Dumbledore, as it turned out, was indeed at Hogwarts.

Harry sort of stayed involved with the whole situation even after Dumbledore took it over, largely because he wanted to hear what had happened (and because nobody seemed to get around to telling him he shouldn't) and so he was there when Lockhart got taken away by the Aurors.

It sounded like he was in a lot of trouble, and Harry was perfectly okay with that.

After that, though, Dumbledore invited Sirius, Remus and Michael up to his office. Harry got brought along for the ride, and sat down on his haunches in the corner because there weren't any armchairs left.

"Well, now," Dumbledore said, after sitting down. "This is quite a pickle, isn't it?"

He paused. "Though I must admit I have never quite understood that term. I rather like pickles."

"I think the idea is that the situation is like being pickled," Sirius suggested, a little hesitantly.

"Ah, that sounds quite possible," Dumbledore agreed gravely. "As I say, I do like pickles, but not so much as to want to have the experience myself."

He adjusted his glasses slightly, and that reminded Harry to adjust his own in that funny way that being reminded about your glasses did.

"Gilderoy Lockhart was my mistake," he said. "The number of people who apply for the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher job is terribly scanty, so I do not often have much choice, but I dare say that it would have been slightly better to have no teacher at all than to have Gilderoy Lockhart as the teacher."

"I don't really think so, Professor," Harry countered. "Or, um… maybe that's not the right way to say it."

"Please, do find the right way to say what you want to say," Dumbledore invited.

"Okay, Professor," Harry said, frowning as he tried to put his thoughts together into words. "So… well, obviously Lockhart was a terrible person, but he did teach me the Homorphus spell. So that's better than nothing."

"A fine point, Harry, a fine point," Dumbledore nodded. "And that must be a very obscure spell indeed. I am glad you have learned it, and I may ask for your help in teaching it to me some time."

"That's something I don't really understand, though," Remus said. "We know from Michael – and from what Lockhart said – that he didn't really do most of these things. We can't be sure about all of them, yet, but we know he didn't cast the Homorphus Charm on Michael. But he did manage to teach Harry."

"Ah, yes," Dumbledore said, sounding sad. "I believe that what was going on is this. We now know that Gilderoy took the details for his books from the real deeds of heroic – and sadly largely forgotten – witches and wizards, such as Ardit Dibra from Albania. But I fear that – before he wiped away their memories of their brave actions, he first took a copy of the memories themselves, so that he might make his books more accurate."

"That's… really awful," Sirius muttered, which was something Harry agreed with. In fact, he probably would have said it himself if Sirius hadn't been first. "But… doesn't that mean he should have actually been good? Maybe nobody would ever have found him out if he was, but from what Harry's told me he's just been having the students do nonsense all year."

"That is a fine question," Dumbledore said, nodding. "I believe he would have been as good as you suggest if he had actually made any sort of effort to practice the skills involved, or to think about the memories in more than the most trivial way. That is why he was able to teach you that spell, Harry, and why – when I conducted the interview for him – I could not tell that he had not actually done any of those things."

He sighed. "I had hoped that, after the main lesson from Professor Quirrell last year was that one should be afraid of the Dark Powers, the main lesson from Professor Lockhart this year would be that one should not be afraid of them. Gilderoy had a real confidence to him, though it seems now that that confidence was from the fact that the worst problem he has had to face in his life up until this point was most likely a book tour."

Harry giggled at that, and he heard chuckles from the adult wizards.

"It seems I will need to get another temporary teacher for the remaining weeks of the school year," Dumbledore added, now more-or-less thinking out loud. "And perhaps I should invite Fawkes to my future interviews, as well; it might provide a very useful check against people who are simply not as pleasant as one remembers from school."

He looked over his glasses at Harry, then at Sirius. "If there is one lesson we can draw from this, it is that really quite dreadful people can come from any of the Houses of Hogwarts."

"I've more than learned that lesson," Sirius said, mostly to himself.

"Has there ever been anyone nasty from Hufflepuff?" Harry asked, curious. "I can't think of any."

"There almost certainly was," Dumbledore replied, raising a hand to his chin. "And if I think of any you will be the first to know."

After that, Dumbledore wanted to get some more details on exactly what had happened, starting with how Remus had found the Wagga Wagga Wizard and why, and then moving on to the details of how they'd all shown up at Lockhart's door and the battle that resulted.

It sounded like Michael might be going to get in a bit of trouble for punching someone, but Dumbledore said that it sounded like there wouldn't be much trouble and he'd probably just be told not to do it again. Dumbledore also seemed very impressed with the wandless wind spell he'd cast from the window, which Harry had to admit he'd been confused by, and congratulated Remus for some excellent Disarming work and Harry for using a non-dangerous fire spell instead of a dangerous one.

Neville also got fifteen points, which was nice. Harry hadn't known you could give or take away points without the person actually being there.

"So there's one question I still have," Sirius said, once that was over, then paused. "No, wait. I have lots of questions. One of the questions I still have is how Lockhart thought he could get away with it."

"I rather imagine he thought he was the cleverest person around," Dumbledore said. "Though unfortunately quite a lot of people had to buy quite a lot of his books; I shall have to see if we can provide the Defence textbooks next year for free, or provide some sort of refund."

"I've known a lot of people who thought they were the smartest person around," Michael said. "They can't all have been right."

"A fine point," Dumbledore replied, smiling brightly. "And you had other questions, Sirius?"

"Well… firstly, why is Harry always involved in this kind of thing?" Sirius asked.

"Perhaps he simply has bad luck," Dumbledore suggested. "Or perhaps it is just how it is with dragons."

"I think it has mostly been luck," Harry agreed, thinking about it. "But I have helped, so maybe it's not always bad luck?"

Dumbledore chuckled. "An excellent question, Harry, and I think it depends on who you ask as to whether your involvement is bad luck or not. Gilderoy, for example, probably considers it very bad luck, though I would not trust his opinion on the matter."

Dumbledore said thank-you to all of them for helping, told them that he'd be getting hold of a temporary teacher for the rest of the year, and then sighed about how few choices there were for who to have do Defence Against the Dark Arts for the 1993-4 school year.

Sirius nudged Remus, who looked surprised, and then one thing led to another and Remus got a job offer. He said he was worried about his lycanthropism causing problems, but Dumbledore replied by pointing out that at the very least Harry would always be around to ensure that Remus' transformations into being a wolf were quickly and safely reversed.

That led to a discussion about the Homorphus spell itself, and how it was only a cure for that transformation (which was a pity) but that that was still much better than the alternative. It sounded like the only thing left to work out was whether Harry was safe from Remus if he hadn't taken Wolfsbane, though hopefully that was something they wouldn't need to test in the first place since Professor Snape was quite capable of brewing Wolfsbane.

Once that had all been explained, Remus sounded quite interested in the job, though he did say it was only if Dumbledore didn't have any other good choices.

The next morning, Neville opened his copy of the Daily Prophet at breakfast.

"Cripes," he said, and Harry leaned over to have a look.

The headline said 'Gilderoy Blackhart?' and showed a quite good picture of Lockhart doing his best to look rakish in chains.

"Oh, they've got an interview with Michael," Harry observed. "That's quite brave of him."

He tilted his head a little. "I wonder if you can undo a memory charm?"

"Yeah, you can," Neville told him. "It's kind of tricky, though, usually you need the same person who cast it to undo it. You can get by with just the same wand, apparently, if you're really good, so maybe they can reverse his ones."

Harry nodded, absorbing that information.

It was a lot like the way that curses and stuff worked in books… or, in fact, how the actual Fidelius Charm worked, because that was about a trade-off as well.

Maybe that would come up in Arithmancy. It sounded like an Arithmancy sort of thing, though Harry wasn't an expert on Arithmancy because he hadn't done Arithmancy yet.

Shaking his head before he got a bit confused about that, Harry selected a thick slice of toast. He spread butter over it, waited for the butter to soak in, and then took a slightly spongy and slightly crunchy bite.

On the other side of the table, Ron did something slightly different by adding butter to a crumpet and then setting it on fire. It was bluebell flames, though, so it just melted the butter more thoroughly.

"Wonder who we're going to have teaching Defence for the rest of the year," he said, before snuffing out his breakfast.

"I hope it's someone who looks at least as good," one of the Sixth-Year girls said.

"I'll be happy just so long as they actually know how to cast spells," Percy volunteered. "We've only got a few weeks before exams."

"Isn't it a couple of months at least?" Ron asked, swallowing some of his crumpet. "And they're Sixth Year exams for you. It's the least significant exams of your last three years at Hogwarts."

"That doesn't make them unimportant, Ron," Percy replied. "Why not ask Hermione for her opinion?"

"I agree with Ron," Hermione said, taking a sausage and slicing it up into round circles. "He said three things and they're all factually correct."

"Blimey, that was unexpected," Ron blinked. "Maybe I should go to Madam Pomfrey."

Harry sniggered.

Finished with the cutting, Hermione arranged the sausage pieces neatly on a slice of bread before putting a second slice on top of them. "I don't want to imagine what the exam questions would have looked like if Professor Lockhart had set them."

"I do," Ginny piped up. "How many scars did I get fighting the Yekaterinburg Yeti? No marks."

Even Percy had to laugh at that one.

Somewhat to his surprise, Harry got some letters over the next few days.

There were a few which were saying well done to him for helping to stop Lockhart from escaping, a few which were telling him off for being involved in stopping Lockhart from escaping, and one rather odd one from Australia which told him he was a 'beaut'.

He wasn't sure what that meant, and nobody else seemed to have much idea either. Penelope thought that it was probably like "beauty", which meant it had to be good, but Harry had never met the person.

It could be based off the drawings Dean had done, though.

Two days before the end of the holiday, Fred and George returned to Hogwarts. They arrived by Floo instead of taking the Hogwarts Express, which wasn't due back until the next day, and somewhat to Harry's surprise Charlie Weasley came with them.

"Hermione wrote to me," he explained to Harry, as they headed down to Hagrid's hut. "And since I needed to bring my brothers back to Britain anyway, I thought I'd come all the way with them."

"Oh, sure, let him know what happened," George grumbled. "Don't let it be a surprise."

"At least you didn't tell him where you had to bring us back from," Fred said.

"Stop tempting fate, Fred, you're too good at it," George said.

"But you're Fred," Fred countered.

"I'm Fred?" George asked. "So I am."

Harry was starting to wonder if he'd guessed wrong about which was which. It was sort of impossible with the Twins, you never knew if they'd been telling the truth this time or the last time.

"Lake Victoria," Charlie explained.

"Oh, so you did the Animagus thing as well?" Harry asked.

"Of course we did," Probably Fred said. "Why wouldn't you?"

"Getting to Kenya was the trickiest bit," Maybe George agreed. "Sort of why we got Charlie involved, really."

"But we're not going to show you yet," Probably Fred told him. "We need to build up the suspense."

"And work out what we're going to call ourselves," Maybe George nodded. "It's no good Percy being the only one with a Marauder codename."

"I wondered about Smaug," Harry admitted. "Or Puff. But neither of them really sounds right."

"Puff the magic dragon," Maybe George said to himself. "It's got a nice vibe."

After deciding that they didn't know where Honah-Lee was (or indeed how to spell it) and that Harry's home in Surrey only really qualified him to live "by the sea" if that applied to everyone in the country, they reached Hagrid's hut.

"Charlie, good to see you," Hagrid nodded, spotting them. "Fred. George. Harry. Come in, come in. What brings yeh here?"

"It's because of Nora," Charlie explained, and the dragon in question poked her head over the side of the hut.

"That's me!" Nora announced. "Hello!"

"She says hello," Harry relayed.

Charlie smiled, waving at her, then glanced at Harry. "She understands waving and smiling, right? I know some animals see teeth and they think it's a threat."

Nora answered one of those questions by waving back, then jumped over Hagrid's house with a single bound (and a powerful wing-flap that sent loose bits of straw everywhere) and landed with a thump next to them.

She gave Charlie a curious sniff, glanced at Hagrid for a moment, then licked Charlie from his knees to his neck.

"Well, that's certainly not normal dragon behaviour," Charlie observed, chuckling and trying to brush off dragon drool. "It's almost a pity Harry's older by more than a decade and grew up in Surrey, or I'd think it was something about Hogwarts that just made dragons… odd."

"And I started off human," Harry reminded Charlie, because it was something he found easy to forget so it was probably something other people sometimes couldn't remember either.

"And that," Charlie agreed. "Okay, um… Hagrid, I'd like to do some tests, if that's okay?"

"What sort of tests?" Hagrid asked, absently picking up a log about four inches in diameter and hurling it into the middle distance. Nora launched herself after it, wings pumping, and they watched as the log bounced on the grass and rolled.

Nora tried to catch it as it bounced, missed, and went wingtip-over-legs in a tumbling, skidding crash before somehow sliding to a halt in front of the rolling log. Snagging it in her jaws, she took off again – totally unharmed by the crash – and flew back to land in front of Hagrid before dropping it at his feet.

"Nothing dangerous," Charlie clarified. "I mostly want to make sure that she's speaking and understanding things, rather than just reading cues like some normal animals do."

Harry was about to protest that he could just tell Charlie that Nora was speaking, because she was even if the language she was speaking happened to not be English, and Hagrid was by now starting to get good at simple phrases in Dragonese, but then he thought about it for a bit.

"Is that because of how other dragons don't seem to?" he asked. "So we need to make sure that it's not just because she's trained or something?"

"That's right," Charlie confirmed. "I read a Muggle book about it, and there was a horse called Clever Hans who seemed to be able to do maths. But his trainer was just kind of… accidentally giving him hints, and he couldn't do maths if the person asking the question didn't know the answer."

"That sounds like the sort of prank a horse animagus could do," Fred said. "Why didn't you become a horse?"

"Me?" George countered. "Why didn't you become a horse?"

"Because I didn't think of it," Fred told him. "What's your excuse?"

"Since you've said it, I'm going to choose to say that that was my reason from the beginning."

"So the idea is," Charlie said, ignoring his brothers. "We work out something where the only way it works is if Nora is actually able to work things out and carry messages."

Hagrid threw a piece of coal, this time, and Nora flew up to blow it up with a little blast of fire breath. That earned her a scratch over one eye ridge, which she clearly enjoyed quite a lot.

Charlie's tests turned out to be kind of hard to do, because it was a lot harder than expected to design something where no cheating could happen – especially when only two people really understood the language that Nora could speak, when one of them was still learning a lot of words and grammar rules (Harry found it hard to explain Dragonese grammar rules, because he just heard Dragonese like it was English) and when Nora herself, while eager to help, was also quite easy to distract.

Fred and George persisted in not helping by using logs to bat lumps of coal for her.

"Okay, let's try this," Charlie said, eventually, and waved his hand to make coloured symbols appear in the air. A blue ring, a yellow cross, and a red star. "Harry, can you tell her what each of these is?"

"Sure," Harry agreed. "Nora?"

Nora stopped paying attention to the flying pieces of coal, and Harry told her the words for each of them. Then Charlie made another two, this time a red ring and a blue star, and Harry told her what those were as well.

Twirling his wand, Charlie then raised up a wall between himself and Harry. Nora could still see both sides, because of where the wall was, but Harry couldn't see through the gap.

"Okay," the Dragon Tamer said, after a few more seconds. "Ask Nora what she can see."

"What can you see, Nora?" Harry asked dutifully.

Nora's head tilted a bit, then she brightened.

"Star!" she said.

Turning so he was looking at Charlie instead, Harry relayed what she'd said.

Charlie vanished the wall, and Harry saw that there was indeed a star floating there – a yellow star, this time.

"That's pretty good," Harry realized. "So I don't know what it is, so the only way that I could know is if it's Nora not just telling me but recognizing what it is in the first place."

"That's right," Charlie agreed.

Two more tries confirmed it, and Harry watched as Charlie wrote up all his notes – and as Fred and George got some Filibuster Fireworks from wherever they'd been hiding them before launching them up so that Nora could chase and catch them. She didn't always reach them, and sometimes when she did there was a big explosion and she coughed a lot afterwards, but she seemed to enjoy it.

"If all of this made sense, it would mean that Hogwarts was a really important place for research on fantastic beasts," Charlie mused. "But almost none of it makes sense. I know you're a special case, Harry, but it seems like Nora is a special case as well – most dragons may not be that violent, but female Norwegian Ridgebacks are some of the most dangerous ones that aren't actual nesting mothers. But not only is Nora more playful than anything else, she's really smart for a dragon. And then there's the whole… speaking… thing."

He threw up his hands. "I wish you'd found that the dragons on the Hebrides Reserve were just reticent, I really do… but none of them seemed to understand the language that only dragons seem to understand."

Harry had to admit that it was quite a puzzle.

"Maybe it's something about Hogwarts?" he suggested. "Or Hagrid?"

"It could be," Charlie admitted. "The only way to test that is to get him another dragon to raise, though."

He chuckled. "I wonder how Nora would take having a baby brother?"

"I'm not sure whether she considers me one," Harry said. "I'm definitely older, and she knows that, but I'm a lot smaller as well..."

The next evening, not long before Curfew (which still happened even in between terms, though Harry wasn't sure why), Fred and George invited the rest of their group into the same classroom Percy had used.

"Okay, so we weren't going to show you these until we'd worked out names," Fred began.

"But that meant there was a problem," George went on. "Tell him, Fred."

"We realized that we're not actually very good with nicknames," Fred completed. "Especially not ours."

"You did spend four years calling Ron Ronniekins," Ginny said, nodding. "Which isn't very impressive."

"Lies and slander!" George protested, as Ron grumbled. "That implies we stopped."

"So, it's not long before curfew, and there's a prefect not far away," Dean said, nodding at Percy (who was, after all, leaning on the disused teacher's desk). "What actually are the two of you?"

"We should probably get on with it, George," Fred said. "That is the whole point of this meeting."

George (or, at least, the one who Harry had more-or-less randomly guessed was George) put his hands on the nearest table, then pushed down – and transformed in a blur of fur and movement, leapfrogging up onto the table as he shrank into a sort of long, tube-shaped animal that Harry couldn't really identify offhand.

It wasn't that he couldn't think of what it was, but that he could think of too many things. George might have turned into a ferret, or a stoat, or a weasel, or a mink, or a marten, or any of those other sorts of things that all looked nearly the same.

Maybe if he got a wildlife book in Fort William he'd be able to work it out? He'd have to ignore the streak of red fur, though...

Then Fred made the whole thing more complicated by doing much the same thing, and turning into a slightly larger but otherwise very similar animal.

"Oh, great," Ron groaned. "You've turned into weasels."

"I'm not sure they are weasels," Hermione frowned. "They look a bit bigger than that. And… it looks like only one of you has any white fur."

There was another blur, and George got down off the table.

"You're sure neither of us is a weasel?" he asked, sounding a bit disappointed.

"Well, I'd have to check to be certain," Hermione admitted. "Why?"

"Oh, we had this whole joke worked out," George explained. "A weasel is weaselley recognized while a stoat is stoatally different."

"I'm sure I've heard that one before," Dean frowned. "Probably in a Christmas cracker."

"That might be where they got it from," Percy observed. "Though I am very impressed with the two of you. I've always suspected you weren't doing as well as you could in school, and this at least shows that you're quite able to do Potions to a very high standard."

Fred reverted to human as well at that. "I think we might have outsmarted ourselves, George," he said.

"Probably," George agreed. "Must be because we're so smart we even outsmart ourselves."

Percy shook his head.

"So… which one of you is Fred and which one is George?" Harry asked. "You look slightly different in Animagus form, so that would at least let us tell you apart then."

"And you could do it with smell in both forms," Neville suggested.

"Well, that's simple," said Fred. "I'm Fred, and this is George."

"My brother's correct," George nodded. "I'm Fred, and this is George."

Harry tried not to giggle.

"What?" Fred asked. "We both said the same thing. I don't see what's confusing about it."

Animal forms and so on notwithstanding, it was the start of the term leading up to exams and so from the next morning there was a lot of work to do.

Potions was all about brewing things with dangerous ingredients without being reminded of the safety precautions, with Professor Snape telling them that it was to make sure they either remembered what the dangerous thing was, or looked it up, or it would go wrong and they'd have a good reason to remember next time.

In Charms they were starting every lesson off with a random Charm test, to make sure they could perform whichever spell they were asked in the exam without needing to spend half an hour revising it first. Professor Flitwick told them all with a smile that while of course you could look up what the spell was to clean the floor if you wanted to clean the floor, wouldn't it all be so much quicker if you just remembered the spell in the first place?

History of Magic didn't really change, though. History of Magic never really changed, except for what the subject of that lesson was.

The biggest change was in Defence.

Harry and his friends arrived a few minutes before the bell, claiming a couple of the desks fairly near the front, and Harry put down the pile of books he was carrying before sorting them into a kind of wall.

"Why do you have so many books?" Neville asked. "I just guessed we'd probably need the spellbook."

"I thought it'd be best to bring all the books we might be using," Harry explained, putting the Lockhart books as crenelations. "It's kind of a guess, but I only need to do it once."

Just as the bell began to ring, the door at the back of the classroom opened and a pleasant-looking witch who looked a bit younger than Sirius came in.

"How you all doing?" she asked, with a sort of twang to her voice that Harry thought was probably some flavour of American. "It's mighty nice to meet you. I'm Sue, or Miss Nym if you're feelin' formal."

She turned and began chalking something on the board. "Now, Dumbledore's told me that you all have had a bit of a problem with a teacher who wasn't teaching. That sound right?"

There was plenty of grumbling, mostly from the Ravenclaws, though Hermione grumbled with the best of them.

"Well, that means I've got to teach you all a year's worth of Defence in about a month or two," Miss Nym went on. "Let's get started with the Disarming Charm, anyone know that one already?"

Harry wasn't sure Miss Nym was very good at teaching, in the abstract sort of way, but she definitely knew her stuff and after months of re-enacting bits of Lockhart's books or writing poems or making collages everybody was eager to do practical work – and to listen to her slightly disjointed explanations about what different spells could and could not do, or why one of the most important things for a Defence specialist was to be good at dodging.

There wasn't a textbook she set any work from, but Harry didn't even mind that very much – it meant he had to take a lot of notes, maybe, but when Hermione asked Miss Nym shrugged and said that anyone who was interested in the class would pay attention anyway and frankly finding a good textbook might take half the time they had left in the year.

Defence Against the Dark Arts might have been the big change, but all the rest of their lessons were speeding towards the exams as well as April turned into May.

As usual, Astronomy lessons were a bit odd in how they were structured. Lessons always happened around midnight, but as they got closer and closer to June – and to the exams – the middle of the night got less… nightlike than it was earlier in the year.

With how far north Hogwarts was, that meant that by about the end of April the sky was never entirely dark. Harry knew that by the end of May it would be bright enough to steer a boat around for the whole of the night, so it would be impossible to really do astronomy at all.

Harry did wonder whether OWLs had something to get around that, though. They usually did theory work in the summer, and labelling star charts and things, but it seemed like an OWL in Astronomy should require some actual astronomy.

Then there was Herbology, where the crop of Mandrakes had long since been handed off to the older students as they got pickier and harder to handle. The changing seasons influenced that subject as well, despite the way the greenhouses were heated, because some plants only grew well with long hours of sunlight.

Harry was sort of staying on top of things – partly because Oliver Wood had been told in no uncertain terms that the Quidditch finals had been scheduled after the exams for a reason – and it felt like one week slipped into the next in a kind of cozy blur of lesson, homework, scheduled revision and then well-earned time to read or fly or teach Dragonish or just spend time with friends.

They'd all been quite surprised when a test had showed that it actually gave them more time (and enjoyment) to just do the work quickly rather than drag it out over most of the evening. Though after they had shown that, Harry sort of thought it was obvious in hindsight.

During the last week of May, Harry was in the library with what was probably about a third of Second Year.

"...okay, so what do your notes say is the recipe for the Hair Raising Potion?" Ernie Macmillan asked. "I got it off the board, but the textbook is different."

"I'm pretty sure the textbook is supposed to be one of those things you only trust if it agrees with Professor Snape," Daphne contributed. "Otherwise it's just something that's been left in because of an editing mistake."

"Why don't you just say that you should trust Professor Snape?" Terry asked, and Ron scoffed.

"What, you think a Slytherin would say to trust another Slytherin?" he asked. "Of course not."

"Hey, some Slytherins can be trusted," Dean said. "I assume. Probably."

"Dean Thomas, you take that back!" Tracy demanded, pointing at him. "Trustworthy? What do you take us for?"

"Hufflepuffs?" Neville suggested.

"Hey, don't bring us into this," Susan Bones said, shaking her head. "Anyway. That potion?"

"It's four rat tails," Hermione informed them. "The textbook says three, but I tested both options and the version on the board is right. The textbook version only works if you have long hair."

"What about if you have no hair at all?" Ernie asked, interested. "Can Harry try some?"

Harry was about to reply, mostly about he was hairy all over, but there was a cough from behind him.

"Excuse me," said Tanisis, the Ravenclaw sphinx. "I was wondering if you could help a friend and I with a problem?"

"Sure," Harry agreed. "Sorry, guys."

As it turned out, Tanisis led Harry through to a part of the library with several people in it – Anna and Taira were both there, as well as Ginny, and someone Harry vaguely remembered was one of Ginny's friends from her home village. (Luna, he thought her name was.)

The friend who Tanisis actually wanted to speak to Harry about, though, was June.

"We're a bit worried about the exams," June explained, sitting on her haunches with a book open in front of her. "I'm a bit slower writing than the humans, and I've been practicing, but sometimes I need to use a dictation quill to finish an essay on time."

"It's pretty much the same for me," Tanisis agreed. "And we thought about it, and realized that you're the only person any of us know who would have had to deal with not being a human in exams."

Harry frowned, thinking about it.

It was actually quite a tricky question.

Obviously it wouldn't be fair in an essay question to make Tanisis or June write with a normal quill, because it would take them longer to write the same amount of words even if they could think of the words just as fast as anyone else. But would it be fair in an exam which was mostly about knowing the right answer?

Was it as easy for Harry to write as the humans? He'd never thought about it before.

"I… don't think I know if there's an answer to that," he admitted. "But there probably should be."

The first thing Harry was able to tell them was just what kind of exams there were. The practical ones sounded okay to both the other quadrupeds, and so did things like the Astronomy exam where they had to answer questions. But there were essay exams as well, and the special anti-cheating quills they were given for the exams meant that – even if they could speak out loud during exams without that being cheating – neither Tanisis nor June could rely on dictation quills, or even just quills that made handwriting neater.

Anna hesitantly asked if Harry knew who she and her brother were, and Harry had guessed that she meant about their being kitsune and said yes, and Anna told them that sometimes they let 'their pet fox' do their homework for them but it was a lot slower. (Sometimes they also used 'their pet fox' as an excuse for unfinished homework by hastily chewing it up, but that wasn't really going to work in an exam.)

Harry wondered aloud whether they could do something like what he did with his wand, and attach it to their tails, but a bit of looking at Tanisis' tufted leonine tail revealed that that wouldn't work. It was only slightly prehensile and it wasn't long enough for her to bring it up to a writing position while sitting down, so it would be very awkward, and even that would be better than June trying it because she just had a wolf tail.

That did give Luna an idea, though, and she asked Tanisis whether she could try tying the quill to one of her claws instead.

It was a bit fiddly – Harry had to help – but eventually they had two of Luna's spare quills tied to the closest thing either Tanisis or June had to index fingers. It worked, a bit, but Tanisis still looked nervous so Harry said that the best thing to do would probably be to talk to Professor Dumbledore.

He did wonder whether they had any other problems they hadn't mentioned yet, though, and told all four of the non-human students that if they had any trouble with that sort of thing they should let someone know. (Preferably either him or Professor McGonagall, since as a part-time cat the Transfiguration teacher should be able to empathize.)

AN:

If this was the late 1990s and early 2000s, they'd be legally entitled to extra time. I'm not sure of the legal situation in 1993 though.

The DADA teacher thing is becoming a bit of a trend...