Sabra's next class was Herbology; she exited the castle and slowed to a walk. Spotting the greenhouses, she checked her schedule and the giant clock, and found that she was two minutes late already.
Sighing, she was about to run across the lawn, when she remembered the note from Professor Snape. Even if it didn't give unlimited time, there would still be leeway for a slow walk to the greenhouses. Arriving at Greenhouse 3, Sabra found Lavender and Parvati sitting at a long, black, stone table, and a short plump woman tucking a piece of parchment in her robe's pocket.
"Miss Levi?" the woman asked, turning around at the sound of the door shutting behind Sabra.
She nodded, not trusting herself not to bark.
"The other students are fertilizing braid-root, but it seems we've run out of pots; perhaps you'd like to do something else...?"
Sabra saw plenty of the large, black flowerpots underneath the long table, but said nothing and nodded her head again.
The woman led her to the back of the greenhouse where a huge plant lay. It looked like hundreds of vines, as thick as her neck, all tangled together.
"I need this to be untangled so I can give individual vines to Madam Pomfrey so she can brew up a sprain-be-gone potion. Could you do it please?"
Even as she nodded her consent, Sabra sighed mentally. Now she understood. Her new teachers were testing her; they didn't trust Hamoreh Dumbledore's judgment. The nerve! As she mentally reviewed her Herbology lessons from the previous year, the professor spoke again.
"So, Miss Levi, do you know what this is called?"
"The Intortus labrusca," Sabra replied.
"Do you want to use magic to do the job?"
"No!" Sabra said, shocked. Was the woman testing her or trying to get her killed?
"Good," the professor said, nodding. "And don't forget to watch out for-"
"The thorns, I know."
"Good," the short woman said again.
"A question..." Sabra began tentatively.
"Yes?"
"May I take my robes off and put of my dragon hide gloves?"
"Mmhm." The woman nodded and turned to go back to the rest of the class. "Oh, and if you need me, just call for Professor Sprout, the plants will let me know." She chuckled and patted a squashed, purple plant and she made her way back to the class.
Sabra stared after the departing woman, then shucked her robe and set to work on the giant plant.
Twenty minutes later found Sabra sitting to rest for a moment, her vest on the floor by her robes and dragon hide gloves discarded for the moment, tucked in her waistband. She took a deep breath and slipped the gloves back on, then stood up. She took a few steps towards the half-untangled mass of vines and saw a few of them moving back to their original tangled state.
"Lo; Tafik im ze! No; stop that! " she muttered, frowning at the unruly plant.
With another step, Sabra tripped over a rock on the floor, falling just as several of the thick vines passed over her head; six-inch thorns whipping through the place in the air her head had just occupied. A low roar sounded from the main mass of vines as Sabra sat up grinning slyly as the vines retreated slowly. After one attack the plant would be too tired to rustle, let alone attack, at least for a few hours. One attack a day was basically all it got.
She picked up the rock she had 'stumbled' over and tossed it into a pile of the like by one of the glass walls.
About ten minutes of work later, Sabra paused to wipe a trickle of sweat from her face and found Professor Sprout smiling at her in a satisfied sort of way. The woman cautiously stepped around the mostly untangled mass of greenery and peered into the last messy bit of vine.
"It's all right Hamorah," she said tiredly. "It already made a grab for me; it's all tired out."
"Oh, I know that," the professor said with a bit of a smile. "I saw you; very nice reaction time."
"Then why are you being so careful?"
Professor Sprout chuckled and fondly patted one of the thick vines. "He's a sweetie; I'd hate to step on him by accident."
"A sweetie...?" Sabra raised an eyebrow at the stout woman.
"The professor laughed again. "Yes. That bite was all for show, Mendula would hurt a fly!"
'Mendula...?' Thinking about the six-inch thorns, and the plant's main diet, Sabra found that unlikely. But Professor Sprout just smiled knowingly and handed Sabra her vest. She buttoned the grey vest up to the top and put her robe on top, careful of the pin at the neck fastening she had brought from home.
Walking back to the front of the green house, Sabra found the rest of the class cleaning up their pots and waiting for the bell to ring.
"You look hot," Neville remarked, coming up behind her.
"What!"
He laughed. "Hot, warm," and then he smirked, "like you shouldn't be wearing that heavy robe."
She sniffed and turned her back to him, walking to the doors as he laughed cheerily.
"Relax," Lavender advised her in one ear, while Parvati giggled in the other. "He's just flirting a bit; flirt back, you look like you could use it."
"I can't," Sabra said stiffly as the bell rang. They walked out of the greenhouse and into the crisp, cool air of fall. She sighed in relief as the stifling heat from within glass walls fell away.
"What d'you mean?" Parvati pressed on. "You mean you don't know how? That's easy, you just--."
"No," Sabra interrupted. "I can't. I'm not allowed to date."
The two girls' jaws dropped. "Not allowed?" Lavender finally said. "What kind of monster parents do you have?"
Sabra laughed. "They're not monsters," she said. "They're religious. Judaism warns against anything with a mind towards dating before marriage; like flirting or exposing too much skin."
"Oh," Parvati said. "That makes sense," and Lavender nodded.
"That's all?" Sabra said, pushing her glasses up where they had slipped down the bridge of her nose. "No Satanism, or third-rate religion?"
Parvati shook her head. "My brother-in-law is Jewish, although he's Reform, and, according to my sister, the perfect..."
"...young Jewish doctor," Sabra finished, and the three girls burst out laughing.
"He's rich too," Lavender put in.
Just then the warning bell rang and they raced for the castle, robes flapping after them.
When Sabra arrived in her Magical Theory class, she found no one whom she recognized, but several Gryffindors whom she knew to be fifth and seventh years. Glancing at her schedule, she saw that it said 'fifth years and above.'
"This must be a hard class," she thought aloud. A Hufflepuff fifth year nodded acquiescently, clutching his bag as if it could save his life.
Sabra sat in a desk in the second row and put her bag down, just as the bell rang and a small door by the blackboard opened. A tall young man strode into the room and shut the door behind him. Sitting on the edge of the front desk, he smiled brightly at the class.
He was thin and slightly bony, with high, prominent cheekbones and a good two inches of wrist sticking out from his blue robe sleeves. His brilliantly blue eyes twinkled as he brushed a stand of shaggy, light brown hair out of his face.
"Good morning," he said, as the hair fell back into his face. "I'm Professor Murdock; welcome to Magical Theory." Spotting some students with quills and parchment, he shook his head. "Put everything away, today is mostly a discussion."
Sabra heard whispers of 'yes' and 'this is gonna be easy,' but judging by the look on Hamoreh Murdock's face, it wasn't. He got of the desk and picked up a fresh piece or chalk. Walking to the board, he wrote:
Where does it all go?
and underlined it.
"Where does it all go? A simple question that is called into play hundreds of times a day in the magical community. And it remains unanswered." He pointed to a tall Slytherin girl lounging in the back row; her feet propped up on another desk and a sheaf of drawings in front of her. "Miss Reynolds."
"Sir," she said casually, putting another line on one of her drawings.
"What does the spell 'evenesco' do?"
"It makes stuff disappear." The look on her face clearly questioned Professor Murdock's intelligence.
"Correct," he said, then asked: "where does it go?"
"What?"
"The thing you made disappear, where did it disappear to?"
The girl thought for a moment, then took her feet of the desk in front of her and put the drawings under her seat. She slowly smiled. "I don't know, sir."
"Mr. Capriotti," Professor Murdock said, his gaze falling to a stocky Slytherin boy sitting next to 'Miss Reynolds.' He was in the process of putting away a sort of comic book, prompted by an elbow in the ribs by the girl. They both seemed to be seventh years.
"Sir?"
"When an object is conjured, where does the mass come from?"
"I don't know," the boy replied, a similar smile appearing on his face.
"Mr. Brantner-Magee?" A tall Ravenclaw boy with brown hair and a stretched out look was frantically waving his hand in the air, a look of impatience on his face.
"Sir, is there some place, maybe another dimension, where's there's just a big lump of matter, to which all banished matter goes, and all conjured things come from?"
"Don't you think more things are conjured then banished?" Professor Murdock countered. "The supply would be exhausted in just a few years, and things have been conjured for long before that."
"It's magic," Sabra said, not waiting to be called on.
The professor grinned at her. "How can you be sure?"
"What do you mean?" she asked. "Isn't magic what we're here to learn?"
"Emc²?" the tall boy said excitedly, and another girl, a Ravenclaw, caught on.
"Yeah," she said. "Matter cannot be created or destroyed; only transferred from energy."
"And as far as I can tell," the Slytherin girl said. "There hasn't been as big a loss of energy as there would be from all that matter being created over the years. We'd have run out by now of all energy altogether!"
"How about this," Professor Murdock said, and took his wand out of his sleeve. With a shower of sparks, he conjured a fist-sized rubber ball and tossed it to Sabra. She smiled and tossed it back to him. "Where did the energy to conjure this come from?"
"The wand?" a Hufflepuff boy asked.
"Me," the professor answered. "My wand just channels it. But humans use chemical energy to do work; that is, the food we eat is transformed into the energy we use."
"So?" The Slytherin boy raised his eyebrows. "What's that got to do with anything?"
"Magical folk do all of the work muggles do, as well as magic. And magic uses up more energy then doing it by hand does. So why aren't witches and wizards chronically tired and hungry? And why don't we have to eat more then muggles? If the laws of science applied to us, then we'd never stop eating, and our metabolisms would be impossibly fast."
"Maybe," the Ravenclaw boy said, "we're talking the energy from far out in the universe, and magical people are simply people with the ability to use that energy."
"Or," Sabra added, "We might be the only ones able to draw on an entirely separate type of energy."
"And the muggles who have ESP, or are telekinetic, are just people who have a weaker version of that power." The Slytherin girl grinned as she got into the interesting conversation.
"More squibs are in pureblood families because of too much in-breeding. Take a wizard or witch with an especially strong ability and breed them with a telekinetic muggle, and their child will be guaranteed magic!" Talk was flying around the room as various people began to comprehend the 'bigger idea' and Professor Murdock laughed and held up his hands in mock surrender.
"I must say," he smiled brightly at the class. "You, in the course of," he checked the sun through the window "half an hour, have picked apart an idea that's been frustrating people for over two hundred years. Only recently has this idea been suggested and you've done it in one class! Well done!" He wrote 'Energy' in big letters on the board, circled it, then sat of the edge of his desk again. "This lesson was supposed to last much longer, but you've figured it out too quickly. Take the rest of the period off." He wiped his chalky hands on the sides of his robe, leaving white smears on the blue material. "Just stay in the classroom."
Sabra went to the back of the class where the two seventh year Slytherins sat, and dropped into a seat in front of them. She smiled sweetly and looked in interest at the drawing the girl was talking out. "That's pretty nice," she said admiringly. "And wasn't that a fun talk. Hello, I'm Sabra."
"Look," the boy drawled. "The Gryffindork has escaped its cage."
"I'm Caitlin, and this is Romeo," the girl said, throwing her long, purple streaked hair over her shoulder. "You know us now, so leave."
"Mah ze? lama? Mah asiti? what's that? Why? What did I do? "
"I don't know about you, but I don't know what it's saying," the boy, Romeo said. "You think it's a Gryffindor secret code?"
"If it is, all it means is 'I'm a loyal, brave puppy.'" Caitlin replied.
"Hey!" Romeo said, his grin widening. "Aren't you the one who turned into a dog in Snape's class?"
"I hear she licked him."
Sabra bit her lip and quickly got up to go back to her seat. As she took her book out she could hear snickers of laughter behind her.
Professor Murdock appeared behind them and grabbed an ear from each of them. They winced as he frowned down at them. "Five points from Slytherin for unkind gossip, and I'd like an essay from each of you on today's discussion, due Friday. Seven inches please."
Sabra grinned slightly as she opened her book to the crimson marker. Justice had been served.
A/N
Sorry the chapter's so short, and I know that it's been ages. Oy. I've been so grounded, so remember all: Do your homework! I'm not...
Review!
On another note: Missy! Your s/n isn't working, nor your E-mail. I beta-ed your fic, but it said that it didn't send, and I tried to E-mail you, and it said that your address is invalid... WTF. So review and tell me if you have another one... I'm not coming this summer.
Sorry all to use for personal reasons...
Flames will be used to charbroil Mendula...