Author's note: So our friends seem to have gotten themselves in trouble in chapter one, but exactly what kind of trouble? And will they be able to get out of it?

- Chapter two -

Out of nothingness, suddenly there was a floor. Hard, cold rock greeted Harry, Ron and Hermione as they fell down upon it.

"Ron? Hermione?" Harry wanted to call out as he scrambled up, but when he saw where he was, things did not look quite as bad as he had expected them to be and he closed his half-opened mouth. He seemed to have landed in a large room inside a castle. The room was hewn from grey stone and had a ceiling which was lost in darkness. The only light came from a large crackling fire, ablaze in the fireplace. It illuminated a long table and the people who were sitting on the chairs adjacent to it. They were in the middle of a royal meal, but were frozen: holding a knife in mid-air, a glass of wine touching their lips or their mouth opened to welcome a bite of meat which didn't move. Harry turned his head to see whether Ron and Hermione were frozen as well, but he found them looking around the three-dimensional photograph in which they had landed as well.

"Where are we?" Harry asked. Disoriented, Hermione and Ron looked at him.

"Some sort of castle, it seems…" Hermione said uncertainly. "I can't see how old it is. Medieval, at any rate, but exactly how old…" She studied the patterns on the brightly coloured carpet on the floor, but shook her head as she couldn't make out from which time it came. Then she looked up again. "It must be an imaginary age. I think…" she bit her lip, "we must be inside the book." For a moment, no one spoke. In a worried silence, they looked at each other. A concerned frown was on Harry's forehead. Then at once it disappeared.

"We got in. We can get out," he said simply. He walked to the enormous wooden door opposite to the table and grabbed the rusted door handle. As he pushed, it didn't resist and Harry heard a click as the locking mechanism opened. Happily surprised with how easy this went, he smiled over his shoulder to Ron en Hermione, who stood behind him. Ron stepped forward and helped Harry to drag the heavy door open. Creaking heavily it scraped over the floor and revealed what lay behind it. At this, Hermione squeaked and stepped backwards with a start. "Ron! Harry! There's nothing there!"

Harry and Ron got to the opening of the door and gasped as they looked into a void. It wasn't black as the entrance into the book had been, or yellow as its pages. There was just nothing at all: no bottom beneath them, no ceiling above. The doorstep ended in a paper thin edge.

"The end of the page," Harry said. "Well, that should be easy." He got that scary look in his eyes he always had when he was about to do something very brave or foolish (you didn't know which until after he had finished doing it). He pulled up his sleeves and made a step in the direction of the doorstep, but at the same time Ron and Hermione lunged out and grabbed him and they all fell down upon the floor. "Ouch!" yelled Harry, and shot an incensing look at both of them.

"We are not jumping off the edge!" Hermione said sternly.

"But obviously that's how we can get-" Harry started, but Hermione interrupted him.

"We don't know that! There's nothing, there's no bottom! You could be falling down forever! And it doesn't look like the darkness through which we came here, so why should it lead us back to the garage!"

"Well, maybe it doesn't, but…" Harry started, and looked into the void hesitatingly. "It's not like there's an other way out of here. We'll have to get out somehow."

"Yes, of course, but let's just not jump down into endless pits the minute we get here!" Hermione snapped.

"Yeah, I guess you're right…" Harry admitted, rather reluctantly. "We'll take a look around the place first," he said and he got up. Ron shot a silent relieved look at Hermione and after that they went after Harry. He was standing at the long table, one hand leaning on the tabletop and his other was waving in front of the eyes of a girl with long reddish golden hair who looked to be about fifteen years old. Her eyes didn't move at all, and kept staring at the chunk of bread in her slender, pale fingers, without even blinking.

"Do you think they've been frozen with a spell?" Harry wondered aloud. "Does that mean we'll freeze too?" he added nervously.

"No…" Hermione said, looking slightly scared at the eaters, imagining herself sitting with a piece of bread in her hand for eternity. "No, I don't think so. It looks like they are characters in this story. And anyway, we've got our wands." She reached inside the pockets of her robes to take hers out, but then found she didn't have any pockets at all, nor any robes. Startled she looked down on her body. Her torso was enclosed by a golden bodice, decorated with small white flowers. Below her waist it sprouted into a large skirt. Stunned she felt the smooth golden fabric with her hands.

"Ron, Harry… Will you just look at-" she started, but when she looked at them, she snorted with laughter.

"You look medieval too!" Harry and Ron looked down at their bodies as Hermione had done. There were dressed royally, in red tunics with golden accents. A leather belt was around the tunics, with a shield with a white flower on it as a buckle. Beneath it were dark tights. As she saw this, Hermione clapped her hand over her mouth and tried very hard to suppress her giggles. Ron's ears turned red when he saw what she was laughing about and even Harry got a slight flush on his cheeks.

"Right," Harry said with a catch in his voice and he cleared his throat. "Lovely." Ron was pulling his tunic down.

"Let's erm… go and continue what we were doing."

"Yes," Hermione said quickly, straightening her face. "What we were doing…" She put her gaze on the people at the table, to give the boys a moment to regain themselves. "Well… It seems like these people are very rich. Look, the woman has even got a golden ornament in her hair. Oh wait, I think it's a crown! Yes, the man at the head of table's got one too! They must be king and queen," she said. The king looked to be about fifty years old, he had lines on his face but his hair was still a warm blonde. His face had round cheeks and looked kind-hearted. His queen, who was sitting on his right, was at least fifteen years younger. She was very beautiful. Reddish brown hair framed her white face. Her cheekbones were prominent and her dark eyes were staring at the door of the room, piercing even though they were frozen.

"The king has got the same weapon on his chest as the one that's on our belt buckles," said Harry, who was standing next to the king and pointed at the large grey shield with the flower on it on the king's chest. "Guess that means we're related… We have become his sons in this story, Ron!"

"Wow, does that make us princes?" Ron asked enthusiastically, suddenly more fond of his new clothing.

"And that means I'm a princess!" Hermione said. "I dreamed of that so often when I was young!" She made a happy twirl with her golden skirt in her hand, but then stopped dead suddenly. "This does mean we're characters in the story now…" she said, grave comprehension dawning on her face.

"Then why haven't we frozen yet?" asked Ron. Non-understanding he looked around. "Why is nothing happening? Why were we put into this story if everything is motionless here except for us?"

"Why would anyone want to put us in here anyway?" Harry asked, giving Ron a questioning look.

The answer to this question, Ron did know. He heard stories about this every day at home. "Some wizards do the weirdest things to Muggle objects, just to tease the non-magical folks… It can get nasty sometimes…" he answered Harry.

"But nothing dangerous, right Ron!" Hermione said, sounding on the verge of getting very angry. "You said your father had no dangerous objects in that garage!" she bit at him. Ron recoiled at Hermione's sudden explosion.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know!" he tried to apologize. Hermione gave a very irritated snort and pouted. "All the stuff we used before was harmless," Ron added, trying to sound his nicest. Hermione opened her mouth to say something but then closed it again and sighed.

"Well, there's nothing we can do about that now. We're here and we'd better not fight or we'll never get out," she said, with considerable effort to keep remarks she wanted to make on the right side of her tongue.

Relieved, Ron resumed a somewhat more relaxed pose. "Maybe we have to sit in those empty chairs to get things started here? There are three of them, so they might be meant for us," he suggested. Three empty dark wooden chairs with a red velvet seat lined the table, on the left side of the king. As Harry, Ron and Hermione looked at them, a tension filled the air.

"Do you think that will start the story?" Harry asked. "It seems like the only way to change this situation…"

"We'll only know if we try," Ron answered and he pulled up the chair in the middle. Harry to his right and Hermione to his left copied his movements.

"Here we go…" said Ron and he sat down, followed by the others. In a silence buzzing with anxiety, they all awaited the magical moment in which everything would be put into motion. They waited longer. But their fictional family didn't move a muscle. Disappointment trickled through the anxiety and Hermione turned to Ron and Harry and spoke in a resigned tone:

"We're stuck."