A/N: Sorry for taking so long, I have no excuse for not updating earlier. I hope you can me for being lax in my duties. But, apologies aside, I feel really good about this chapter and the next one should be done at a far more agreeable time. Well, here it is:

Hailey Potter Chapter 8: Mysteries Found and Mysteries Revealed

The year was quickly turning into a nightmare, not only had Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly-Headless Nick been petrified, but the new student Thomas Alexander as well. The strange thing was, while Justin and Nick seemed to have been done at the same time, and there was an excuse for why Justin wasn't dead, having seen through Nick, Thomas was an anomaly. The faculty and staff decided to hold a meeting so that they could try and figure out the cause of the attacks.

It was at that time it seemed that Madame Pince decided to come forward with a book she had on mythical creatures that she had just remembered about that described the Basilisk in great detail, as well as how everything had occurred. But it still did not explain how Thomas had survived when normally he shouldn't have. The fleeing spiders even added to the theory that it was the king of snakes.

However it was at that moment that Filch stepped forward and announced that he had decided to use an insect repellant that worked especially well on spiders and that that was the reason they were fleeing. With this new information everyone was stumped as to how the students were being attacked. And so they went back to the drawing board.

HPDM

In the infirmary, Madame Pomfrey was looking over Thomas' records and found that she didn't have any medical information on him. Frowning, she decided that now was as good a time as any, since she hadn't seen him in the infirmary before, and probably wouldn't get another chance like this again. And so, after grabbing the paperwork she would need to do, she walked over to his bedside and started the exam, only to be stumped when her wand came back negative. Never experiencing such a thing before, she tried again only to get the same result. So, walking back to her medical closet, she pulled out the muggle devices that they use to check heart rate and a syringe to extract blood. Not entirely enthusiastic to have to use them, she walked over to his bedside and put the plugs in her ears and placed the end near his heart. What she heard in reply was even stranger than she could have imagined.

The beat was so slow that if she hadn't been listening for it she might not have heard it. Considering that everyone else had a normal heartbeat beyond the fact that they were petrified, it was strange that his was slower. So, worried for his safety, she grabbed the syringe and placed the needle into the vein on the back of his hand and filled the device with blood. When she removed the needle, she prepared to heal the small wound but when she turned around it was like he had never been poked at all.

Frowning, she went over to her cabinet and grabbed the necessary equipment in case her magic wouldn't work on the blood. And so, once she was all set up, she pointed her wand at the blood and said the diagnostic spell, and was pleasantly surprised when she got a positive response, and the papers began to fill themselves out with the new data.

When the papers were done, she picked them up and began to read, and when she was done, her eyes had widened almost to the point of popping out of her head.

"It can't be!"

HPDM

The day only went downhill from there, with the disappearance of Ginny Weasley and the words on the wall everyone knew that someone would die, although no one knew that the one who took her had written something quite different from what was on the wall now. And Hailey, feeling compelled to help someone who looked up to her so much, and so, having ascertained the location of the Chamber of Secrets from Myrtle, she opened the sink and slipped down the tunnel.

Of course, no one thought that she would ever find it, even the one who wrote the second message, and so while the perpetrator was prowling the halls, trying to find his prey, she was already miles beneath the school opening the true entrance of the Chamber.

HPDM

Hailey made her way through the door and walked into a high-ceilinged room with giant columns on both sides with stone carvings of snakes adorning each of them. She went forward finally noticed a body lying on the floor, a body with vivid red hair.

Running across the dimly-lit room, she fell to her knees tossing aside her wand and shook Ginny's still form.

"Wake up, Ginny! Wake up! Why won't you wake up!" she cried as she shoo the youngest Weasley.

"She won't wake up." A voice said quietly behind her.

Whirling around, she reached for wand but couldn't see it. She looked up to see an unknown face twirling it between his fingers.

"Can I have that back, please? And what do you mean she won't wake up?"

The teen before her shook his head. "I don't think so. Not until I am sure you won't act rashly. And as for the girl, she's tired from writing the message on the wall and rushing down here before anyone noticed she was missing."

Of course, that made no sense to Hailey, as she didn't understand why someone would write their own death note and then hide before it was read.

"I don't understand."

The strange teen with raven-colored hair shook his head, "Didn't you read the note?"

Hailey looked up at him indignantly, "Of course I did, it said that she was taken to the Chamber of Secrets and her bones would lie here forever!"

At that the boy frowned, "That wasn't the note I had her write. Someone must have changed it. What it read before it was removed was, 'The Heir of Slytherin awaits his own in the Chamber of Secrets'. I trust you understand that?"

She looked up at him confused, "Who's the other heir? I don't understand."

At this he face-palmed, "I see that you weren't told of your heritage, young lady."

Hailey bristled at this, "Hey! Who are you to be calling me young? You're like, what, 5 years older than me?"

The teen rolled his eyes, "Hardly, from what I have gathered, I am at least fifty years older than you. If you don't know already, my name is Tom Riddle. And I'm your grandfather."

The Heiress of Slytherin stared blankly at her supposed grandfather, unsure about what to say. She hadn't expected hear that when she came down to rescue her former friend's sister. Honestly she wasn't sure what to make of the situation, and so did what a great many before her have done when faced with startling information: she fainted.

Now Tom, while being in the room, wasn't quite corporeal, as the process to become so required quite a bit of blood and several potions that his non-solid hands couldn't create and his inability to move beyond the Chamber proper limited him even more. Sure, he could touch things and hold things, but he wasn't able to imbue magic into potions, as his own magic was sorely needed to keep himself alive, as it were.

Looking around, he tried to think of something he could use to make her more comfortable.

Tom, while not being big on showing emotions in public, did actually have them, and therefore not an "unfeeling monster who loved to torture the innocent" as Dumbledore once portrayed him. Sure, he had killed his father and grandparents and uncle, but they deserved it, and were the only ones he ever killed. The reason? Morfin was a repeat offender and two-time Azkaban resident who took pleasure in killing muggles and raping women. His father, Tom Riddle Sr. left his mother while she was pregnant all but killing her in the process as without resources it made her pregnancy a great deal harder and when the time came she didn't have the strength to survive long beyond naming him and praying he looked like his father. His Grandparents were added on because they had done nothing to stop their son from leaving his wife, just because he claimed to be hoodwinked. Honestly the only reason he left her was because he didn't want to care for a child and he had grown bored of her. They deserved their fate. Not that he was going to tell his granddaughter that.

He shook his head. It was still weird to think of himself being a grandpa, after all, to the last of his knowledge he was just a school student who never failed a class and was Head Boy.

He was lucky that Dippet had been in charge at that time otherwise he might not have gotten the quality education he had, for as soon as Dumbledore was in office he removed the old History of Magic Teacher and reinstated the older one who had perished almost two centuries earlier: Binns.

A drop of water on his head brought him back to the present as he continued to look around for something he could transfigure when he looked up at the statue of Salazar Slytherin and gave the password in parseltongue:

"Speak to me, Slytherin! Wisest of the Hogwarts Four!"

When the mouth opened fully, a quick command for stairs and he was inside Salazar's personal library and workshop.

Looking around he finally found a chair and grabbed it along with a stool and took them out to the main chamber and walked toward the two girls lying on the ground. Laying the two objects in his hand down, he pulled out Hailey's wand and pointed it at the chair, and transfigured it into a bed with sheets, and then, picking up the stool, turned it into a pillow that he laid on it and then, pocketing the wand once more, picked up the two girls and put them both under the covers and walked back into the workshop to grab another chair that he used to watch the two and waited for his heir to wake up.

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