Word Count: 1746

Space Address: 3B - Lake

Challenges: Gryffindor MC (x3); Hufflepuff MC; Short Jog; Ethnic & Present

Warnings: Shenanigans and tomfoolery

This story is for Bailey, a.k.a. brokenbottleaurora, who helped me pass Biology and ultimately get my degree.

~o0o~

They messed up. George knew this the second the prank was triggered. See, he and Fred were trying to knock Percy off his personal pedestal, and so they set something up at the library knowing he had been using his super-secret Time-turner to get some early studying done. It wasn't easy getting up this early, so they forgot to double check who was leaving the library to go to breakfast. If it were anyone else, they might have been okay, but no. They just had to set off some fireworks near Hermione Granger.

Evidently, loud noises scared her because she clapped her hands over her ears and burst into tears.

"Silencio!"

Cedric Diggory, perfectly popular prefect, was right behind her. He slid his wand back up his sleeve into a holster. Of course he had a wand holster.

"That was quite a wake-up call," he said and asked Hermione. "Are you okay? Granger, right?"

"What's your deal?" Hermione cried at the twins.

"Sorry, Granger," said Fred. "We thought you were Percy."

"Oh, yes," said Cedric, quirking up an eyebrow. "Because they look so similar."

True, a five-foot-two black girl shouldn't have been mistaken for a five-foot-eight ginger with glasses.

"Oh, buzz off, Diggory," Fred snapped, still sore that Angelina fancied the handsome Hufflepuff.

Cedric rolled his eyes and removed a candy bar from his book bag for Hermione.

"Here," he said to her kindly. Ugh, could that guy be more annoyingly good? "Are you going to be alright?"

"I-I'm f-fine," said Hermione, shrugging off contact. "Loud n-noises sort-sort of… Er—I have aut-autism, so…"

"Oh, I read about that," said Cedric. "It makes you susceptible to over-stimulation, right?"

"A-among other things," she said, wiping her tears away with her sleeve.

"We didn't mean for it to be you, Hermione," said George feeling bad. "Honest, we didn't. It was meant for Percy."

Hermione scowled at them, brown eyes glinting dangerously.

"Yeah, right," she said. "I bet you did it on purpose. I already told Ron that Crookshanks didn't kill Scabbers. I'll get you back for this! I'm done with being bullied!"

Spinning on her heel, she stomped off muttering under her breath.

"Well," said Cedric. "I was going to assign you two detention, but I think Granger has something worse in stock. Good luck."

He waved at them cheerfully and left whistling a light tune.

"Should we be worried, Fred?" George asked.

"Nah," Fred replied. "It's Hermione. She couldn't prank her way out of a paper sack."

They were soon to find out exactly how wrong he was. Nothing happened for the first few weeks, and the twins began to wonder if Granger had forgotten the whole ordeal. That's when they entered their dormitory to find it completely covered in aluminum foil.

"What on Earth?" Lee breathed. "Did you two do this?"

"Lee, you were with us all day," said George. "When could we have done this? And why would we do it to ourselves?"

Their other roommate, Yuuto Kawaguchi, sent them an annoyed look and began tearing the foil off his bed. The twins exchanged looks. There was just no way.

"Oh, come on," Fred groaned.

Under the foil, a plastic film was wrapped around his bedclothes and when George peeled away the foil, he too saw that he received the same treatment. It took them ages to get the stuff off.

"Not a bad prank," George conceded. "Especially for Granger."

Little did they know, that was only the beginning.

The next morning, when they went to breakfast, they approached Hermione to congratulate her on the prank and let her know that there were no hard feelings.

"Maybe on your end," she said bitterly.

"Hey, George?" said Fred, looking through his book bag. "Have you seen my transfig textbook?"

"You can use mine, Fred." George opened his own bag but found his textbook was also amiss.

Hermione stared them down and placed a massive tray of jelly on the table. Suspended in the green goo were their transfiguration textbooks and wands. When she stole them, they would never know. The bell tolled signaling the fifteen minutes before class would begin. Hermione got up and rushed off to get to her first class.

Fred and George winced and plunged their hands into the jelly to retrieve their textbooks. They wiped them off the best they could, but the pages had been dyed green as if they were being reminded of her wrath. They got to Transfiguration just as the second bell tolled, only to find the classroom had been set up backwards. It was unnerving, but nobody else commented or seemed to mind it.

"Messers. Weasley, if you would be so kind to take a seat," said Professor McGonagall.

The twins nodded and sat in the seats behind Cedric and his fellow Hufflepuff, Redmund Ellis. They reached into their bags once more only to find that all of their quills were gone. George leaned forward and tapped Cedric's shoulder. He always had spare quills.

"Hey, Diggory, loan me a quill?"

"All I have are pencils," he whispered. "Are you sure?"

"It'll have to do," said Fred.

"Suit yourself." Cedric opened his book bag and removed two pencils each the size of his arm.

"No, really," said George.

"Is there a problem?" Professor McGonagall asked. "It is important that we move on with the lecture."

"We just needed to borrow a couple quills," said Fred. "Angelina, do you have a spare?"

"Nope, sorry," she said.

Others shook their heads and Cedric was keeping an amazingly straight face as he held out the giant pencils. George took the pink one and Fred took the purple. They had to hold the pencils in their fists like children in order to write with them. How Hermione arranged this was beyond them, but if she was getting help from an older student, then they might be in more trouble than they realized.

"George, you worry too much," said Fred when his brother voiced his concerns a few days later. "Granger is taking a lot of classes, how much mischief could she make?"

At that moment, he opened his ink bottle only to have more glitter than could have possibly fit exploded in their faces.

"Okay," said Fred. "This means war."

For every prank they pulled, jinxing her slide rule, changing her hair from brown to teal, and even translating her textbooks to Chinese, she got them back tenfold. She filled their dorm room with shaving cream, replaced their shampoo with baby oil, and had an insurmountable number of red rubber balls fall out of every cupboard and book bag they touched..

"Okay," said George, wiping the whipped cream off his face from Granger's latest prank. "I think we need to call a truce."

They went down to breakfast and conjured a bouquet of flowers to say how sorry they were. To their surprise they didn't see her, so they approached Ron and Harry, who were sitting next to an Asian girl with long brown hair.

"Hey, Ron. Harry," said George. "Have you seen Hermione?"

"Yeah," said Harry. "She's right here."

The girl nodded her head.

"That's not Hermione," said Fred.

"What are you going on about, of course that's her," said Ron.

"Okay," George laughed. "She got you in on the prank, too. That's cute. Seriously, who is this girl."

"We told you," said Ron. "This is Hermione. She's only been going here for three years."

George scoffed and shook his head, then spied Neville Longbottom. "Oi, Neville! Who is this?"

Neville gave them a strange look. "That's Hermione."

"Can't be," said Fred. "Hermione isn't Asian!"

"Hey, good for you two for not seeing race," said Cedric. "Five points to Gryffinpuff!"

"Excuse me? What's Gryffinpuff?"

"One of Hogwarts' two Houses," he said as if it were obvious and pointed to his red and yellow tie. "Gryffinpuff." He pointed to their ties. "Gryffinpuff."

They looked down to see they were indeed wearing red and yellow ties and their robe lining was red on one side and yellow on the other.

"How on Earth?" they breathed and raced to the teacher's table. "Professor McGonagall!"

The stern professor looked up from her magazine. "Yes, Messers. Weasley?"

"Who is that girl sitting with Harry and Ron?" Fred asked.

"Why I assume it would be Miss Granger."

"Uh-huh," said George. "And how many Houses are there?"

She gave them an odd look. "Two. Gryffinpuff and Slytherclaw."

Fred and George gaped. Had they gone mad? Were they living in a blur this entire time and had just now checked into reality? The game kept up and at both lunch and dinner, Asian Hermione was sitting where regular Hermione sat, all the teachers gave points to either Gryffinpuff or Slytherclaw.

Three days later, the twins woke up to find their mattresses floating in the lake and they had finally reached their limit. They stormed into the castle, soaking wet, and found Hermione as she usually looked sitting in her normal seat. The banners had returned to normal and so had everyone's ties.

"Okay," said Fred.

"You win," said George. "We're sorry we pulled that prank that made you cry."

"And all the subsequent pranks," Fred added. "It won't happen again. You are King of the Pranks and we are not worthy."

Hermione smiled and closed her book. "Okay. I forgive you."

They blinked. "That's it?"

She nodded. "That's it. Honestly, it was getting a little exhausting. Do you know how hard it was to convince Professor McGonagall to allow my sister to come up here?"

"Your sister?" Fred echoed.

"The girl who was posing as me is my twin sister, Paulina," said Hermione.

"Okay, you're pulling our legs," said George. "She looked nothing like you."

"Didn't she though?"

The more they thought about it, the more they realized the two girls had the same eyes, same hair color, and similar facial structure.

"How?" George asked.

Hermione quirked an eyebrow. "Our mum is Japanese and our dad is black; children don't end up a perfect mix of their parents or clones of each other you know. The hardest part of getting her to pose as me, though, is that she's deaf, so I had to give her cues from across the room."

"Sure, that was the hardest part," Fred laughed and stared at Hermione as if he were seeing her for the first time. "You're bloody terrifying, you know that?"

Hermione rested her chin in her hand and grinned.

"I try."