Dumbledore was sitting at his desk alone.
"Where's Peeves?" asked Ron.
"Right here." answered Dumbledore.
"The only person here apart from Harry, Hermione, and me is you."
"Exactly, I am Peeves."
"WHAT?" Ron was in shock. Peeves couldn't be Dumbledore, he just couldn't!
"Well," said Dumbledore, "I guess that's not entirely truthful. Another person wrote the column quite often, but it was my idea, therefore, I am Peeves."
"Hermione!" gasped Ron, "How did you guess it was Dumbledore?"
"He left many obvious hints, and it was so hard for me to not laugh at your stupidity." she answered.
"True, he should've gotten the clues, but he gave the second best guess. As you know Peeves has insulted Harry greatly, and shown a dislike for werewolves and the Weasleys. Professor Snape and I wrote this column together. Since I started Ask Peeves, and Hermione was the only person to accuse me (unlike Professor Snape who many people thought to be Peeves), I decided she won the meet Peeves contest. One reason I chose the name 'Peeves' because he is an angry man. I knew many people would still think of him as the Peeves here, despite how different they are. The other reason was when I was done performing a charm on the Muggle Studies classroom to allow computers to work, I was as they say 'surfing the web,' and found a website used to search for other sites called Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves is a low quality 'search engine', as Muggles say and cannot compete with a very helpful one entitled Google. I also thought the butler graphic made it look even worse than it was. From Ask Jeeves I made the parody Ask Peeves and even designed a cartoon that looks like Jeeves, but is making a rude hand gesture and is carrying a baseball bat. If I had put this in a Muggle newspaper it would have been much more funny, as I'm sure Hermione is the only one who has any idea what I'm talking about."
"Yes, I did notice the parody, and you're right, Ask Jeeves cannot compete with Google and Yahoo." said Hermione.
"I also," he continued, "wanted to get back at the Daily Prophet for printing such fake articles last year, and I decided that Ask Peeves would be great for that. I put it in the Daily Non-Prophet along with many articles slamming the Daily Prophet. When Professor Snape found out I was writing it, he wanted to write for it too. I said I was very busy with my job and writing all of the paper's content, so I let him write Ask Peeves a lot of times. I'm sure if you went back and looked at previous columns it would be easy to tell who wrote what."
"But Professor," said Ron, "you don't seem like the type who would swear that much or be mean to people. Snape does, but you wrote a lot of Ask Peeves, right?"
"Yes, but Peeves wasn't me, Ron. He was an angry advice columnist. I told Professor Snape to put in hints to his identity, because another purpose of Ask Peeves was seeing who could figure out who Peeves is. Most of the people figured out it was a Hogwarts teacher, but I still got an unusual person who still thought it was Peeves the Poltergeist. Now I can't be writing a newspaper everyday, even with other teacher's help. I'm asking if you three would like to continue writing the Daily Non-Prophet."
"YES!" said Hermione, "As long as it doesn't interfere with classes, I would love to! I'll be able to write about half, Harry can cover the other half, and Ron can write Ask Peeves!"
"I'd love to do that, Hermione, but I've never gotten an opportunity to read anything in that paper but Ask Peeves." Harry retorted.
"Then I'll show you tonight. They really are hilarious."
"And I get to be the new Peeves?" Ron asked hardly believing it.
"Yes." said Dumbledore, "You can start tomorrow."
Ron felt like he might faint. He stood there gaping at Dumbledore when Hermione asked, "If you were planning on writing Ask Peeves, then why did you put that advertisement in the Great Hall?"
"I thought it would be humorous to read people's submissions."
Dumbledore then gave them information on mailing the copies out to people, and found the majority of the people who subscribed were Hogwarts students. That meant that it was not only a non-prophet, but also a non-profit.
After all the explanations and handing of papers, Dumbledore said, "You have paper to write, get lost, dullards."
So Harry, Ron, and Hermione left the office to continue the Daily Non-Prophet, Ron still in pleasant shock.
A/N: So that's the end, thanks for reading my story. I plan to write a sequel soon, but for now I'll continue this story with just Ask Peeves questions. I'll keep on answering them until I run out, so keep sending them!
