29.

"Bet you wish you were back in Muggle Studies, Seamus," Ron teased during lunch.

Seamus and Dean both shot him a look, but Ron didn't care. He had just found out that the Divination class had been measuring each other's earlobes to determine their lifespan. And that Seamus was expected to live until he was eight years old. Obviously this hadn't impressed Professor Trelawney, so she had issued them a two-page essay on why this skill was particularly important to possess.

"Oh, shove it Weasley," Seamus muttered.

"Hey, what do you think we're doing tomorrow in Muggle Studies?" Harry asked Hermione loudly to avert their attention.

"I don't know," Hermione started.

"What?" Fred and George shouted after spitting out their food.

Hermione rolled her eyes, "Oh, you two shove it, I don't read minds."

"Why is everyone shoving it today?" Frankie asked amusingly as she sat down at the neighboring Ravenclaw table.

"Oh, simply because everyone is in the shoving mood," George said indifferently.

"Or, more or less, we want everyone else to shove it themselves," Fred thought over.

"How can you guys be in a bad mood? We just had so much fun in Muggle Studies!" Frankie tried to reason.

"Never thought I'd hear 'fun' and 'Muggle studies' in the sentence," Fred muttered to George under his breath, George nodding in agreement.

"Ms. Jobey? A word, if you will," Professor McGonagall announced behind the twins, making them jerk at her firm and unexpected tone.

"Oh, Professor, we're up now," Fred breathed heavily.

"Mr. Weasley, if I ever had either you or your brother here awake in my class I would be able to tell if there was a difference. Ms. Jobey, it'll only take a minute," McGonagall asked Frankie from the Ravenclaw table. Frankie did not seem surprised, on the contrary, she sighed and nodded expectantly.

When Luna asked her in Muggle Studies what McGonagall had wanted, Frankie laughed and replied, "Oh, nothing, she just wanted to make sure that I was getting that spell, the Locomotion one, right. I was having a bit of trouble with it yesterday, you saw."

As it just so happens, not that much happened the rest of the day. In fact, compared to the Great Muggle Studies Debate, every other class was dreadfully dull. Back to the typical Monday tendency.

So, to save you from sniveling and whimpering for more to read, let's just fast forward to the next day, right before Muggle Studies.

But before we begin, let me remind you that Tuesdays are not much better than Mondays. True, it is one less day to slog through, but Tuesdays are sometimes worse because you were up most of the previous night cramming for tests and scribbling essays.

Now that's off of my chest, on with the day:

"What…kind…of…idiot…builds…this…many…stairs?" Ron heaved up the spiraling stairwell up to Muggle Studies. "Why aren't you dead yet?" he asked Hermione, who wasn't sweating a drop.

"Oh, yesterday in Potions we learned how to make the Preventing Perspiration Infusion, so I just pocketed some of it after Snape graded it," Hermione explained as she pulled out a quarter-filled vile of blue-greenish semi-liquid.

"Hermione, that is seriously smart," Harry commented as he wiped his forehead from beads of sweat.

"Yeah, would it kill you to share next time?" Frankie demanded with a half-smile on her face.

Hermione grimaced at Frankie's comment, she had come to regard Frankie as a pleasant, congenial, biting Blast-Ended Skrewt.

At long last they all ended up at the door usually open to their classroom, but today a sign hang from the front, saying: 'MUGGLE STUDIES CLASS: REPORT TO GREAT HALL AFTER LUNCH'.

"Oh, no way!" Ron protested at the sign as if demanding it to read something else.

"Ron, chill, it's easier going down anyway," Harry sighed, also angered by the sign.

"But we still came up," Bea whined.

"But at least we didn't stay in the Great Hall," Luna observed.

All five students whirled around at Luna's comment. "What on earth do you mean?" Harry asked.

"If we had stayed in the Great Hall, then we would have disturbed the Rite of the Fourth Tuesday in November," Luna said with a straight and guiding face.

"Dare we ask what that is?" Ron asked, still huffy over his overexertion of stairs as they all headed down.

"Oh, don't you know? Trumpling Orpilas escape from their pods every fourth Tuesday of November and scavenge around for crumbs in the Great Hall," Luna went further to explain.

"You're right Luna, thank goodness we didn't get in the way of their scavenging," Bea commented politely as she and Harry shared a smile. Hermione rolled her eyes to keep from battling simple facts with Luna while Ron and Frankie also shared a smile.

But as they arrived with beads of sweat piling on their foreheads, (except for Hermione), they found the doors closed and there was more than the Muggle Studies class standing outside of them. If truth be told, Harry would bet his Firebolt that the entire school was there.

"What's going on?" he asked Neville, who was shoved in the crowd beside him.

"No one knows, just that we were all told to come here, I guess," he mumbled. "I really hope they let us in soon. Davey Grinchaw, the Head Boy from Hufflepuff, is going nuts. He thinks he would have been told if something like this was planned."

Sure enough, a freckled, bespectacled ginger-haired boy stood nearest to the brass door handles, (he had pushed everyone aside to reach that frontal position), was shouting in his furious lisp, "I thould think that they would have thaid thomething to me!"

And the doors swung open, banging the Great Hall's stone walls. At first everyone rushed in, then they all stopped, leaving those in the back of the horde still outside the hall and clueless.

"What's going on? Why aren't they moving?" Ron bellowed.

Davey Grinchaw walked forward from the frozen crowd, examined the room closer, then shouted back at the school, "Well, why aren'th you moving? Let'th go sit down!"

"We can't, stupid!" a kid from near the front yelled, "There aren't any tables or anything!"

Davey seemed to be at a loss for an answer for a minute, then he said, "Well, let'th all come in and…and…take a theat on the floor, alright?"

Slowly they did as he said, and as our trio and friends crept into the hall they saw the reason for the holdup.


Let me just take a moment and congratulate everyone who has been reading this story. I'm a horrid writer, so this really surprises me if you stayed awake these past 29 chapters, (much like our beloved Weasley twins).

Coming soon is a different game completely, one beginning with chapter 30. Stay tuned and see why.