Chapter 2
"There is a castle on a cloud," Harry sang mournfully as he stared once again up at the ceiling in his little bedroom, trying hard not to notice the bars on his window. "I like to go there in my sleep-"
"NO SINGING!"
"Sorry, Uncle Vernon," he called back in a very bored tone which served only to quite clearly state that he wasn't sorry at all.
He sighed. If he thought things had sucked royal amounts of donkey arse at 4 Privet Drive before, it was nothing compared to how much things seemed to suck now. Verily, he had had no concept of the amount of donkey arse that a situation could suck until this very moment.
After a quick huddle following the arrival of his warning letter from Hogwarts, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had come to a mutual decision to lock him, Harry, in his room until he died, or went insane from the shame of still being stuck in that dress, and they could foist him off onto some asylum somewhere.
And so, here he lay, busying himself with counting the cracks in his ceiling, and internally singing his own rendition of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' which always inevitably melted back into 'Castle on a Cloud' through ways unknown. By Jove, he did love a good medley!
At some point, he must have drifted off to sleep, because when he glanced at the window next, there was a freckled face, topped in a thatch of red hair, hovering outside his window.
"ARGH! Pippi Longstocking has come for my blood!" he howled.
"Shhh!" the apparition outside the window hissed. "It's just me!"
"Oh, hello, Ron," Harry greeted, grinning sheepishly at his outburst. "I'm a little excitable right now."
"Yeah, solitary confinement'll do that do ya," George put in from the back seat with a sympathetic smile.
Fred glared at him.
"It was your own fault for bringing that weasel home in the first place."
"It was your idea!"
"Yeah, well, you should've learned by now never to listen to me!"
"Fellows!" Ron interjected severely. "We're trying to rescue Harry here!"
"Oh, right," George agreed.
"Sorry 'bout that, Harry," Fred added.
"No problem," Harry assured him. "Er, actually, there is a problem."
"Whazzat?" the three boys chorused together.
"These bars on my window."
"Oh! Them! Don' worry about them, Harry!" George said soothingly. "We'll have 'em off in a second!"
And so, Harry watched in amazement and slight consternation as George, Fred and Ron attached a hook to the bars covering the window of Privet Drive's smallest bedroom, then proceeded to clamber back to their seats. The next instant, the car shot straight out from the side of the house, wrenching the bars from the window with a sickening crack.
"Cool it!" he hissed. "You'll wake the dead!"
"Hehehe! Sorry," the boys chimed together.
But there was no sound from any of the other bedrooms down the hall. This seemed to Harry exceedingly strange. Even as he ran down to the cupboard under the stairs, none of the Dursleys awakened.
'This was altogether too easy,' Harry reflected, quite uneasily, as he shoved his trunk into the car and climbed in after it.
"Hey, what's that you're wearing, Harry?" Ron demanded.
"A...a dress," Harry replied, quivering slightly. Something really felt wrong...Ron wasn't usually so tactless...at least where he, Harry, was concerned.
"A dress?!" Ron repeated incredulously. "What're you doing in a dress?!"
"What's the problem, Ron?" George and Fred chorused together, eerily toneless. "We have dresses."
With a gasp of horror, Harry turned to peer at the two young men, and saw that, indeed, both were garbed in strange blue polka-dotted dresses. This was just the beginning. In addition to the dresses, both were clad in droopy stockings, and their hair, the same bright carrot orange as always, was up in long braids that stuck straight out from the sides of the boys' heads.
"Pippi Longstocking!" Harry yelped in terror. "Ron, your brothers have turned into twin Pippi Longstockings!"
"What's a-matter, Harry? Don't you like it?" Ron inquired in much the same flat, toneless voice that his brothers had used seconds ago.
A sensation of cold crept down his spine as he turned to look at Ron.
Then, as his gaze lit on Ron, in the same dress and stockings, his hair done up in the same braids, he let out a shriek of utter panic, wrenching frantically at the car door, trying with everything in him to escape to freedom.
"Harry, what do you think you're doing?!" Hermione's voive demanded severely from the back of his mind. "You'll get yourself hurt or killed if you try that!"
"Join us, Harry...join us..." the Fred-Pippi was currently chanting, advancing toward him through a car that had mysteriously grown. By a lot.
Harry turned and took to his heels, pursued by three rabid Pippi Longstocking impersonators.
"Do not fear us," Ron implored.
"It's ever so nice here," George added.
The next instant, Harry found himself swamped by gravity defying red braids and freckles...
...And he woke up in his own bed, drenched in sweat, screaming frantically.
"Harry! Harry! What is it?" Ron hissed at him, rolling out of his own four- poster bed within the Gryffindor boys' dormitory, and bounding over to Harry's.
"Wha...? Ron? Where am I?"
"Oh, no," Neville Longbottom sighed, ambling over to Harry's bedside. "He's been dreaming he's back at Privet again. It always gets him disoriented."
"It would get me disoriented, too," Ron admitted, shaking his head sadly and handing his friend a chocolate frog to aid in his recovery from the trauma of the dream.
"It wasn't just Privet Drive again," Harry gasped. "There was a...actually, three.they were..."
"They were what?" Ron urged him gently.
"I can barely stand to say it," Harry shuddered.
"It's okay, Harry, it's all over," Neville reminded him soothingly. "Just tell us what it was."
"It was..."
"Yes?"
"It was...it was...Pippi Longstocking..."
"No!" Ron and Neville gasped together, both growing pale with fear.
Harry nodded miserably.
"I dreamt that I was back at Privet Drive, and Ron and his brothers had just come to get me. I thought it was awfully familiar, which is why it seemed strange that no one woke up and tried to pull me back this time. Then, just as I got settled in the back seat, Ron started asking me about my dress."
"Just as if I would!" Ron huffed, quite offended. He knew exactly how much trauma Harry had undergone, being stuck wearing that dress all summer, and he had sworn to himself that he would never, under any circumstances, bring it up ever again, unless Harry had first, thus authorizing him to.
"And then," Harry went on, "George and Fred turned into Pippi Longstocking."
Ron gagged slightly.
"George and Fred are bad enough already..."
Harry nodded emphatically.
"And then I looked for you, to tell you, but...but...YOU had already turned into Pippi Longstocking, too!"
"I hadn't!" Ron exclaimed, voice shaking slightly. Dream or not, it was a terrifying thing to imagine. Being AROUND a Pippi Longstocking was bad enough, but to actually BE one? Unthinkable!
"I'm afraid you had," Harry returned morosely.
Neville sighed.
"That's a nightmare, alright. You've had some year so far."
"Yeah," Ron agreed, grinning as he launched into a brief summary of the first quarter of the book. "First, we kidnapped you from Privet and took you home, then we got stuck on the train platform and missed the train to Hogwarts, then we had to fly the car, and crashed into the Whomping Willow, and THEN we found out we've got a class with that Gilderoy Lockhart idiot!"
"At least Hermione likes him," Harry said consolingly.
"Yes, yes, she does," Ron ground out, unknowingly clutching the edge of Harry's quilt in a death-grip as the sound of creaking teeth filled the air.
"Steady on, there, Ron," Harry snickered as Neville grew bored and returned to his own bed. "What's my quilt ever done to you?"
"What?" Ron blinked. "Oh, sorry, Harry. Forgot where I was for a second."
"Thought you were in Defense Against the Dark Arts class, and you'd got Lockhart's neck in your grip?" the dark-haired boy asked mildly.
"Something like that," Ron replied absently, a dreamy look coming into his eyes at the delight of this thought. Then he shook his head frantically. "No! No, that's not it at all!"
"Sure, it isn't," Harry agreed mildly, hiding a grin. "Anyway, I'm fine now, so you can go back to bed."
"If you say so," Ron agreed doubtfully, turning and starting back to his own four-poster bed. "Now, I've got to get some sleep, 'r I'll be a zombie for first day of classes t'morrow. You better sleep, too, Harry."
"Right. G'night, Ron."
"G'night, Harry."
"My goodness! What on earth happened to you last night? You look awful!" Hermione exclaimed the next morning at the breakfast table as Ron and Harry collapsed into their chairs.
"Nightmare," Harry explained weakly, trying to peel his face off of the table, where it had fallen nearly the second he'd sat down.
Hermione nodded in sympathetic understanding.
"Ooh...was it the one where you've been tied to the highest branch of a tree by insane pandas, and a group of rabid airline attendants are throwing Danielle Steele novels at you?"
Ron blinked, setting down his toast and peering at her strangely.
"Hermione...have you been studying too hard?...already?"
She looked quite astonished.
"What, have you never had that one?"
Ron shook his head apologetically.
"Afraid you're on your own there."
"Oh...well, anyway, Harry, tell me about your nightmare."
Harry looked dubious.
"It isn't the sort of thing to talk about when there are people around you trying to eat..."
"Oh, come now. I'm not squeamish. Just...whisper it in my ear."
Exchanging foreboding glanced with Ron, Harry shrugged, then motioned Hermione to come closer. Then he imparted the terrifying secret of the previous night's dream.
Hermione gasped.
"THREE Pippi Longstockings?!"
The entirety of the Gryffindor table stopped moving and speaking abruptly. There was an immense clatter as everyone simultaneously dropped their forks in dismayed shock. This was followed by the sound of upwards of three hundred students turning green at the same time.
"Hermione!" Harry admonished.
"Sorry," she squeaked, shrinking back, attempting to hide inside her robe, turtle-like.
It is doubtful that anyone in the dining hall should have regained their powers of motion any time that day, had the air not chosen that moment to fill with owls.
"Mail time!" Dumbledore sang from the other end of the hall.
Taking this cue, the teaching staff of Hogwarts leapt to their feet and launched into the daily song and dance number.
"Here's the mail, it never fails, it makes me wanna wag my tail! When it comes, I wanna wail, 'MAIL!'"
"We've just been sued by a guy named Steve!" a random voice proclaimed from outside the dining hall.
"This place gets stranger by the day," Harry commented, shaking his head. "Why d'you think they instituted that new mail tradition?"
"It's because a certain faction of the population decided that these books needed more musical numbers. I have a feeling we can expect more of these," Hermione replied absently, eyes glued to Ron, who had gone a rather ghastly shade of white at the letter dropped in front of him by the Weasley family owl, who then flapped weakly into the wall.
"It's...it's a...Howler," Neville gasped as he chanced to glance over at Ron's letter.
"Oh, boy," Ron groaned. "I think I'd prefer an attack by three Pippi Longstockings."
"Don't you say such things!" Hermione admonished severely, shaken by the mere thought. "Pippi Longstockings are nothing to joke about!"
"Hermione, have you ever SEEN a Howler?"
She shook her head, baffled.
"You'd better open it," Neville said sadly. "I ignored one from my Gran once. It was horrible! One day, the thing up and ate my pet chinchilla!"
Ron blinked in confusion, then decided that it was usually best not to ask with Neville. He turned to Hermione.
"Just watch what it'll do. Harry, you too."
"I can only imagine," Harry muttered, suddenly not so sure that this experience would be preferable to the one in his dream.
Ron opened the letter, then set it gingerly on the table. The next moment, the angry visage of Molly Weasley hung over the scene, glaring furiously at her youngest son.
"Ronald Weasley!" the translucent image bellowed. "That was positively the most foolish thing I have ever known one of my children to do, and that is no small feat after the incident with Fred and George and all those mail- order cadavers last summer! What was going through that vacuum you call your brain? This is the second time you've stolen the car in the space of a month! Is this becoming a trend, is all I'd like to know. Are you going to need to find you a parole officer? Well, parole officers aside, young man, if you set one more toe out of line, I will be there to drag you off by that toe so fast, your head will spin like a Frisbee! Love, Mother."
For a time, the entire Gryffindor table sat in a silence easily filled by the howls of laughter coming from the Slytherin table.
"W-well...that was quite an education, wasn't it?" Hermione finally commented brightly to Harry.
"Kind of an ironic way to end it, I'd say," Harry replied.
Hermione nodded in agreement.
"I hate everybody," Ron muttered, bright red.
"You deser-" Hermione began.
"If you finish that," Ron ground out, grabbing her collar and pulling her closer until their noses were less than an inch apart, "I'll tell everyone what you were saying in your sleep the other night about Lockhart."
Hermione blinked.
"Er...why were you in a position to know what I was saying in my sleep?"
"Curses!" Ron hissed, breaking character for neither the first nor the last time. "Foiled again!"
"He came up to kiss you goodnight," Parvati giggled from several seats down. "He was obviously disappointed that he didn't get to say hi earlier."
"How d'you know that?! I though you were all asleep!" the ever-foolish Ron exclaimed.
Parvati's eyes widened.
"Did you really?! I was just bluffing!"
"Er...well, uh...me, too!" Ron laughed lamely. "Heh-heh-heh...ugh..."
Very, very luckily for Ron, Hermione had failed to hear any of this exchange, as a book had made its way into her line of vision, and she had been rather busy mauling the person holding it, attempting to claim it for her own. Now she was contentedly engrossed in a copy of 'The First Ninety- Thousand Years of Mankind, Wizard and Muggle: Unabridged,' only her eyes and nose visible above the top of the enormous volume.
"Ow..." whimpered Percy, who had been the unfortunate bearer of this book, as he lay on the floor, twitching ever so slightly.
"Whew..." Harry whistled. "I guess no one ever told him not to get between Hermione and a book."
"Eh...Percy?" Ginny murmured, eyes wide with concern as she knelt next to her brother. "Are...are you okay?"
"He'll be fine, Ginny," Ron assured her easily, reaching for a hot, buttered roll.
However, it seemed that time was not on poor Ron's side that day, as just as he bit into it...
"Ron, hurry up! We've got to get to class!" Hermione exclaimed, tossing her book over her shoulder and tugging Ron to his feet. By the hair.
"Ow!" Ron yelped in unison with Percy, who had given a similar exclamation of pain as the massive volume struck him squarely in the head.
Deciding not to try his luck in the same manner that had brought great pain to two unfortunate Weasleys already this morning, Harry climbed to his feet, slung his book bag over his shoulder, and started from the Great Hall.
Yes, another ordinary day was underway at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A shame the ordinariness wouldn't last...
End Notes: [Blink] Wow...that was odd, even for me. I don't know what this sudden firm conviction of mine is that Pippi Longstocking is the most frightening thing ever, but...well, let's just say that this will probably be a recurring gag, which will likely work to the detriment of the story, but what the heck. What's a parody for if not to do the same stupid joke, over and over and over and over? ^_^
As well, it appears as though the Ron/Hermione 'shipperdom has begun already...I do hope it won't make anyone nauseous by the time the story's over...maybe I should get everyone to sign a waiver, absolving me of any responsibility, should any readers of this be plagued afterwards by severe and lasting stomach problems, or tooth decay.
"There is a castle on a cloud," Harry sang mournfully as he stared once again up at the ceiling in his little bedroom, trying hard not to notice the bars on his window. "I like to go there in my sleep-"
"NO SINGING!"
"Sorry, Uncle Vernon," he called back in a very bored tone which served only to quite clearly state that he wasn't sorry at all.
He sighed. If he thought things had sucked royal amounts of donkey arse at 4 Privet Drive before, it was nothing compared to how much things seemed to suck now. Verily, he had had no concept of the amount of donkey arse that a situation could suck until this very moment.
After a quick huddle following the arrival of his warning letter from Hogwarts, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had come to a mutual decision to lock him, Harry, in his room until he died, or went insane from the shame of still being stuck in that dress, and they could foist him off onto some asylum somewhere.
And so, here he lay, busying himself with counting the cracks in his ceiling, and internally singing his own rendition of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' which always inevitably melted back into 'Castle on a Cloud' through ways unknown. By Jove, he did love a good medley!
At some point, he must have drifted off to sleep, because when he glanced at the window next, there was a freckled face, topped in a thatch of red hair, hovering outside his window.
"ARGH! Pippi Longstocking has come for my blood!" he howled.
"Shhh!" the apparition outside the window hissed. "It's just me!"
"Oh, hello, Ron," Harry greeted, grinning sheepishly at his outburst. "I'm a little excitable right now."
"Yeah, solitary confinement'll do that do ya," George put in from the back seat with a sympathetic smile.
Fred glared at him.
"It was your own fault for bringing that weasel home in the first place."
"It was your idea!"
"Yeah, well, you should've learned by now never to listen to me!"
"Fellows!" Ron interjected severely. "We're trying to rescue Harry here!"
"Oh, right," George agreed.
"Sorry 'bout that, Harry," Fred added.
"No problem," Harry assured him. "Er, actually, there is a problem."
"Whazzat?" the three boys chorused together.
"These bars on my window."
"Oh! Them! Don' worry about them, Harry!" George said soothingly. "We'll have 'em off in a second!"
And so, Harry watched in amazement and slight consternation as George, Fred and Ron attached a hook to the bars covering the window of Privet Drive's smallest bedroom, then proceeded to clamber back to their seats. The next instant, the car shot straight out from the side of the house, wrenching the bars from the window with a sickening crack.
"Cool it!" he hissed. "You'll wake the dead!"
"Hehehe! Sorry," the boys chimed together.
But there was no sound from any of the other bedrooms down the hall. This seemed to Harry exceedingly strange. Even as he ran down to the cupboard under the stairs, none of the Dursleys awakened.
'This was altogether too easy,' Harry reflected, quite uneasily, as he shoved his trunk into the car and climbed in after it.
"Hey, what's that you're wearing, Harry?" Ron demanded.
"A...a dress," Harry replied, quivering slightly. Something really felt wrong...Ron wasn't usually so tactless...at least where he, Harry, was concerned.
"A dress?!" Ron repeated incredulously. "What're you doing in a dress?!"
"What's the problem, Ron?" George and Fred chorused together, eerily toneless. "We have dresses."
With a gasp of horror, Harry turned to peer at the two young men, and saw that, indeed, both were garbed in strange blue polka-dotted dresses. This was just the beginning. In addition to the dresses, both were clad in droopy stockings, and their hair, the same bright carrot orange as always, was up in long braids that stuck straight out from the sides of the boys' heads.
"Pippi Longstocking!" Harry yelped in terror. "Ron, your brothers have turned into twin Pippi Longstockings!"
"What's a-matter, Harry? Don't you like it?" Ron inquired in much the same flat, toneless voice that his brothers had used seconds ago.
A sensation of cold crept down his spine as he turned to look at Ron.
Then, as his gaze lit on Ron, in the same dress and stockings, his hair done up in the same braids, he let out a shriek of utter panic, wrenching frantically at the car door, trying with everything in him to escape to freedom.
"Harry, what do you think you're doing?!" Hermione's voive demanded severely from the back of his mind. "You'll get yourself hurt or killed if you try that!"
"Join us, Harry...join us..." the Fred-Pippi was currently chanting, advancing toward him through a car that had mysteriously grown. By a lot.
Harry turned and took to his heels, pursued by three rabid Pippi Longstocking impersonators.
"Do not fear us," Ron implored.
"It's ever so nice here," George added.
The next instant, Harry found himself swamped by gravity defying red braids and freckles...
...And he woke up in his own bed, drenched in sweat, screaming frantically.
"Harry! Harry! What is it?" Ron hissed at him, rolling out of his own four- poster bed within the Gryffindor boys' dormitory, and bounding over to Harry's.
"Wha...? Ron? Where am I?"
"Oh, no," Neville Longbottom sighed, ambling over to Harry's bedside. "He's been dreaming he's back at Privet again. It always gets him disoriented."
"It would get me disoriented, too," Ron admitted, shaking his head sadly and handing his friend a chocolate frog to aid in his recovery from the trauma of the dream.
"It wasn't just Privet Drive again," Harry gasped. "There was a...actually, three.they were..."
"They were what?" Ron urged him gently.
"I can barely stand to say it," Harry shuddered.
"It's okay, Harry, it's all over," Neville reminded him soothingly. "Just tell us what it was."
"It was..."
"Yes?"
"It was...it was...Pippi Longstocking..."
"No!" Ron and Neville gasped together, both growing pale with fear.
Harry nodded miserably.
"I dreamt that I was back at Privet Drive, and Ron and his brothers had just come to get me. I thought it was awfully familiar, which is why it seemed strange that no one woke up and tried to pull me back this time. Then, just as I got settled in the back seat, Ron started asking me about my dress."
"Just as if I would!" Ron huffed, quite offended. He knew exactly how much trauma Harry had undergone, being stuck wearing that dress all summer, and he had sworn to himself that he would never, under any circumstances, bring it up ever again, unless Harry had first, thus authorizing him to.
"And then," Harry went on, "George and Fred turned into Pippi Longstocking."
Ron gagged slightly.
"George and Fred are bad enough already..."
Harry nodded emphatically.
"And then I looked for you, to tell you, but...but...YOU had already turned into Pippi Longstocking, too!"
"I hadn't!" Ron exclaimed, voice shaking slightly. Dream or not, it was a terrifying thing to imagine. Being AROUND a Pippi Longstocking was bad enough, but to actually BE one? Unthinkable!
"I'm afraid you had," Harry returned morosely.
Neville sighed.
"That's a nightmare, alright. You've had some year so far."
"Yeah," Ron agreed, grinning as he launched into a brief summary of the first quarter of the book. "First, we kidnapped you from Privet and took you home, then we got stuck on the train platform and missed the train to Hogwarts, then we had to fly the car, and crashed into the Whomping Willow, and THEN we found out we've got a class with that Gilderoy Lockhart idiot!"
"At least Hermione likes him," Harry said consolingly.
"Yes, yes, she does," Ron ground out, unknowingly clutching the edge of Harry's quilt in a death-grip as the sound of creaking teeth filled the air.
"Steady on, there, Ron," Harry snickered as Neville grew bored and returned to his own bed. "What's my quilt ever done to you?"
"What?" Ron blinked. "Oh, sorry, Harry. Forgot where I was for a second."
"Thought you were in Defense Against the Dark Arts class, and you'd got Lockhart's neck in your grip?" the dark-haired boy asked mildly.
"Something like that," Ron replied absently, a dreamy look coming into his eyes at the delight of this thought. Then he shook his head frantically. "No! No, that's not it at all!"
"Sure, it isn't," Harry agreed mildly, hiding a grin. "Anyway, I'm fine now, so you can go back to bed."
"If you say so," Ron agreed doubtfully, turning and starting back to his own four-poster bed. "Now, I've got to get some sleep, 'r I'll be a zombie for first day of classes t'morrow. You better sleep, too, Harry."
"Right. G'night, Ron."
"G'night, Harry."
"My goodness! What on earth happened to you last night? You look awful!" Hermione exclaimed the next morning at the breakfast table as Ron and Harry collapsed into their chairs.
"Nightmare," Harry explained weakly, trying to peel his face off of the table, where it had fallen nearly the second he'd sat down.
Hermione nodded in sympathetic understanding.
"Ooh...was it the one where you've been tied to the highest branch of a tree by insane pandas, and a group of rabid airline attendants are throwing Danielle Steele novels at you?"
Ron blinked, setting down his toast and peering at her strangely.
"Hermione...have you been studying too hard?...already?"
She looked quite astonished.
"What, have you never had that one?"
Ron shook his head apologetically.
"Afraid you're on your own there."
"Oh...well, anyway, Harry, tell me about your nightmare."
Harry looked dubious.
"It isn't the sort of thing to talk about when there are people around you trying to eat..."
"Oh, come now. I'm not squeamish. Just...whisper it in my ear."
Exchanging foreboding glanced with Ron, Harry shrugged, then motioned Hermione to come closer. Then he imparted the terrifying secret of the previous night's dream.
Hermione gasped.
"THREE Pippi Longstockings?!"
The entirety of the Gryffindor table stopped moving and speaking abruptly. There was an immense clatter as everyone simultaneously dropped their forks in dismayed shock. This was followed by the sound of upwards of three hundred students turning green at the same time.
"Hermione!" Harry admonished.
"Sorry," she squeaked, shrinking back, attempting to hide inside her robe, turtle-like.
It is doubtful that anyone in the dining hall should have regained their powers of motion any time that day, had the air not chosen that moment to fill with owls.
"Mail time!" Dumbledore sang from the other end of the hall.
Taking this cue, the teaching staff of Hogwarts leapt to their feet and launched into the daily song and dance number.
"Here's the mail, it never fails, it makes me wanna wag my tail! When it comes, I wanna wail, 'MAIL!'"
"We've just been sued by a guy named Steve!" a random voice proclaimed from outside the dining hall.
"This place gets stranger by the day," Harry commented, shaking his head. "Why d'you think they instituted that new mail tradition?"
"It's because a certain faction of the population decided that these books needed more musical numbers. I have a feeling we can expect more of these," Hermione replied absently, eyes glued to Ron, who had gone a rather ghastly shade of white at the letter dropped in front of him by the Weasley family owl, who then flapped weakly into the wall.
"It's...it's a...Howler," Neville gasped as he chanced to glance over at Ron's letter.
"Oh, boy," Ron groaned. "I think I'd prefer an attack by three Pippi Longstockings."
"Don't you say such things!" Hermione admonished severely, shaken by the mere thought. "Pippi Longstockings are nothing to joke about!"
"Hermione, have you ever SEEN a Howler?"
She shook her head, baffled.
"You'd better open it," Neville said sadly. "I ignored one from my Gran once. It was horrible! One day, the thing up and ate my pet chinchilla!"
Ron blinked in confusion, then decided that it was usually best not to ask with Neville. He turned to Hermione.
"Just watch what it'll do. Harry, you too."
"I can only imagine," Harry muttered, suddenly not so sure that this experience would be preferable to the one in his dream.
Ron opened the letter, then set it gingerly on the table. The next moment, the angry visage of Molly Weasley hung over the scene, glaring furiously at her youngest son.
"Ronald Weasley!" the translucent image bellowed. "That was positively the most foolish thing I have ever known one of my children to do, and that is no small feat after the incident with Fred and George and all those mail- order cadavers last summer! What was going through that vacuum you call your brain? This is the second time you've stolen the car in the space of a month! Is this becoming a trend, is all I'd like to know. Are you going to need to find you a parole officer? Well, parole officers aside, young man, if you set one more toe out of line, I will be there to drag you off by that toe so fast, your head will spin like a Frisbee! Love, Mother."
For a time, the entire Gryffindor table sat in a silence easily filled by the howls of laughter coming from the Slytherin table.
"W-well...that was quite an education, wasn't it?" Hermione finally commented brightly to Harry.
"Kind of an ironic way to end it, I'd say," Harry replied.
Hermione nodded in agreement.
"I hate everybody," Ron muttered, bright red.
"You deser-" Hermione began.
"If you finish that," Ron ground out, grabbing her collar and pulling her closer until their noses were less than an inch apart, "I'll tell everyone what you were saying in your sleep the other night about Lockhart."
Hermione blinked.
"Er...why were you in a position to know what I was saying in my sleep?"
"Curses!" Ron hissed, breaking character for neither the first nor the last time. "Foiled again!"
"He came up to kiss you goodnight," Parvati giggled from several seats down. "He was obviously disappointed that he didn't get to say hi earlier."
"How d'you know that?! I though you were all asleep!" the ever-foolish Ron exclaimed.
Parvati's eyes widened.
"Did you really?! I was just bluffing!"
"Er...well, uh...me, too!" Ron laughed lamely. "Heh-heh-heh...ugh..."
Very, very luckily for Ron, Hermione had failed to hear any of this exchange, as a book had made its way into her line of vision, and she had been rather busy mauling the person holding it, attempting to claim it for her own. Now she was contentedly engrossed in a copy of 'The First Ninety- Thousand Years of Mankind, Wizard and Muggle: Unabridged,' only her eyes and nose visible above the top of the enormous volume.
"Ow..." whimpered Percy, who had been the unfortunate bearer of this book, as he lay on the floor, twitching ever so slightly.
"Whew..." Harry whistled. "I guess no one ever told him not to get between Hermione and a book."
"Eh...Percy?" Ginny murmured, eyes wide with concern as she knelt next to her brother. "Are...are you okay?"
"He'll be fine, Ginny," Ron assured her easily, reaching for a hot, buttered roll.
However, it seemed that time was not on poor Ron's side that day, as just as he bit into it...
"Ron, hurry up! We've got to get to class!" Hermione exclaimed, tossing her book over her shoulder and tugging Ron to his feet. By the hair.
"Ow!" Ron yelped in unison with Percy, who had given a similar exclamation of pain as the massive volume struck him squarely in the head.
Deciding not to try his luck in the same manner that had brought great pain to two unfortunate Weasleys already this morning, Harry climbed to his feet, slung his book bag over his shoulder, and started from the Great Hall.
Yes, another ordinary day was underway at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A shame the ordinariness wouldn't last...
End Notes: [Blink] Wow...that was odd, even for me. I don't know what this sudden firm conviction of mine is that Pippi Longstocking is the most frightening thing ever, but...well, let's just say that this will probably be a recurring gag, which will likely work to the detriment of the story, but what the heck. What's a parody for if not to do the same stupid joke, over and over and over and over? ^_^
As well, it appears as though the Ron/Hermione 'shipperdom has begun already...I do hope it won't make anyone nauseous by the time the story's over...maybe I should get everyone to sign a waiver, absolving me of any responsibility, should any readers of this be plagued afterwards by severe and lasting stomach problems, or tooth decay.