Brandishing the Marauder's map and pacing in front of his three co-conspirators Fred grandly announced, "Despite our best monitoring efforts, surprisingly-"

"Not," Hermione muttered.

"Surprisingly," he emphasized, giving what he imagined was a quelling glare, "has yielded little-"

"None," George corrected.

"Little," Fred practically growled, "information for our quest to find the Unknown Prankster."

"Sorry, twin, I meant to say no useful information," George amended. Hermione and Lee snickered.

"I happen to find the information that Percy and Penelope Clearwater sometimes linger in classrooms together after hours to be quite-"

"Disgusting? Vomit inducing?" his twin helpfully supplied.

"Fine," Fred deflated. "We haven't turned up anything with our monitoring but- yes, Mini-Lee?"

Hermione was practically bouncing on her seat between George and Lee, her hand in the air as if she were back in September of her first year.

"I have something to report," she crowed.

"And you waited all this time to tell us!" Lee ruffled her hair as she smirked at him.

"I wanted to see what Fred's update was first," she replied impishly.

Fred sank to the ground dramatically. "Upstaged by our own protege. How do I ever recover from this ignoble defeat? I thought we had years left before it came to this!"

"Oy! Don't drag all of us down in your defeat because of your daft idea," George griped, poking his twin with his toe. "I nearly fell asleep in History of Magic after monitoring that damn map all night!"

"You always almost fall asleep in History of Magic," Lee cheerily informed him.

"Ahem. Would anyone like to hear my update?"

"Yes!" three voices chorused, one a big glummer than the rest.

"So, I waited until after History of Magic class ended and asked Professor Binns about the Chamber of Secrets. I think if he wasn't already dead he would have had a heart attack and died he looked so surprised to see a student asking him a question! Anyways, after arguing with him about it's not being 'real history' and a 'tawdry fable,' he finally told me about it. Apparently the legend goes eons back, back to the days of the founders. Slytherin didn't want to admit Muggleborns but he got outvoted-real history up until this point. Unwilling to have his name attached to such a degraded institution, Slytherin walked out but - and here's where we get into the legend territory - apparently left behind a huge Chamber of Secrets into which he placed some terrible creature that could be controlled only by his heir. The legend states that this creature would rid the school of those Slytherin considered unworthy of education. So definitely me, good likelihood that includes the half-bloods and blood traitors, but who really knows. Anyways, apparently there have been a great many expeditions to try to find said Chamber and said beast, to no avail, thus the confidence in its status as 'legend.'"

"Blimey. I was peeved that this U.P. was being creepy and upstaging us, but he-"

"-or she-"

"Or she, is really stooping to new lows! Threatening to open a Chamber that releases some sort of deadly, bigoted creature," George murmured.

"But no one knows that, except us," Lee reminded them. "I think everyone would be a lot more terrified if they knew what the Chamber of Secrets was."

"Malfoy was making some comments at dinner insinuating that he knew all about it," Fred offered. "So some people might know, and if the prankster ramps this up, that knowledge will definitely spread. I agree this isn't a stand-alone prank; it's part of a series."

"Are we at all worried it's real?" Lee queried. His eyes followed Hermione with worry.

"I doubt it. Why now? If there is an Heir of Slytherin, it seems likely it'd be Malfoy but then why didn't it come out for Malfoy Senior?"

"Oh! I almost forgot!" Hermione exclaimed. "There was one other time it was allegedly opened. Before Malfoy senior's time though. 1943, exactly 50 years ago. A student actually died-but it turned out to be unrelated; Hagrid's Acromantula had killed the girl and that's why he was expelled."

"What?" the boys breathed in near unison.

"Hagrid killed someone? I can't believe that!"

"Hagrid didn't kill anyone, his pet Acromantula did," Hermione huffed.

"Still," Fred mused, "That doesn't sound like him at all. Well, I suppose he does really love dangerous creatures…"

The group chuckled half-heartedly. They all remembered the incident last year when Hagrid had somehow obtained a baby dragon that had nearly burned his house down before Dumbledore had intervened and called Charlie Weasley in to take it away.

"He must feel terrible about it, though, even if it was an accident. He probably knew the student," Lee suggested gloomily.

After a few moments of silence as they all pictured the gruesome death of a student wrapped in Acromantula webbing, George broke in, "Okay, so we know this legend is about the Heir of Slytherin and the Chamber of Secrets and blood-purity shenanigans. How does this help us find the prankster?"

"I can try to look up more about the Slytherin lineage. That might at least help us predict what they're planning next," Hermione offered.

"I'm going to continue monitoring the map," Fred asserted ignoring the groans from his companions.

** JP ** JP ** JP **

"Learned anything useful?"

Hermione jumped, hearing Fred's voice so close by.

"You freaking terrified me!" she chastised. He smirked.

"And, no. Nothing other than Slytherin's descendants were really just awful. Madame Pince almost didn't let me take the books - said that students wanting this information were never up to any good - but I also found out that no one else has checked them out, so whoever is doing this either doesn't know about the Slytherin lineage or got their information elsewhere."

"So any snot-nosed-inbred-cares-too-much-about-Blood-Purity Slytherin then?"

"Yeah, pretty much. But back to the awfulness of Slytherin's children. He had one daughter, who killed two of her children because they were 'weak;' she obviously went to Azkaban after that. The surviving son was actually one of the least offensive descendants. He tried to push through legislation in the Wizengamot to allow Muggle-hunting, but otherwise, pretty mild. His descendent though… over the next couple of generations, siblings killed each other, the ones that didn't and tried to lead normal lives for a few generations were later hunted down by their distant cousins either to 'honor their heritage' or make sure they were the only heir to the Slytherin line. It's really a miracle they didn't actually drive the line to extinction. Anyways, the last-and as far as we know, only-descendants were Morfin and Merope Gaunt. She died in 1929, while Morfin and his father died in the late 1940s in Azkaban after they tortured a local Muggle named Tom Riddle to death. None of them went to Hogwarts though; they were apparently completely insane and only spoke Parseltongue."

"That actually seems like quite a lot of information." Fred peered over her shoulder at her neat notes.

"But none of it is useful. No current students are related to Slytherin or even married into the family; they died out too long ago. And nothing in these histories suggests something the prankster is likely to use in their upcoming work."

"What about the Parseltongue thing? That could be incorporated."

Hermione rewarded his idea by circling "Parseltongue" in bright red.

"How's your map monitoring going?" Hermione smirked at him.

"Ugh, not well at all! If I wanted to start a gossip service, it would be going swimmingly. Your naive little mind would be shocked, nay, appalled to see how many students are locked together in classrooms after hours! That and I have a pretty good sense of who skips class on the reg. That Peter bloke in your original year does all the flipping time, for example."

"There's no Peter in my current or former class," Hermione replied, already writing down questions about Parseltongue.

"He's in Gryffindor. I can't believe you don't know him."

"Do you know him?" Hermione inquired. She'd abandoned her parchment to look at Fred again.

"I mean, I've never met him, I don't think," he responded. "But I've seen him on the map in Ron's dorm all the time and in class-he usually sits by Ron when he bothers to go."

"I'll bet you 10 galleons there is no Peter in that class. I'd definitely remember. I memorized my whole cohort the first night we got here so I could try to make friends."

"Done! I'll go ask one of the boys in that dorm, and you will bow down to my superior knowledge," he crowed.

"Fine." Hermione was already packing up her books, ready to head back to the Gryffindor Common Room. "I'll just put these books back and walk back with you."

** JP ** JP ** JP **

"Nope, definitely no Peter," Harry responded. "It's me, Ron, Neville, Dean, and Seamus. Has been since our first day."

"Agreed," Ron chimed in.

"Hah!" Hermione held out her hand meaningfully to Fred, who just looked baffled.

"Thanks, Harry, Ron," he muttered distractedly. The bespeckled boy looked similarly confused, but flashed them both a smile and returned to the other side of the common room with Ron, who was glaring at his older brother.

"We need to call a Prankster Team conference. Emergency," he whispered to Hermione.

"Because you're bitter you're wrong?" she whispered back.

"No, because I'm pretty damn confused about this whole situation!"

Hermione nodded, appreciating the desire not to be confused about anything. She darted up the stairs to the boys' dormitories to find Lee and George and emerged a minute later with an intrigued George and peeved Lee; his hair was still wet from the shower and the moisture on his arms suggested that he might not have actually finished his cleaning before being summoned.

Fred cast a few spells around them to hide their conversation.

"Thank you all for coming on such short notice-"

"Cut to the chase. Some of us were busy," Lee growled.

"Right. Okay, so I mentioned to Hermione that Peter from her original year often skives off class; I see him on the map in the Gryff dorm all the time during the day. But," he gave a theatrical wave, "Hermione-and Ron and Harry confirm-says there is no Peter in their year."

The silence that greeted him was less awed than he seemed to have expected.

"And this merited dragging me from my shower, why?" Lee demanded.

"Because he's on the map in that dorm all the time! And in class with them. Who is he? The map has never been wrong before," Fred sounded affronted.

"That we know of," Hermione argued. "It could be wrong loads of times, but we can't go across the castle and check every time. Maybe it's another prank they added in that you've just noticed."

"Well, we can investigate this right now. Where is Peter Pettigrew?"

Fred pulled the map out of his pocket and tapped it with his wand, muttering the passcode under his breath. The castle bled into existence on the ratty page and four sets of eyes eagerly scanned for the mysterious name.

"There!" Lee pointed at the tiny dot in the Gryffindor dorms.

"Okay, let's go see who it is!"

The four of them rushed up the stairs and clambered into the second year boys' dorm, apologizing to Neville and Seamus who looked rather confused to see the crowd that was entering the room.

"And it's no one," Hermione chirped. "Let's go."

"Wait, let's look around a bit, if that's okay?" George clearly had decided to back up his twin a little on this, but after several minutes of looking under beds and in closets decided Hermione had been right. This Peter Pettigrew didn't exist.