"Black. Potter. What are you doing here?" Snape asked, sounding thoroughly annoyed at the interruption...of two students who really should have been there, it wasn't as though they were doing anything particularly offensive. They had been excused for the Wand Weighing, but it wasn't as though they were required to skive off if they'd gotten done earlier than expected.
Hermione was slightly surprised, honestly — she'd understood there were supposed to be interviews for various news outlets, and while Harry might skip out on those as early as possible, Lyra she would expect to thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to convince the poor reporters to publish the most outlandish lies (or worse, truths) she could come up with to explain where she'd come from, where she'd learned her improbably large range of magical skills, why she'd suddenly appeared in Britain last summer, and how she'd managed to enter herself in the Tournament in the first place.
"Well, you see, Your Honour, we simply couldn't let a Tuesday pass without spending at least some few minutes in your gracious company."
There were a few suppressed sniggers from both sides of the room. The professor glowered at Lyra even more heavily. "Given that your ever-so-crucial publicity event has taken the majority of the class period, and thus even had you any hope of completing today's assignment without having attended to the instructions — which, in all fairness, would be nothing unusual for the two of you — you simply haven't time to do so, and I suspect that your only purpose here today is to disrupt your fellow students' learning, you may go. Now."
Hermione stifled a snort of amusement. She had to admit, she did like Snape a bit better knowing that was how he spoke to students he liked. He was still an enormous arse, and really one of the worst teachers she'd ever had, but maybe not quite as much of a bully as she'd thought before Lyra joined their class.
Lyra gave Snape an entirely unconcerned little hum. "If disrupting the lesson is the goal, you're doing all the work for me, Your Honour. I only wanted to distract two students — you were the one who thought we needed to make a big production out of our arriving late and distract everyone."
"Lyra!" Harry hissed, glaring at her.
She ignored him, and Snape's scowl of exasperated annoyance, dragging a stool from the empty table which would have been Harry and Blaise's, if Blaise hadn't moved over here to work with her instead, and plopping down beside them. The professor decided to ignore her right back, instead ordering the class to bottle whatever poisonous concoctions they intended to present as an antidote to doxie venom — because of course he couldn't remind them that the period was almost over more civilly.
"Hey," Blaise said, sealing his sample with a quick charm and vanishing the rest of his cauldron. (Potions was so wasteful...though she didn't imagine they'd ever need that much doxie antivenin, so— Whatever.)
"So, do you two have plans after class?"
"What?" Hermione said distractedly, filling her own vial with fizzy, red-orange liquid. It was slightly more orange than the textbook described, but she was sure she'd followed Snape's instructions precisely... "You know we have Arithmancy next..." She and Blaise did, anyway, neither Lyra nor Harry were taking that particular class. Lyra, of course, clearly didn't need to — not that she actually needed to be at Hogwarts at all, at least as far as classwork was concerned (it was both absurd and somewhat annoying how little attention she paid to their lessons) — and though Hermione thought Harry might actually be good at maths — Professor McGonagall occasionally asked them to practise balancing the energies in transformation equations as part of their homework, and those were obviously the easiest assignments for him — he claimed to have no interest in quantifying magic or modeling spells, when he could just cast them and figure out how to tweak them through trial and error. (As though that was actually a thing people did, and not ridiculously difficult, not to mention dangerous...)
"Skip it, this is more important."
"What? Lyra, I can't just skip Arithmancy! We've just started modeling probabilities!" If it were, oh, she didn't know...Herbology, maybe, but—
"The probability of a single missed lesson affecting your understanding of the subject is approximately nil." Well, that was true, but Professor Vector often included more real-world examples in her lectures than Hermione would find in their book, and probability modeling was one of those topics that really required a more nuanced understanding than she thought she might get just talking to Lyra about it... "Skip it."
"Why, exactly, are you asking us to risk the wrath of an annoyed Septima Vector?" Blaise drawled.
"The pride and reputation of our illustrious institution is at stake, apparently," Harry informed them. "Mira just reminded us that we need to finish putting together a team for the first task, so..."
"Ah. That." Blaise plucked her labeled sample from her hand, went to turn them in, apparently completely unsurprised. Though, honestly, Hermione couldn't quite say how she was surprised — Lyra never took deadlines seriously, and Harry could be absurdly absent-minded about even the most important things. The fact that he'd been walking around with a goofy Gabbie likes me smile for the past two days probably didn't help. (She knew that was what that smile was, despite Harry not saying so, because Gabrielle had been chattering about how serendipitous it was meeting Harry, because he was a mind mage and Blaise was a mind mage, and threesomes were great, and that was pretty much where Hermione stopped listening.)
(Sometimes Hermione really wished Gabrielle would just shut up.)
"Are you telling me you haven't even— The task is in four days!" Three, really, since it was going to start at nine in the morning on Saturday and it was already Tuesday afternoon!
"So, is that a yes, you'll help?"
Hermione groaned. "Of course I will, just— How many people have you recruited so far?"
"Well, you make one," Harry said, far too calmly to understand how difficult it was going to be to not only put together a team for any sort of serious contest in the next three days — even just recruiting people, what if they wanted time to think about it? — but design a strategy, practise the spells they'd need to know— Hermione didn't even know who the top duelists in the school were, and— "Assuming you're—"
"What?! No! If she's on our team for this, she can't be on my team for Edinburgh!"
Harry gave her girlfriend perhaps the most scornful look Hermione had ever seen on him. "If she's not on our team for this, we're going to have to organise things! Maïa is clever and devious and methodical and we need her help if we're going to not get our arses kicked on Saturday!"
Hermione was certain Harry had intended that as a compliment, and she didn't...not take it as one. She just kind of wished it didn't make her sound so... Well. She didn't know, exactly.
"But—"
"Please say yes, Hermione?"
"Well, yes, of course I will, I just wish you wouldn't put things off like this..." She sighed heavily. She'd just have to go to Professor Vector's office hours tomorrow and explain the situation... "Just— Here, help us pack up our things, and we can go hash this out in the Library."
፠
"Circe's tits, Maïa, I didn't completely forget about this, I've been waiting until we knew what the other teams were going to look like before we put ours together. Plus, I just found out what exactly we're doing yesterday."
"What are we doing?" Harry asked, rather warily.
"Capture the Crown, which is good for us. The other schools have put together teams that seem to be favouring offence, and they have a lot more serious duelists, they'd crush us in Capture the Castle."
"Is that like a capture-the-flag type thing?" Harry asked.
"Puzzle rings, usually," Blaise explained, "or jewels that you have to set into a crown — not flags, but yes."
Hermione frowned at him. "Is there a difference?"
"Kind of. The win condition is more specific than just grabbing the flag. There's usually a puzzle or something that you have to solve before you can win. The crown version, the jewels and the crown itself are usually kept in warded boxes or whatever; puzzle rings, you have to figure out how they fit together to form the crown. You don't win until your king's wearing it," he explained.
"You designate your king and the order of succession at the beginning of the game," Lyra added. "If they're still conscious, they specifically have to have the crown to win, so a lot of the time, if you can't capture the crown you capture the other person's king, give yourself time to take it back. If they want to make it really difficult, the king will have to be in a certain place in order to be crowned, like in a 'castle' area or safe in your own base."
"So, we may need to get this 'crown' as well as whatever the other two teams are protecting, and protect our own flag or jewel or whatever, and a particular person, and possibly take and hold a certain spot against the other teams? With fifteen people."
"It's not as hard as you're making it sound, Maïa. They're only going to have fifteen people on their teams too, and they'll have all the same priorities. At least, I don't think they'd give us unbalanced conditions..."
"No," Blaise agreed. "The spirit of the Tournament is that you're all on level ground to start. The tasks and judges can't be biased toward one school or another, so I think you have to have the same challenges."
"Right, so, the standard strategy is to keep your king and your piece of the crown in the same place to make it easier to protect them. We'll need some people to do that, and another team to go after the objectives—"
"And we're sure this is the game? Where did you—?"
"I asked Nyberg."
"And he just told you? You don't think he might've lied, you know, for Durmstrang?" Harry asked.
"No, I bribed him with an analysis of Cursebreaker Weasley's elemental sunlight bounce ward, to be delivered if his information turns out to be good. The layout of the field suggests it is — no obvious 'castle' to capture and hold. We're using flags. All three have to be assembled to retrieve the crown from a pocket dimension. One of those overlapping rune-scheme laminate-fusion circles." All three of them stared at her in complete incomprehension. "They were popular in Eastern Europe in the Eighteen-Eighties?" She gave them an exasperated sigh. "You literally just lay the three pieces of cloth on top of each other and reach through them to retrieve the crown. It's got to be pretty obvious, unless they're planning on letting us all know how it works somehow — I doubt most of the other students have heard of them, either. Anyway, flags. And the other schools seem to be going heavy on offence. Word is Durmstrang and Beauxbatons have made an alliance of sorts, agreeing to take us out first, knock out the interfering children before dealing with each other."
Hermione frowned. "And they're definitely going to have more experienced mages on their teams, we probably won't be able to face them directly, so...I think we're going to need to be sneaky."
"My thoughts exactly. So, Blaise: who's the sneakiest person you know?"
፠
Who's the sneakiest person I know?
Well, Lyra was pretty sneaky herself, Blaise was pretty sure she had gotten most of her information on the other schools' plans by spying on them from the Shadows, but the first person who actually came to mind was Tori — Daphne's younger sister, and therefore the closest thing Blaise had had to an actual sibling until Lyra had come along. She had a sort of tendency to...fade into the background. Not that she was quiet, exactly. Daphne was quiet, with her tendency to observe others, let them do the talking. Tori, when she was at home, surrounded by people she'd known all her life, was outgoing and animated, and she definitely had no problem speaking her mind. Around people she didn't know, though, she was...shy.
Shy in this case meaning that she'd figured out how to cast a freeform attention-deflecting field when she was about seven — accidental magic, a response to Lady Greengrass attempting to bring her to a tea party with her peers for the first time — and just...never stopped using it. Which made sense, he guessed, most kids' accidental magic tended to be basic physical charm effects, or if they were more powerful, like Harry, transfiguration. There wasn't really much reason to keep intentionally doing freeform spells that you could cast more precisely and at a greater distance with a wand. Most people got out of the habit and kind of forgot how — if they even did 'accidental' magic on purpose in the first place, a lot of kids didn't, or overthought it and so couldn't do it reliably.
But Avoidance Charms weren't exactly the sort of thing Hogwarts taught first-years, so it kind of made sense that she'd kept doing it — even more so because she'd suddenly been thrown into interacting with loads of strangers who were themselves kind of strange, by the standards of the Greenwood. (Their village was practically a different world, and Tori hadn't exactly spent a lot of time outside of it before coming to school.) And where Daphne would fall back on the training she'd been given to interact with outsiders, giving that interaction her best shot and often making a stiff and overly-formal first impression (overcompensating, Blaise had told her more than once, but she'd rather be thought of as an Ice Princess than a jumped-up Mister), Tori preferred to wait and watch — not interact with them until she had some idea of how they would react to her and could tune her performance accordingly. Which meant Tori tended to be much better at fitting in than Daph, she just needed more time to assess the situation.
(Most people tended not to have much of a first impression of her at all, it was weird. Cool, but weird.)
She'd managed to find her feet eventually, of course, made friends in Slytherin and at least stopped diverting most people's attention from her all the time, but she'd kind of had a lot of trouble her first year with the professors not realising she was even in class and constantly taking points for it.
Anyway, Blaise was absolutely certain she still knew how to do it, and Daphne had spent a solid chunk of the summer teaching her the Sneaking Spells Snape had taught all of them last year, "for emergency purposes" — i.e., so he knew which concealment spells they were most likely to be using and could keep an eye out for them trying to spy on him or otherwise get away with shite — and helping her get a head-start on the illusions and glamours she'd be doing in Charms this year. (Blaise hadn't been even a little surprised to hear that Tori was a natural at Glamoury.)
So basically, if Tori didn't want to be seen, she wouldn't be. She also wouldn't be caught out with mind magic — she wasn't great at keeping Blaise out, but she was good at using occlumency to hide her mental and magical presence, pulling herself in and putting up a sort of breakwater to weakly divert the currents of ambient magic around herself. (It was really bloody annoying, actually. Again, kind of cool, but annoying.) She said this was the same thing she did with being seen, though she couldn't actually describe how she did it.
Of course, she also said that it was harder to do with mind magic than with people's attention in general, so she usually didn't bother unless she was trying to spy on Blaise and Harry (nosey little Parker). She claimed she didn't do this very often, because Blaise and Harry were kind of boring, and the trip-line ward Blaise had put on his room still alerted him when she tried to sneak in anyway. They could also pick her out with detection charms, but he kind of doubted anyone was going to just be throwing detection spells around their own base camps, so he was sure she'd be fine.
She wasn't making any efforts to hide herself when he tracked her down, just leaving Defence, which made it the easiest thing in the world to slip a thought into the front of her mind. Tori! Ditch the Rosiers, I need to talk to you.
"Hey, you two go ahead, I'm meeting someone."
"Oh?" Amanda asked, smirking at the shorter girl.
"A special someone?" her twin suggested on Tori's other side.
"Oh, yeah, he's special all right," she said, rolling her eyes at the pair of them and their insinuating tone. "There are probably all sorts of innuendos I could make about riding him, but..."
The Rosiers giggled. Carina, the shorter, darker-haired of the two (unlike the Weasleys, they weren't identical), poked Tori in the side, making her yelp. "You have got to stop talking about trying to tame that bloody unicorn like he's a person."
"He is a person! You just don't know him like I do!" She performed the protest overly dramatically, Blaise got the impression she was quoting or mocking some terrible novel, not that he cared enough to hunt down which one.
"Yeah, because you're a crazy person." "We don't know what they told you in the Greenwood, but" "people don't actually ride unicorns, Tori." "Professor Lovegood is totally having us on."
"She's not, and some people can. You just have to be more pure of heart than you dirty-minded hags."
"Uh-huh."
"Yeah, right."
"Whatever, if Daph asks, I'll be out in the Woods." She skipped off down a cross-corridor without giving the twins a chance to respond, ducking into a classroom to wait for Blaise to catch up as soon as she was out of their sight.
She was sitting on the professor's desk when he reached it, kicking her heels and grinning at the doorway. "What's up, Blaise?"
"Are you really trying to ride unicorns?"
She giggled. "No, of course not, that would be silly, and probably really dangerous. I would never..."
"You know, I don't need legilimency to know when you're lying."
Shrug. "Believe me or don't, I don't care. What did you want to talk to me about?"
Ah, that. Well—
She frowned at him. Why are we doing the mind-reading thing?
Because this is a secret, and I don't care to cast half a dozen privacy palings at the moment. This is far more secure than actually talking.
Oh. Fine. Carry on.
Well, I'm here to offer you a very important mission. If you should choose to accept it, you must conduct yourself with the utmost secrecy, and—
Now you're the one being silly!
Maybe a little. Want to help Team Hogwarts win the Triwizard Tournament? Maïa and Lyra have a plan, but it calls for a sneak-thief of the highest calibre...
Her eyes lit up as she bit her lip to stop herself responding aloud. You have my attention...
Blaise grinned. She was definitely in.
So, the original idea here was to write an Ocean's Eleven-style recruitment scene, showcasing each of the people they're recruiting for the team, but of course it ended up being far too long to post as a single chapter. So this is part 1 of 7, more to be posted every couple of days. —Leigha