Colin Creevey drew the short straw, as it turned out. The rest of the Gryffindors were apprehensive, but Colin went off to his potions detention with Snape with a spring in his step. And when he came back two hours later, he was spattered from head to toe in purple liquid but practically vibrating with excitement.

"I got it! I got it, you guys!"

The commons room erupted into cheers, a marked change from the dead silence which had reigned since Colin left. Nearly every Gryffindor had found some reason to be there, waiting. Colin bounced into the room (leaving wet purple footprints behind him) and produced a snarled handful of greasy black hair, which he laid reverently on the table. "He made me stir a potion for almost two hours, and the potion exploded, and he came over to look, and I 'accidentally' got my wand hand tangled in his hair when he bent over the cauldron to fix the flame, and I got a whole big hunk of it!"

Fred and George Weasley immediately had him crushed from both sides in an enthusiastic hug. "I can't believe you did it!" Fred exclaimed. "Just a sec!" He dashed up to the dormitories and came back down with a largish box. Several Gryffindors craned their necks to see, but Fred batted them away with a smirk.

"Time to show off our newest creation," George announced with a theatrical flourish. "We present to you . . . doppelganger dolls!"

Ron - one of the handful of Gryffindors, alongside Harry and Hermione, who had not rushed to peek in the box - glanced up from his chess game. "They look like lumps of clay, George," he said.

George grinned. "They do now. But - watch!" He plucked a single hair out of the wad Colin had acquired and wrapped it around one of the flesh-colored lumps. And before everyone's eyes, the lump shifted, elongated, became -

"It's Snape!" Colin exclaimed, a shade louder than necessary. "It really looks like him!"

Fred's grin matched his twin's. "Moves like him, too." He tapped the foot-high figure with his wand and motioned for George to set it on the table. The miniature Snape immediately began pacing back and forth, tiny robes billowing out behind him.

Harry gave up on the chess game - Ron always beat him, anyway - and moved closer to get a better look. "Damn fine likeness, Fred, George. I'm impressed."

Fred tapped the figure again. It stopped pacing and glared at Harry. "Ten points from Gryffindor!" it announced in a shrill voice - the pitch was commensurate with its diminished stature, but the tone was undeniably Snape's.

The room erupted into laughter, which only seemed to irritate the tiny Snape more. "Ten points from Gryffindor! Ten points from Gryffindor!" Fred tapped it again and it resumed pacing and glaring.

"It can only do two or three things at a time," George explained, "but those two or three things will be as accurate as the casting witch or wizard knows. Which means if he or she has seen Snape with bright blue hair -" - he tapped again and the figure's turned a greasy shade of electric blue - "- the doll will react appropriately."

And sure enough, the miniature Snape was now fingering its blue hair and glaring at anyone and everyone it saw. The signature scowl on such a tiny face brought the room back to gales of laughter again. It was exactly the expression the real Snape had worn when George had managed to slip some hair-brightening potion into his tea the year before.

"Put him in a frilly skirt!" Dennis Creevey demanded.

"Never seen him in one," Fred shot back, "so I can't. If he dresses in frilly skirts for you, though, by all means - go ahead!"

Dennis blushed, but his embarrassment was quickly forgotten as Fred and George started handing out dolls and strands of hair. A few students experimented with hair from each other, but most opted for what they were given - the result being an army of tiny Snapes stalking around and glaring at each other and demanding points from Gryffindor and thoroughly making the commons room a useless place to study. Hermione took the rest of her work up to her room.

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"I just don't think it's right," Hermione told Ron and Harry at breakfast the next morning. "Professor Snape would be furious if he knew."

Ron shrugged. "It's not like they can make the dolls do anything Snape hasn't already done - can't make him shag a McGonagall doll or anything."

"Eww, thanks for that," Harry said around a mouthful of toast.

"Not the point," Hermione countered.

"What is?" Ron asked.

Hermione frowned, then let her shoulders drop. "I don't know. But I don't like it, and I wish Fred and George would stick to harmless pranks."

"This is harmless, isn't it?" And Ron managed to fit most of his pancake in his mouth at once.

"God, Ron," Hermione said. "At least chew?"

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Potions class that morning was much more interesting than usual. Every single Gryffindor was paying full attention from the moment that Snape walked in the room - something Hermione was usually the only one to do. Everyone was watching for something interesting to command their doppleganger dolls to do, though, so no one wanted to miss a potentially funny slip or facial expression.

"I find myself curious," Professor Snape finally announced, after his fifth lightning-quick question for which everyone on the Gryffindor side of the room raised their hand immediately to answer. The Slytherins were obviously confused, which only made the situation funnier. Snape crossed his arms and glared at the Gryffindors. "Why the sudden interest in potions, today of all days?"

Ron (Ron!) answered on behalf of his house. "We're just eager to learn, sir," he said.

Snape's eyes narrowed, but he couldn't take points from Gryffindor merely because a student expressed interest in learning. "Any particular reason for that, Mr. Weasley?"

Ron reddened, but he kept his tone steady. "Nothing special, sir."

Snape glared a moment longer, then twirled on his heel and stalked back to the chalkboard. His cloak billowed out behind him dramatically, and Hermione knew before the day was out, a dozen miniature Snapes would probably be twirling in just the same dramatic manner.

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Hermione saw her first Snape doll outside the Gryffindor commons room just after lunchtime. She, Ron, and Harry were going back to get their books for Care of Magical Creatures, and Harry nearly stepped on it.

"Ten points from Gryffindor!" the tiny figure announced, waving its miniature wand at his foot, before stalking off down the hallway. Harry and Ron bit back laughs, but Hermione chased it down and stuck it back in the box Fred had left next to the door.

The second, third, and fourth Snape dolls were on the stairs, in the girls' room, and just outside the castle doors, respectively. Colin Creevey's was obvious - he was the only one who had ever seen Professor Snape with a faceful of purple potion, and thus the doll wiping purple goo from its robes and hair was clearly his.

There were no dolls at Hagrid's cottage, thank goodness, but by the time Ron, Harry, and Hermione arrived, everyone had seen them - even the Slytherins. The reaction was split along house lines, unsurprisingly, with the Slytherins and Hermione being the only students who didn't think the dolls were funny. She didn't want to announce her feelings too loudly in front of everyone, though, so she mostly just listened as her classmates swapped stories of the dolls' antics.

"Funny as that all sounds," Hagrid cut in, "we have a class to do." And so they did.

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Supper that evening was chaos. Word of the doppelganger dolls had spread throughout the school, and Fred and George had given out nearly their whole stock. "It's a trial run," Fred had explained to Ron as he handed half a dozen dolls to a seventh-year Hufflepuff. "If we really want to test them, it's best to get it all out of the way now, before Dumbledore bans them from the school."

"It's not Dumbledore I'd worry about, if I were you," Ron had replied.

Harry nodded. "Yeah, Snape is going to have your balls."

Hermione just frowned and swept past them on her way down to the Great Hall.

But now that the meal was served, it became obvious that several students had snuck their dolls down to supper with them. Most of the figures wandering around under the tables were Snapes, but not all - several were credible copies of students, and one particularly persistent Dumbledore went around offering microscopic lemon drops to everyone at the staff table. The real Dumbledore seemed charmed, accepting a tiny lemon drop from his doppelganger, but Professor Snape didn't seem to share his enthusiasm.

"Ooh, he looks pissed," Ron whispered to Harry and Hermione. "Think he knows who's responsible?"

"Obviously not just Fred and George," Hermione grumbled back. "How many people did they give those things to?"

"Nearly everyone! And Ernie Macmillan managed to get another hunk of Snape's hair - nearly knocked him down the staircase outside Filch's office - so the Hufflepuffs have a bunch of Snapes, too."

Hermione scowled and jabbed at her potatoes with her fork. "Look, you know Snape irritates me just as much as he bothers you two, but doesn't this just seem wrong?"

But Ron and Harry were both too busy watching the dolls to answer.

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It was the Snape doll falling down the stairs that finally made Hermione determined to do something. She split off from her friends on the way back to the Gryffindor tower after supper, intending to go pick up a book she needed in the library, but on the way she was distracted by a Snape which was working its way down the staircase one stair at a time. Each step it lost its footing, tumbled forward, fell, and grabbed the railing with a very real look of panic in its eyes. And then did it again on the next step. Given that it was in an otherwise-empty hallway and the staircase went up for another three flights, Hermione assumed it had been doing this for a while.

Hermione sighed and picked up the doll, tapping it with her wand to make it stay still. The doppelganger may not have been embarrassed about tripping on the stairs, but the real Professor Snape would have been - and whatever the man said in class, he didn't deserve to have every little misstep repeated forever for comic relief in front of his students. It's possible this slip was what gave Ernie Macmillan a hunk of Snape's hair - which meant other students may very well have started pranking him as well, just to endlessly copy his reactions. Hermione didn't like the professor and was pretty sure he didn't like her either, but he didn't deserve that.

Before she gave herself time to think about it, she scooped up her bag and the doll and headed down to Snape's office. There was no guarantee he'd be there, but she didn't know where his quarters were -

"Come in."

Hermione pushed down a frisson of anticipation and entered his office. The potions master was seated behind his enormous desk, marking papers, but he put down his pen and steepled his fingers as Hermione walked through the doorway.

"What can I do for you, Miss Granger?" he asked in an icily polite tone.

Hermione silently held out the doll. Snape eyed it, but made no move to accept it from her hand. She sighed, then reached out and plucked out one of her own hairs.

"They're doppelganger dolls. Wrap a hair around them like this -" - she demonstrated - "- and they'll change into whoever's hair you used." The doll started morphing, and in a few seconds was a miniature copy of herself. "They can only carry out actions you've seen that person do, and only two or three at once."

Professor Snape watched the Hermione doll with lidded eyes. Hermione tapped the doll and thought about - well, she didn't intentionally think it, but suddenly her miniature self started jumping up and down with her hand in the air, waving and hoping to be called on. One corner of Snape's mouth turned upward into a hint of a smirk.

"I understand very well what these dolls are, Miss Granger. What I don't understand is why you felt the need to bring me one."

Hermione swallowed. "I just . . . thought you'd like to know how they worked. In case you wanted to stop them." She could feel her cheeks warming, and hated that she was so easy to read. "It's not right that everyone seems to have chosen you for their target - to the point they're engineering accidents to pull out locks of your hair."

"Is that what that was?" Snape's hand flew up to tuck an escaped lock back behind his ear. "In that case, thank you, Miss Granger, for your misguided but well-intentioned aid."

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Hermione and Ron and Harry didn't have potions until the last thing in the afternoon the next day, so they were some of the last to find out what was happening in the potions classroom. When Professor Snape strode in, he waved toward his desk and a piece of sellotape with each student's name on it soared through the air toward all of them.

"Each of you are to place one of your own hairs on the sellotape and fold it in half. Quickly, please."

Hermione, Ron, and Harry all exchanged glances, but did as they were prompted. It was obvious from the silence in the classroom that everyone present knew exactly what the potions master was doing. After collecting the sellotape and the hairs, though, Professor Snape proceeded to hold class exactly like normal, glower and all.

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It wasn't until the next morning, in the Great Hall, that everyone noticed the house points. And how they were disappearing at a dismaying rate.

"Ten points from Hufflepuff!" bellowed a miniature Snape from somewhere under the Hufflepuff table, and ten gems obediently flowed upward inside the Hufflepuff hourglass. Ron and Harry gaped, but Hermione wasn't entirely surprised.

"What's going on?" Ron demanded, pointing out the hourglasses to the Gryffindors at the table who hadn't noticed them yet. "How did Slytherin get such a big lead in house points?"

"Oh, take a wild guess, Ron," Hermione said. "I suspect Professor Snape has worked it so that whenever one of his doppelgangers takes off house points, the points come off for real. And since almost no one in Slytherin is mocking him with those stupid dolls, they're not losing points."

Ron glared at her. "They're not stupid, they're bloody brilliant!" George looked down the table and raised his chin at his brother, a silent acknowledgement of the praise.

Hermione looked down at her food. "They're impressive, but it serves everyone right for what they've been doing."

"What, you have a crush on Professor Sevvie?" Harry nudged Hermione's knee under the table.

She knew he was teasing, but she pushed him away anyway. "I just don't like bullies."

Ron's eyebrows drew together in consternation. "He's a professor, Hermione!"

"Doesn't mean he should have to put up with pranks like this," she snapped back, and grabbed her books. "I've got to get to class."

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Harry and Ron still hadn't managed to tease her out of her bad mood by the time they got to the potions classroom that afternoon. Hermione had giggled at the look on Harry's face when they passed a group of second-year Slytherins in the hallway who were congregated around a miniature Harry falling off his broom - obviously created by someone who had seen the fateful quidditch match - but other than that, seeing those dolls mostly just made her angry.

She had a change of heart, though, when she stepped through the door into the potions classroom and saw the array of tiny desks arranged on Professor Snape's much larger one. Seated at the desks were doppelganger copies of every student in the class, including the Slytherins. And all of them were doing something embarrassing.

The Neville Longbottom doppelganger, unsurprisingly, was struggling with a cauldron which kept spitting and belching smoke in his face. Draco Malfoy, however, was an astoundingly cheerful bouncing ferret (when did Snape see that encounter?), and Hermione was relieved to see herself merely waving her hand in the air instead of something more cringe-worthy. Most of the other students were suffering potions mishaps in some way or another - grotesquely swollen appendages, odd colors, and one of them was giving off a terrible odor. Ron's doppelganger was sound asleep with his face stuck in his cauldron.

"I never did that," Ron whispered.

"Yes you did, third year," Hermione whispered back. "You just don't remember it because you were asleep."

Professor Snape strode in and closed the door behind him with a loud bang, effectively silencing the chatter in the classroom. He waved casually at the chalkboard, covering it in his precise, cramped writing. "You have an hour and a half today for this Ever-Sticking potion. Please pay special attention to the temperature of your cauldron - boil this potion too hot and the surface layer will evaporate, filling the room with a foul-smelling gas which will leave your skin sticky for the next several hours. I fully expect that at least one of you will fail to follow the directions, so I will be behind a ward at my desk for the duration of the brewing time. Do not mistake that, though, as a failure to be watching your work."

Hermione was particularly careful with her potion, interfering once when Ron accidentally tapped his wand on his cauldron while daydreaming and turned up the flames without realizing it. The brewing was actually not that complicated, apart from the exacting temperature requirements, so she found her mind wandering a bit. And her eyes drifting up to the desk.

Professor Snape sat leaning back in his chair, body relaxed, but his hawk-like gaze kept searching the room. Every once in a while he touched his wand to his throat and whispered something.

"Problems, Miss Granger?" hissed his voice in her ear. Hermione jumped. Professor Snape grinned evilly at her, removed his wand from his throat, then leaned forward and lightly tapped her doppelganger on the desk in front of him. The miniature Hermione immediately stopped waving her hand in the air and startled, nearly spilling her cauldron just as the real Hermione had done. And then did it again, and again . . .

He tapped other doppelgangers, too, updating the dolls with other students' embarrassing behavior as the class went on. Whatever he said to Pansy Parkinson made her startle violently and drop her wand into the cauldron, covering it in her potion, and soon her doppelganger was fishing her miniature wand out of her miniature cauldron over and over again.

The hour and a half stretched for forever, but Hermione was gratified to see that not only did her Ever-Sticking potion come out at exactly the right consistency, the only student to heat his cauldron too hot and release a horrific burst of foul-smelling gas was a Slytherin. The Gryffindors were far enough away to avoid the sticky skin side effect, but Draco and Pansy got facefuls of it. The potion was probably hell to get out of hair.

All in all, it was an oddly satisfying class.

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Nobody was terribly surprised when Headmaster Dumbledore addressed the students at supper that evening, alerting everyone that the doppelganger dolls were being rounded up at that very moment and would be banned from Hogwarts in the future. Fred and George looked very proud of themselves nonetheless.

"Gonna sell a million of 'em," Fred whispered to Ron as Dumbledore finished his speech and sat. "Gonna be great for teasing younger siblings everywhere!"

"After all," added George, "We've seen you in diapers . . ."

"Sod off," Ron grumbled, but he was smiling.

Hermione looked up at the staff table, where Professor Snape sat with an extremely satisfied smirk on his face. Well, it looked like all his smirks, but she imagined it was a satisfied one. He did get revenge on them in the end, after all, and he had the most to gain by Dumbledore banning the rest of the dolls. He deserved this round.

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It turned out the Headmaster's ban wasn't quite absolute. One lone doll remained on Professor Snape's desk over the next several weeks. Often it was Harry, but sometimes it was Neville or Ron or, more rarely, one of the Slytherins. Always it was reliving someone's most embarrassing moment from the previous day's class.

Professor Snape caught Hermione's eye the day after Dumbledore's pronouncement - and he winked at her.