Oh well, I'm sorry I took this long to update. My Internet broke down, I'm
updating from an internet café but now that I'm going back to school
tomorrow I'll be able to update, read and review! ^_^
Thanks for everyone who reviewed and feel free to suggest stories to read, as soon as I have time, I'll read em'.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Chapter 3:
It was nearly eleven o'clock and Harry was sitting with the Marauders at a table in the otherwise empty Griffindor common room. Sirius had brought Butterbeers in his suitcase and they were all drinking merrily, talking about the night's events again.
"No, it's because James isn't easily hexed," Sirius explained. "He's the guy that throws the hexes, not receives them."
"I'm sorry," Harry said for the fourth time, smiling due to the effects of the butterbeer, unbelieving that he was having a talk with his father and godfather.
"I told you it was okay," James said, taking another sip of his bottle. "What's your name, by the way?"
"Harry," he said. "Harry . . . Potter."
"What?" James exclaimed, looking at him with cocked eyebrows.
"It's the name I took after my parents died," Harry said, figuring that he wasn't really lying.
"Do you mind us asking how your parents died?" Remus asked shyly, turning his half-filled bottle in his hands.
"Well . . . they were killed by a Dark Wizard," Harry said slowly.
"Sorry," Sirius, James and Remus said at the same time.
"He . . . he gave you that scar?" Remus asked, looking at Harry's forehead.
"Yeah."
There was a moment of silence, as all of them didn't really know what to say next.
"Hey, Peter," James said, shaking his little friend, seeing that he had fallen asleep.
Peter's head jerked upwards from the table and he stared at them with sleepy eyes.
"Wasn't me," he muttered, yawning.
"Go to bed, Wormtail," Sirius said, playfully punching his arm. "No action tonight, anyways."
"Action?" Harry asked, supporting his head with his arm, elbow on the table as Peter walked away towards the dormitories.
"We play tricks on people," James said, smiling. "We're preparing tricks tomorrow night. Wanna join us? I mean . . . you did hex me, and that's a first, so I guess you could join us. What do you think, Padfoot? Should we bring him?"
"Definitely," Sirius said mischievously.
He yawned and took another sip of butterbeer.
"Finish up, people," he said. "I'm going to sleep and I need to hide the bottles. I don't want a detention on the second day of school . . . I mean . . . we need to prepare our stuff tomorrow . . ."
Harry took his three last gulps of beverage and handed his third bottle before rising from his seat.
"T'was great to see you again, Sirius," he said, wobbling away. "This is way better than the present . . . I'm with you and dad and mom too . . . It's weird."
James, Sirius and Remus stood in silence, listening to him with small smiles on their faces.
"Somebody got too much butterbeer," James noted.
"Hey Sirius," Remus said. " He looks like James, don't you find?"
"Hell, he is James," Sirius laughed.
"Hey!" James exclaimed happily. "Maybe we're lost twins or something!"
"I dunno," Remus said. "Its just that all of this is . . . odd."
"Yeah, well maybe we'll think more clearly after a good night sleep," Padfoot said, walking away. "You're all coming or what?"
"Yeah," the other two Marauders answered, following him.
~~~
"Please state me why Augurey feathers are useless as quills, mister Black," a slightly bothered professor Cortaine, defense against the dark arts teacher, said, seeing that half of his class could not write down their notes.
"Because they repel ink, professor," Sirius answered, unable to stop grinning, seeing James, Harry, Remus and Peter cracking up next to him.
Professor Isabella Cortaine, a tall woman with blue eyes and a crooked nose on which balanced a tiny pair of glasses was wearing dark blue robes and was now rubbing her temple, sighing discontentedly.
"Please write down five hundred times 'I will not sell Augurey feathers as quills in the hallway before classes because it is completely useless'," she said. "You too, mister Potter. I know you were in it too."
"Me?" Harry asked.
"No, James Potter," Professor Cortaine said, shaking her head.
Many of the students glared at Sirius before starting searching in their things for an old quill. They had all wasted five sickles for the beautiful greenish/black quills he and James had been selling in the hallway. They hadn't suspected anything, which was the oddest thing.
"Those idiots'll never change," Lily muttered to her friend that had bought one of those quills and was now pulling out an old quill from her school bag.
The professor continued her course, which consisted of revising what they had learned the previous year about controllable effects provided by dark spells and the repellant formula able to stop the thrown curse, otherwise known as the 'protective spell'. Harry had used it against James the previous night and had no trouble understanding the lesson.
He saw that being with his young father and his godfather was the best thing he could have imagined. They immediately became good friends and spent all their time together. Harry saw that even if they played tricks on everyone, the Marauders still had exceptional grades.
"It comes naturally," Sirius had joked.
~~~
The rest of the day passed surprisingly fast for all of them. Their two periods of Defense Against the Dark Arts class started by students being unable to write down their notes and continued with ink that wouldn't work (that James had sold in the Hogwarts Express). The next class was Herbology and Harry noticed his father trying to capture a bowtruckle, a woodland creature seeming to be made of twigs, while all of them looked for healing plants on the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest. James had come back holding it by a foot, but didn't get to keep it for long. It jumped to his face and poked his eyes with its long fingers before running back to the forest, running in zigzags as Sirius and Peter tried to catch it again.
After dinner, they attended Care of Magical Creatures where they studied fire-dwelling Salamanders that fed on flames. The object of the course was to make the little white lizards live outside of their fire, while keeping them alive. In order to do so, the students had to feed them pepper.
The second objective of the course was to retrieve sample of the animals' blood, which had powerful curative and restorative properties.
Peter received severe burns to his fingers when trying to feed his specimen, but it hadn't eaten his pepper and had returned to his fire immediately, and so no blood sample had been obtained by his lizard. Remus had later on offered some of his Salamader's blood so Peter could nurse his wounds.
They had double potions with Slytherins at the end of the day and Harry was absolutely delighted to see that the teacher was almost Snape's exact opposite.
The teacher was a tall bubbly man with short black hair and a big mustache. He was head of Slytherin house, but did not seem to pay more attention to the students of his house.
Harry was very surprised to see that professor Wretcher actually *helped* him when he mixed too much cleaver powder to his luck potion, without taking points off Griffindor House. For the first time in his life, he spent something close to an enjoyable potions lesson.
After their class, Harry saw that sixth years were given a free period at the end of each Mondays and Thursdays in order for them to study. As Remus had told him, every sixth year student needed to have extremely good grades in their O.W.L.s at the end of the year, so they could achieve their NE.W.T.S. in their seventh year.
Seeing that they hadn't been given any homework, Harry and The Marauders decided to take a walk outside to take a breath of fresh air.
Walking near the lake, the boys talked about what they intended to do during the year, without really revealing anything to Harry.
"And so I think we should get Bundimuns," Sirius said. "Just set them loose near the entrance of the Slytherin common room . . . I'm sure we could find someone that could get some for us in the Hog's Head."
"What's a bundimun?" Peter asked, throwing little rocks into the lake.
"Animal that oozes a secretion which rots away foundations and that feeds on dirt. It can make floors collapse," Remus answered scientifically. "It looks like a patch of greenish fungus with eyes and little legs."
"Isn't that a little dangerous?" Peter answered anxiously. "I mean . . . we wouldn't want to really hurt them or anything . . .do we?"
"Nah, they'll just be surprised," James answered. "Very, very surprised . . ."
". . . Not to find a floor in their common room the next morning," Sirius finished, smiling. "But of course, Dumbledore e'll fix it immediately. He'll maybe call the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures' Pest sub-division and ask them to take them away if he doesn't do it himself."
They walked in silence for a few moments, James staring at a group of girls under one of the numerous willows near the shore, He brought his hands to his mouth and shouted.
"HI, LILY!" he yelled.
The girl with red hair turned around, saw James and smiled before going back to her conversation with two other girls.
"Did you see that?" James asked excitedly. "Did you see that? She smiled! Oh my God, this is a good day!"
"He's got a huge crush on that girl," Remus whispered to Harry, thinking that he didn't know.
"Yes, well maybe it was a sarcastic smile," Sirius teased.
"I don't care."
"Or a mocking smile," Remus continued.
"I don't care," James continued.
"Or a 'You don't have a chance with me' smile," Peter said.
"I don't care! There's a start to everything!"
"Or maybe it was simply a smirk," Harry said, joining them.
"Stop it! All of you! Agh!" James said, ruffling his hair. "I'm telling you, I'm going to get her."
"Now where have I heard that before?" Sirius asked mockingly.
"Shut up, all of you," James commanded.
~~~
They walked back up to the school for supper and ate in a rather silent way, Harry thinking that they were most probably concentrating on new tricks they wanted to pull off the next day.
In the end, he was right.
They all walked back to their dorms after eating and directly went to sleep, telling Harry that they would wake him around two in the morning.
~~~
"Harry! Harry! Wake up!"
Harry grumbled and turned sideways.
"Come on!" he heard again. "Peter and Remus won't come this time. Too tiered. Are you coming?"
Harry opened his eyes and nodded positively. He grabbed his glasses from his bedside table and slid to the side of his four-poster bed.
"Do I need to change?" he asked, looking at the pajamas he had borrowed from Remus.
"Nah, not this time," Sirius said. "And slippers make less noise than shoes, so it gives us an advantage."
"I don't have any slippers," Harry said dully.
"You don't have anything, Harry!" James chuckled. "Take Remus'. Peter's won't fit you, he has tiny feet."
Harry did what he was asked, yawning from time to time.
"Now for the rest, you must solemnly swear on you own head that you will never reveal anything to anyone," Sirius said. "And that you are up to no good."
James sand Harry smiled. Both knew that it was the password to accede to the Marauders' Map.
"I swear," Harry simply said.
"Good!" James said happily. "Well that settles it!"
They all descended to the common room and it is there Harry was shown two things both Sirius and James thought he didn't know about: the Marauder's Map and James' invisibility cloak.
"Now . . . we're going to the History of Magic class," Sirius said.
The three students walked out of the common room under the invisibility cape in order not to be seen by the Fat Lady. Once they were a good distance away, they could all walk freely without fearing of being seen . . . thanks to the Marauders' Map.
"Over here!" James whispered when they were walking through a completely deserted corridor.
Harry saw him bend down, lift the carpeting to reveal . . . a passageway.
"It's quicker by this way," he said. "And professor Beckus is coming towards us."
Before Harry could ask whom professor Beckus was, Sirius explained.
"He's the charms teacher," he said. "And he's always in our way when we're out of bed at night because he's a sleepwalker. He goes to the kitchen almost every night to get something to eat. It gets annoying."
Harry followed his father down the stone passageway and walked through it crouched in two. They passed many traps that they could have used, and all of them leaded to a different hallway.
"Here we are," James said, arriving to another trap door. "No one up there, Padfoot?"
"The coast is clear," Sirius answered, taking one look at the Marauders' Map.
The trio climbed up and Harry found himself facing a gigantic Winged-Horse statue he had never seen before.
"Where are we?" he couldn't help but ask.
"One level underground, right above our potions' class," Sirius answered. "The corridor's been out of use because the tiles move when you walk on them and it really hurts when you hit the floor, believe me."
"History class is three levels above us," James said, looking at the ceiling. "We'll use the wall panel."
Harry didn't need an explanation this time. James simply walked to the wall, carefully jumping over the tiles, tapped his wand on one of the panels and it glided sideways, revealing some sort of lift."
"Cool!" Harry exclaimed.
"Let's go," Sirius said, closing the trap door.
The lift wasn't slow but it still took them a few minutes to reach the second floor, where finally, they found the History of Magic class.
James didn't even pick the lock or use the alohomora spell, seeing that the door had been left ajar. They walked in, James immediately seating himself in the teacher's place, a wide grin on his face.
Harry walked around and noticed Sirius carefully opening a jar he had brought from the Griffindor tower.
"What's in there?" he asked.
"The thing that's going to make boring History class, tomorrow first period, *very* fun," Padfoot said, carefully turning the lid of his glass jar.
Harry approached and recognized immediately what was in the jar. About thirty or so Billywigs.
"We decided to pull tricks on people by using magic creatures for the first term," James said. "Billywigs were first on the lists, even before the Augurey feathers... for the second term, we'll have belly blasters and hypnotizing books . . . then we'll have a big surprise for the Slytherin Quidditch team . . . for Christmas we'll probably use billywigs again . . ."
The billywig, Harry knew, was an insect native to Australia. It was round, half an inch long and was a vivid sapphire blue. As he could see, they were very quick, having wings were attached to the top of their heads and rotating very fast, making themselves spin as they flew. At the bottom of the body is a long thin sting. Those stung by it were known to suffer from giddiness . . . soon followed by levitation.
"We made sure no one was allergic," James said, reassuring Harry. "In fact, Remus was the one to do the research."
Sirius moved the lid sideways, enough to pass his wand into the jar.
"Stupefy!" he whispered, making all the billywigs stop rotating.
He then opened the jar and pulled out the fist billywig, holding it by its sting.
"The spell will stop in exactly six hours and twelve minutes," Padfoot said. "Now . . . help me attach them to the chairs."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Everything is going well for Harry but I'm telling you know, there's a reason why you're not supposed to be seen when going back in time . . . mweheheh . . .
Hope you like it, please review! And don't be shy if you have any sort of suggestion for plots or anything else!
Thanks for everyone who reviewed and feel free to suggest stories to read, as soon as I have time, I'll read em'.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Chapter 3:
It was nearly eleven o'clock and Harry was sitting with the Marauders at a table in the otherwise empty Griffindor common room. Sirius had brought Butterbeers in his suitcase and they were all drinking merrily, talking about the night's events again.
"No, it's because James isn't easily hexed," Sirius explained. "He's the guy that throws the hexes, not receives them."
"I'm sorry," Harry said for the fourth time, smiling due to the effects of the butterbeer, unbelieving that he was having a talk with his father and godfather.
"I told you it was okay," James said, taking another sip of his bottle. "What's your name, by the way?"
"Harry," he said. "Harry . . . Potter."
"What?" James exclaimed, looking at him with cocked eyebrows.
"It's the name I took after my parents died," Harry said, figuring that he wasn't really lying.
"Do you mind us asking how your parents died?" Remus asked shyly, turning his half-filled bottle in his hands.
"Well . . . they were killed by a Dark Wizard," Harry said slowly.
"Sorry," Sirius, James and Remus said at the same time.
"He . . . he gave you that scar?" Remus asked, looking at Harry's forehead.
"Yeah."
There was a moment of silence, as all of them didn't really know what to say next.
"Hey, Peter," James said, shaking his little friend, seeing that he had fallen asleep.
Peter's head jerked upwards from the table and he stared at them with sleepy eyes.
"Wasn't me," he muttered, yawning.
"Go to bed, Wormtail," Sirius said, playfully punching his arm. "No action tonight, anyways."
"Action?" Harry asked, supporting his head with his arm, elbow on the table as Peter walked away towards the dormitories.
"We play tricks on people," James said, smiling. "We're preparing tricks tomorrow night. Wanna join us? I mean . . . you did hex me, and that's a first, so I guess you could join us. What do you think, Padfoot? Should we bring him?"
"Definitely," Sirius said mischievously.
He yawned and took another sip of butterbeer.
"Finish up, people," he said. "I'm going to sleep and I need to hide the bottles. I don't want a detention on the second day of school . . . I mean . . . we need to prepare our stuff tomorrow . . ."
Harry took his three last gulps of beverage and handed his third bottle before rising from his seat.
"T'was great to see you again, Sirius," he said, wobbling away. "This is way better than the present . . . I'm with you and dad and mom too . . . It's weird."
James, Sirius and Remus stood in silence, listening to him with small smiles on their faces.
"Somebody got too much butterbeer," James noted.
"Hey Sirius," Remus said. " He looks like James, don't you find?"
"Hell, he is James," Sirius laughed.
"Hey!" James exclaimed happily. "Maybe we're lost twins or something!"
"I dunno," Remus said. "Its just that all of this is . . . odd."
"Yeah, well maybe we'll think more clearly after a good night sleep," Padfoot said, walking away. "You're all coming or what?"
"Yeah," the other two Marauders answered, following him.
~~~
"Please state me why Augurey feathers are useless as quills, mister Black," a slightly bothered professor Cortaine, defense against the dark arts teacher, said, seeing that half of his class could not write down their notes.
"Because they repel ink, professor," Sirius answered, unable to stop grinning, seeing James, Harry, Remus and Peter cracking up next to him.
Professor Isabella Cortaine, a tall woman with blue eyes and a crooked nose on which balanced a tiny pair of glasses was wearing dark blue robes and was now rubbing her temple, sighing discontentedly.
"Please write down five hundred times 'I will not sell Augurey feathers as quills in the hallway before classes because it is completely useless'," she said. "You too, mister Potter. I know you were in it too."
"Me?" Harry asked.
"No, James Potter," Professor Cortaine said, shaking her head.
Many of the students glared at Sirius before starting searching in their things for an old quill. They had all wasted five sickles for the beautiful greenish/black quills he and James had been selling in the hallway. They hadn't suspected anything, which was the oddest thing.
"Those idiots'll never change," Lily muttered to her friend that had bought one of those quills and was now pulling out an old quill from her school bag.
The professor continued her course, which consisted of revising what they had learned the previous year about controllable effects provided by dark spells and the repellant formula able to stop the thrown curse, otherwise known as the 'protective spell'. Harry had used it against James the previous night and had no trouble understanding the lesson.
He saw that being with his young father and his godfather was the best thing he could have imagined. They immediately became good friends and spent all their time together. Harry saw that even if they played tricks on everyone, the Marauders still had exceptional grades.
"It comes naturally," Sirius had joked.
~~~
The rest of the day passed surprisingly fast for all of them. Their two periods of Defense Against the Dark Arts class started by students being unable to write down their notes and continued with ink that wouldn't work (that James had sold in the Hogwarts Express). The next class was Herbology and Harry noticed his father trying to capture a bowtruckle, a woodland creature seeming to be made of twigs, while all of them looked for healing plants on the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest. James had come back holding it by a foot, but didn't get to keep it for long. It jumped to his face and poked his eyes with its long fingers before running back to the forest, running in zigzags as Sirius and Peter tried to catch it again.
After dinner, they attended Care of Magical Creatures where they studied fire-dwelling Salamanders that fed on flames. The object of the course was to make the little white lizards live outside of their fire, while keeping them alive. In order to do so, the students had to feed them pepper.
The second objective of the course was to retrieve sample of the animals' blood, which had powerful curative and restorative properties.
Peter received severe burns to his fingers when trying to feed his specimen, but it hadn't eaten his pepper and had returned to his fire immediately, and so no blood sample had been obtained by his lizard. Remus had later on offered some of his Salamader's blood so Peter could nurse his wounds.
They had double potions with Slytherins at the end of the day and Harry was absolutely delighted to see that the teacher was almost Snape's exact opposite.
The teacher was a tall bubbly man with short black hair and a big mustache. He was head of Slytherin house, but did not seem to pay more attention to the students of his house.
Harry was very surprised to see that professor Wretcher actually *helped* him when he mixed too much cleaver powder to his luck potion, without taking points off Griffindor House. For the first time in his life, he spent something close to an enjoyable potions lesson.
After their class, Harry saw that sixth years were given a free period at the end of each Mondays and Thursdays in order for them to study. As Remus had told him, every sixth year student needed to have extremely good grades in their O.W.L.s at the end of the year, so they could achieve their NE.W.T.S. in their seventh year.
Seeing that they hadn't been given any homework, Harry and The Marauders decided to take a walk outside to take a breath of fresh air.
Walking near the lake, the boys talked about what they intended to do during the year, without really revealing anything to Harry.
"And so I think we should get Bundimuns," Sirius said. "Just set them loose near the entrance of the Slytherin common room . . . I'm sure we could find someone that could get some for us in the Hog's Head."
"What's a bundimun?" Peter asked, throwing little rocks into the lake.
"Animal that oozes a secretion which rots away foundations and that feeds on dirt. It can make floors collapse," Remus answered scientifically. "It looks like a patch of greenish fungus with eyes and little legs."
"Isn't that a little dangerous?" Peter answered anxiously. "I mean . . . we wouldn't want to really hurt them or anything . . .do we?"
"Nah, they'll just be surprised," James answered. "Very, very surprised . . ."
". . . Not to find a floor in their common room the next morning," Sirius finished, smiling. "But of course, Dumbledore e'll fix it immediately. He'll maybe call the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures' Pest sub-division and ask them to take them away if he doesn't do it himself."
They walked in silence for a few moments, James staring at a group of girls under one of the numerous willows near the shore, He brought his hands to his mouth and shouted.
"HI, LILY!" he yelled.
The girl with red hair turned around, saw James and smiled before going back to her conversation with two other girls.
"Did you see that?" James asked excitedly. "Did you see that? She smiled! Oh my God, this is a good day!"
"He's got a huge crush on that girl," Remus whispered to Harry, thinking that he didn't know.
"Yes, well maybe it was a sarcastic smile," Sirius teased.
"I don't care."
"Or a mocking smile," Remus continued.
"I don't care," James continued.
"Or a 'You don't have a chance with me' smile," Peter said.
"I don't care! There's a start to everything!"
"Or maybe it was simply a smirk," Harry said, joining them.
"Stop it! All of you! Agh!" James said, ruffling his hair. "I'm telling you, I'm going to get her."
"Now where have I heard that before?" Sirius asked mockingly.
"Shut up, all of you," James commanded.
~~~
They walked back up to the school for supper and ate in a rather silent way, Harry thinking that they were most probably concentrating on new tricks they wanted to pull off the next day.
In the end, he was right.
They all walked back to their dorms after eating and directly went to sleep, telling Harry that they would wake him around two in the morning.
~~~
"Harry! Harry! Wake up!"
Harry grumbled and turned sideways.
"Come on!" he heard again. "Peter and Remus won't come this time. Too tiered. Are you coming?"
Harry opened his eyes and nodded positively. He grabbed his glasses from his bedside table and slid to the side of his four-poster bed.
"Do I need to change?" he asked, looking at the pajamas he had borrowed from Remus.
"Nah, not this time," Sirius said. "And slippers make less noise than shoes, so it gives us an advantage."
"I don't have any slippers," Harry said dully.
"You don't have anything, Harry!" James chuckled. "Take Remus'. Peter's won't fit you, he has tiny feet."
Harry did what he was asked, yawning from time to time.
"Now for the rest, you must solemnly swear on you own head that you will never reveal anything to anyone," Sirius said. "And that you are up to no good."
James sand Harry smiled. Both knew that it was the password to accede to the Marauders' Map.
"I swear," Harry simply said.
"Good!" James said happily. "Well that settles it!"
They all descended to the common room and it is there Harry was shown two things both Sirius and James thought he didn't know about: the Marauder's Map and James' invisibility cloak.
"Now . . . we're going to the History of Magic class," Sirius said.
The three students walked out of the common room under the invisibility cape in order not to be seen by the Fat Lady. Once they were a good distance away, they could all walk freely without fearing of being seen . . . thanks to the Marauders' Map.
"Over here!" James whispered when they were walking through a completely deserted corridor.
Harry saw him bend down, lift the carpeting to reveal . . . a passageway.
"It's quicker by this way," he said. "And professor Beckus is coming towards us."
Before Harry could ask whom professor Beckus was, Sirius explained.
"He's the charms teacher," he said. "And he's always in our way when we're out of bed at night because he's a sleepwalker. He goes to the kitchen almost every night to get something to eat. It gets annoying."
Harry followed his father down the stone passageway and walked through it crouched in two. They passed many traps that they could have used, and all of them leaded to a different hallway.
"Here we are," James said, arriving to another trap door. "No one up there, Padfoot?"
"The coast is clear," Sirius answered, taking one look at the Marauders' Map.
The trio climbed up and Harry found himself facing a gigantic Winged-Horse statue he had never seen before.
"Where are we?" he couldn't help but ask.
"One level underground, right above our potions' class," Sirius answered. "The corridor's been out of use because the tiles move when you walk on them and it really hurts when you hit the floor, believe me."
"History class is three levels above us," James said, looking at the ceiling. "We'll use the wall panel."
Harry didn't need an explanation this time. James simply walked to the wall, carefully jumping over the tiles, tapped his wand on one of the panels and it glided sideways, revealing some sort of lift."
"Cool!" Harry exclaimed.
"Let's go," Sirius said, closing the trap door.
The lift wasn't slow but it still took them a few minutes to reach the second floor, where finally, they found the History of Magic class.
James didn't even pick the lock or use the alohomora spell, seeing that the door had been left ajar. They walked in, James immediately seating himself in the teacher's place, a wide grin on his face.
Harry walked around and noticed Sirius carefully opening a jar he had brought from the Griffindor tower.
"What's in there?" he asked.
"The thing that's going to make boring History class, tomorrow first period, *very* fun," Padfoot said, carefully turning the lid of his glass jar.
Harry approached and recognized immediately what was in the jar. About thirty or so Billywigs.
"We decided to pull tricks on people by using magic creatures for the first term," James said. "Billywigs were first on the lists, even before the Augurey feathers... for the second term, we'll have belly blasters and hypnotizing books . . . then we'll have a big surprise for the Slytherin Quidditch team . . . for Christmas we'll probably use billywigs again . . ."
The billywig, Harry knew, was an insect native to Australia. It was round, half an inch long and was a vivid sapphire blue. As he could see, they were very quick, having wings were attached to the top of their heads and rotating very fast, making themselves spin as they flew. At the bottom of the body is a long thin sting. Those stung by it were known to suffer from giddiness . . . soon followed by levitation.
"We made sure no one was allergic," James said, reassuring Harry. "In fact, Remus was the one to do the research."
Sirius moved the lid sideways, enough to pass his wand into the jar.
"Stupefy!" he whispered, making all the billywigs stop rotating.
He then opened the jar and pulled out the fist billywig, holding it by its sting.
"The spell will stop in exactly six hours and twelve minutes," Padfoot said. "Now . . . help me attach them to the chairs."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Everything is going well for Harry but I'm telling you know, there's a reason why you're not supposed to be seen when going back in time . . . mweheheh . . .
Hope you like it, please review! And don't be shy if you have any sort of suggestion for plots or anything else!