All right. I have a chapter 3 now. Sorry it took so long—I've been kinda busy. Read on. Things start getting a little interesting.

III: The Marauders' Map

The rest of the year and the summer were dull. Life went on as it always had at home, with the exception of some homework.

The Marauders, as we had chosen to call ourselves at the end of our first year, met on the train back to school to discuss our back-to-school prank. As I remember, it involved a plate of toast, the Slytherin table, and a spray bottle of Hiccupping Draught. More than half the Slytherins had hiccups all day.

Maybe a week after that, Peter was bullied by a third year into stealing something out of Filch's office—I don't remember what—and he was caught. We had been caught a few times, and Sirius had always managed to get us out of it, but that made us realize that, if we wanted to put something special into our troublemaking crusade, we would need some sort of alarm system. We all thought very hard about this, but didn't come up with anything for a very long time.

One night James, Peter and I were arguing about something in our bedroom when Sirius looked at Steve's cat as if he'd never seen it before, then put some funny spell on it and another spell on his quill. The cat didn't do anything, but Sirius' quill moved on his parchment as the cat went to its usual chair. We watched it.

"How did you do that?" we all asked.

Sirius bit his tongue. "I don't know if I can get it off...." He said something else to the cat, and the quill went still. "Mobilius scriptor," he said to James. Something glowed in his shoes. "Go somewhere." James walked around the room with his fingers touching the wall—and the pen drew the room. Then he sat down.

Peter was wearing the face he always wore when he was going to have one of his rare, random brainwaves. "I just had a beautiful idea," he said.

"Well, do us a favor, Pete, and tell us."

"Well...if we if we mapped the school somehow, and somehow put that spell on everyone who came in, we'd be able to keep track of people."

Sirius looked impressed, and said something to the point where the lines James had "drawn" crossed. "All right. Go." James walked around the bed, and the dot at the crossing point moved in a rectangle. "We could put it in the stone, and coordinate it with the map....Each person'd have a dot, and it would move around the map as they moved around the school." Sirius smiled evilly. "We could be great."

"Fine," James said, "but Seeker tryouts are tomorrow. G'night."

The next morning during breakfast, Peter had another brainwave. "There's something my dad told me about last summer...legi—legilimency."

"And that is..."

"A spell that lets you read people's minds."

"Why are you telling us?" I thought it sounded illegal, but I kept it to myself.

"Well, we could use it to know people's names." Peter had adopted that airy, annoyed air he always did when he was explaining his more exotic ideas. "Then we'd know the difference between, say, me and Filch."

"I see where this is going, now..." James said. He arranged his breakfast in a smiley face.

"How'd tryouts go, by the way?" I asked him.

"Oh, well enough, I guess. They let the snitch go and we had to catch it before ten minutes were up. I caught it in four. Top three."

That night Peter went to the library with James' cloak. He came back in half an hour with a huge leather-bound book with crackly old pages.

He dumped it unceremoniously on the bed. "I think this'll do." He flipped to the middle and skipped a few pages. He stopped at a title page. It said, The Artes of the Minde. Chapter VIII: The Usefull Artes of Legilimencie and Occlumencie. "Fetch that cat," he said. Steve's cat had always been the guinea pig of our various experiments, but we didn't know its name. Sirius put the cat on the bed and moved away. Peter gave me the book. "Read this page." He flipped to a page and pointed to a marked off section.

"Legilimencie is a moste usefull arte...blah, blah...ah. Bring the thoughtes that thou wouldst most wish to know of thy subjecte to the fore of thy minde."

"OK. I want to know your name."

"Bend all thy thoughte upon these and firmly hold thy wande, pointing it at thy subjecte." Peter raised his wand. "Say thou the incantation 'Legilimens' and the thoughtes that thou wouldst read should appear in thine own minde." Peter put on a face of concentration and said the spell. The cat started having a sort of seizure.

"This isn't supposed to happen, is it?" Sirius asked me.

I looked at the next line. Nothing about seizures. "I don't think so."

Suddenly the cat went limp. "I don't think I got it quite right, but its name is Cloud."

"It's probably just 'cause it's your first try."

"I s'pose."

Three weeks later, all of us could do legilimency without hurting Cloud, and Sirius could do it without us noticing that the cat noticed. We started writing down the other spells we would have to use to make this work, and the list got quite lengthy. There was Protean, to keep track of everybody, a spell to make the spell spread all over the grounds from where we cast it, Sirius' spell, and a whole bunch of others. I wonder if the other Marauders would have been able to be Animagi if we hadn't made the Marauders' Map.

By Easter, we had everything ready, but one thing, and the most important. We didn't have a map to put all this on. Sirius solved that problem for us. He exploded a dungbomb in the hall farthest from Filch's office, had his girlfriend tell Filch, and then James invaded the office while he was gone. James came to the common room a few minutes later with a folded piece of parchment. It was perfect. We drew a few more secret passageways on over time, but when we got it, it had everything we knew about, including the grounds, including, to my dismay, the passageway under the whomping willow. We cast our spells, and we were enlightened. The school was ours.