few survivors had often done).

The other was of a Greek Ministry of Magic official, older than Dumbledore, who had moved around alot after that whole mess with Grindelwald, and had caught onto the schemes my predecessor was running and tried to blackmail him. His body was still in the long term care ward of St. Mungo's, and I'd been debating the morality of returning the old guy's memories to him or not.

A quick look in them, and I decided not, as the guy had fled mainland Europe to go to Peru, where the crowds screaming for revenge for his deeds as one of the senior followers of Gellert Grindelwald had failed to follow him.

But the guy had a ton of skills I might later want. He'd been heavily involved in the Greek magical creatures regulatory agency and had a part in running their preserves and breeding programs, up until a scandal had driven him out of public office. Then he had moved across the Med to Egypt for a few years where he fell in with odd crowds and became a carpet maker of sorts before returning to his native Greece to take on work with a wandmaker, before he fell in with Grindelwald's cronies and became their specialist in crafting odd magical artifacts of all sorts.

Including crafting a set of secret vaults, interestingly enough. Long since emptied by the victorious forces, of course, but still interesting to have done.

Fleeing Europe on the fall of Grindelwald, he'd gone to South America to rest and wait until the furor had died down, getting back into his old businesses rather quickly. My predecessor had gone there seeking stories, done some shady trades with the old man, and the former dark follower had followed the original Gilderoy back to England, thinking since he had the dirt on the boy he could make this young punk do anything he liked.

And instead the Greek refugee had caught a full force Obliviate in the face. The closest my predecessor had ever come to getting caught doing his dirty deeds, short of that fiasco at Hogwarts that now wasn't going to happen.

The Greek was a thoroughly disreputable scoundrel through most of his life, but always the greedy, whiny sort of evil who made for a great toady, not ever a leader of men, just a background hanger on and scavenger, much like Mundungus Fletcher and Pettigrew in that aspect.

No strength of will at all, so I could probably absorb those memories at some point without too much fear of corruption. So long as I did so slowly it should be safe, seeing as I had far much more strength of personality than he.

But now was not the appropriate time. I was in the mood to gulp something down that would be fun and non-trivial, while at the same time non dangerous and useful. None of what I had left truly fit that bill, but the team of six came closest, so one of their number would be what I would try.

Then I learned why my original self had wanted them.

My predecessor had run into the Greek while searching for these guys, one of the very few times he'd gone after an active person or set of people instead of old timers long retired. They'd been a team of curse-breakers originally, although working on Mayan tombs and temples instead of the other side of the pond where most of the rest of his targets had plied their trades.

But that wasn't what was most interesting about them. They'd had a few magical builders among them, people whose specialty allowed them to build, but also to tear apart structures too difficult to enter normally, and from all they'd uncovered the team had discovered enough runes and relics they'd started to gain some slight degree of understanding of the lost Mayan magic.

It was a 'Wow! If we study this for the next dozen years we might start to really get some use out of it' sort of discovery, not a 'Neat! Now we can do everything they once did, and do it this afternoon!' sort of thing. So it wasn't terribly useful in the short term, but Lockhart had wanted to claim credit for their discovery all the same.

It would have made him even more famous, but at the end, as I'd said, he'd proved unable to adapt their work to where he could take sole credit, and he didn't dare share. Nor did he have the knowledge to do anything with their discovery himself, as it was all terribly thick and academic, far surpassing the reach of his uninspired scholastic abilities. I think a good part of why he proved unable to turn their story into a book praising himself was that he could not actually understand the breakthrough they'd made!

Well, lucky me he'd at least preyed upon interesting people.

From time to time wizards felt the need to get four of them together and create a place like Hogwarts, or toss a prison up in an afternoon, or one will want to run off on his own and create a place like the Chamber of Secrets. Or they'll get one to drill down in London proper to make a Ministry of Magic building below ground right under the muggle's noses without them noticing.

In short, they had specialists among them who could do more building in a few wand flicks than an entire muggle construction crew could manage in months of hard, backbreaking labor with heavy machines in support! And what they built would often last thousands of years without serious flaw or complaint.

It was not surprising that this skill was as rare as it was useful. However, it did exist and among the most well paid posts such a person might receive was to take a position with a team of curse breakers and use those skills in reverse, to tear apart ancient tombs for the money and ancient artifacts inside. Such teams also tended to work alone, independent of Gringotts so they didn't have to share out a major portion of the riches to the goblins.

Well, I was fortunate (or perhaps not so lucky, as it was those teams that had builders who were most successful, and only the most accomplished drew the original Lockhart's interest in obtaining their memories) that the team he had Obliviated had two builders upon it, one to tag team the other for long projects, or who could work together to handle larger loads.

So I eagerly poured one of those specialist's memories inside my head, happy to get the skills for throwing up a structure magically.

For, if nothing else, this meant I could simply go wild with sets.

And I did.

We even sat down with some floorplans of the Enterprise I'd provided and built an entire Starship Enterprise, the working corridors of one anyway, in an unused gold mine I bought with my earnings from the first movie we'd done. There wasn't any super technology in it, but the doors worked, and more than that everything looked real.

To my continual amusement, often the kids would say "You got this wrong" and point out some useful feature or other that, for practical purposes, really ought to have been included in the first place. Of course they wanted to turn the whole thing into a living environment instead of a film set.

The way they wanted sick bay set up would have done proud as an actual hospital, with gadgets and devices galore and screens where Dr. McCoy could see readouts of patients' conditions or realtime displays of various parts, like skeleton, muscle tissue, nerves, circulatory system... anything, really. There was also a wealth of practical touches like you'd find people doing in the real world, like a few reclined transporter pads in the transporter room for bringing up bodies, living or dead; and high tech stretchers you could put down over those horizontal transporters so the body appeared right on the stretcher and could be easily carried away to Medical, where they could then be laid down directly on those med-beds and clicked into the frame so you didn't have to disturb the trauma patient at any point by transferring him from one bed to another. We even had a closet for storing those stretchers in the transporter room, so they were always ready to hand in emergencies.

Stuff like that, things people would actually do if they had to live in this environment.

And you know what? I was ok with that. It added depth and realism, and more than that, film sets only existed as they did because it made things easier on the camera crews and people who designed, put up and took down temporary sets they built on sound stages.

But, well, the whole thing was already designed, my newest set of memories made building it all childishly easy, and we had no plans to take it down... um... ever? Besides, to cut down on the extraneous people angle of the whole thing we were talking about animating the cameras to do the work automatically, creeping around on animated tripods and such so we didn't have to allow for filming crews as much.

I'd seen a movie once where'd they'd built an entire house on a two-story gimbal, allowing them to tilt, angle or shake the set as they desired. And you know what? That worked out well for us, so we built a starship bridge that way, separate from but identical to the one in the continuous and complete Enterprise. That way we could film the battle scenes and other 'shake up' sequences in one, while having 'continuous walk through' shots in the other.

That way we didn't have to rely on our funky elevator to chop all those shots up. Also, we got a humongous, glare-free mirror to hang on the front of our bridge, enchanted to do the two-way thing with another large mirror that we could stick on whatever alien starship bridge we'd prepared for that episode.

Also, it made acting a whole lot easier to see the person you were interacting with, rather than to emote at a blank wall special effects people would later add your conversation partner to. And we could hang a mirror at different angles to help flavor the transmissions of each major space faring race.

Once we were done with all of these tweaks and adjustments, it was almost a real environment. Enough of the gadgets, like intercoms and lights, worked to make it a functional living space, even a comfortable one, and once our animated camera spiders got disillusionment charms put on them it was easy to ignore them scuttling about, trying to shoot things.

Perhaps too easy, as reviewing the footage they'd taken in preparation of splicing together our pilot episode, I stuck in one reel and got treated to the image of Miranda in the act of taking her shower.

One mad blush and a destroyed tape later, and it was time to instruct our little cameras on legs not to film certain things.

Ever.

But once we'd gotten the bugs out, and our sets as solid as they were, most filming was so easy as to be almost trivial. And there was enough worthless desert land about our abandoned mine that virtually any alien setting could be whipped up in an afternoon. We even had, on our property, a box canyon that had a small forest and lake for filming those kinds of scenes.

In all, it made for a great period of stress relief, healing and bonding.

OoOoO

Unbeknownst to me, while we were all living at Godric's Hollow, meeting old friends of Harry's original family and having fun, healing emotional wounds from a number of sources (wounds that, while presently dealt with and doing well, were by no means completely healed), then again while we were filming a chunk of the first season of Star Trek, the original series, doing that week over again, Snape had called for a Slytherin reunion at Hogwarts.

All of his cronies, old and new, had been there, and shortly after that meeting broke up small groups of his students had begun to run all over the globe fetching back potion ingredients or magical artifacts.

Someone was planning something, but whether it was Snape, or one of his masters, or even one of his friends, I had no idea until much later.

On one such mission, Draco, and his own cronies Crabbe and Goyle, had been sent in to the Forbidden Forest to fetch back something or other, and they had been consumed by hunger-mad acromantulas.

No, I hadn't wiped out the colony there, just substantially reduced it. I'd been crazy at the time and my priorities had been to fill my collected bottles, not to wipe out the entire local supply of giant magical spiders. A bit messy, but what is one to expect from a lunatic?

And, to all appearances, Snape had wanted some of what could be harvested from the acromantulas there, too. As those three were not the only team of Slytherins he sent in there. I didn't even think Draco and his friends had been after acromantula ingredients, as he'd set several post graduate students on that (since I had unknowingly deprived Snape of the ability to raid my stockpiles of those priceless bits by taking them with me - just before he'd wanted to raid them, too).

No, piecing together all of the evidence we had available, Draco and his pair of dim, ugly friends had been in a formerly peaceful part of the forest hunting after unicorn hairs or werewolf droppings. It's just that the disturbed nest of spiders had been rather maddened by my attack and was ranging far wider than usual in their efforts to collect food and expand back up to their former numbers. The end result of which was a war between them and the centaurs (who were holding them off or avoiding them quite easily, using their superior speed and arrows), and that Draco was now dead as just one more incidental casualty, having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Well, acromantulas make bad neighbors in any case. Nobody would have come to any harm if they'd just left the forest alone until the spiders settled back down again, but I hadn't known and they hadn't asked.

However, with Draco dead that left his mother as the last remaining Malfoy, and soon after our little group arrived back in England on a trip for supplies I found myself approached at my penthouse by Narcissa, who pled with me to save Bellatrix, her last surviving relative. (Last one that she liked, anyway, there was also Andromeda and Tonks if you'd wanted to get technical, but their lives were not in any danger that anyone could tell. Nor was she close to them at present.)

It turned out, as the one to arrest her, the fate of Bellatrix was going to be left in my hands by a court tied up between a ministry wanting to seem harsh to evildoers and those who wanted to let her off due to not being in her right mind at the time she'd committed those crimes, with the pureblood vote being too diminished recently to carry it in favor of one of their own. So it was up to me, and Narcissa had raced to be the first to make an appeal to me once that decision had been made, catching me just as I walked inside my door.

With the former Grangers standing around, just as shocked as I was by all of this, I was faced with the proud and noble Pureblood Narcissa kneeling on my carpet offering me everything if I will but spare her beloved sister - the last person on this planet she had any affection towards.

It was a rather pitiful sight and the first I'd heard of this tangled mess. "It rests entirely with you whether she is hanged or not," the beautiful woman blubbered into my vest as I picked her up off the carpet and guided her to a seat on my oft-abused couch, site of many emotional breakdowns lately, the rest of my family filtering in around me.

Hanged? Ah! No dementors meant no kiss.

I asked her about Draco, only to hear that he and his friends went off a week ago and got themselves killed by acromantulas in the Forbidden Forest.

The first I'd heard of that, too. Several of the kids gasped in shock on hearing it.

Pausing for a long moment of thought while the pureblood paragon blubbered in my arms pleading for mercy on behalf of her sister, I weighed my options and drew a deep breath.

"Okay, Narcissa. You have a deal." I accepted so that I could get and destroy Riddle's diary. Wherever the Malfoys had hidden it, pretty much no longer mattered, as wherever it was, if they had access to it, now so did I. Although really, she needn't have bothered. I LIKED Bellatrix. Once the empath had that horrible reversal spell removed she'd turned into a remarkably nice person, and not one I was going to see executed if I could help it!

Actually, I'd had a contingency plan bubbling away in the background to break her out again if that became necessary. But it wasn't, and that was a good thing. Best of all to have her crimes forgiven so she could go forth as a normal person instead of as a fugitive.

And we were all too happy to welcome her back into the family fold.

But, by doing things this way, I now had a decent amount of influence over her one sister who'd remained on the dark side of all of this, and hopefully now we could save Narcissa too.

Moving us all over to the Malfoy estate, as by now my apartment was far too crowded to get our whole group together, I set everyone to getting things together while I popped over to the Ministry to recover Bellatrix. Narcissa and Miranda went with me. The first I'd thought came along to expedite the recovery, using her influence to cut through some red tape, but there was surprisingly little of that.

No, what she was there doing was keeping up her side of the bargain, being prompt about registering with the official Ministry archives that all of the former Malfoy property now belonged to me.

And yes, according to laws that I already knew, the only way she could do that was to arrange for all of that to be her dowry and officially register herself as my wife.

There was nothing romantic in her doing this. It was merely the only means Narcissa had at her disposal to live up to her end of the promise. So it was strictly mechanical on her part, like signing over a car's pink slip.

Truthfully, her last experience at marriage was so bad she didn't think it mattered much who held the other end of her leash, as she was effectively a caged animal either way.

Boy was SHE wrong!

I think my jaw fell off and rolled down the stairs when she met up with us as I was just escorting a newly acquitted Bellatrix out of her cell, a free woman for the first time in many years - and the first thing Bella did upon hearing the news was to shriek at the top of her lungs how unfair it all was - that she had married me first!

Well, technically, I suppose...

But there was nothing for it at that point but to agree that I HAD accepted her and ownership of the LeStrange estates through her, but before I could go on to explain WHY I'd done that... well, those eager toadies, flunkies and suck ups at the Ministry had done what good sycophants do and rushed ahead to 'Give me what I want', and there I was standing between two Black sisters, each of whom were now legally my wives!

And yes, there was some actual interest in there of a romantic sort. It wasn't much, but we were already friends, something she'd never been with either of the LeStrange brothers. So there was some bubbling of potential affection there, not yet realized for all that it was eagerly sought after.

Oh, and then MIRANDA, of all people, had to get involved!

Once she'd learned that polygamy was not only legal (and I do recall saying there were very few laws among magical society concerning what was and was not appropriate mating habits), but TREASURED! Miranda proposed to me practically on the spot!

Luckily I was able to put her off for a bit by declaiming that I would have to think it over, and that the wives I'd already gotten would both deserve their individual honeymoons first.

I think if I'd set off an explosion right there in their offices it would have drawn less of a reaction from the Ministry.

You see, by saying the magic word 'honeymoon' I'd admitted to actually having some degree of sexual interest in those women who'd just recently become my wives.

And I'd already said how unusual that was among purebloods.

The ever elegant and poised Narcissa, who'd never had a hair out of place that I could recall, let her jaw fall open upon hearing the news out of my mouth as I'd stumbled, trying to delay Miranda's proposal until I could properly think it over. Bellatrix skipped straight over that step and gave me her best impression of an Amazon Glomp, which, while not up to a Ranma fic's standards, still did quite well for our current circumstances!

Blushing, something I'd thought she'd NEVER do, Narcissa stuttered in the background of this mighty hug (and stuttering was another thing on the 'there is no way she'd ever do this' list) about ordering a set of materials for the ritual to create an heir...

... and some obscure corner of my logical processes decided that, since my higher functions were offline that moment, it could take over, and retrieved from data storage a truthful answer, then delivered it.

"Don't bother." I heard my own lips say before I could stop them. "I'd really prefer to sire all of my kids the natural way."

You'd think I'd set the Ministry building on fire from the reaction THAT got!

In a perfectly rational environment, I'd consider it one of the standard duties of a husband to... (blushes), well, you know. Marrying perfect strangers was not a new thing in this world either, and whether you got into that situation out of arranged marriages or otherwise, well, if the two people involved were both good at heart it could and eventually would work out to where they each learned to love the other and be happy. And everyone had a right to expect children to result from that couple.

It's just something I never personally expected to be involved in, mind you.

Meanwhile, you'd think I'd kicked an ant's nest among the Ministry workers.

There were not quite laws, but customs firmly controlling how many women a man could marry, but those only applied if he was just after their property.

One of the big limiters was one insisting that each wife be permitted opportunities to produce a child until she did so (something that most pureblooded males found as disgusting as I did THEIR habits), and there was a law on the books that the original estate or dowry of each girl in a harem be restricted so it was only inheritable by her offspring or nobody, so for combining estates into huge, hereditary fortunes, polygamy was next to useless, no better than monogamy.

So, of course, most purebloods didn't bother with it.

It was fine, I understood that, even agreed with the principle. It was a waste of precious resources to let one guy marry multiple women if he was going to be a total stranger to them, lock them up in a tower, and otherwise utterly waste the potential for a relationship with them, just after their money.

On the other hand, the magical world (especially the pureblood side of it) was starved for children. The artificial insemination ritual worked, at best, only a handful of times per woman, and couldn't be performed too often in any case so it was in no way going to do more than replace the parents under ordinary circumstances, not accounting for all of the casualties caused by those wars they'd had!

So they knew they were shrinking. Knew, and felt helpless to do anything about it. They'd felt locked into that course by their habits.

Magical purebloods so often had no interest in their wives that once a man was found who was actually interested in women, well, sure they'd consider him a deviant, but they just kind of fell out of their chairs trying to help that guy be fruitful and productive.

It was the only way their own children would eventually have someone to marry.

The original Lockhart was a halfblood, but due to all of the awards, accolades and honors I'd been accumulating lately I'd effectively become an honorary pureblood. Nobody asked about Merlin's ancestry, he was Merlin! And now I was just touching the fringes of being a modern equivalent, in their eyes. So I was, by default, considered an acceptable match for pureblooded women.

Fame! Ah, what a fickle friend, one moment your best ally, the next your worst enemy!

Well, I'd had a brother raise pedigreed cats, and what you do when you've got a male with a strong reputation is make sure he produces lots of children. It was more than a little sick and twisted, but pureblood society was reacting much that same way towards me!

I'd gotten another two proposals before I'd left the building, and doubtless there were more to follow!

Egads! How was I going to get out of this mess?!

I didn't know, but later that day, after a special edition of the Daily Prophet came out declaring the news that I was some sort of sicko bastard that actually found females of my own species attractive, Minerva McGonagall dropped by the Ministry to confess that she belonged to me and registered her own claim as my property, a magically binding agreement, as I recall, that they were able to test and confirm. The original deal made by her parents was still on record at the Ministry. As she had the cane, a simple testimony under Veritaserum that I'd given it to her, and they had that nailed down from another angle still, so went ahead and registered that regal lady as a third wife, yet first in order of acquisition.

Minnie then dropped by to tell me the joyful news, sending my hair flaring out at all angles and eyes bulging in surprise.

That was the moment, of course, for the Addams family to get involved.

With both the series and the movies in agreement, I understood the Addams tended to actually love their wives. The line, "I would die for her, I would kill for her. Either way, what bliss!" was a little telling in that department, and which, quite frankly, was yet another thing that made them creepy to the rest of the ancient magical families.

Okay, it was a little scary when THEY found reasons to relate to you. But it got multiplied by, like, tenfold when I was the one seeing things in common betwixt us!

Still, I highly doubted that any Addams had been at the crashed party.

Back to the subject at hand, Morticia decided to get involved, and sent out formal proposals, written on tasteful if macabre stationary and fringed with black lace, to Each. And. Every. Girl. On. That. List!

I'd begun thinking this was a good time to practice hiding under a rock, but Nicholas Flamel decided that was as good an opportunity as any (and better than most) to show up at our little family get together at the Malfoy house (where I was in chains to prevent me from taking a nice vacation to the dark side of the moon - without leaving a forwarding address) revealing that he and his wife had perfected a youth serum based on the ideas I'd given them.

The former dark lord and his wife then administered enough to render the whole lot of us adults: myself, Miranda, Bellatrix, and Minerva, to our 'just come into adulthood' age of our early twenties.

Then secretly, the Flamels delivered on their promise to me, presenting me with the Philosopher's Stone they'd promised me earlier. I was a little aggrieved that not even this could buy me out of trouble anymore. But also they showed that they'd been using that youth serum themselves, hidden under polyjuice for this visit, and were now quite young and ready to go start new lives for themselves.

I envied them, but once they'd refused to smuggle me out to go with them, I wished them luck and took note of how to contact them for my training.

As if that weren't enough, Bellatrix, in a search for how to offer restitution to her victims, cornered the Flamels before they could depart, approached them on my behalf, as my wife, asking for them to go apply their new youth serum to the torture victims who'd lost so much of their lives to lying insensate at St. Mungo's.

She made a successful plea.

The former Gargamel made a stop by St. Mungo's, picked up copies of their records as to who had been in their long term care ward, and for how long, then he sought those people out, administering just enough elixir to make up for the time they'd lost out of their lives.

For the adults this was a big thing, as folk like the Longbottoms got restored to childbearing age, so Neville would have a number of siblings in the coming years. Also, it served as a potent psychological boost that got many on their feet once again, in spite of other losses.

But the real kicker was what he did for the children who'd been tortured. We got a couple thousand extra Hogwarts students, swelling the enrollment to many times what it had been any time in the past four hundred years, as kids who were in the midst of their schooling got restored to their pre-torture ages to pick up from where they'd left off, and younger ones Nicholas reset to eleven, or in other words starting school age.

That girl, who'd been the first person I'd used those experimental spells to emulate muggle limb reconstruction techniques on. She'd been in her mid twenties at the time, but had been in the hospital's care ward for twenty years. She'd been seven at the time of her being tortured to insanity. Now she was eleven, able to start her education and build toward having a life and jubilant over not having missed out on her opportunity for education.

The halls of Hogwarts would be filled for the first time in many generations.

And the hope that came from this was palpable.

During the midst of this, I was able to make a suggestion that did not involve sneaking me out at the bottom of some bag, and both Sirius and Remus, both victims of torture in a way, also got their bio-clocks set back by the decade or so they'd lost.

Twenty one for each of them, just like me and my... wives, I suppose you'd call them, although how Miranda got that officially registered was...

Oh, of course, she'd got an invite to marry me mailed fresh from Morticia's pen. And of COURSE she'd accepted it!

This seemed like as good an opportunity as any to grumble about how unfair it all was. Okay! So I hadn't had the brain power to protest when Morticia had adopted me as an Addams! How was I to know that made Gomez my official Clan Head, able to decide marriages for me?

Well, the alternative to their adopting me was death, so I suppose in the end it wasn't all that bad a price to pay, but still!

Getting introduced to Wednesday and Pugsley as "Uncle Gilderoy" was enough of a shock all on it's own, thank you very much! I didn't need, on top of that, for the creepiest family in the universe to be arranging marriages for me!

For one thing, the more disturbing something was, the better they liked it. So they felt nothing, NOTHING AT ALL against proposing to eleven and twelve year olds on my behalf!

NOT EVEN WHEN I WAS ALREADY ENGAGED TO THEIR MOTHER!

Ah, those sedatives were nice.

I watched, smiling quite peacefully as Miranda took away both her daughters' official offers of proposal to marry me, written in Morticia's clean hand, sure that some shred of sanity must remain in her somewhere, so she'd at least take care of that one.

Once Luna received hers, however, she offered to come over to our house and be tied up next to me, for company.

Then the Flamels 'died', to escape the magical world's notice, leaving me behind to take credit for the production of a magical eye-curing potion they'd developed on my request.

Among the first persons to take it were myself and Harry. It gave perfect eyesight at a swig, and absolutely perfect eyesight was rare, so I didn't want to miss out on a chance to do away with my own imperfections. And perfect eyesight was a positive necessity for anyone living on his own in the Alaskan wilds trying to avoid unwanted wedding engagements.

However, on that matter, as my self appointed guardians, Miranda and her daughters shared some around between them before making it available in general to the magical world, negating that advantage and complicating my escape plans.

Then, seeing as how I was absolutely filthy rich through my various marriages and publishing ventures, and wanting to appear sane so they didn't drug me up to my gills so could no longer plot my escape, I started a fund to provide some to all who stood in need (including Bathilda Bagshot).

The already tremendous psychological benefit the magical world had gotten by the instant and near miraculous recovery of all of those former torture patients now got a second and third, totally unexpected but similar in scope boost as those who'd lost much of their lives found them restored again. It was enough to change one's totally outlook on life, at least for some time.

One could scarcely find an end to the rejoicing and celebrations.

Unless you looked in my room, where I'd just gotten a positive reply from Pansy Parkinson regarding the marriage proposal Morticia had sent her on my behalf.

Then, of course, there was the note from Morticia herself regarding how excited she was to be planning all of those big, stately weddings for me.