Eughhhh. Writers block for days.

I swear, writing gets harder the closer you get to a big build-up.

I'm probably still not going to update regularly, but hopefully I'll start making forward progress again, rather than just grinding to a halt like I've done this week.

Well.

That certainly just happened.

Potter, against all odds, managed to take an egg from an angry dragon.

Golden egg, mind you, not like it would make a different: bastard nearly melted his broom doing so. If he wasn't in a place with a fully stocked medical wing, he'd be looking at a pretty solid burn for a few weeks.

As is, he'll be fine if he rubs some dirt in it.

All in all, a good showing, but nothing to write home about. Now convincing Ginny to go to sleep before midnight, on the other hand, is something that I'll need to work quite hard on.

Oh dear god.

Well, I'm screwed.

Like, incredibly screwed.

Ginny, against all odds, has discovered that there is going to be a Yule ball this year.

I can tell, because she just burst into the room, grasped my neck, and started begging/threatening me to make her perfumes/love potions/etc.

I didn't have any perfumes, and honestly, it'd be a cold day in hell

like, colder than Scotland. Which is already pretty goddamn cold.

before I ever even consider brewing a love potion. I don't even want to be an accessory to the drugging of Potter.

Besides, I have no idea how, but he'd find a way to take revenge, and honestly, I don't want to find out just what he'll do.

But yes, between the inelegant blubbering about 'not being pretty enough', the sheer panic of not having a decent dress to wear, and also the fact that the panic over the tournament still hasn't faded, and I foresee an uncomfortable next few days.

Cinder's started laughing at about ten, and hasn't stopped since. It was, miraculously, unsettling enough to snap Ginny out of it for a good five minutes, but the shock quickly faded.

I'm going to take a break from here.

I reconnected with Luna today.

In a desperate ploy to avoid the still-rampaging Ginny, I spent pretty much the entire day talking to her instead.

Sure, it was sorta hard to decode the way she speaks, but man, anything's better than what I've been forced to listen to.

I think I managed to handle everything Ginny was saying, up until she somehow started complaining about being flat, and had begun to wonder if there was a spell to fix that. At that point, it was an incoming downward spiral, and I just left the room, not-quite-running for my life.

Anyway

When walking around with Luna, I ended up bumping into Monique as well, and from there, the conversation drifted towards being a Veela-blood. I, having already been through that line of conversation myself, was able to answer about half of the questions.

Not like I needed to, but it felt good to actually know things.

The entire time, Luna was scribbling away at a little clipboard, after having claimed that she was doing the questions for her father's newspaper. Neither of us really had any objection, as long as we were able to see what she had written when she was done.

I actually didn't know Luna's family ran a newspaper.

Anyway, as a thank you (or perhaps because I was looking at her funny when she mentioned that she was writing for a newspaper, Luna handed me one of her old copies (dated about a week and a half ago), told me to read up, and skipped away.

I think me and Monique both shrugged, before heading our separate ways.

Right now, I'm writing in the common room, as I don't particularly want to go back to our dorms quite yet.

Maybe in an hour or so.

PARGON-PROTECTION-PARGON-ABSORPTION-PARGON-ANTIMAGIC-PARGON RING IS UNSTABLE.

DO NOT USE.

SERIOUSLY DON'T

This is actually pretty interesting.

Once again, I'm writing in the dorms. I had to help dispose of a vat of who-the-hell-knows earlier, which I couldn't even begin to identify the ingredients of.

But that's not really relevant.

What is relevant, is Luna's paper.

Sure, on the surface, it's pretty worthless. Gimmicks about random creatures, lots of speculation. A few of them I don't recognise, but the magical world is weird, and I'm sure they could potentially exist.

It was just enough to make me shrug and work on runes again (which, to my luck, didn't blow up this time).

It was when I looked back to the paper, mage sight still active.

The paper was glowing. And not the usual magic-items glow.

It had, well

It had text, glowing brightly. Legible text, at that. It was upside down from the regular paper, and was bright enough to bleed out the rest of the text.

This particular portion was still gossip, but it was a lot more interesting in content: rather than just creatures, it had information on ley lines, rune arrays, or even some old, gimmicky spells which could be adapted.

I'll need to see if I can't get my hands on more copies of the paper: maybe something in one of them will help me get over the Patronus barrier.

At least, I can hope. I still am not feeling particularly confident regarding that one.

That was incredibly disturbing. The Defense teacher demonstrated the 'Unforgivables' Lupin hinted about last year.

A torture curse, a mind-control curse, and a death curse.

Yikes.

Even worse, he implied that he was upset that he was unable to cast the mind-control curse on students below year four.

At least without their consent.

I, of course being overconfident, volunteered, assuming my magic resistance would protect me.

Yeah, no luck. What saved me, was the language barrier.

Turns out, my ability to speak English is linked to my free will, and when put under the Imperius, the connection is temporarily severed. I don't know how long that particular effect lasts, but I'm still feeling it, a good hour later.

So rather than listening to his commands, I just sat there, silently unable to do anything, as he spoke vaguely commanding-sounding words which had no meaning to me. I stood there listening for about ten seconds, before the teacher started scowling, and I started looking around, apparently attempting to find a way to parse his commands.

So yeah, they can't turn me against my friends (unless they know Infernal, at which point it doesn't really matter, since they'd be able to use standard binding spells anyway), but they can effectively force me immobile and useless.

As I walked back to my seat (which took a while, since it took a minute to regain control of my body), I could hear the murmuring, but again, I couldn't understand any of it.

And then I sat back down beside Ginny, who was looking at me rather concerned.

Yeah, I don't think I reassured her at all when I answered back to whatever she was saying in Infernal.

I'll need to apologise to her later. Probably when the headache stops.

Day fifteen of the Ginny-pocalypse. After the whole Imperius debacle, she's pretty much begun to calm down, but is still chewing her fingernails about whether or not Potter will ask her to the ball. I think it's beginning to transition from fear to just straight up existential terror.

I have two options. One, I can fix this goddamn problem.

Oh wait, did I mean two? I meant one. I've never been a planner. Besides, isn't that what Gryffindors do?

I can't handle this any more.

I'm fixing this now.

Potter, after our little heart-to-heart, finally worked up the courage to ask Ginny to the ball at lunch.

He of course glanced at me partially in fear when we he came over, but that was expected. I might've been too blunt, but that's the only way to get through to someone like him.

Ron Weasley, being the closest older brother, immediately started to sputter the cliche 'That's my sister!', but was silenced with my throat-slashing motion.

Hopefully now Ginny'll stop destroying everything in our rooms with her panic.

Weasley

I can't believe

he actually did that

It's fucking hilarious

I was halfway through a bowl of rather strong curry (It was soup night, and there was everything from lentil soup, to pea soup. Amusingly enough, Parvati was the only other girl to go for the curry, which was pretty damn lethal)

I can't

I just can't

"I know that my sister's going with my best friend, and I know you probably don't have a date, so I should probably go with her best friend, right? Would serve her right."

It wasn't the fact he said that. I fully expected him to say something that dumb.

It was the complete, deadpan look he was wearing, as if he assumed he was doing everything perfectly.

I looked him straight in the eye for about twenty seconds, before I completely lost it and just started laughing maniacally.

I swear, I tried to stop, but I just couldn't.

I ended up collapsing into my bowl, and got a nice lungful of curry, which was rather loud, rather disgusting, and definitely would have hurt if I was a human.

And then he fucking nails it

Like, takes it to eleven.

I'm still face-down in the bowl of scalding soup, blowing bubbles as I forget stupid little things like 'remembering how to breathe'.

"So is that yes?"

How?

How the hell is someone this dumb?

I'm still laughing, and Ginny's laughing along with me. It's been three hours.

I think I just sat there, with my face in a bowl of curry, for five minutes, before someone (read, Ginny) helped me out of the bowl.

I only stopped laughing just long enough to loudly state 'no', before I fled the hall to wash my face.

According to Ginny, he honestly doesn't understand where he went wrong.

That might actually be the funniest part.

If he tries again, I might end up laughing myself into a coma.

No coma, sadly.

One of the boys must've talked to him, and told him just how badly he screwed up.

That'd definitely explain the sheepish looks he was giving me.

Anyway, it's mid-November, and the ball's mid-December.

If Ginny doesn't manage to find herself a set of dress robes by the ball, I'll just lend her mine. Not like I'll be needing them: I'm probably not going.

We're about the same size.

Yeah, I'll probably end up doing that.

One week from the ball. As expected, Ginny couldn't manage to get a decent enough dress, so I lent her my combat robes.

Yes, they're technically combat robes, but they're needlessly fancy, and heavily enchanted. You never know when you'll need them.

It was an attack of foresight that led me to grab Ginny by the shoulders, look her directly in the eye, and recite the following.

"You are not going to refer to him as 'The Boy Who' Lived. No matter who he is, no matter what he is, he wants to be known as Harry. You're going to the ball with Harry. Sure, he's goddamn awesome, but he doesn't want that fame. He wants a date, you want a date. Screw this up, and you're not getting another."

Or something to that tune.

Basically, I just told Ginny to treat him like a human, and that he's as shy as she is.

If not more. Hopefully, it'll help break the ice.

Otherwise we'll just have two awkward dolts standing around during the ball.

Honestly, I get a feeling that if she were to treat Potter as if he was a hero, then she'd do nothing more than force him to retreat into his shell.

I'm going to be lurking to the side the entire ceremony. It's too perfect of an opportunity to miss: perfect for an ambush.

Perhaps I'm becoming paranoid.

Perhaps I'm just beginning to understand this whole 'Constant Vigilance' thing that the Defence psychopath is spewing eternally.

V2