chapter by Neville Longbottom
Eleven
The Government Stole My Half-Blood Prince!
I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in this secluded location. And already, after only this seventeen-word sentence, you are wondering why this story is suddenly first-person, and who the narrator is.
The name's Longbottom—Neville Longbottom. As you would have noticed if you had read this chapter in its entirety from the start. It looks something like this:
chapter by Neville Longbottom
Eleven
The Government Stole My Half-Blood Prince!
I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in the secluded location. And already, after only this seventeen-word sentence, you are wondering why this story is suddenly first-person, and who the narrator is.
The name's Longbottom—Neville Longbottom. As you would have noticed if you had read this chapter in its entirety from the start. It looks something like this:
chapter by Neville Longbottom
Eleven
The Government Stole My Half-Blood Prince!
I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in the secluded location. And already, after only this seventeen-word sentence, you are wondering why this story is suddenly first-person, and who the narrator is.
The name's Longbottom—Neville Longbottom. As you would have noticed if you had read this chapter in its entirety from the start. It looks something like this:
chapter by Neville Longbottom
Eleven
The Government Stole My Half-Blood Prince!
I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in the secluded location. And already, after only this seventeen-word sentence, you are wondering why this story is suddenly first-person, and who the narrator is.
The name's Longbottom—Neville Longbottom. I assume that after four readings of the opening of this chapter, you have read the line saying that this is a chapter by Neville Longbottom. As you now have, I shall move on.
You may have been wondering whether the light goes on inside the flashlight (torch to me) when you click the little button twice—or maybe your weren't. Instead, perhaps you were wondering why Potter47 wasn't writing this chapter. The answer is simple: he was taken away from his computer in a dramatic and/or fictional incident while sneaking up to tap a reviewer on the back in Iceland—where he had been sure he would be safe—that may or may have not have led to his captivity in a Greenlandish dungeon that he perhaps is now sharing with the Muggle murderers that he for some reason decided simply must have killed Harry Potter's grandparents in Living inside Yesterday. Of course, I should not know of Living inside Yesterday because I am a fictional character, depicted within the fanfiction itself. I shall, however, ignore this fact.
Now that all author confusion is out of the way (I hear Potter47 would use the word 'confuzzlement' and then state that it was not a word, but should be; however, Obscurus Books' "The Wizard's Dictionary" has introduced it as a word, as you would know if you had kept up with the HBPNN) I will continue with the actual story of this chapter, which I only briefly began in the seventeen-word sentence "I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in this secluded location," that you have read five times now. Well, sixth time's the charm, so I shall now begin the story again from the beginning, without saying 'shall' and without all this yammering gibberish in between productive sentences:
I walked into the room cautiously, wondering if perhaps the perpetrator was hiding in this secluded location.
I had followed him here, to this very classroom. Or perhaps I had followed her here, to this very classroom: it is very dark, and he or she was wearing a particularly out-of-place raincoat and fireman's hat. Or is it a helmet? It's red, that's all I know. Have you ever seen blood once it has been exposed to air but the moon has not yet risen and it is still light out or simply with a sufficient light source? It appears quite...red. Just like the hatelmet (which isn't technically a word, but instead a combination of 'hat' and 'helmet').
Whatever gender the perpetrator may have been, I knew one thing for certain. They worked for the government; or at least, that's what Luna Lovegood had told me.
"I'll bet any mysterious, rain-coated figures with firemen's hatelmets you meet tonight will work for the government, Neville," Luna had said, walking up to me after Herbology.
I contemplated her statement angrily, which is an unnecessary adverb that is not only useless, but factually incorrect, as I was not the least bit angry with her.
"Right," I said, nodding, continuing on to see a professor about some Mimbletonia.
The Mimbletonia discussed is not pertinent to this tale, and so shall not be further discussed here.
"Hem, hem," said a voice behind me, as I exited the location at which the professor and I were discussing the Mimbletonia that I have repeatedly mentioned for no reason at all, and I turned around quickly, my heart skipping a beat.
My fears were groundless, however—it was only Luna Lovegood again, back from wherever she lives when she isn't speaking nonsensically to one of us more 'major' characters... yes, of course I count myself among this group... if they ever made a movie about my life, I'd get second billing! Name right on the poster, just a teensy bit smaller than Harry's...
"Hem, hem," said Luna again, almost frustrated-ly, and she was pointing to the ground. She had clearly been trying to get my attention... clearly wanted me to see whatever it was that she had found on the ground... it must have been something to do with the perp. ('Perp' is a shortened version of 'perpetrator' that is used for ease of conversation between Aurors, in case you didn't know.)
"What is it?" I asked, and she Hem, hem-ed again as if it were clearly going to help me see whatever it was she was pointing at, as if she hadn't gotten my attention yet...
I got to my knees and began looking very closely at the spot she was pointing at...there was nothing.
I looked up at her, confused and puzzled. She pointed again. "Hem, hem!"
And then I let out a breath of frustration, realising just what she was talking about.
"The hem of your robe, Luna? What's so great about that?"
"I love you," she said, though I'm not sure if it was true or if she was just changing the subject—or, perhaps, that her loving me was actually what was so great about the hem of her robe...
A light fell onto Luna as I stood, a whole new light that I had never seen before—I didn't know where it had come from, but it made her glow ethereally and I realised just how well-suited the two of us really are...
...and this is why I trust that Luna was in fact correct when she said, "I'll bet any mysterious, rain-coated figures with firemen's hatelmets you meet tonight will work for the government, Neville." I'll believe anything she says, now that we're in love...
(Though she may not like the fact that I love ellipses just as much as I love her... perhaps even more...)
To snip to the hunt, I loved Luna and she loved me... we're as happy as two can be... and now I return to the dark, secluded classroom that I had chased the Hatelmet-ed Fiend, as we shall now refer to him or her. Luna loves the word 'fiend,' because it's really very close to 'friend' and she thought that was funny. She especially liked it when it was capitalised.
"Who are you?" I called out into the seclusion. I could feel that the Hatelmet-ed Fiend was here, in this room, I could just taste the one who had taken my precious Trevor away from me...my Trevvvvvor...
"No one," said the voice, and it was distinctly female, and...distinctly something else, too, though I couldn't place it right then. "I am no one at all. Please believe me, or I'll have to do something you won't like."
"Like scream?" I suggested. "I hate it when people scream."
"YES, LIKE SCREAM!" screamed the voice. "I WILL SCREAM AND SCREAM AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE UNTIL YOU BELIEVE THAT I DON'T EXIST AND YOU FOLLOWED ME FOR NO REASON AND CERTAINLY I COULDN'T HAVE STOLEN TREVOR!"
"Stop it!" I thought of penguins then, for some reason, and I feel that if I could reason out why I had thought of penguins, I would know a very great deal more about what I was dealing with.
"NOW CLOSE YOUR EYES AND COUNT TO NINETEEN OR I'LL KEEP SCREAMING!"
I did so: "One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Ready or not, here I—"
I opened my eyes, and she was gone.
Days went by, and I didn't see hide nor hair of the Fiend, though of course the Fiend was a person and persons are not usually referred to as having hides as much as animals are, and the Fiend was Hatelmet-ed, deftly obscuring my view of his or her hair.
I wondered then if the distinctly female voice could possibly have been the Fiend... if it had been, then that would be good news, as it not only meant narrowing down my search by approximately fifty per cent, but also it meant that I could simply call the Fiend a 'she' and refer to the Fiend's hair as 'her hair' instead of 'his or her hair.'
Yes, I was making progress.
And then, despite all evidence that this whodunit story was, essentially, only beginning, it came to its climax, rather anticlimactically.
I was walking down the hallway, you see, and I was looking at the hem of my robes and thinking about how much I loved Luna, and then suddenly I walked into someone and I heard a scream, and a crash, and a croak.
I looked around from my rather inconvenient new vantage point of nose-pressing-into-flagstone, and I saw Trevor, just hopping merrily away from the two of us (myself and the other participant in the aforementioned collision).
I yelled, "Trevor!" and tried to scramble to my feet, but I heard a spell cast from behind me and it hit and I couldn't scramble to my feet because my feet were scrambled already, and incredibly edible-looking.
And from my slightly more convenient vantage point of head-on-flagstone-with-eyes-pointing-in-one-direction, I could see the other collisionist leap over me almost as though she (for I saw that she wore a Hatelmet and therefore must have been the Fiend) were a toad herself. She scrambled after Trevor, and (rather inconveniently for me, I might add) her feet did not turn into eggs.
Then, rather conveniently for me if I had had a very twisted sense of humour, she fell down on the flagstone of the corridor, allowing me to catch up to her (my feet had returned in their normal unyellow form).
And I pulled off her Hatelmet which conveniently (for her) covered her face, and...
...my heart stopped in my chest, yet I somehow did not die...
...could it really be...?
It was Luna. But that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that when she had fallen, she had landed on Trevor and he was now the world's first toad-flavoured pancake. At least, I think he's the first—some people do, after all, have a very twisted sense of humour.
"Luna! How could you? I mean..." I said, bewilderedly betrayed. "You stole Trevor!"
"He was the Half-Blood Prince," said Luna, as though this would justify her actions.
"But you stole him! And then... you squashed him!"
"Oh, he'll be all right."
"But he's flat as a pancake!"
Luna furrowed her brow. "Do we really call them pancakes in England? That seems far-fetched to me."
"No, we do," I informed her. "But ours are even flatter than American ones, almost crepe-like, so that just proves how badly you damaged Trevor."
"But he'll be fine," said Luna.
"But he's almost crepe-like!"
Luna rolled her eyes, rolled over, and lifted the flattened, not-quite round form that was Trevor off of the floor—it was rather difficult, actually, and she was lucky she kept a spare spatula in her robes. Then she lifted him to her face, and kissed him right on his flattened toad-lips...
Nothing happened.
Luna's eyes widened. She glanced back and forth shiftily.
"Um, Neville," she said, biting her lip. "Do you have a computer at home?"
I shook my head. "And neither do you, you're a witch." Luna ignored this.
"Would you like a mouse-pad?" she asked, and she handed Trevor out towards me—I didn't take him right off, and so she tossed him at me, taking me off-guard.
Then she ran for it. What, exactly, I don't know, but she sure ran for it hard. She turned round a corner, and she was gone.
I stared after her, mouth open in incomprehension, and then looked down at my almost crepe-like toad. And then I wondered something I'd never thought of before:
Why on earth did I agree to write this chapter? If I hadn't, none of this would have ever happened, and Trevor would still be alive...
And then my eyes widened.
I wrote this chapter! Oh, God...I'm a murderer! I did it! I killed Trevor myself, because I had Luna fall on him! I wrote it! It was me! And it's my fault that exclamation points are endangered! I have no regard for the diminishing punctuation population!
And I reeled from this knowledge, dizzy with thoughts, and fainted dead away on the floor.
Then I woke up, and wrote all this down, and sent it off to Greenland where Potter47 is going to upload it for me, because I don't have a computer because I am a wizard. Don't ask me why he has internet access from a dungeon. I don't even know what internet access is.
The end. Hope you liked it. It was really one of the most distressing encounters of my life. Pleasure to be of service. Really terrible feelings, didn't feel better for weeks... you think I might be able to do this again sometime? Maybe for book seven? Hope JKR doesn't kill me off... please review, I'd love to hear what you think.
The end.