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Chapter 25

"Dear Diary"

AKA

"Fucking Writer's Block"

If found, please return to Hermione Granger (Gryffindor)

Fred, if you read this, I'll kill you.

I'll kill you with fire.

I'm serious.

This is the first chance I've had to write in this for a while.

The adults, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it might be a bad idea for us to run around and sealed off about three-quarters of the castle. That included our tower, which was inconvenient to say the least, but was probably necessary. For some reason other people seem to have a lot more trouble with the various animals running rampant that we do.

I'd say It's nice to see them do something intelligent for a change, but I'm almost certain it was Prof. McGonagall that suggested it. It hardly seems fair to give everyone credit for it. It's too bad, because it might have made up for the fact that they're idiotic enough to be taken down by an eleven-year-old throwing blobs of jelly.

Not really, but it would be a start. Maybe.

They did manage to keep anyone from getting eaten, though. That's a really good thing, because I'd hate for Nev or Fred to go to prison just because a carnivorous creature they let loose in the castle ate some moron. Like it's their fault the idiot couldn't fend off an ice skating ninja narwhal.

Breaking them out would be annoying. I only have a couple of plans for that so far, and even those might not work. I'm pretty sure they will, though, since every one of them hinges on the people running the prison being morons.

I'd rather not waste them, though.

The adults have everything more or less under control now. To be honest, it's a lot more less and a lot less more. It's pretty safe to walk around in a group, but there's enough narwhals and Alliderions around that wandering the halls alone is a bad idea. Luckily, the narwhals still suck at eating kids and the Alliderions haven't quite figured out their leaping lunge doesn't work in the halls. It just sort of slams them into the ceiling, but it seems to be the only way they know how to attack. The only place the roof is high enough is the Great Hall, but that's the area where the most narwhals hang out.

Narwhals are a lot better at eating Alliderions than they are children.

I counted 107 different rodents during the course of the day today. The little buggers are all over the place. It seems like they did exactly what they were supposed to after Halloween: go and find a million and one places to hide. You can't go three steps without seeing one. Mammals of the Rodentia order seem to be the most common, but members of the Carnivora order - Mustela genus specifically - are pretty common as well.

They're more of an inconvenience than anything, and not even that for me. You have to watch your food and they merge into a wizard-swallowing doom ball if too many are in one area, but that's about it. We're still not real sure what's up with the ball thing, but it's hilarious to see someone get absorbed by one. It just sort of tosses them around until they grab something and pull themselves out or the ball breaks up on its own. It's good for a few bumps and scrapes, but that's it.

I think it's a pretty safe bet they won't get rid of our furry tenants for a while. Angel apparently likes having lots of "friends" around to play with, so her and Orchid have been giving some of them little creeper collars. She put out the word that anyone who eats one of them would be in for it, and I doubt there's many fuzzies here that will risk it.

She's basically securing herself a nice little breeding stock, which is surprisingly intelligent for her.

Amusingly, the castle still recognizes the collars as Orchid, and opens entrances to the familiar tunnels to anything wearing one. It took the walking treats all of 24 hours to realize this. I've already seen a collared beast opening an entrance for a gang of his uncollared brethren.

What the hell was that company teaching these things to do?

Our competent and incredibly useful staff finally figured out how to get rid of the ice today.

Oh, the ice. Did I mention that?

No, I didn't.

Harry followed through on that "favor" he owed the ice chick right after Halloween. I'm not sure how I feel about Fred pimping him out, especially since he doesn't know what's going on. Angel has a much clearer understanding, based on how she was looking at Fred. It brought up a rather worrying and uncomfortable subject.

I doubt Harry's family is going to do anything like mine did. He doesn't say much about them, but they don't seem like the type to give him The Talk. Seeing how Angel reacted, I was kind of hoping we could count on her to explain things. But when I asked her…

Her explanation confused me.

Either Mom didn't explain things well at all, sex works very different in the Other Place, or Angel is completely insane. I'm pretty sure people don't actually have the right parts to do half the things she was talking about. Then again, I don't even know if I've got it right, or if I completely misunderstood what she was trying to say. The parts I did understand made me blush far worse than when Mom talked about it.

She wasn't really happy about the whole "get Snow hot and bothered" plan Fred came up with. He sure seemed to appreciate it, though. I guess I can understand, considering the way she was squirming on the ice and that he's a huge pervert. Snow obviously enjoyed it too, and the… experience had the same effect as last time.

Fred's two feet of ice instantly became that weird white frost, plunging the castle into an ice age.

The halls weren't a frozen tundra for long. The staff managed to clear them out entirely today, so I guess they learned something from the last time this happened. It's pretty impressive, and shows a much longer attention span and memory than I gave most of them credit for.

The disappearance of the ice left the poor narwhals high and dry. They can't move through worked stone, it seems, and they're not all that good at walking. They looked so pathetic that I thought King was going to cry.

That's probably why he suggested the inline skates.

We're not really good at transfiguring the wheels yet, but the narwhals seem to like them. They certainly figured out what to do with them pretty quick after we left a few piles laying around.

The adults got pretty cocky after they managed to catch a couple of the beached beasts. I suppose they thought they'd have them all rounded up in no time. Given that the aquatic Saharan menaces are just as good at skating on dry land as they were the ice, I'd say they were wrong.

The staff was so busy chasing them around that busting into Filch's office and reclaiming the redehydrated narwhals was laughably simple.

We found that book Hagrid gave Nev months ago. No one's seen it in ages, and we've just been so preoccupied with other things. Even Nev had totally forgotten about it. If it hadn't happened to be in that Cho girl's robes when they mysteriously appeared among my things, we would have never thought about it again. It took several minutes and a great deal of thought, but Harry eventually told us that nineteen different people had owned it in the past two months, and that on at least one occasion we had all owned it in the same day. He's not 100% sure on that, since it's hard for him to keep track of things he didn't transfer on purpose, but if the number is inaccurate, it's because it's too low.

I didn't really pay much attention to it at the time, but I'm still kind of shocked that I didn't notice how tatty the thing is. Or maybe I did, but the memories were repressed as part of a cow-related traumatic experience. Either way, it's nasty. Just… nasty.

The parchment sheets it's written on were pretty cheap to begin with. They're not even all cut to the same size and shape, and some are definitely thicker than others. The whole thing is held together by three loops of old twine that act as a binding, at least one of which has needed replacing in the past. Even beyond that, the thing has clearly had a rough life. It's dirty as heck, with soil ground into it and an impressive array of stains on its pages.

Judging by the general look of the book, it seems like someone's journal. Given the that it has an actual title, it might be something more like the rough draft of a rough draft of a reference book. It's kind of hard to tell, though, because the whole idiotic thing is written in some kind of shorthand. I've seen both Gregg and Pitman shorthand before, and it's much too angular to be either of those. It must be one of the less common styles or, even worse, some sort of personal shorthand.

Deciphering it is going to be a massive task, and that's understating it by quite a bit. I'm pretty curious, though, so I'll probably at least look at it when I have a second.

The Alliderion population is getting a bit out of hand. They must either breed fast or the ones outside found a way into the castle, because there's just more and more of them. This is further complicated by the fact that they actually seem to be learning. They've figured out the narwhals have a hard time catching them in the halls, and some of them are realizing they can bite people.

Dear god, I wish Patravi and Lavender would just leave me the hell alone!

When I met them on the train, I was really upset that they seemed to get along so well. I was really hoping one of them would be my friend. My best friend, even. But since they hit it off so well, it seemed like that wasn't a possibility. I was so disappointed that I thought I was going to cry.

What the hell heck hell was I thinking!?

Ever since their makeup started vanishing - and what kind of eleven-year-old wears makeup? - they've been at each other's throats. I swear, not fifteen minutes goes by without me hearing one of them shriek like a harpy, and their familiars are even worse. Do you have any idea what it sounds like when a doe and a peacock scream at each other?

Not nice. Not nice at all.

Kara and Isabelle aren't ever in our rooms, aside from when they sleep. I wish that was an option for me. I'm not away from the boys for five minutes before one of them "just happens" to find me. It's pretty obvious they're looking for me, since both of them seem to have decided that I am, in fact, their best friend.

Despite my obviously ignoring them, whoever finds me insists on staying and distracting me with whatever insipid idiocy she's spouting. Then, when the other moron finds us, things only get worse. I go from listening to moronic yammerings about boys and fashion to hearing them fight. Again.

The worst part is that slamming them face-first into a stone wall does absolutely nothing to deter them. Nothing! They seem to have turned it into yet another stupid competition. Some kind of warped "she hurt me but we're still friends, aren't we so close?" stupidity. They practically beg me to hurt them. Like whoever I hurt worse is my best friend or something.

At least, I really hope that's why. The alternative makes me distinctly uncomfortable…

The boys scare the piss out of them, though. Harry especially, for some weird reason. He hasn't even set them on fire so far. Why would you be afraid of someone if they haven't even given you a friendly little scorching.

I'd say I should make sure to stick around them more, but I don't know if that's possible. It's pretty rare to not have at least one of them with me, unless I'm in the toilet.

Sometimes not even then, if you count Orchid and Angel.

I need to remember to check my bag more often.

Nev surprised us with something very interesting and amusing today.

A while back we noticed that most of the narwhals didn't leave the first floor. It's a pretty obvious problem, really. Despite being much smaller than a normal aquatic narwhal, some of the larger ones barely fit onto a stairwell, let alone have the ability to skate up it. They're pretty good at jumping and stuff, but they can't go nearly high enough to make it to the next floor.

Well, they couldn't, at least.

We've dubbed it the Magic-Assisted Narwhal Ascent System. It's a rune array that Nev came up with all on his own. I'd noticed him spending more time scribbling in his notebook than normal, which is saying something, but I had no idea he was working on this.

He got the idea from the conversation we had about seal-throwing stairs a while back. The MANAS is only triggered by narwhals, and applies an effect similar to a momentary Wingardium Leviosa. It literally throws the narwhals into the air. The effect isn't incredibly strong, but - coupled with their impressive jumping ability - it's enough to toss them up most flights of stairs.

The narwhals figured this out almost immediately. I'm honestly starting to wonder why people are frightened by dragons when there's apparently much worse things to be afraid of.

Now the narwhals have no problem going up staircases. Under normal circumstances, this would only last until someone found and scraped the array off the floor. Unfortunately for pretty much everyone but us, that's not very likely.

Sometimes Nev is evil enough that it kind of scares me.

He designed the array to go on the underside of the railings, not the floor.

Most of the animals don't really bother students anymore. Angel says it goes back to us making the skates for the narwhals.

Apparently the beasts are smart enough to know a good thing when they see it. Hogwarts is a much nicer environment then they're used to, and I'm certain being dehydrated and stuck on a shelf isn't a lot of fun. It's a hard fate to avoid if they're lacking mobility, so in order to ensure we continue to maintain and replace their skates, they decided not to piss us off.

A reasonable course of action, though I'm not sure why they'd think eating our classmates would upset us.

I guess the Sissy Wolves were more than happy to cooperate with the narwhals, especially when they were offered protection from the Alliderions. The two species have been actively hunting the nasty creatures since, with the Sissy Wolves baiting them and leading them straight into narwhal ambushes. They must taste a whole lot better than they look, considering that both narwhal and Sissy Wolves more or less leave the humans alone.

Oh, sure, the wolves chew on stragglers a bit and the narwhals chase them around, but it's more for fun than anything.

This is doing a pretty good job of keeping the Alliderion down to a reasonable number. I'm kind of glad for that. Even though their bones are hollow so they can jump high, making them crunch real good when you hit them with a strong Shoving Jinx, it does get old after a while. It was only really fun for the first several dozen, and now they're just an annoyance.

I do manage to get a rather interesting splatter sometimes. I had one the other day that looked like a clown. I think it did, at least. I didn't have time to get a good look at it before Harry screamed bloody murder and torched it.

Apparently clowns are one of the few things worse than a daisy.

Having dozens of carnivorous predators in the halls is probably a bad thing in general, I guess. I feel like it should bother me more than it does, but it's not really more than an inconvenience. They're starting to avoid me, anyway.

That's so weird.

One of the narwhals said something that really pissed Angel off today. I don't know exactly what it was. She was just muttering about them having an attitude and getting uppity, stomping around, and growling. I mean actually growling, by the way. I have no idea how she produces that sound, but it's pretty obvious her throat isn't structured quite like a human's. No person could ever make that noise.

I guess what it said - and it's still really weird to think of a narwhal talking - isn't really relevant. What's relevant is the fact that she was really, really mad. She was mad enough that she actually tracked down the biggest narwhal she could find and beat the ever-living piss out of it with the broad side of its own sword.

Well, technically she beat the piss out of it with two swords, four maces, three lances, six spears, a warhammer, two axes and a katana. It turns out narwhals have a tendency to break most things they're hit with. Regardless, she must have impressed the other monodons, because they were lining up to hand over their weapons by the end of it.

As a side note, Hogwarts apparently has a living set of Edo-era samurai armor wandering around. Who knew?

It kind of makes me wonder what's in all those places we can't get to. A good chunk of the castle is completely inaccessible.. There is are just blank walls at the end of any hall that should lead to them. You can't even get in from the outside. All the windows just lead to places we can already get into, no matter where it looks like they should be.

It's infuriating.

There must have been a lot more going on here at some point, because we only use somewhere between twenty-five and thirty percent of the castle. The exact number is hard to nail down, because the numbers don't seem to add up.

I have no doubt that it's because of some idiotic magic-thing that exists solely to give me a headache and a nosebleed.

I guess I can add "narwhal goddess" to my resume now.

Angel says it was a combination of things we did that triggered it. According to her, the narwhal gods - which is are a thing they have, apparently - are equal parts kind and cruel.

On one hand, we've made them skates, the MANAS, and new weapons since they've gotten here. On the other, I've tried to eat one a couple of times, Harry has set several on fire, King has punched a few through walls, George has tested a bunch of potions on them, and Fred has been riding them around dressed in full cowboy gear while screaming "yippie-kai-yay!" and twirling a lasso.

He's surprisingly good with that thing, by the way. You should have seen him loop Drico by the ankle, tie it to the narwhal's horn and ram a spur into its side.

Also, Nev's tried to lick their eyeballs more than once, chased several down to tie pretty bows on their horns and painted a rather crude picture on the side of at least one. All while he was higher than normal, of course.

So now the things pretty much do whatever we say. The Sissy Wolves too, for that matter. I guess they were converted to worship the Great Hornless Gods or something. The narwhals do make pretty good mounts, the Sissy Wolves are really soft and make good pillows or feet warmers, and they're both handy for smiting people with.

The beasts have even decided to bring us regular tributes. It would appear that there's a lot of weird things living in the Forbidden forest.

Most of them taste surprisingly good.

Mr. Moo Moo the Fourth died a horrific death today. It's a disgusting thing to see, but somehow watching it seems like the right thing to do. It's like paying our respects to the poor beast as Orchid tears it apart in the worst way imaginable.

Speaking of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that the damn plant actually aims for us. It seems like no matter what we do, she manages to coat us with warm cow slurry. We actually transfigured a small barrier (Professor McGonagall was more than happy to teach us the extra bit of magic) to protect us, but she somehow managed to get us anyway. It's a bit hard to believe that she somehow lobbed a chunk off still-twitching meat right over it on accident.

Getting hit with a meaty cow artillery shell is about as fun as it sounds. At least I was smart enough to keep my mouth closed. Harry hasn't quite learned that lesson.

It's strange, though. He doesn't seem nearly as bothered by it as he used to.

The strangest thing happened today.

While we were on our way to Charms class, we stumbled across a talking suit of armor. I didn't even know our armor could talk. As if that wasn't odd enough, it sounded exactly like Fred.

Of course, its claim that it was Fred immediately aroused my suspicions. I realize I haven't known Fred that long, but I like to think we're close. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if he was a talking suit of armor. In fact, I'm quite certain he would have told us if he was a suit of armor, since he doesn't really have a filter between his mouth and brain.

He's probably stand in a girl's shower, looking all innocent and armor-y if he could.

The suit of armor tried hard to convince us it was Fred, of course. It even made up some cockemamy story about transfiguring the armor around himself. I suppose being wrapped in a metal prison to scare random first-years as they pass is the sort of thing Fred would do. But, I'm sure he would have told us if he was planning something like that. I mean, we're first-years, too. I'm sure Fred would realize laying in wait to scare us would be a bad idea. Fred certainly wouldn't be dumb enough forget enclosing himself in an iron casket would make it impossible to use his wand.

We left the armor behind, of course. Who knows what sort of mischief a suit of talking, lying armor that tries to impersonate people would get up to?

I regretted that decision a bit when Fred never showed up for dinner. Hopefully the armor didn't do something to him. I was going to have Harry set him on fire for being a pervert this morning, but I suddenly feel like forgiving him. After all, who knows how he might have suffered in the cold grip of that monster.

It worries me just thinking about it.

Or maybe I'm confusing worrying for smiling.

Hagrid didn't say much about the book. That he couldn't read it and that it belonged to a friend of his was about all we could get out of him. He seemed reluctant to talk about it, so we dropped the subject.

The red-brown stains on the pages suggest it wasn't pretty.

After we visited him, I had to go and track down another pair of weasels. I'm not sure what happened. How do you lose a couple of weasels? I've never heard of that happening to someone before. They're usually pretty content to nap in my robes, and always come back if they leave. They're obviously too happy with me to leave.

That's okay, though. It only took a couple of minutes to catch a few, since I enlisted Angel's help. She's a little weird and not that bright, but she can be pretty useful if she wants to.

Headwig seems to like the new pair at least as much as she did the last ones. She keeps cuddling up to them and giving them little nibbles on their ears. It's so cute.

The damn cat somehow "lost" two QCCS today. Her right index and middle finger are completely sheathless. It's pretty obvious she didn't actually lose them on accident. I mean, how do you lose something that's literally clamped to your hand? The bracelet is even made so she can't take it off herself.

The remains of the destroyed chains make it pretty clear she cut them off, but why? Why wouldn't she cut the rest off?

I was trying to some answers, but she got all whiney at Harry.

"My Boy, Mi'oh is being mean to me. Am I a bad kitty?"

A cat should not be able to put on the sad puppy eyes like that. Even King was looking at me like I'd done something wrong! And Harry, being the total pushover that he is, just told her she wasn't a bad kitty and everyone let the matter drop.

I swear Orchid was laughing at me every time the others turn away. It's strange that she appears to understand some things perfectly fine, while others just elude her despite being even simpler to grasp. I suppose it makes sense to a degree. She isn't a mammal, and isn't even - technically speaking - a corporeal being. The records I've found make her sound much more like Lady: a spirit inhabiting a physical object.

Who knows how someone like that would think? Her frame of reference would be completely foreign to our own. I'm pretty sure the things she does understand are more based on instinct than an actual thought process.

So King and I get to make a couple of new QCCS now. It's annoying, but I guess it's not a big deal. Heck, we might just replace them all. We had some ideas about how to make them open and close without her having to touch them that we wanted to try. It'd be nice if we could make them a little smaller, too, so I wouldn't have to listen to her complain about how they were "heavy and uncomfortable and icky" anymore.

Divinity tried to get all rapey with Angel today. It happens at least once a week, but I guess Mrs. Kitty had a bad day or something. She actually got pissed off enough to retaliate, despite the fact that Harry has asked her not to hurt people. She hurled the spirit right over Ravenclaw and pegged Snow with her.

It turned out to be a pretty good distraction, since the hit slammed the ice girl out of her seat and knocked her kimono open. The dumb spirit actually spent the rest of the day trying to grope her, despite the fact that she nearly froze her shiny little fingers off every time.

How strong is Angel, exactly? That was a pretty impressive throw.

Cats in general are capable of bursts of powerful speed or strength. There's a reason zoos have to put five-meter walls around their enclosures. If you assume Angel's body is still more like a cat's than a human's when she changes, which is a pretty safe assumption considering some of the noises she makes, she should have a much higher power to mass ratio than a normal witch.

That reminds me. The castle's walls are solid and strong, but they're full of windows and stuff. A lot of them aren't particularly high.

I'd better sharpen my shears again, just in case.

I can't find my weasels. Again.

How does a person manage to lose two sets of weasels in a few weeks? It just doesn't seem normal.

Headwig seems pretty upset, too. It's been a pretty bad week for her. First her weasel friends vanish, then she somehow manages to get her armor all dirty again. It took the better part of an hour to get all that crusty gunk off. Where in the world does she keep finding that stuff.

At least I've learned to use red cloths now. The stains don't really show up on them. I'll have to make sure Harry gets some more for me.

Ron's nasty-ass rat got into our dorm room again today.

I know he somehow managed to clean the thing off, but it's still nasty. It's fur is gross looking, its tail is clipped short, and the missing finger makes it look creepy.

I swear that thing watches us change. I see those beady little eyes on me all the time. Harry says it watches him a lot, too. The thing is some kind of magic pervert-rat or something.

I'd think it was like Angel, but human animagi are really, really rare. Plus, it's doing a pretty good job of hiding it if it is.

Gross thing. We'll have to find some way to "accidentally" set it on fire.

Harry ignited Fred seven times for various offences, George twice for trying to eat eggs, both of us while we were setting random potions supplies on fire, Neville - who was standing behind Fred - twice, Drico four times for being Drico, Pansy once in an attempt to eliminate her stench (it didn't work), Chew three times (that girl has a nasty habit of being in the wrong place), and both a large group of older Slytherins and the smaller group of Hufflepuffs standing too close to them.

Thirty-one people in a single week. That's a new record.

We also made a note not to set fire to Pansy again. While the grease makes her burn really good, it also seems to act as some sort of insulator. The girl barely notices that she's on fire.

Everyone else does, though.

That stuff does not smell good when it burns.

We've been brewing potions in the Common Room, especially Firehole Gelly. There's more than enough room, and Orchid can easily grow any iron wood tables or shelves we need. Between the fact that we have a very large stock of ingredients "donated" by are peers and the fact that Orchid can just grow a lot of the stuff we might need, we barely even had to leave. Our little alcove was conveniently close to the dorms, and completely ignored due to the SEP charm over it.

Well, almost completely ignored. Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to have to find another place to do it.

As it turns out, Perfect Prick Percy is familiar with both the SEP charm and Firehole Gelly. He finally noticed what we were doing, and he wasn't impressed at all. I guess it's kind of understandable, since the Gelly can go off like a napalm bomb and most people are pathetically unprepared to be on fire.

He did give us a few hours to clear out, and even said he wouldn't report it if we did. That was surprisingly nice of him, so I almost felt a little respect for him.

Then he started bollocking Fred and George.

I realize I don't have any siblings, but I can't even imagine talking to them the way he does. How could you possibly call your brothers disappointments and failures? How could you tell them they won't get anywhere in life for "fooling around," when they spend so much time and work so hard learning and experimenting?

The twins say that he, like practically everyone in their family, don't pay a whole lot of attention to what they're doing. I can't imagine having so much work overlooked and so much talent ignored in favor of being scolded for making a few eyeballs people lose an eyeball here and there.

How can people be so awful?

Fred pissed me off this morning, but he ran before I could properly punish him. I spent a good chunk of the day trying to track him down. I even sent a few hit discipline squads out to find him, but it was no good.

There's definitely something the twins aren't telling us. The castle's big, but we don't use most of it and there's only so many halls. I suppose he might have been hiding in a broom closet or unused classroom, but I think my narwhal and Sissy Wolf minions would find him. The Sissy Wolves

You know, that's really annoying to keep writing.

In my divine providence as a hornless goddess, I declare them Swolves from this day forth. Let all who defy me suffer my narwhal-fueled wrath.

I mean, I think I'll just tell the boys they're Swolves now.

Anyway, the Swolves have a pretty good sense of smell, and I'm sure they know his scent. There's no way he could hide. They also sometimes pop up in places they shouldn't be, coming from the wrong side of the hallway or ending up somewhere they could only have gotten if they passed us.

No matter how many times we ask, they just say it's a surprise and that we'll see eventually.

I guess I'll let it go for now.

So, when I finally caught red hair moving out of the corner of my eye, I just spun around and swung. I didn't want Fred to get away again, after all. Unfortunately, it was George, not his brother.

I think I heard something pop when I punched him.

For obvious reasons I didn't want to admit I'd mistaken him for Fred. So, I told him the first thing that came to mind.

I said I suffered an unnatural compulsion to hit anyone who steps on seventeen cracks while travelling north.

Yeah, I don't think he bought it.

So, George had been very careful to avoid cracks when we're headed for the north side of the castle. In retrospect, my excuse was exactly the kind of stupidity you'd expect around here.

I've been counting under my breath everytime he stops paying attention to where he's stepping, just to mess with him.

It seems like fair payback.

He's been hiding something from me, even more than he already was. I can tell, since it's surprisingly easy to tell when he and his brother are being cagey sometimes. Ri and Ru have been running around all over the place, and I've heard a few people complaining about supplies missing from their trunks. It's not uncommon for them to "borrow" things they want, but they're usually a lot more subtle about it.

What's worse, I'm pretty sure Harry and Neville are in on it too. I've seen a lot of swallows around lately, and I've seen Angel outside a few times. She's been lurking around the edges of the forest rather than playing in it. If she's doing something out there, it's a safe bet Orchid is as well.

Then again, maybe she isn't. It can be really hard to tell whether she's with Angel or Neville sometimes. It seems like it only takes her a minute or two to switch from one to the other, no matter how far apart they are.

That damn rat is pretty good at dodging spells.

I swear, it knows when we're getting ready to torch it. It isn't that surprising, I suppose. Most of the animal familiars are a lot smarter than they should be.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was smarter than Ron.

Had a breakthrough with the idiot book. Sort of.

Angel saw me looking at it, and started picking up patterns in the script like crazy. She found more in two minutes than I have in a week. She says her other language is 100x as idiotic complex, so it's easy.

The problem is that the linguistic structure she's used to is retarded completely different. I asked her about it, and ended up regretting it. Why would you start in the center of a page and read out? I guess it makes sense to have the core concepts in the middle, but the rest…

I ended up with a massive headache when she started going into detail on how things are read.

So, she can't write, read or convert the shorthand into something I can understand. She doesn't even understand it, because our written language is just as dumb to her as hers is to us.

Still, it's nice to have a bit of information. Now I have a much easier time picking out some of the recurring patterns. The book is like a massive cryptogram: the more patterns you can isolate, the easier the rest is. Unfortunately, this little tidbit is probably around 0.5% of the puzzle.

That's 0.5% more than I had, at least.

I got Lady to mess with the water in most of the toilets.

She can leave little tiny fragments of herself in liquids, animating them slightly. It's a lot like how Orchid can order plants around, but the bits of Lady are even dumber and fade faster. They can still follow very simple instructions for an hour or so, though.

"Go up as hard as you can when someone sits above you," is a pretty simple order. About 80% of our toilets suddenly acquired bidets. Of course, they were a lot closer to a firehose than a garden hose. But even if they're powerful enough to throw you right off the seat, it still counts.

King thought it was pretty good. "An excellent use of resources," he said. I guess we can use each other's familiars without penalty, as long as we convince them ourselves and don't go through their master. Considering how willing they generally are to cause mayhem, I don't think that's much of a restriction.

I wish Lady had told them to make an exception for me, though. I forgot elementals don't exactly have what we'd consider common sense.

It did not feel good.

The cat helped the fox sisters catch half the Swolves in the castle and dyed them to match the girls perfectly. Now there's black and white canines running around all over the place. Even though the foxes are way smaller, it can be pretty hard to spot them amongst the hordes. I'm not sure whether the plan came from the foxes or Angel, but it's pretty effective camouflage.

They dyed the other half eye-gouging shades of neon pink, green and yellow. It must have been some sort of magic dye, because the colors are far brighter than they should be. They somehow actually glow in the dark, despite not emitting light of any kind.

The colorful Swolves literally hurt to look at, and they aren't much more than blinding lines when they shoot across a hall in front of you. They leave streaks across your vision and everything.

The new Potions room was supposed to be opened tomorrow. They buried the hall in detection spells and various wards. They even put flame retardant charms all over the place. It's almost insulting that they thought that would be enough.

It took a while to get the mixture right. Everything I've read says it's extremely finicky. We ended up sending the twins (the furry ones) to steal ingredients from all over the place. Whoever designed the tunnels didn't have small, highly intelligent familiars in mind, because the little furballs can get everywhere. They stole ingredients from a third of the school to get what we needed. Then they stole the rest, just because they could.

So, I made my first pipe bomb.

It was an acid pipe bomb, to be more accurate. That bit came from King, surprisingly. We were trying to decide how big of a bomb it would take to destroy the place completely, and I think it make him nervous. Either way, it worked out.

Transfigured liquids are considered useless because you can't eat them safely or use them as ingredients or reagents in any kind of magic. Transfigured anything is like that, since the residual magic messes things up. They still have all the more mundane effects, however.

That means sulfuric acid still acts exactly like sulfuric acid should.

It wasn't until afterward that we realized dissolving the containers of a crapton of potion ingredients and adding a bunch of acid at the same time might not be a great idea.

The upside is that we'll be missing Charms, Potions and History of Magic tomorrow. I'm pretty sure it'll take them at least that long to get all the acid jelly stuff off the walls, floor and ceiling of the hallway. It looks pretty sticky, and it's eating through the stone as fast as Hogwarts can fix it.

It also seems worth noting that George was worryingly interested in the process of creating makeshift explosives. It would be worrying if I was anyone but me, at least. I'm pretty sure I don't have to be concerned about being on the wrong side of something like that.

I'm probably in more danger of being immolated by Harry.

Or myself.

With Christmas coming up, I have to admit I'm feeling a little worried. This is technically the first time I've had to get gifts for my friends, since it's technically the first time I've had friends to buy them for. I can't help but worry that they won't like them. What would I do then?

It's not like they'll stop liking me because because I got them a bad gift, right? I mean, we hurt each other for fun all the time. What's not liking your present compared to being set on fire?

I hope not…

A/N:

This one ended up being a little different than normal, obviously. It's the ultimate result of rewriting the chapter in completely different ways. That's why this took so long, by the way. I didn't like any of them and ended up scrapping every single one.

Basically, I suffered from a massive lack of motivation and inspiration. This took way longer than I wanted it too, and I didn't have any better luck with Unheroic or New Game Plus. I was just in a really major slump.

As far as the other two go, I have a couple of different directions I'd like to take them in. They are, of course, mutually exclusive. None of them seem to work quite right, so I'm stuck for the moment.

Part of the problem with SF was that I wanted to move right along to Christmas, but there was a couple of important bits I wanted to add. They're in there, by the way, though some are more obvious than others. This pretty heavily conflicted with my desire to not get sidetracked into a 20,000 word chapter filled with nothing but Giggledust-fueled narwhal duels.

So, I kind of wanted to sum things up a bit, but no one likes sitting there and reading a massive chapter full of infodump. I was already thinking of doing the occasional side chapter, including at least one from Hermione's journal. I decided to try it here, rather than a more typical narration, and I like to think it worked out pretty good.

Lots of this actually came from the scrapped chapters. Little pieces from many of them, stitched all together into something resembling a coherent whole.

We finally make it to Christmas in the next chapter. I've actually gotten a lot of work done for it already, so it'll be a much smaller gap between postings. I'm hoping that finishing it will help with the other two stories. If not, I'll just work on this until I'm inspired.

That's about it for the A/N. Sorry about the lack of incoherent rambling. I haven't been sleeping much, and my brain slows down a lot when I'm exhausted.

…

Is that really something I should be apologizing for?