Disclaimer: If you are reading this, I applaud your attentiveness for my every word, but I shall also mock your boredom with these two words in High Arayan: Shitaki cryfiar! I shall not translate them, although I'm sure those who have read my 'Arilyn Chronicles' understand, LOL. Unless… *gasp* You actually consider these words worth reading?!
If this chapter sounds overly humorous and OOC, forgive me. I just got back Science Olympiad Regional Tournament, and not only are we going on to state, but my neck hurts from all my gorgeous medals. Let's see… Fossils…. Dynamic Planet… Process Skills for Life Science… That's it? Oh; I ALMOST got two more *mutters about stupid White Pines Middle School beating me*. I did great, I'm actually happy for once, and the soundtrack for The Return of the King is blasting at 60 decibels in my ears. Who wouldn't be pleased?
I'm now writing this for two reasons;
A) To work on humorous stuff. I have one humorous original fic that I'm working on ('The Continuing Adventures of Rómensûl', for those that know me personally), and I need to work on that, mostly because it goes with my Arilyn fic.
B) So I can get to the sequel. The sequel gets deep into angst, my favorite thing to write. I already have it all written out, and it deals with the events after Eternity Code. It has touches of humor in it, but so far it is my crowning achievement as a writer. Writing that was my best two weeks ever as a writer. I know you'll love it, but I have to drag my way through this first.
Oh, and I moved up the year in which Fred and George start their dear company. After all, Artemis needs a bit of competition in that area as well. Yes, he's going to try and squeeze as much money as he can out of the Hogwarts. To quote Captain Jack Sparrow from The Pirates of the Caribbean, 'I couldn't resist, mate.' I just love that quote. With it, you could get away with just about anything.
Someone stated in an anonymous review that 'belle' was not a word for girl in French. In the more poetic and story-sense, it can be used so. It technically (At least, by the dictionary in front of me) means either 'beauty' or 'a fair girl in either countenance or mind'. I don't know about you, but I think the second part of the second definition fits Hermione pretty well.
Oh, and one final note: This chapter primarily lays down the foundations for the next one, which gives the 'mayhem' to the title. That one is where I make up for the lack of humor in these last few chapters.
NOW to the story.
Chapter Eleven: Potions and Plots
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Artemis somehow managed to drag himself to his first class; Potions. He had high hopes for that class, mostly because he had heard so many complaints about it its difficulty from Cho and her clique of gossipers. The journey down was a slow one, weaving through the crowds and trying to figure out his way through the winding corridors, but he managed to get second into the classroom. Hermione was the first.
She was bent over her overly large stack of notes and books, scribbling away on some parchment sheets. With a slight smile, he sat right next to her.
Hermione, of course, glared at him. "There are other seats, you know." She said huffily, abandoning her notes in favor of crossing her arms.
"This is front and center." He pointed out. And it was true; those two seats had the best view of the board on which he assumed Snape would later write upon, as well as the demonstrative cauldron.
She narrowed her eyes, and he smiled slightly. After several moments of the exchanged glares, she cried out in exasperation, "Why can't you just leave me alone?!"
Artemis snorted in disbelief, taking out his book, quill and parchment. "If I remember right, you were the one who first talked to me."
Her eyes widened out of more shock at his daring to retort then from the actual words. She remained speechless for several long moments, and his tell-tale smirk widened. With a final hmmph!, she turned back to her notes.
Other people began to slowly enter the forbidding dungeon, looking quite fearful themselves at the return to their nemesis class. Most of them paused to look about the room in fear, especially at the shrunken mandrake heads on the mantle of the green fire.
Of course, no one sat near the muttering Hermione, nor the pale boy with the vampiric smirk on his face. It took a full ten minutes for two boys to gather their courage enough to sit by Hermione.
Artemis looked over at them with a slight smile curving his lips. One was obviously Harry Potter, although he had done a good job at trying to hide the scar on his forehead, and the other was undoubtedly Ron Weasley by the blatantly red hair. They both glared at him, and then exchanged questioning looks with Hermione. She whispered something to them which, despite all of Artemis' conspicuous efforts, could not be heard. They shrugged, and brought out their supplies.
No one needed their cauldrons on the first day, something that Artemis was very grateful for. Lugging around a cauldron was almost as appealing as feeding the flobberworms in the Magical Creatures class. The same was for their ingredients, of which he had still to clean out Juliet's cat's mess. Once they got into the real stuff, they would supposedly keep their Potions supplies in-class, but he would rather procrastinate about things like that. So out of character for a genius such as him, yes, but he had bigger things to worry about.
Artemis looked at some of the other people filing in, trying to place the names with their appearances. There were many schemes spinning through his head for Hogwarts, and almost all of them involved other people. He had heard from Cho and her little club—they were actually quite useful, now that he had though about it—that the current troublemakers were Fred and George Weasley, twin brothers of the pair sitting down three seats in the row.
All stories about the pair, whether about how dashing they were—those stories made him shake his head at such nonsense—or at their notorious pranks in and around the school, had made Artemis applaud their creativity. He doubted that they would help him, being in the ever-so-righteous, but they would be interesting adversaries in trying to gain control of the Hogwarts market. He had learned that had started a small 'company', Weasley's Wizard's Wheezes, which dealt in things that were general annoyances to teachers. Since that was one of the markets Artemis was planning on cornering, he had believed he actually had some serious competition.
Of course, they were suspects as to who the would-be poisoner was, but they were pretty low on Artemis' list. He doubted it was the Fairies; they were too proud to do something silly like that. Hermione? Never. She was too righteous, too smart, and he suspected that she actually wanted the rift between them so they could compete.
He knew her to be the smartest person in the entire school—after him, of course—and that she was actually getting a bit bored with the classes there. He already knew that he would be bored as well, especially since Snape was bridging far past 'fashionably late', and thus making him a teacher that probably did not care a nit about his students. The only class he was remotely worried about was Potions, and only for the fact that Cho had many nasty stories about him.
Murmurs rippled through the classroom as the door flew open, and Snape came striding in. His dark hair was still very greasy—Didn't he take any pride in his appearance?—and his skin sallow as curdled milk.
"I suppose you are all wondering why I was late to class?" Snape asked, sweeping up to the front of the room.
The class was silent, all thinking that it was a rhetorical question. They were wrong.
"Well?" Snape demanded, looking directly at Hermione. "Has our resident genius been rendered silent?"
Hermione blushed, and looked towards the ground. "No, sir." She whispered.
Snape looked amused. "Then why was I late for class today, Ms. Granger?"
Her blush deepened. "I don't know, sir."
"Well well. She has been stumped. Ten points from Gryffindor."
The rest of the class—at least, all the Gryffindors—gasped at this outrage. How were they supposed to know how he was late?
Answering their unspoken question, Snape continued. "I was late because someone in the hall left this rather amusing picture." He pulled a carefully folded slip from his robes, and Artemis could see a rather idiotic grin inside the fold. It was…
"Lockhart." Snape confirmed, unfolding it for the whole class to see. "Someone had a picture of Lockhart which had apparently slipped—" he let the picture fall to the floor. "—from her book-bag."
Or his Artemis thought darkly, and shuddered at the thought.
Several of the girls paled as they saw the picture slid from Snape's hand, including, Artemis noted, Hermione. To her further embarrassment, it landed right at her feet.
"Pick it up." Snape said coolly, malicious delight in his dark eyes.
Hermione's eyes flicked around the classroom, but she did not bend down to pick it up.
"Did you not hear me, Miss Granger? Or do you want more points taken from Gryffindor?"
Hermione shook her head mutely, and picked it up from the ground.
Snape began to pace in the front of the classroom. "Is that yours, Miss Granger?"
She shook her head again, and put the picture face-down on her desk.
"Whose is it then?" he asked, touching the top of the picture as if it were poison.
Hermione looked up at Snape, flinching as her brown eyes met his dark ones. "I don't know." She said quietly.
"What did you say?' Snape asked her, almost mockingly.
"I don't know." She said, a bit louder this time.
Snape broke the eye-contact, sweeping back around the front of the classroom. "Another ten points from Gryffindor for littering the hallways."
Gasps of outrage met this, but Snape did not care, instead beginning to write notes on the board in narrow, spidery handwriting. The class stood silent for a few moments, torn between an act of open rebellion or betraying the cause of the hurt pride.
Betrayal won, and the class brought out parchment to copy down notes of proper cauldron usage. So the most difficult class in Hogwarts began, and Artemis found it rather boring.
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That's all, folks. Don't be mad! The next chapter is going to be around 4,000 because it deals with The Incident at my school (Mithostwen, Parrot, and the Seal; this is Mr. Vanderslice's *behavior* towards a certain object of Sun Yang's… You know what I'm talking about!) It's really good, so I'll try to have it done by Friday. I don't know though, because I'm going to try and finish 'Enter the Shadow' over Spring Break…
Namárië,
*`~Nallasariel the Weeper