By the next morning nothing had changed, so Harry got to work. He first had Ron send off a letter to his own parents, and Joshua to owl Neville's grandmother about what was happening too. Before breakfast he also dropped by the clinic, but the door was locked.
Then came time for the morning meal.
"Where are you going?" Hermione asked when he turned away from the red and gold ties.
"I'm eating with Draco today, remember?"
"After what happened last night?!"
"Yes?" Harry said. "Why would that change who I'm having breakfast with?"
"He's—he's—" Her voice dropped several decibels. "What if he's involved?"
Harry stared at her. "He's eleven." Was this really what he thought when he was her age?
"But he's a—you know—a Slytherin. And," she added, seeing his face, "a bully."
That was very hard to argue with.
"Okay, sure, but if no one ever talks to him but other bullies then how is he supposed to learn? Look, he's nicer than he acts, I know it, and he's the one who reached out, so..."
Hermione huffed.
The other first years milled around them, waiting for the end of the argument—none of the other girls cared enough, and the boys had long since realized that Harry could rarely be dissuaded from doing anything.
"Fine." Hermione snapped. "But influence goes two ways, you know? I hope you don't end up a worse person just because you have it in your head that someone who speaks and acts like he does is redeemable."
Harry grinned. "Never." He'd seen the failings of that particular belief system too often to fall into it himself.
Draco, it seemed, had been watching the confrontation between Harry and Hermione, because he had a look in his eyes like he didn't quite know what to think when Harry plopped himself opposite him and between Tracey Davis and Vincent.
"Sup." Harry said.
Draco grimaced.
"Hello, Potter."
"So, what did you want to talk to me about?"
"I'd like to... apologize on behalf of my associate Gregory Goyle for the way he treated you following your article in the Daily Prophet." Draco deliberately ignored that his so-called associate was sitting right beside him and clearly expected Harry to too, likely some combination of traditional pureblood etiquette and unavoidable Malfoy snobbery.
Harry honestly, truly, could care less about both those things, but he also knew that if he wanted to go more of a political rather than a risk-his-life-every-damn-minute-of-every-damn-day route then he'd have to tread carefully, so for now he followed Draco's lead.
"I am always willing to forgive an honest misunderstanding." He said instead.
"I am happy to hear it." Draco said. A few seats down a girl—Daphne?—got up and walked towards the upperclassmen. Harry watched her in his periphery but made sure to keep his eyes on Draco; it was clear that something was happening beneath the surface in Slytherin, and the more information he could get on it while appearing the right combination of oblivious, useful, and adept the better.
"I do have something else I need to talk to you about, though."
"Oh?"
Harry grinned. "I heard your father was on the board."
Draco smirked. Then, he froze. Harry watched in real time as puzzle pieces began to align before Draco's eyes (had he always been so transparent?) Draco's eyes darted to the Gryffindor table, where Neville was still strangely absent, then to the head, where most of the teachers were carefully avoiding all but the most mundane of conversations.
"It won't work, you know." He said instead. "Nothing more than direct threats will shake Dumbledore's control over the school, and even those wouldn't work for long."
"Your father has power." Harry countered. "He might not have as much as Dumbledore, but this time he's got the safety of children on his side."
Draco sat back a bit, apparently trying to visualize the political battle. "It might still not be enough... you know my father's reputation; it is not as if he is likely to be followed by many purely because of events he had no control over. With your vocal support, however..."
"Yeah, I'm not going to do that." Harry said. "I'm still too new to this world to be lending my voice to anybody, no matter how good their word. But I've thought of that, too—would having a petition help? One signed by as many students as possible asking for an investigation into what is going on?"
"A petition?" Draco said.
"Yeah, a little piece of paper that says something like 'we, the students of Hogwarts, do hereby ask that the board of governors launch a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the ollepheist, the children getting ill, and the faculty's silence to not only the students but also the parents on both counts.' Then we get as many people as possible to sign under it—saying they agree with the statement—and have it sent to the board and published in newspapers and stuff."
"That... might be sufficient." Draco said. "I'd have to write my father, though. Let's talk tomorrow after dinner. That should give me plenty of time."
They shook hands over the devilled eggs.
After some more small talk—mostly about how the giant squid seemed to be in a good mood—Harry moved back to his own table to finish breakfast and tamp down his housemates' Pavlovian response to him (or anyone else) having anything to do with the Slytherins.
Harry spent the rest of his free time that day in the library. While finding any information at all about what was going on ended up being a bust—he had no new information on ollepheists at all, and the medical texts the library did have were sorely limited—he did manage to make some headway into understanding ley lines, the giant magical rivers that crisscrossed the earth and affected everyone and everything around it (one of the books he read, among other things, ascribed the more numerous but far weaker ley lines that covered North America to their far smaller numbers of muggleborns, which was an interesting tidbit if only because it actually mentioned magic in the Americas at all.)
In fact, he was in the middle of searching for any other books written by the same author later that week when Hermione came barreling around the corner, and began to speak in an excited whisper.
"Harry! I've been looking all over for you! I couldn't call out for you, of course, but Neville seemed relatively certain you were in the library, so I knew—"
"You found me." Harry grinned. "What for?"
Hermione, because she was Hermione, held out a book.
"Hogwarts: A History?" Harry said. "I've read it."
"Yes, but have you read the unabridged version?" She breathlessly whispered back.
That... was a good question.
Harry actually had no idea that there was an abridged version in the first place, and there had been no sign that the one he'd read through—a near carbon copy of the favored book of Hermione's in their first lifetime—was such, but the book Hermione was holding out to him right now was undeniably larger than any title he remembered going by that name.
"Published 1983?" Harry asked to be sure.
"November 1982." Hermione said. "Harry, this book is four times larger."
It was not.
Harry said so.
Hermione rolled her eyes. "It's a version of the expansion charm," she explained, "so that even large tomes and encyclopedia-sized books can be easily stored. This book is more the size of an encyclopedia than a tome, mind you."
"Where did you even find it?" Harry asked, accepting his own fate of being sidelined for the afternoon and leading the two of them to a small table setting pressed between the books on modern history and those on the toad (and the many, many ways toads could be used, loved, relied upon, hated, cooked, cleaned...)
"It's from Professor McGonagall's personal collection." Hermione explained. "I went to see her after class today to see about what was going on with the illnesses and the troll and everything and she didn't know but when I mentioned confusion over how a troll could have gotten in in the first place—and she did confirm that there was a troll—she suggested I read this. When I told her I had she gave me the unabridged version and said I might find it a mite more helpful." Here Hermione finally began to slow. "I... I know you like history and the like too, so I thought you might enjoy reading it with me."
Harry smiled. "Of course! I'm honored, anyway—I've never heard of Professor McGonagall giving anyone books from her private collection before." This was very, very true. Harry wondered what had changed.
Then they both turned to look at the book.
"I... I don't know where to start." Hermione said. To demonstrate she opened the book and flipped a few pages into what were clearly only the first and second of a many-page monster of a table of contents. Like she had said, it really was more of an encyclopedia than a tome—the first entry (under the category 'founding' and subcategory 'Godric Gryffindor" was apparently a seven-page write-up of everything known about his ancestry and descendants. Keeping a thumb pressed against the bottom of the page, Hermione used her index finger to select that entry and the book flipped forward a few sheets.
After the title card ("Hogwarts: A History: The Founding: Godric Gryffindor: Family Tree of Known Ancestry and Descendants as Compiled by Bathilda Bagshot, Author") and a several paragraph (and surprisingly detailed) introduction of how she'd come to the information she used in the tree, the rest of the page was taken up by miniscule names and crisscrossing lines and tiny little footnotes that directed you to the bottom of the page where Bathilda explained exactly where that name specifically came from, and whether she thought it trustworthy.
Harry decided then and there that absolutely nothing could convince him that reading through the following six pages (which looked to be more of the same) was in any way a productive way to spend his time.
"Could we start with looking into the troll?" Harry said instead. "We don't know how long this loan is for, after all."
Hermione agreed immediately and flipped back to the table of contents, where both first years began coming through the many entries to find anything relevant.
WARDS was a seventy-three page section that was, somehow, even more rambling than the average wizarding book he'd come across. Still, considering that it matched what they were looking for the most, both tweens dived in.
Harry had just finished the first half of the fourth page when Hermione gasped.
"Look." Hermione said, pointing to the third paragraph on the first page.
"What?" Harry said. He squinted at it—it was a fairly innocuous paragraph, he'd thought, but apparently she had seen something he hadn't.
"What do you mean what?" She snapped, then paused, reconsidering. "I mean, sorry, it's just—read it again, okay?"
Harry read it again.
He still couldn't see what the issue was.
Hermione rubbed her forehead. "Harry... Trolls are Class Four beasts. This paragraph says that 'all beasts, be they Class Three or higher, must not be allowed on Hogwarts Grounds except for cases of a) student protection, b) student education, or c) Ministry order, to be enforced by Ward Type B6 unless wards are under Stage Three."
"But the wards are under Stage Three," Harry said, "the last page said that Hogwarts was attacked so much during the war that after it was over they'd had to let them drop to stage two to give them time to recover to full strength."
"Yes," Hermione said, "But she also said that the wards would be allowed to recover to full strength at the rate of a few months less than a full stage per decade. Harry, the war ended exactly ten years ago the exact date of the attack—after the wards should have been pulled up to stage three."
Harry blinked.
He really needed to pay more attention.
"Huh. Okay, so either the wards haven't recovered—something in the past decade could have sapped them just enough to delay the power-up past Halloween, or the troll somehow came onto the grounds for one of the other reasons."
Actually, Harry's money was on the second option, which was part of the reason the paragraph hadn't sparked anything the first or second time he'd read it. He already knew that there was another troll in Hogwarts, and that that one was (very, very arguably) for "student safety", or (depending on how you wanted to take the ease with which he and the rest of the Golden Trio had first managed to gain access) "student education." Still, it wasn't as if he could tell Hermione that.
"Alright, let's find the section on what, exactly, saps ward strengths." Hermione said.
"I'll grab another book," Harry said, "to see what saps wards in general instead of just whatever this book says about Hogwarts' ones."
He had a sinking feeling that he'd have no choice but to go into this black hole until Hermione had found a suitable answer, so he may as well try to find some additional useful information while he was at it.
Hermione smiled. "Thanks for... doing this with me." She said. "You're the only other one in Gryffindor who willingly reads library books, and the Ravenclaws..." she trailed off. "Anyway, thanks."
"That's what friends are for, right?" Harry said, and then he disappeared into a row of ancient looking books before he had to watch her eyes water.