The Potions Prank
"Her eyes glow, I've seen it!" Ron whispered to Harry in Potions class.
"More like, she has eyes on the back of her head," Harry added, grinning wickedly from behind his cauldron.
"Ron! You're going to get us in trouble!" Hermione hissed through the side of her mouth.
"Ah, Mr. Potter…and…friends…" The soft female voice to their right practically purred the words. "Socializing about unrelated material, again? I believe that calls for five points from Gryffindor. Each. I trust that I shall not need to do so again."
Hermione blanched as Harry and Ron's faces went an angry shade of scarlet. They all waited until Professor Norris finally padded back to the chalkboard, her dusky brown robes sweeping silently against the desks as she moved.
"Ornery old bint," Ron mouthed. Even Hermione suppressed a snicker at that.
None of them saw the black cat with long, pointed ears staring at them through a crack in the door.
Everyone knew that Professor Norris was a formidable Potions mistress. Most agreed that she was more intimidating than Professor McGonagall. She had eyes that looked as though they could see right through you and her cold, standoffish demeanor meant that none of the students besides, perhaps, Draco Malfoy, (who was the only exception to her strict refusal to fawn over anyone), would dare to go to see her for tutoring help during her office hours.
No one liked her, especially with her obvious dislike of Gryffindor students; using every excuse to take points from their House. It probably didn't help that she was Head of Slytherin House, and as such, liked winning the House Cup rather much, but most students, even the Slytherins agreed, she was not a very nice person at all.
"I say we play a prank on ol' Norris!" Ron said, grinning with his mouth full of sandwich in the Great Hall.
"Professor Norris, Ron!" Hermione said irritably.
"What do you have in mind?" Harry asked, leaning in intently.
"Don't encourage him, Harry!" Hermione groaned, "You're going to get caught and then you're going to lose more points and get detention and you're going to be even bigger targets in class!"
"But if we used the Invisibility Cloak, we'd be invisible!" Ron said, rolling his eyes.
"Wow, Ron, did you realize that an invisibility cloak makes you invisible all on your own?" Hermione said snippily. "In any case, count me out of your stupid plans. I'm going to be sure to tell you that I told you so at every opportunity when your prank goes wrong!"
She stomped off with a big stack of books, her nose in the air.
"Ugh! That insufferable girl!" Ron groused, "I bet she's off in the library again…studying!"
"Maybe we should listen to Hermione, mate," Harry said, "I mean, exams are coming up and-"
"Don't tell me she's gotten to you as well!" Ron groaned. "Fine! You know what? Why don't you just lend me the Cloak and let me get Seamus or Dean to prank her instead!"
"Ron, you know that's not what I meant," Harry said, glancing over at Professor Norris, who was staring at her salad as though it had murdered her family in front of her, "Ok, then. I'll go with you, but if there's even a possibility we get caught, I have the right to cancel the prank and we go back to the tower without anyone the wiser."
"You're the best, mate!" Ron said, beaming. "Now, here's what I have in mind…"
The corridors were mostly deserted that night, as Ron and Harry crept along under the Invisibility Cloak.
"What was that?" Harry asked, looking around and seeing nothing.
"Don't get cold feet now," Ron whispered back, "we're nearly there."
They stopped in front of a room at the end of the hall. POTION INGREDIENTS, read the sign.
"I'm still not sure about this," Harry said, staring at the sign.
"It's brilliant" Ron said, "we just have to get inside and switch all the labels around using this charm that Fred and George gave me! Sure, some of the ingredients are very obviously different from one another, but it'll be confusing enough to cause chaos. Norris will get in trouble and have to fix it all, which will take hours, and no one will be the wiser!"
Harry snickered quietly. He did have to admit that it was a rather nasty prank.
"Right, then!" Ron said, "I'll just have to get through the lock on the door. You stand watch, Harry, ok?"
Ron stuck out the tip of his wand from the Cloak and said "Alohomora!"
The door popped open with a click and they peered inside together. Suddenly, they felt the Cloak being tugged off of their bodies. They turned to find the tip of the Cloak in the mouth of a long-eared black cat with a tiny line of white fur circling his throat like a collar, whose eyes were so dark that it was hard to see them at first. The cat pulled the Cloak to the floor, revealing the two would-be pranksters, and jumped on top of it, looking at them both with narrowed eyes.
"Shite! It's Mr. Snape!" Ron exclaimed.
"What do you reckon he's doing?" Harry said, looking down at the cat, who was kneading the fabric with his paws.
"MROWRRRRRRRR!" Mr. Snape yowled, a one-cat alarm.
Both boys tensed up. They knew that Filch would be there any moment, but they couldn't just leave the Cloak under the smug, scrawny beast. Thinking quickly, Harry levitated the cat into the air while Ron dove at the cloak. Mr. Snape squeaked with surprised and then simply yowled even more loudly than before, his tail spiked up like a bottle brush as he whirled in the air.
"Shut him up!" Ron hissed, as light began to glow down one side of the hallway, "Quickly!"
Harry didn't know what to do, but the door to the ingredients room was still open. Before he could imagine the possible consequences, he simply flung his wand in a wide arc, which launched the poor cat straight into the ingredients room. Ron slammed the door immediately, but it didn't muffle much of the crash that followed as a very frightened cat slammed into what was obviously a case of potions ingredients.
The two threw the Invisibility Cloak over their heads and pressed against the far wall of the hallway just in time for Filch to round the corner with a lantern in hand.
"Where are you, Mr. Snape? Where are the no-good students up to mischief, eh?" he called out in his froggy, gruff tone.
Harry and Ron crept down the hallway quietly in the opposite direction, running only when they were certain that the cantankerous caretaker wouldn't hear the sound of their feet echoing down the stone floor.
The next morning, Professor Norris was in a terrible mood. Her eyes flashed from behind her spectacles as though they really could glow of their own accord. Apparently, not only had one entire wall of the potions stores been largely demolished but Mr. Snape had been hit with so many ingredients that it had turned part of his fur a strange mossy green, which was drawing a number of biting flies from outside the castle. The poor cat was in the Infirmary being looked after and Filch was on the warpath, trying to catch students everywhere for infractions, both real and imagined. Ron and Harry weren't sure how she knew, but the professor's eyes seemed to linger on them when she was talking about the terrible accident the night before, and how they would be unable to brew the potion she'd planned for that morning's lesson, so instead they would be writing a ten foot paper about the potion's various uses on parchment, due the next morning.
Everyone groaned and both Ron and Harry winced at the smug look on Hermione's face.
"Well," she said, when class was over, "I'm not going to say it because you already know, but I hope you don't get any other bright ideas. They only seem to make matters worse. When will you two ever learn that whenever you try to spread misery, it comes back to you tenfold?"
Harry shrugged when Ron looked at him, expecting support. After all, Hermione did tend to be right about these sorts of things.