Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the creative process that resulted in the wonderful world of Harry Potter, thus I do not claim ownership of it.
Goyle and Trouble….
The chameleon is one of nature's fascinating creatures. Widely known in the muggle world for its colour-changing abilities; it has been marvelled at through the ages. In the wizarding world too, it has provoked hundreds of studies and papers chronicling its many magical qualities. Whilst poor bio-physicists and bio-chemists struggled with the enigma behind the animal's colour shifting, the wizarding world forged ahead with its research into practical uses of these properties being more accepting of the true explanation for the chameleon's powers. Somewhere along the line in this field of academia, it became quite common for chameleons to be adopted as pets in wizarding families. So it was that Norbert, of a great and long line of famed chameleons, came to be at Hogwarts, as the pet of Vincent Crabbe.
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Norbert blinked slowly. Having a brain the size of a pea seriously limited his ability to ponder at length on life's mysteries. Usually they just passed him by; but today he felt somewhat unsettled. He had been looking at his human who, being the size of a lesser planet, tended to occupy most of Norbert's field of vision when in the room; when suddenly he had vanished! Not left the room gone, but disappeared right in front of the chameleon's eyes. Cautiously Norbert moved his gaze from where Vincent had been and scanned around, shifting his feet in readiness for any escape manoeuvres he might have need to make. The boy's dormitory was much as usual, that is to say, a complete mess. Rather alarmingly his small brain was now also telling him that whilst the boy was nowhere to be seen, he could definitely be heard. Tensing slightly Norbert felt a sense of déjà vu wash over him, recalling an incident with Vincent's older brother when he had unwittingly been on the receiving end of one of Mr Crabbe senior's camouflage spells. Having reached a satisfactory explanation of the situation Norbert resumed his previous action of falling asleep and hardly stirred when the door slammed as the most junior member of the Crabbe family hurried down to join his housemates.
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Draco followed Zabini out of the common room, checking to see who was behind him before sneering, "Hair out of pla…" he trailed off as he realised that Blaise was no longer there in front of him.
On hearing Malfoy's cold tones Blaise turned to say something cutting back to Malfoy, but his witty retort dissipated from his mind as he realised that noone was there behind him.
"Zabini?"
"Malfoy?"
"Who's there?"
Both Draco and Blaise jumped as a third frightened voice chimed in after theirs. Their hearts started to race and, unwittingly in unison, they moved to push their backs up against the wall, figuring that the least they could do was to make sure that no-one was behind them. Unfortunately, given their proximity to each other, they crashed together, causing their hearts to speed up further. Both reached for their wands and uttered silent curses as they realised that due to Snape's dislike of 'silly wand-waving they had left them in their rooms.
This presented the two boys with an inner quandary: should they shout and summon help which lay only a few yards away in their common room, but would reveal weakness in front of their peers, or should they struggle in silence against an unseen foe who might well kill them. The inner struggle was short-lived as the voice of self-preservation and the hammering of their hearts drowned out all other arguments in their mind. As one they commenced yelling at the top of their lungs.
Gregory Goyle was almost knocked over by the force of sound that suddenly began echoing around the corridor. It sounded like the wailing of banshees, high-pitched, completely garbled and unintelligible. He slowly backed away from the area from where it appeared to originate, murmured a password, and attempted to quietly disappear into the Slytherin common room. Except that he backed straight into a solid wall. He repeated the password, louder this time but still not much above the level of a whisper. Again the wall did not yield. Up to this point Goyle had kept his eyes looking forwards making sure that he would see any movement from whatever creature was there, now he chanced a glance over his shoulder. The stone appeared as it should be, the entrance remained concealed, he knew he was in the right place as he could see the three cracks that were used to discreetly mark the hidden door. Gregory scanned the corridor in front of him trying to pinpoint the exact source of the sound, it seemed to be moving into the centre of the corridor, obviously trying to block his other route of escape. He tried to rapidly think of a plan. Pushing aside a tiny voice in his head which rudely pointed out that thinking fast was not one of his strong points he focused on what he could do to get out of this situation.
Whilst Goyle was engaging in the relatively novel task of thinking of his very own strategy, Zabini and Malfoy had fallen to the ground, scuffling all the time and had managed to roll away from the wall into the middle of the corridor, still shouting blue murder as they went. It was just as Malfoy felt his nose being twisted that he reached the startling conclusion that the other screaming voice sounded extremely familiar. In fact the more he thought about it the more he came to the worrying realisation that he was on the floor wrestling with Blaise. His nose was released abruptly and Draco scrambled as far away as possible up the corridor, rightly deducing that Blaise was preparing to throw himself against his opponent. He was proved right when he heard Blaise give a ridiculous screeching battle cry followed by a dull thud as Zabini launched himself physically at his assailant only to be met with the admirably hard stone floor, knocking him out instantly.
"Zabini?" Draco cautiously edged closer to where he had heard the thud. "Zabini, I know it's you." He waited for a response. After a few seconds he spoke again, though more loudly this time. "Zabini, answer me! Where are you?" As an afterthought he added, "Are you alright?"
A different voice to the one he had been expecting answered him.
"Draco? It's me, Goyle. Is that you? Be careful! There's some sort of banshee about." Gregory Goyle's voice floated down the corridor.
Draco sat up on his haunches, unsuccessful in his attempt to locate Zabini. He tried to pinpoint the direction from which Goyle's voice had come from. Futilely peering back towards the portrait entrance he scanned the walls for any discrepancy that might give him a clue to his friend's whereabouts. Giving up, exasperated he called out,
"Goyle, in case you hadn't realised, we're all invisible. Where are you, and what's all this about a banshee?"
"I'm by the common room entrance. I can't get in. I heard terribly awful screeches further down the corridor. Can you see anything? Is Blaise with you?"
Now, it is not without reason that the House of Slytherin are renowned for their subterfuge, slight of hand and annoying ability to turn bad situations to their advantage. Draco already was shaping up to be yet another showcase of these characteristics. Seeing an opportunity to gain more kudos and rise in the esteem of his housemates he began to formulate an elaborate tale in his mind with himself as the hero. He had the bare skeleton of the plot outlined in his head when his train of thought was interrupted by Goyle calling out his name frantically.
"Calm down Greggo, I'm still here. Blaise is with me but he's unconscious. I've scared away the monster, so you don't need to worry about that any more." Draco felt no remorse for his little white lie, after all three-quarters of what he had said had been the truth. As his father and his mentor had often advised him, start with the truth and make minor embellishments, then sit back and let others do the rest. It was excellent advice.
"You mean you fought that monster and won? What happened? Did it attack you and Blaise? What spells did you use?"
Unseen to Goyle, Draco smirked to himself. This was going better than he could have ever hoped.
"Well, I would've hit it with an unforgivable, but I didn't have my wand with me, plus it was attacking Zabini and it was invisible. I had to fight it with my bare hands."
In a far off distance Blaise could hear voices. They had a thick syrupy dream-like quality, rather like someone talking through a heavy velvet scarf. All in all it was strangely comforting; a nice way to wake up. He relaxed and tried to hear more clearly what they were saying. As he focused, the voices grew louder and morphed from soothing tones to the sickening sound of Malfoy.
Blaise groaned and groggily tried to sit up. He remembered fighting furiously with some invisible thing and then hurling himself toward where it had been in an attempt to knock it out. With hindsight, it had not been the best of moves. Throwing oneself at sparring opponents could hardly be called the most sensible action to take in normal times, when the creature was invisible it was downright suicidal and, he could attest, extremely painful. He leaned back against the smooth cold wall of the passage breathing in deeply to calm himself and looked around for Malfoy and Goyle who he was sure would be enjoying his present state of distress. Blinking hard he stared around him trying to see them. Before he could shout at them for being childish and tell them to stop hiding from him, Malfoy spoke.
"Zabini, you ok? We're all invisible at the moment. Well at least you, me and Goyle are. We're not sure about the rest; apparently we can't get back into the common room. . . Hey Zabini, did you hear me? Where are you?"
Having only recently returned to the world of the conscious, Blaise was not processing information at his usual sharp pace. It took him a couple of seconds to register that they were undetectable, so he continued to gaze intensely in the direction where Malfoy's voice was emanating. As the penny began to drop, he analysed his encounter with the creature in the corridor. From his little wrestling match he could tell that it wasn't much different to him in size and weight, and from the pulls and pushes he had received whilst struggling with it he concluded that it must have arms and hands. In fact the more he thought about it the more he was beginning to wonder whether it was a monster. It was then that Blaise's light bulb reignited and the veil of mystery over his foe fell.
"Did the monster hurt you Blaise?"
Goyle's voice cut across his unpleasant realisation. Shaking an unseen fist at the gods who were mocking him, Blaise found himself in the disheartening position of having to play to Malfoy's tall tale in order to prevent himself from appearing like an idiot. To try and distract himself from the nasty thought of having boosted Malfoy's kudos his brain commenced thinking of any advantages that could possibly arise from their predicament.
"I'm okay. I was just thinking…" he was rudely interrupted by a loud snort from Malfoy. "Shut up Malfoy, hear me out. We can use this. If no-one can see us and we're careful, we can mess around with the Gryffindors in Potions, Snape'll be only too happy to deduct points at the slightest excuse."
"You're such a simple creature Zabini. Never look beyond your own nose do you? For all we know the whole school could be invisible. Fat lot of good it'd be for us to go gallivanting around if we couldn't see anyone!"
"Simplicity often works best, Malfoy. You on the other hand lack imagination. Maybe the whole school has been affected, maybe not. If it has, all we'd say is that we were going to see our Head of House to inform him of the situation in his tower. No harm no foul."
There was a pause as Draco considered this,
"It's still too risky. We don't know how or why this spell was cast. It could wear off at any minute. I can't really see us being able to explain why we sat invisibly for half of Snape's lesson. Can you?"
"Draco, Draco, Draco. It's perfectly straightforward. We didn't realise until now that we were invisible. It's perfectly plausible that we wouldn't realise it in Potions. Snape never asks us any questions, the goodie-goodie Gryffindors never talk to us. Why would we be aware that they couldn't see us? Come on Malfoy, show a bit of spunk for once!"
It was a not-so subtle hit at Draco's most self-conscious part of his psyche. He could not stand, in fact really hated, to be viewed as cowardly.
"Alright, I'll do it, but let it be known Zabini, if this blows up in our faces you'll owe me big time."
"Yeah, right. Whatever. Goyle, you stay here and try and get back into the common room or at least get a message to them. We need to get everyone in there to swear that we were there too, just in case someone gets suspicious."
With that Blaise and Draco left Goyle with the puzzle of how to get back into the Serpent's Den.
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Meanwhile, barely ten metres away in the Slytherin common room, Rose Parkinson knew that she was in deep trouble. All she had been trying to do was cast a concealment charm on the small walnut table that stood near the exit of the common room. The next thing that had happened was that everyone, and this was no first-year storytelling exaggeration, literally everyone around her had disappeared.
You might have thought that at this point Rose would be feeling extremely embarrassed about it all, but really the only thought that was going through her head was that that her sister was going to have a field day bringing this incident up forever more at the slightest excuse. Thankfully she hadn't tried to impress anyone about her idea for a defence of their tower, so no-one had been watching when she cast it. If she could have thought of a way to recant it in those first few seconds, she might just have gotten away with it. Unfortunately, in her rush to try out her idea she hadn't actually thought of the counter-charm and as the seconds turned into minutes, she became more flustered realising that she wasn't going to have that sudden flash of inspiration that usually got her out of trouble. And boy was she in trouble.
Happily, though not so from the perspective of Marmaduke DeVries, Rose wasn't the only one who was having difficulty reversing a spell they'd cast. Even worse in his case was that he'd committed the classic new boy folly of bravado and had demonstrated his ideas in front of his peers without so much as a trial run in private. Thus it was that Marmaduke was speedily realising that at times you can be too successful in your endeavour. Even more rapidly Marmaduke was coming to the conclusion that testing a locking spell just as your entire house is about to leave for the first lesson of the day was not the brightest of plans.
It was a shame really. The spell had worked brilliantly, better than Marmaduke had envisaged. Not only was there a barrier securing against entry from the outside, but everything was blocked: sounds, smells, even non-substantiate entities. What he hadn't foreseen was that the door would be completely sealed the other way, such that no-one could now leave and no-one on the exterior could hear them call for help.
He knew from his elder brothers tales that the key to survival in Slytherin was never to show your full hand, and above all else to maintain a good image amongst your housemates. Yet again he found himself wishing that he'd heeded their counsel. This mishap would not be soon forgotten and would probably earn him the label of idiot buffoon or something equally undesirable. Stomach churning, he turned to face what he knew would be the contemptuous looks of the other boys.
He waved his hands in front of his eyes to check that they were functioning. The room appeared to be empty which he knew to be impossible. He realised that in his panic he had totally blocked out the hustle and bustle coming from behind him as he had worked feverishly to unlock the door. As the sounds flooded back in, his senses short-circuited on the anomalous input of his ears hearing about thirty raised voices whilst his eyes couldn't see another living soul.
This was definitely not good.
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A/N: Well, this took a while, still not completely happy with it. Whaddya think? Promise that the next bit will be posted rather rapidly. Think that I might limit my chapter length a bit and try and post more frequently. As ever, please review.