Fixing the Room of Requirement had taken long enough in the screwed up Nevernever time that it was already fully dark, an entire day passed in minutes. We'd caught everyone else still awake up on what happened, then had a tense few hours to see if people were actually going to wake on their own.
Even though the twins could see her moving around a bit on their map, Maeve had the good sense to hide in the Slytherin dorms. If we'd had the password or she came out, it could have gotten violent. I wasn't actually sure whether she'd be able to defeat me, Mathilda, Hagrid, and the whole Gryffindor quidditch team. She likely would have at least seriously injured us in the process, so I was grudgingly happy we didn't have to find out.
Hagrid was uncommonly okay with helping with the violence once Mathilda explained to him that Maeve was behind everything. His good nature didn't extend to people that endangered his animals (especially if they were already in Slytherin).
After a tense few hours in the dark, fortunately the denizens of the castle began to wake with the dawn. We split up to inform the headmaster and heads of house what had happened, had breakfast (the elves had made a lot), and then went to bed: everyone else was acting like they'd had 36 hours of sleep instead of the few hours of subjective time those awake had experienced, while we were effectively up way past our normal bedtimes.
We slept right through lunch on what we discovered was, indeed, Sunday, but Dumbledore had been off since we debriefed him anyway gathering information from the Ministry. He wound up interrupting dinner to make his announcements.
"I'm sure most of you have discovered that Hogwarts was placed into an enchanted slumber, and that today is Sunday, rather than the Saturday you expected. What you may not have heard is that the school and Hogsmeade briefly disappeared: Aurors sent to the location found only a primeval forest in our location. I understand from the few not enchanted into slumber that, during this missing period, we were in the realm of the faeries. Fortunately, the damage from marauding creatures is minimal.
"This appears to have been part of a series of gambits to bring the Ministry and ICW to the negotiation table. I understand several other magical schools disappeared as well, and the entire city of Milwaukee in the United States, which holds one of their most populous wizarding districts. These gambits were… successful. The nations of the ICW have once again signed the Unseelie Accords, which primarily govern relations with other intelligent magical races. This should hopefully have little impact on you in the near future, but I have encouraged Professor Binns to research the Accords and explain them in upcoming classes.
"Though we've lost a day, our class schedule is not affected, so I encourage everyone to get any homework they planned to do over the weekend finished after we finish eating. Dig in."
I glanced over to the Slytherin table, where Maeve was shooting me an unreadable look, which wasn't the smug victory face I'd expected. Maybe she'd planned to get away with it entirely, and wasn't pleased that I'd removed her control over the Room and drastically increased the scrutiny she'd receive from the rest of staff going forward. Still didn't exactly feel like a victory.
That evening was such a frantic scramble for all of Gryffindor to get their weekend homework finished that there weren't even a ton of questions for me and the quidditch team about what had happened. I managed to catch most of the way back up on my sleep and get through my Monday classes before Percy and Alexis made Oliver and me tell them the whole story while we waited for Penny at our afternoon spellcrafting session.
The Ravenclaw prefect finally showed up about twenty minutes late with an armload of notes. "Sorry. I had to go check something in the library. I think I've cracked it!"
We'd been stuck on the final Apology for a while, mostly in finding a workable incantation that fit the rest of the arithmancy. "Is this your dream you told me about?" Percy asked.
Penny nodded, spreading her notes out on the table. "I guess an enchanted sleep was good for something. Really let my sleepy-time brain work the problem. Also, Harry, I hate you."
"What did I do?" I asked, the picture of innocence.
"You know the stupid incantation you wanted to use?" she began.
I nodded, because I'd jokingly suggested that we should use hocus pocus since this was the opposite of the killing curse, which basically sounded like abra cadabra. "Right number of syllables, but it didn't fit the arithmancy," I shrugged.
"What I remembered in my dream was something I read about one of the theories of where 'hocus pocus' came from. I looked it up and it fits. So… I hate you."
She shoved over the final notes page, where she'd underlined hoc est corpus on the sheet. I beamed and asked, "Thoughts on the emotion?"
"Well, since the killing curse is hate, and I heard about how you woke up 'Thilda…" Penny began, getting a bit of the same romantic look in her eyes Ginny had been sporting every time she looked at me for the past day.
Percy, understanding what was expected of him, looked deeply into his girlfriend's eyes, pointed his wand to our "downrange" wall in the classroom, and did the wand gesture while breathing, "Hoc est corpus."
The blast of orange-red light, shot through with streamers of silver, almost looked like what happened when Dumbledore's phoenix teleported. It splashed against the masonry, leaving a momentary field of glowing color that evaporated harmlessly from the inanimate object.
Beaming, Penny mirrored the cast, having a similar effect. I grinned at how lost in each others' eyes my friends were, shrugged, and thought of Mathilda, adding my own splash of anti-wraith energy to the collection.
Alexis was now looking expectantly at Oliver, who hadn't even pulled out his wand yet. He was also smiling at the spectacle of Penny and Percy, and it took him a minute to realize his girlfriend was staring at him. "The wand gesture for this one's complicated," he said, somewhat defensively.
"Ollie, why didn't you wake me up, like Harry woke up 'Thilda?"
The burly Scotsman shrugged, explaining, "We were downstairs while Harry and Ginny checked the seventh floor."
"Harry, how long was it between when you fixed the Room and when the sleeping spell wore off?" she asked, adding me to the brewing fight.
"I mean, time was messed up, so there's no way to be totally sure…" I hedged, but her eyes were narrowing and I shrugged helplessly at Oliver. "Couple hours?"
She turned back to her boyfriend and asked, "Maybe you just didn't think about it? But, well, the wand gestures aren't that hard."
Taking a deep breath to marshal his courage, Oliver nodded, looked Alexis in the eyes, and incanted, "Hoc est corpus." His wand gesture was fine. He got a pinkish mist, similar to trying to cast a patronus without a strong enough memory.
Alexis just nodded, sadly. She looked back at Oliver, whispered the incantation, and her own fully-formed blast of light hit where the rest of them had.
Wiping a tear from her eye, she walked out of the room without another word.