Chapter 128
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Sunday 11/14/92
Dear Harry
I think I'm very glad that that potion is very expensive and almost impossible to brew, it worries me that it exists at all. If it were easy to brew and readily available, that would mean you couldn't trust anyone to be who they look like they are. I can think of so many horribly illegal ways to use that potion. Someone could use your hair and commit a terrible crime in front of witnesses or start a fight with all your friends, kiss or even rape your girlfriend or have sex with someone's wife or even just walk around insulting everyone or naked in your body or in a dress and makeup with your hair tied up in pigtails in front of everybody or a million other things to humiliate you or try to destroy your life. This potion would make all eye witness testimony and most alibis worthless, because nobody could say for sure whether they saw you or saw someone using Polyjuice potion to look like you, or which version of you was the real one. Is there some sort of magical defence that stops anyone from being able to use your hair or fingernails short of spelling them all away? There must be otherwise people in a really important position to national security would be forced to permanently remove all their hair.
I feel really sorry for the school girl ghost Myrtle, please be as nice to her as you can be. You're right about the idea that she almost certainly wouldn't want to haunt the site of her suicide, particularly after the people she blames for making her want to kill herself have left the school. Could she be stuck here somehow? Is there a way to offer to help her move on? Or is it possible that she didn't commit suicide or is stuck here wanting to talk to a particular friend or family member that you could try to contact for her?
Have you thought about telling one of the professors if Hermione does try to brew this potion for her own safety. You've told me enough stories about potions blowing up or going wrong and giving off noxious fumes, and those stories were about the simple potions that twelve year old kids are encouraged to brew that were brewed in a classroom designed for brewing potions in and under a professor's supervision. The fumes this one lets off if it goes wrong could be seriously harmful, especially if brewed in a room that is not set up with any safety features to protect the brewer from things going wrong. If you don't want to let a professor know at least tell someone when you're going to be working on the potion, or hanging around Ron and Hermione as they work on the potion. Even if it's only Dean or Seamus, at least that way someone knows to start looking for you if you don't return when expected and they know where to start looking. It could take days to search a castle as big as the one you and 'Hogwarts a History' have described, and that's without secret rooms, hidden passageways and magical places to hide and nobody is going to start the search for two boys by looking in the girls' toilets, it could take days for them to notice you missing and find you.
Has Hermione thought about how she's going to get a hold of all these expensive ingredients for this potion, surely if they are as rare and expensive as your suggesting and the potion could be used for so many illegal reasons then someone buying that combination of ingredients would be noticed or recorded somewhere and questions would be asked? Not to mention how she intends to pay for them if she's already spent all her allowance on books over the summer. How expensive are these ingredients anyway?
The whole idea of Salazar Slytherin being able to hide something so that only his true heir can find it is ludicrous! There is absolutely no way to know what skills or magical gifts one of your descendants will have, not you own son or grandson much less a descendant that won't be born for 1,000 years. That's something like 30 to 35 generations. You couldn't guarantee that your family would survive that long much less that they'd still live in Britain and attend Hogwarts, and someone from that long ago could potentially have hundreds of living descendants around the world, and if the key was something genetic there's no telling if any of them would still have the gene given that rare traits tend to be rare because they are recessive meaning that you have to inherit a gene for it from both parents to have the trait. It is also impossible to make a secret that only one person would be able to find without passing the secret down to them somehow like in a letter. I suppose with magical preservation charms and a bank that's been around since before the founding of Hogwarts that it would be possible to leave such a letter but not to guarantee it would be read in 1,000 years and by someone with access to come and go inside Hogwarts whether as a student or a professor. I suppose there is a charm to ensure that the letter couldn't be read until the author wanted it to be? But why would anyone even want to communicate with a descendent so far into the future? I could understand wanting to leave letters for your children and grandchildren, perhaps even a great-grandchild who'd been born already but to ignore or bypass all of them for a descendent that may not even exist is ludicrous.
I hate to say it but if it were possible for a letter to be sent to the future like that and Salazar had been insane enough to do it, then I think that would make your Professor Idiot the prime suspect for being the Heir of Slytherin. If someone received and opened the letter in the last year then applying to work at Hogwarts would be the reasonable course of action to find and open the chamber, and I think that curiosity and possibly greed would outweigh caution for most people in that situation. I know he's the only new professor you've mentioned but is there anyone else that's new at Hogwarts this year who you haven't mentioned, administration support or a professor that only teaches the upper classes? Who knows what the heir was told they'd find in the chamber, I doubt that they were told that they would release something that was capable of turning them into a statue. Though perhaps Professor Idiot would still have been stupid enough to have released it, in his opinion it would give him the opportunity to save the school and he could have written another book about it, no doubt starring you as an awestruck and grateful student and himself as your mentor. Of course, your argument about why it couldn't be Malfoy probably works equally well in making it unlikely that it could be Professor Idiot as well, I would expect him to brag about coming from a famous family like the Slytherins and probably have put it in his autobiography if he knew about it. Or for it to have been mentioned by your newspapers when they're talking about him. Unless he's been disowned by his parents and is trying to prove that he's as good as any of his family and can make a name for himself without them, or if the proof of his heritage has been lost over the centuries and he knows nobody would believe him.
You mentioned portraits visiting each other and gossiping and also mentioned the possibility of asking one of them what they had seen the night the cat was petrified. You are aware that they all most likely report anything odd directly to Dumbledore and that he might have asked them to keep a closer than normal eye on you and report anything unusual? Spread throughout the hallways and common rooms they'd make a hell of a spy network. If he is using them the way I suspect then almost nothing happens at Hogwarts without the headmaster knowing about it. I don't know how loyal they'd be to him though, it might be possible that he's not the only one they're reporting to. Or that they've also been told to lie to you (you personally or more likely students in general) if you ask them questions.
I'll stop feeling bad about the price of my satchel if you promise to buy me only one book and nothing else for Christmas. Seriously you have given me more than enough this year as it is. I do love the satchel, it is a little old fashioned perhaps but so are my clothes and a lot of other things I'd choose to have, so it suits me perfectly. You're right it does fit a decent amount of reading in it. I had to remind myself not to use the satchel the other day to take all my research books to meet my project group. They're far to observant not to have noticed that all those books shouldn't have fit in a bag that size. They liked the bag though and asked where I got it. I think that Carl was disappointed when I told him it was a gift from a friend in Britain and not available here.
Your friend always
Spencer
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
Please stay safe everyone.
