a/n-two updates in five days, it's a miracle!!! do i need pen name did not ever think this day would come. An-Jelly-Ca thinks we are quite amazing. do i need a pen name would also like you to know that she had to work on the 4th of July and it was raining, so no one came to buy ice cream from her. so, since there was no ice cream to scoop, she began writing a chapter for all of you, and thus this amazing updating feat was accomplished! aren't you so grateful? since it's been an acceptable time since our last update, no apologies necessary!
Thank you immensely to all of our amazing reviewers! Of course, as amazing as you are, we wish there were more of you! Like the dude in the back row with the bowler hat, the girl next to him with the purple pants, the self-proclaimed "Lord of the Fuzzy Pink Bunnies", the periwinkle spoinkle, the quite invisible person who cannot be described in more detail at this time, and their bff jill, some of you lovely readers have not reviewed. we promise to not be mad if you go review this chapter...
Disclaimer-do i need a pen name has no idea what the colors are. An-Jelly-Ca will not tell her, and therefore she finds it doubtful that anyone else will ever be told either. Oh, wait...I meant to say: No, thanks for asking, but we're not J.K. Rowling, and we probably never will be.
Chapter Seven-The Fine Art of Bowling
"Nice strike, Ana." Sarah said, giving the other girl a high-five.
"Thanks, Sarah." Ana replied with a smile. That smile faded from her face, however, when her gaze drifted behind her friend. "Uhm, Sarah…why is there a creepy old guy dressed like a pimp watching us?
"What?"
Ana nodded in the direction of the man with a long white beard and a purple outfit. Sarah turned to look just as a shout came from the other side of the bowling alley.
"Professor, we're starting!"
At this announcement, the purple-clad man wandered over to the other side of the bowling alley, where a rather large group of teenagers was standing.
"That was odd." Sarah commented.
"Were his eyes twinkling?!" Ana demanded.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the alley, the seventh years had split up into their bowling groups. Lily and Remus were attempting to be patient as they explained to James, Sirius, and Marlene how the game of bowling worked. Remus, however, was failing miserably at the fine art of extreme patience.
"Can Susie's cousins play, too?" Sirius asked before the explanation even began.
"No." Remus said shortly. "You actually have to be alive to bowl."
"Susie's cousins are alive, Remmie." Sirius said, sounding as if he was trying to explain this simple fact of life to a pre-schooler.
"Don't worry, Remus." Lily said consolingly, patting her friend on the arm. "I'm sure this just stems from a childhood in which his only friends were inanimate objects."
"What's this thing for?" Marlene asked, poking a bowling ball with her finger.
"That's a bowling ball." Lily said. "You pick it up and throw it down the lane. The object of the game is to knock as many of those pins—over there—down as possible on each turn.
"But you can't do that!" Sirius protested.
"Why not?" Remus asked warily.
"Because those bowling ball things are obviously the kindred spirits of Susie the Spoinkle and her cousins." Sirius stated, as if it was obvious, which it really wasn't. "It would be the highest level of spoinkle cruelty to chuck a bowling ball down that…did you call it a 'lane?'"
"More cruel than what your cousin Bellatrix did to Susie?" Remus asked, sounding doubtful.
"That doesn't count." Sirius said with a wave of his hand. "That wasn't the real Susie. It was only an impersonator who wishes she could be as amazing as Susan Penelope Spoinkle Puff Black."
"With a name like that for a rubber yo-yo," Remus began, "I'd hate to see what kind of name you'd thrust upon a poor, innocent child."
"None of my godchildren will ever be innocent." James cut in.
"Well, Cassiopeia, of course." Sirius informed Remus, talking over James. "Cassiopeia Chrysanthemum Black."
"That has a nice ring to it." Marlene said.
"Well of course you think so." James declared. "Sirius' kids are going to be your kids, too, Marlene."
"Let's just play the game, why don't we?" Remus suggested before Marlene could protest this fact. "It's too agonizing to have to wait for my impending doom. I just want to get it over with!"
Sirius sighed. "I suppose kindred spirits don't exactly have the same laws. You may proceed with torturing Susie's very distant relatives.
"Thank you!" Remus muttered under his breath to himself.
"Dibs on going first!" Marlene yelled, causing practically all of the people in the bowling alley to give her strange looks."
"I'm second then!" Sirius exclaimed equally loud.
"Did anyone ever tell the two of you that you behave as though you were five?" Remus enquired.
"Why, yes, you, of course." Sirius answered in a tone of voice that suggested he was concerned that his friend was going senile.
"I want to be last," James declared before Remus could argue the point with Sirius. "After all the best should go last, right?"
"…right, dear." Lily said after a pause. "And, I'm sure you'll be quite good at bowling."
James as it turned out wasn't quite good at bowling, or good at all as it were. They were three rounds into their current game and he had managed to throw four gutter-balls and had wracked a totally score of two points, from when he had managed to hit the ten-pin twice. However, he would be doing quite well if the object of the game were to get the lowest score possible without actually trying to suck. Unfortunately, this was not the case. There was one positive thing to be said about James' bowling skill however, in that he had actually managed to bowl on his lane.
Sirius, meanwhile, did not seem to understand that his bowl was supposed to land on his lane, as opposed to the lane next to him, (he did manage to get a strike on Caradoc's lane, however). This had led to a long drawn out argument over whether Sirius' strike did in fact count given that he hadn't actually gotten it in his own lane. James, competitive as always insisted that it did not in fact count, and that Sirius should very likely receive negative points for his failure to bowl on his own lane. Sirius had replied that James was just jealous because he was the worst bowler there, which had resulted in a few terrifying seconds when Remus was sure that James was going to pull out his wand and hex the other boy thereby resulting in a severe violation of the Statue of Secrecy. Fortunately, James was distracted from hexing Sirius by Marlene's actions.
See, while Sirius and James had been arguing Marlene had decided that her ball was rather heavy and had walked over to the ball storage shelves located conveniently behind her teacher's lane to find a lighter one. Her professor had called to Marlene asking where she was going and so Marlene had been obliged to walk over to her teacher and explain exactly what she was doing. The problem with this was that Marlene, who had always been a hand-talker forgot that she was holding a rather heavy ball and went to make a hand gesture causing her to drop the bowling ball, which, aided quite generously by gravity, promptly hurtled toward the ground. But instead of finding faded linoleum, it landed on the foot of her Muggle Studies professor who gave a shriek so loud that even Mrs. Black would be hard-pressed to do better.
"Oh my gosh!" Marlene shrieked in an equally loud tone of voice causing the good majority of the bowling alley's patrons to stare in her direction yet again. "Was that your foot? Did it hurt? Huh? Huh? HUH?"
Needless to say, their professor was not amused, rather she was wondering whether her foot was broken and at the same time what on earth had possessed her to conduct all these field trips, with this particular group of seventh years.
"Is something the matter, my dear professor?" Dumbledore asked, coming over to Marlene and the muggle studies teacher.
"Everything's fine, Marlene just had a little accident," The tone of voice the professor used seemed to indicate that at this point she was fairly sure Marlene and her friends were out to kill her and it was probably no accident at all. "However, I think she may have broken my foot, so if you don't mind I think I'm just going to sit out the rest of the bowling,"
"Of course," Dumbledore replied in a conciliatory tone. "Miss McKinnon, kindly help your professor into a seat and than you may return to your lane, I wouldn't want you to miss out on this most wonderful experience."
After depositing their professor in a chair Marlene skipped back over to her group.
"I think she hates us," Marlene remarked unceremoniously.
"Who could possibly hate us?" Sirius asked incredulously.
"You'd be surprised." Remus muttered. "Enough chit-chat, let's finish this torturous, er, I mean, wonderful game."
They continued their game with no more major mishaps other than a couple of frames where it seemed that James had bewitched his ball to go the way he wanted it to, thereby causing a loud argument with Sirius. And, then there was also a conflict when Sirius insisted that Susie's cousins would very much like to try to bowl, which had caused Remus to have to spend ten minutes explaining to Sirius why Susie's cousins could not possibly manage to throw the ball down the lane. Meanwhile, Sirius had said that Remus simply did not understand the power of the spoinkles, which had led Remus to believe that Sirius had enchanted all of his spoinkles in some fashion. So, while Remus did manage to convince Sirius not to have his spoinkles play, the prefect spent the rest of the game jumping every time he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, clearly afraid that Sirius' spoinkles were going to attack him at any moment.
At the end of the game the standings stood thus: Remus in first place with a score of 220, Lily in second with a score of 183, Marlene in third with a score of 47, Sirius in fourth with a score of 33, and James in last place with a score of 21. James, meanwhile, had now taken to insisting that he had done so badly on purpose in order to show his darling Lilyflower that he did not need to win everything.
Their professor (who had managed to covertly heal her foot under the table) and Dumbledore ushered them back to the waiting ministry cars amidst James loud declarations of his intentional loss. Once the five teenagers were stuffed into their car, Remus (to his joy) was once more stuck between Sirius and Marlene, while Lily sat next to James in the first back seat.
They had not been in the car for more than five minutes when Sirius had declared that he was bored. Marlene followed up his equation by poking Remus repeatedly in the shoulder and asking "are we there yet." Remus, to his credit, actually endured several minutes of this torture before finally cracking and telling Sirius and Marlene to leave him alone and find some other way to entertain themselves (which was perhaps his biggest mistake thus far today), because Sirius had cheerfully replied that Susie's cousins, Marlene, and him would put on a show for them.
Which led to the current situation:
"100 bottles of butterbeer on the wall, take one down pass it around 99 bottles of butterbeer on the wall." This song was made even worse by the fact that Sirius and Marlene were not in fact the source of the singing; rather fifty spiky, colorful yo-yos were shouting the words from a mouth-like slit that had appeared in their surface. Of course, the thing that made it more annoying than should be humanly possible was the fact that the yo-yo's all appeared to have stolen the voice of Rita Skeeter. And Remus Lupin would have been the first to tell you how very glad he was when that nosy girl had graduated three years ago and taken her painfully annoying voice with her!
As the spoinkle serenade continued Remus valiantly fought to keep from banging his head against the back of the seat in front of him. In the end, he lost horribly.
"You know, Remmie," Sirius began, "I think the pain you are inflicting upon yourself would be much more effective if you were to hit your head against the window, instead of the padded seat."
"He's right, you know." Marlene told Remus. "Switch seats with me, Remmie!"
And that was how Remus ended up losing as many brain cells as he possibly could by hitting his head on the window. Unfortunately for him, however, none of the brain cells he lost were ones currently being used to remember that he was friends with one Sirius Black. Oh, the unfairness of all life…
"This bowling-thingy was exciting, today." Sirius said suddenly, speaking over the serenading spoinkles. "I hope we'll get to liberate more of Susie's cousins wherever we go next."
And that was the last thing Remus Lupin heard before hitting his head so hard against the window that he knocked himself out, thus sparing himself the pain of having to endure the rest of the car ride with Sirius and Marlene.
!ycnaf ruoy stius ti fi weiver ,gnidaer rof sknaht-n\a
--do i need a pen name got VERY bored.
