Yes, there is discontinuity between the previous chapter and this one. Do not write in to tell me so. The fossil record might be pretty complete, but it tends to be discovered in fits and jumps. Patience. The holes will be filled.
Also, I don't want to hear anything about aubergines.
Snape was unfond of the Lovegood child. As a general rule he respected creatures that didn't blink, as most of them were small supply-cabinets in and of themselves, but most of them did not know English. The Lovegood child did. This was unfortunate.
Her knowledge of English was selective enough to make him want to Accio a fifth of Ogden's every time she opened her mouth.
On her first day in his class her hand had gone up as soon as he'd turned to glare them all into silence. He'd idly wondered how long she could keep her arm in the air before it started to twitch, then proceeded to test his hypothesis (three minutes) by ignoring her. She ignored his ignoring her. After seven and a half minutes, during which he enumerated rules, procedures, and consequences, she had neither blinked nor moved. After eight minutes he started to twitch. After nine it was all he could do to keep himself from drawing his wand, casting Silencio on her, and only then inviting her to speak.
"Was something unclear, Miss--?"
"I was wondering, Sir, are you part goblin?"
There had been giggles, which had ceased as soon as he'd scowled at their source.
"Have you a name?" he'd replied in a dangerously neutral tone.
"I'm Luna Lovegood," she'd said. (Snape had felt his lip curl like leaf in the fire.) "I was asking, Sir, because your--"
"Enough," he'd hissed. "This class is not an article in the Quibbler; and you, Miss Lovegood, will in future confine your questions to subjects that pertain to the study of Potions. Do I make myself clear?"
This had gotten her attention.
"No, Sir."
Most of the front row had begun to flutter as if in a breeze. To their credit, none of them had dared turn to look at the back row and the girl in it-- a happy surprise, as he would otherwise have permanently set their necks in a wrung position.
"Excuse me?"
"I don't understand what you mean about the Quibbler, Sir."
"Ten points from Ravenclaw," he'd explained, turning a shade of aubergine. "And I strongly suggest you stop wasting the class's time with your impertinent nonsense."
Luna had given him the benefit of the doubt, in the form of a toothy grin. "The Quibbler's a very nice magazine," she'd mused as if to herself. "And it has the Three-Cornered Cauldron every Friday-- do you know it, Professor Snape?"
The Three-Cornered Cauldron was a supplement in which all manner of charlatan, Muggle, and lunatic could publish their favourite cure for boils & feminine pains, etc. Needless to say, Friday and Saturday were the busiest days in the Poison Control Centre at St. Mungo's.
"Twenty five, Miss Lovegood, and if you open your mouth again it will be fifty."
She'd stared at him with slightly glazed eyes.
"My father says--"
"It does not matter," he'd finally snapped, "what your fiction-writing father says on this or any other subject. If you wish to pass this class you will pay especially close attention to what I say. Now BE QUIET!"
He'd given her a detention for good measure. The points had deducted themselves automatically.
Luna's Housemates had been chill to her for a short time thereafter, but as it was the official policy of Ravenclaw House to treat the winning and losing of points as an exercise in applied Arithmancy, such losses were quickly forgiven-- in her case, by the end of lunch. The calculation of expected wins and losses was an elaborate ritual conducted every night in the common room, with bets taken and prizes given out for the best predictive algorithms, all with Professor Flitwick squeaking his enthusiasm in the background. For the more dedicated folk it had become the equivalent of an extra class.
Snape found the self-absorption of Ravenclaws mildly amusing.
"Do you call this an essay, Beckett?" he'd inquire. "The snakestone was valued by Athanasius Kircher as a validation of his alchemical integral 25 f-parentheses-Rose-parentheses multiplied by... is that my name you're multiplying? How odd. I would not have thought I deserve a place in this Jesuit fantasy."
Beckett would try to explain.
"I assume the points you are about to lose have been factored into this drivel?" he'd reply sleekly.
Beckett would point to a scribble towards the bottom of the page. They had gall, the narrowminded fools.
"Well? How many am I going to take?"
A former student named Bartholomew "Cabbage" Kabalski, after months of insomnia, had discovered the Law that bore his name: the average weekly points lost in altercations with Snape will be equal to the number of points Isaacs and Sverdloff will gain in Astronomy.
And there was the rub. As neither Isaacs nor Sverdloff showed any signs of finishing school, the approximation had held good for a number of years. Yet since Rose Vizvary and Tim Douglas were still around too, and since Garvan Little had been erratic since his mid-OWL breakdown, and since Nguyen Phu had withdrawn into Herbology to the exclusion of everything else, and since Snape had discovered sins in Maudie Matilda...
The problem with Luna was clear to anyone with a brain-- however many glitches said brain had.
There was much excitement, much of it joyous, when Jeremy Beckett had tapped his pumpkin juice glass and announced the end of the Cabbage Monopoly. The equations would have to be redone. The ceremonies would begin at precisely eighteen hundred hours. All were required to be there-- and encouraged to steal food, as there was no guarantee when the communal labours would end. And could we have a toast for our paradigm shifter Miss Lovegood?
Luna had clapped so enthusiastically that one of the bumblebee bats hanging off her earlobes had come detached and landed, flapping and displeased, in an unfinished cup of soup.
Since the most pressing issue was to come up with a workable solution for the immediate future, the Summa Punctillicae -- a product of the great Cebus Johanson's excruciating imagination back in the late 1930s-- was detached from the Ravenclaw hourglass and taken to the common room. To prevent any change in point totals while the data was being analysed, the portrait (a Sevillean monk) was instructed to keep everyone in (to which request he smirked a little and went back to reading).
"I'm getting a severe case of Ravenclaustrophobia," intoned Cho Chang to a friend.
"Tell me about it," the friend had rolled her eyes. "Seriously, I should have been in Gryff... God, I don't really care where; this House is a bloody loony bin."
The Summa Punctillicae recorded the occasion for each change of points. Reading and extracting the relevant bits took most of the night as two of the correlation circuits had become weak and ineffectual, and because the extracters had a propensity to get distracted.
"Oy, Peters! You lost points for sticking mint up your nose at the theatre?"
Fortunately butterbeer appeared at around midnight. Fitch Miller, in a fit of inspiration, spilled his on one of the cylinders, which prompted a reaction very similar to that of the circuits when working. Efforts redoubled. Chocolate was consumed. Chants were chanted. When Luna's expected losses were reduced to a matrix of normal curves, it transpired that all would be well if Elise Weinstein, Pipsa Karjalainen, and Archangelo de Casale each answered one more question per week.
"De Casale?" Flitwick had squeaked. "What makes you think I want to hear another word out of him?"
Beckett had explained that everyone else already had their quota filled too; Ravenclaw was sadly cursed-- and blessed, of course-- with a high number of people who barely knew how to talk, or got nervous trying, or were simply too busy being intellectual to actually go to classes--
"And it's cursed with an even higher number of people who don't know how to listen," Flitwick had tried to be stern. "Silly boy; do you think you're teaching the class?"
Rose Vizvary had rolled her eyes: she had an enchanted quill; she could pass notes with Archangelo; she would answer instead of him where necessary. "So you might have to get sick of me--"
Professor Flitwick had pointed out that such plots were hardly appropriate for the ears of the Charms Professor.
Archangelo had pointed out that the Charms Professor's ears were not in attendance, having been replaced by those of the Ravenclaw Head of House.
This had provoked an extended bout of laughter from Luna, who immediately transfigured Flitwick's ears into a pair of Muggle headphones. Flitwick would later report that they had been playing Gregorian chants--oddly appropriate, since by that then it was most definitely matins and time for the Invitatory. She won back her fifty points then and there, although the good professor reconsidered his decision when it turned out that Luna was unable to reverse the spell. She was also unable to repeat the accomplishment on any of the eager volunteers who lined up for a go. Yet the mood was optimistic nonetheless, as Jeremy Beckett's Babylonian tables assured them that Miss Lovegood would, with an eighty-three percent probability, be able to contribute an average of ten weekly points in Transfiguration within two months.
"Eighty-three and thirty-six sixtieths, that is," he amended. "Which is marginally better than the chances of running into Filch behind the statue of Korah at any given time on a Sunday."
Flitwick had flooed McGonagall for help with his ears and played deaf when she asked him who had authored this nonsense. And when the matter served itself at the staff table, Snape had fixed Luna with a glare which she insouciantly failed to see.