MuseBlog

What if the Muses wandered into the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?

WARNING: Longer-than-usual post. May eventually contain spoilers. Not approved by Larry Gonick or J. K. Rowling. Etc., etc.

For years, the Fan Page has been hinting that Musers might like to try their hands at writing Muse fanfiction. For years, the response has been the same: nada, zip, zilch.

So we’ve decided to give you a little encouragement. For no good reason we can think of and without anybody else’s knowledge or permission, we’re dropping Muse‘s Muses–plunk!–into the plot of the latest Harry Potter book. We have no idea what they’re going to do there. That’s for you to figure out. We’ve got a couple of other scenes in mind, but no overarching plan. Anyway, here goes the Noble Experiment.

INSTALLMENT 1: Replaces text starting on page 17 (American edition)

“I’d rather not be interrupted,” said Scrimgeour shortly, “or watched,” he added, pointing his wand at the windows, so that the curtains swept across them. “Right, well, I’m a busy man, so let’s get down to business. First of all, we need to discuss your security.”

No sooner had he spoken than a peculiar change came over the room. From the far wall, a faint breeze gusted, rattling the papers on the Prime Minister’s desk. It was warm and bone-dry and smelled of sage and the scentless scent of sand–a desert smell. Then, as the three men watched in stunned silence, half of the room seemed to melt away. The paneled walls, portraits, and bookshelves that had hemmed them in just a moment before were gone, replaced by a vast openness of ground and air. The two wizards and the Prime Minister found themselves staring into the twilight glow of the sun setting behind distant mountains. High, wispy clouds reflected its coral light, while further overhead stars brighter than any seen in London gleamed in a blue-black sky. For a split second, the men sensed something moving in the soon-to-be-darkness. Then the scene shimmered, dwindled, and vanished. The walls and bookcases returned to their former places; the sunset gave way to yellow lamplight. The men blinked. They were no longer alone.

In fact, they were seriously outnumbered–and by the strangest assortment of figures the Prime Minister had ever seen. At the head of the procession stood a tall, fair-haired woman, draped in gray robes and a stole of lavender satin, with an old-fashioned nautical telescope tucked under her arm. A few steps to her left they saw another woman, taller and almost unnaturally thin, wearing a strange plumed headdress or hair style (it was hard to tell which) and a broad, cheerful smile on her face. Between them, a large horned beast–some sort of cow, the Prime Minister saw–chewed its cud meditatively. On the hump of its shoulders, a jet-black crow or raven perched, shifting its weight from leg to leg as it stared at the men with unblinking eyes. Behind them, a troupe of other exotic figures stood straightening their garments and looking around the room.

“Well, here we are,” the woman in the stole said matter-of-factly. “Chad’s Interdimensional Instantifier has done its job again. Well done, Chad!” In the back of the group, a stocky dark-skinned man in a white African robe and fez looked up from a hand-held control console and grinned.

Scrimgeour recovered his wits first. “Take cover, Prime Minister,” he ordered, pushing the politician behind his desk. Then, whipping around, he trained his wand on the intruders, waving its tip from side to side to keep them all covered. Fudge blinked, then fumbled for his wand and did the same. “Nobody move,” the Minister of Magic barked at the group. “This is a weapon, in case you don’t recognize it. Twitch one muscle, and I promise you’ll regret it.”

“Send your p-p-people away,” the Prime Minister said, peering over the top of his desk with as much dignity as he could muster.

“They aren’t my people, Prime Minister,” Scrimgeour replied without turning his eyes from the newcomers. “In fact, I’m not sure they are magical beings at all.”

“Some of them look as if they might be magical,” Fudge ventured.

“We’ll soon know,” Scrimgeour said. “Identify yourselves! Who are you? Who sent you? Are you working for him?”

The spindly woman in the headdress shook her head. She put her hands up and, still smiling, stepped toward the Minister of Magic.

Scrimgeour leveled his wand at her. “Stupefy!” he commanded. Sparks shot from the tip of the wand, but the woman shrugged off the stunning spell and took another step. Scrimgeour’s eyes widened. He stepped backwards and aimed again. “Petrificus Totalus!” he shouted, still retreating. “CRUCIO!” The recoil from the third spell propelled him backwards onto the Prime Minister’s desk. Sparks from the wand cascaded off the bright patterned cloth of the woman’s garments, wreathing her in sulfurous smoke. She stopped advancing, brushed herself off, and frowned, wrinkling her nose at the fumes. The magic did not seem to have affected her at all. “You’re just being–” she said. “This is all so– If only you’d let me–”

Behind her, the golden-haired woman in the robes rolled her eyes. “There’s no time for this nonsense,” she sniffed. “Give me that silly stick before you put someone’s eye out with it.” She strode forward and with a decisive swoop plucked the wand out of the gaping wizard’s hand. “Yours, too,” she said, confiscating Fudge’s wand with an equally deft grab. “Don’t think about trying any plain old-fashioned violence,” she warned. “We’re prepared for that, too. Now, will all of you please sit down and let us explain why we are here?”

“It seems we have no choice,” Scrimgeour said.

“Now you’re talking sense,” someone chuckled.

Scrimgeour glanced toward the source of the voice. At first he couldn’t see anyone. An invisibility cloak? he wondered. Then he glimpsed the speaker: a dark, flickering, angular figure, shadow-like but blacker than any shadow. The creature was standing near the magic portrait that had earlier announced the Minister of Magic’s arrival, running what looked like straw-thin arms along the frame.

“Kokopelli! Leave that portrait alone,” the woman in the purple stole said.

The dark figure stepped back from the portrait and seemed (it was hard for Scrimgeour to trace its motions) to turn a square, eyeless face to glance back over a spiky shoulder. “I was just straightening it,” it said in an aggrieved tone, and resumed its inspection. “Hmm… there’s something odd about this picture.”

The Prime Minister seated himself in the chair behind his desk. Two of the intruders–the tall woman in the headdress, and a short, pot-bellied being with feathered wings and a beaked face or mask–pushed leather chairs over from the sides of the room, and the two wizards seated themselves. “Definitely magical,” Fudge muttered under his breath.

The woman in the robes and stole cleared her throat. “I suppose we had better start with introductions,” she began. “My name is Urania. My eight colleagues and I are not magical beings. We are Muses, from Kokonino County. Of course, we know who you are, Mr. Minister of Magic, Mr. Former Minister of Magic, Mr. Prime Minister–” She stopped. Instead of paying attention, the Prime Minister was staring distractedly at something behind her. “Is something the matter, Prime Minister?”

The Prime Minister blinked and looked up at Urania. “Your cow,” he said. “Is it, erm, safe in here? It’s just that the carpeting is, well, rather expensive…”

The cow snorted, swung her ponderous head slowly toward the Prime Minister, and opened her mouth. “I’m perfectly well behaved, as long as nobody spoils my mooood,” she said.

The Prime Minister fainted.

“Oh, dear,” Urania said, looking at the inert form slumped on the desk. “I suppose you were right, Mimi. We probably shouldn’t have come all at once.”

“I told you something like this might happen,” the plume-headed woman replied in an exasperated tone. She strode to the desk, felt the Prime Minister’s pulse, and listened to his breathing. “He’s all right. He’ll come around in a minute or two.”

“He’s English, isn’t he?” the tubby angel-winged being said. “We’d better have some tea ready.”

“He likes ooolong,” the cow said. “Two spooons of sugar.”

“Better make it something stronger, like Darjeeling.”

As Mimi predicted, within a couple of minutes the Prime Minister had raised his head from the desk and was gratefully accepting a cup of steaming tea that Fudge had conjured for him. “Terribly sorry about that,” he said, between sips. “Rather a lot to absorb all at one go. Please, carry on.”

Urania began again. The Muses, she explained, monitored the world a little at a time through a vast communications network called Intelligent Air, looking for people with problems and whispering suggestions to help them. Each Muse had a different area of expertise. Urania herself was the Muse of Astronomy, with a subspecialty in mathematics. The tall woman, Mimi, was the Muse of Getting Along With People–“or politics, if you like,” she told the Prime Minister. Feather, the short being with the wings and beak, focused on Plants; Pwt, bronze-skinned,dressed in ancient Egyptian garb, and carrying a net, was Muse of Animals. Bo, the cow, dealt in the random snippets of information known as factoids. Crraw, the crow perched on Bo’s back, was Muse of Bad Poetry (“the kind most in demand,” Urania explained). Chad, the African man with the control panel, was Muse of Hardware. Aeiou, a silent Asian woman wearing a long-sleeved garment of cerise silk, was Muse of Software. Finally, the dark, angular being near the portrait was Kokopelli, the Muse of Tricks and Tunes. (Kokopelli executed a low, sweeping bow, turned a somersault in place, and blew a couple of arpeggios on a jet-black flute he had produced apparently from nowhere.)

“Very impressive,” Scrimgeour said after she had finished. “But there is one thing you haven’t explained. How did your colleague here manage to counter my spells?”

“I didn’t counter them,” Mimi replied. “I didn’t even notice them, except for the fireworks.”

“We’re immune,” Urania said.

“Contextual incommensurability due to the juxtaposition of mutually orthogonal imaginitive axes,” Chad added, unhelpfully.

The silent woman in silk gesticulated with her long rustling sleeves. “Aeiou says it’s like computers’ having incompatible operating systems,” Crraw translated. By now the Prime Minister found he took a talking crow almost in stride.

“We really don’t understand magic at all,” Urania admitted. “That’s why you haven’t heard from us before. Feather says he once helped a wizard named Bott with flavors for some sort of beans he was working on. But by and large, magic doesn’t fit in with what we know. We’re uncomfortable with it.”

“Mandrakes,” Feather said with a shudder. Pwt nodded sympathetically.

“In that case,” the Minister of Magic said, “what are you doing here?”

“The same thing you are,” Mimi replied, pointing at the Prime Minister. “He’s from the government, and we’re here to help him.”

“AAAAAAAACH!” Kokopelli had had enough. Faster than anyone could follow he was in front of Scrimgeour, dancing around in disgust and waving his flute in the wizard’s face. “Look, bozo, you’re in big trouble–and I know trouble. You people have messed things up every chance you got, oh, boy, let me count the ways! Now your enemy is back, and he’s hurting Humans, and none of you has a clue what to do about it. So we show up. We can see things you can’t. Magic spells bounce off us. Nobody knows we exist. And you have to ask what we’re doing here?!

“We’re your secret weapon, genius. Now here’s the plan…”