If you recognize any of the characters contained here, unless you have read some of my other work, I do not own them.  The whole Harry Potter Universe belongs to J.K. Rowling, I just like playing in it.  Kate Rhys, Gwen Rhys-Black, and their various animals, yes Orion I'm including you, belong to my bestest friend Megan, aka Katherine Silverhair. I thank everyone who allows me to play with their people, places, and heads.  Have fun.  Oh, by the way this is the only time I am mentioning this, so if you don't see it in later bits, don't be surprised!

It was my first time coming back since the troubles ended.  I had not realized how much it might have changed until I finally came back and saw that it hadn't.    First I should probably tell you who I am.  My name is Ana Dimitrios.  I was born in a small town in Transylvania.  You may see this as odd, but I am not completely human. I am a veela.  Some people think that we do not exist, but they are the same people who do not believe in magic, muggles I think you call them.  We are what the ancient Greeks based the idea of the sirens on and although some may not know it, we not only dance but we sing.  Whoever hears the voice of our kind never forgets it, be they male or female, they can only bend to the will of the singer, and wonder afterward whether or not they were only dreaming. 
            Anyway, earlier in the summer I received an owl from Albus Dumbledore, headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  He desperately needed someone to fill in as a professor of the Dark Arts, due to the unfortunate fact that for the past ten years the school could not keep any one professor for more than a year consecutively.  It seems it all stemmed from the trouble surrounding a boy named Harry Potter and what had happened between him and Lord Voldemort.  Knowing that I held no fear of the latter myself, owing to the fact that I was related to him on my father's side of the family, Dumbledore asked me to come and teach the students about the dark magic harnessed by him and his cohorts.  I accepted the position and made arrangements to be there at the beginning of august to prepare for the coming school year.

I had apparated most of my belongings into Hogsmeade and taken them by coach up to the castle prior to the arrival of the students. I was surprised at how little Hogwarts and the nearby village of Hogsmead had changed in the past twenty-three years since I had graduated.  Although I had only spent three years there as a student, I had also attended the other two great wizarding schools in Europe, Durmstrang in Eastern Europe and Beaux baton in France, at my family's insistence on having a multi-national education.  That and the fact that I protested and nearly got the Dark Arts Professor at Durmstrang fired for what he was teaching the students, it was not really what he was teaching the students; rather it was how.  He was teaching them, as a way to defend oneself against them I guess, how to perform the unforgivables, the banned curses, the imperious, the cruciatus, and the aveda kedavra. To my dismay I learned that he is now the headmaster there.  There was also a slight mishap at Beaux baton involving me and one of the girls dormitories being burnt to the ground, but it was not my fault, one of the petty French girls, jealous of my heritage or something, had set the tower ablaze and it was not noticed as everyone was in the dining hall for the Christmas feast before holiday.  Somehow I got framed for it, I had gone to the bathroom at the same time it was set or something of that sort, and since I was not part of one of the great French wizarding families as she was, I was the one to be expelled.  But then, I had come from Durmstrang the semester before and trouble seemed to follow me wherever I went.

After discussing procedures with Dumbledore and the other professors, I went back to London to gather my remaining belongings that were waiting for me at the muggle flat I had rented over the summer.  Taking the final trunk with me to the Leakey Cauldron, I resolved to spend the last week before school started studying the people in Diagon Alley and the various offshoots of it.  One of my first stops was to acquire new teaching robes, as I had been living disguised as a muggle in New York for the past ten years, I did not have any every day robes in good repair.  I had been earning good money as a paranormal researcher, a psychic if you will, for some time.  The poor muggles must have thought I was just an eccentric, keeping owls as pets in my penthouse apartment, actually using my fireplace, and keeping cabinets full of odd assortments of ingredients.  I even used a cloaking spell to hide the pointiness of my ears, an unmistakable trait of those who are not fully human.  The apartment had a large greenhouse that I could open up to the night air and dance to my hearts content.  Needless to say my heart was never content there, which is why I came back to London in the first place.
            After gathering my new robes and some texts to be used in class that year, I figured it was always best to have a copy of the books your students will be using as a reference to your class, I went and got an ice cream soda and started making lesson plans at the little soda shoppe on the corner.  Halfway through the first year student's lesson plans I realized that I would need to know what the higher grades had covered before I could make definite plans for what to teach them.  I resolved on my first day to pose an essay survey of all levels, except first years, asking what they had covered in the previous years and what they would like to learn this year.  I then proceeded to make out basic, fill in the blank type lesson plans for the older students.  I did this for the next four days.