A Moonlit Search of a House for Flags
From the files of the Department of Mysteries, Ministry of Magic,
London, England
It's nighttime. There is a strange noise coming from Abi's closet. Hmmm. what can it be? Well, the reader doesn't know, but we do know what it is. It is Sirius, in a dog kennel, scratching and trying to get out. Finally, we hear a loud crash.
CRASH!
Yeah, that was it. We now see Sirius, in horrible shape, crawling out of the cage and shaking himself off, sighing with relief. Quietly, he sneaks around the room to the bed, peaking under the covers.
"DAMN! Abi is not there. Now, where could she be?" Resolved to find Abi, he snoops around, peaking into every room, but she is nowhere to be found. Finally, he decides to go to the basement.
While he is walking through the basement, he trips on a billiard pole, and sends a whole line of them crashing down on the floor. Of course, the noise awakens Abi's father, who is sleeping nearby. Why he sleeps in the basement, nobody knows. It's a mystery that we won't discuss in this particular story. Well, anyway, he wakes up, and Sirius realizes he has to run. Fast.
So he runs to, naturally, the nearest exit he sees: the window. Now, keep in mind, it's a basement window. So it's small. So you can't get out of it. But Sirius is pretty terrified at this moment, so he is not thinking very well. That happens to you after a while of being stuck in a dog-kennel. So you can imagine what happened when he tried to get out of the little basement window.
Simply put, he got stuck. He got stuck just as Abi's dad was approaching. We will draw the curtain on that unpleasant scene, for now, and go to 12 Aspen Court, which just happens to be where Abi actually is, at a sleepover with Meghan and Katia. 12 Aspen court is, by the way, Katia's house. Well, it used to be Mr. Moore's house, but that's a different story all in itself.
* * * *
In the meantime, Severus Snape has been under the impression for a month now that the students of Hogwarts are plotting against the teachers. He is at the moment checking every student's household to destroy any such plots. In fact, he has just arrived at the home of Katia; where Katia, Abi, and Meghan are sound asleep.
"This may be the house of the key plotters," he murmured to himself, and sure enough he saw a movie running on the laptop on the floor. The picture showed a man standing on the crow's nest of a sinking ship.
"I knew it!" he shouted, then slapped his hands over his mouth scared that he had awoken the girls, "They must be plotting to turn Hogwarts into a ship and sink it in the lake!" he whisper/yelled.
He is five seconds from smashing the laptop when Sirius bursts in the door yelling something about Abi and a kennel. So, instead, he smashes the laptop into Sirius' head, knocking him out. Suddenly, the house transforms into twelve Grimwald Place, Sirius' house and a crash is heard from upstairs.
If you were wondering how Sirius got out of the window, he wiggled, a lot. After he realized he was invisible to muggles
* * * *
Well, it is about time that we introduce a certain character named Mrs. Starch. Mrs. Starch is a red-haired, evil Colorguard instructor. Now, see, we'll have to add yet another mystery to our collection of mysteries in our story. This particular one, is the mystery of Mrs. Starch's past. Nobody knows who she was before she became a chorus teacher/colorguard instructor. There are, however, many theories circulating around. Some say that she used to be a dominatrix; others will assure you that she was a lion tamer, but we must admit that none of those theories are actually correct. The reader must know the truth, so we will tell it to the reader. The truth is actually that before she became a sort of a second principal of the school, she was a dictator of a small, third world country. And like all dictators of all small third-world countries, she was constantly paranoid about people plotting to overthrow her. It never did occur to her, that if she wasn't such a tyrant to both her people and her students, maybe they wouldn't try to overthrow her at all. She just couldn't grasp that, so she just continued being a tyrant, and so her fear was constantly present.
On this particular day, or rather, the night before, she had a strange dream. This dream disturbed her deeply and she woke up in cold sweat afterwards. It was very frightening. Because you see, she dreamed that her Colorguard students had plotted a revolution, presented her with a Declaration of Independence, and when she declined it furiously, they suddenly brought out their flags from behind their backs (how these flags got behind their backs in the first place was something she couldn't comprehend), and attacked her with them. It was horrible. She ran and ran but they just continued chasing her all around the football field, yelling in their horrid little high-pitched voices and threatening her with the flagpoles. She hated them. She hated them all. And when she woke up from the dream, she felt distinctly that it was not one of those dreams that just come and go, and don't mean anything. No, she was certain that this dream was meant to come true, if she wasn't going to try and prevent it somehow from happening. And that is exactly what she set out to do.
First she was going to go and rule out the whole possibility of them attacking her with flagpoles, and the only obvious way to do that was to go to the household of every student and steal the flags. It would be very hard, as there are a lot of Colorguard students, but she felt that making them surrender the flags willingly would be too suspicious, and it would just quicken the progress of the revolution. So this particular day, she decided to look into the house of Meghan. Meghan, of course, was not there, as the reader would kindly remember, she was at Katia's house at the sleepover. So, of course, she thought that they had all gotten together to plot, and assumed that all of them had their flags with them in case of an emergency. Because you see, Mrs. Starch could never imagine that anyone could think in a different pattern than her. Sadly, she considered her students to be as paranoid and scared as she was.
Well, unfortunately for her, she had just gotten through the upstairs window of Katia's house, when, as we remember, it turned into 12 Grimwald place. Amazed, she looked out of the window, but outside, everything seemed to be the same. So she thought that she was a little too tired from climbing all the way up to the upper window (we won't tire the reader by relating the painful process) and she just blacked out for a second.
She took one look at the room and immediately saw what she wanted to see. The flags! They were up on the wall. The hideous beings were using them as mascots, hanging them up on the wall! How dare they! What they were in reality were the curtains draped around the portrait of Sirius' mother, but Mrs. Starch didn't know this. She has never read Harry Potter, and she lacked an imagination that would make it possible to comprehend it at all. To her, the brightly colored curtains were nothing but Colorguard flags. She didn't know about the horror concealed behind them. With a triumphant shout, she sprang towards the curtains, and just as she was about to yank them off the wall, she heard a terrible voice behind her shouting:
"STOP! DO NOT TOUCH THE CURTAINS!"
Startled, terrified, and most of all, appalled at the fact that someone had the guts to call her precious flags "curtains", she turned and looked at the man who had apparently uttered the cry. What she saw almost smote her from her feet. She drew a sharp breath, and immediately her heart started to race. And suddenly, (if only her students could see her now!) she sighed dreamily and smiled. The man in front of her was Severus Snape.
* * * *
When Sirius woke up, Mrs. Starch and Severus Snape were still standing there, breathing hard, staring at each other. In fact, they have been standing there for quite a few hours now. Sirius groaned.
"Oh, God, not again. What a gushy moment."
Meanwhile, the loving couple was still staring into each other's eyes. And finally,
Severus found his voice, cleared his throat and said in the softest voice he could manage: "My dear. would you. would you marry me?"
With tears in her eyes, Mrs. Starch answered him. "Oh, Severus, dear" how she knew his name right away is yet another mystery we can add to our list. But then again, lovers always know each other's names before they ask. They gather it from dreams and visions.
Anyway, the vicious Colorguard instructor looked so unusually tender (oh, if ONLY Meghan, Katia, and Abi weren't asleep and could see this!), and she was so touched that she could barely utter the sacred word.
"Yes," she whispered.
Unfortunately for Sirius, he actually had to witness this horrifying scene. We will assure the reader that reading this is not even remotely as terrible as witnessing it. Shuddering with disgust, he stood up, walked over to the two star-crossed lovers, pulled out a flagpole out of nowhere, and whacked them both over the head with it.
The last words that were heard from him before he dragged them both off to the woods were: "Damn it all, why am I always the one to clean up everyone's romantic messes?"
* * * *
At precisely this same moment, a small origami ship made and set down on the water by some careless student at Hogwarts sank into the lake.
* * * *
Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering what happened to Katia, Abi and Meghan, they slept through the whole thing.
* * * *
Oh right, we forgot to add one thing. An ending. I suppose the reader cannot do without an ending. So we will assure the reader that everyone lived happily ever after, in a way.
From the files of the Department of Mysteries, Ministry of Magic,
London, England
It's nighttime. There is a strange noise coming from Abi's closet. Hmmm. what can it be? Well, the reader doesn't know, but we do know what it is. It is Sirius, in a dog kennel, scratching and trying to get out. Finally, we hear a loud crash.
CRASH!
Yeah, that was it. We now see Sirius, in horrible shape, crawling out of the cage and shaking himself off, sighing with relief. Quietly, he sneaks around the room to the bed, peaking under the covers.
"DAMN! Abi is not there. Now, where could she be?" Resolved to find Abi, he snoops around, peaking into every room, but she is nowhere to be found. Finally, he decides to go to the basement.
While he is walking through the basement, he trips on a billiard pole, and sends a whole line of them crashing down on the floor. Of course, the noise awakens Abi's father, who is sleeping nearby. Why he sleeps in the basement, nobody knows. It's a mystery that we won't discuss in this particular story. Well, anyway, he wakes up, and Sirius realizes he has to run. Fast.
So he runs to, naturally, the nearest exit he sees: the window. Now, keep in mind, it's a basement window. So it's small. So you can't get out of it. But Sirius is pretty terrified at this moment, so he is not thinking very well. That happens to you after a while of being stuck in a dog-kennel. So you can imagine what happened when he tried to get out of the little basement window.
Simply put, he got stuck. He got stuck just as Abi's dad was approaching. We will draw the curtain on that unpleasant scene, for now, and go to 12 Aspen Court, which just happens to be where Abi actually is, at a sleepover with Meghan and Katia. 12 Aspen court is, by the way, Katia's house. Well, it used to be Mr. Moore's house, but that's a different story all in itself.
* * * *
In the meantime, Severus Snape has been under the impression for a month now that the students of Hogwarts are plotting against the teachers. He is at the moment checking every student's household to destroy any such plots. In fact, he has just arrived at the home of Katia; where Katia, Abi, and Meghan are sound asleep.
"This may be the house of the key plotters," he murmured to himself, and sure enough he saw a movie running on the laptop on the floor. The picture showed a man standing on the crow's nest of a sinking ship.
"I knew it!" he shouted, then slapped his hands over his mouth scared that he had awoken the girls, "They must be plotting to turn Hogwarts into a ship and sink it in the lake!" he whisper/yelled.
He is five seconds from smashing the laptop when Sirius bursts in the door yelling something about Abi and a kennel. So, instead, he smashes the laptop into Sirius' head, knocking him out. Suddenly, the house transforms into twelve Grimwald Place, Sirius' house and a crash is heard from upstairs.
If you were wondering how Sirius got out of the window, he wiggled, a lot. After he realized he was invisible to muggles
* * * *
Well, it is about time that we introduce a certain character named Mrs. Starch. Mrs. Starch is a red-haired, evil Colorguard instructor. Now, see, we'll have to add yet another mystery to our collection of mysteries in our story. This particular one, is the mystery of Mrs. Starch's past. Nobody knows who she was before she became a chorus teacher/colorguard instructor. There are, however, many theories circulating around. Some say that she used to be a dominatrix; others will assure you that she was a lion tamer, but we must admit that none of those theories are actually correct. The reader must know the truth, so we will tell it to the reader. The truth is actually that before she became a sort of a second principal of the school, she was a dictator of a small, third world country. And like all dictators of all small third-world countries, she was constantly paranoid about people plotting to overthrow her. It never did occur to her, that if she wasn't such a tyrant to both her people and her students, maybe they wouldn't try to overthrow her at all. She just couldn't grasp that, so she just continued being a tyrant, and so her fear was constantly present.
On this particular day, or rather, the night before, she had a strange dream. This dream disturbed her deeply and she woke up in cold sweat afterwards. It was very frightening. Because you see, she dreamed that her Colorguard students had plotted a revolution, presented her with a Declaration of Independence, and when she declined it furiously, they suddenly brought out their flags from behind their backs (how these flags got behind their backs in the first place was something she couldn't comprehend), and attacked her with them. It was horrible. She ran and ran but they just continued chasing her all around the football field, yelling in their horrid little high-pitched voices and threatening her with the flagpoles. She hated them. She hated them all. And when she woke up from the dream, she felt distinctly that it was not one of those dreams that just come and go, and don't mean anything. No, she was certain that this dream was meant to come true, if she wasn't going to try and prevent it somehow from happening. And that is exactly what she set out to do.
First she was going to go and rule out the whole possibility of them attacking her with flagpoles, and the only obvious way to do that was to go to the household of every student and steal the flags. It would be very hard, as there are a lot of Colorguard students, but she felt that making them surrender the flags willingly would be too suspicious, and it would just quicken the progress of the revolution. So this particular day, she decided to look into the house of Meghan. Meghan, of course, was not there, as the reader would kindly remember, she was at Katia's house at the sleepover. So, of course, she thought that they had all gotten together to plot, and assumed that all of them had their flags with them in case of an emergency. Because you see, Mrs. Starch could never imagine that anyone could think in a different pattern than her. Sadly, she considered her students to be as paranoid and scared as she was.
Well, unfortunately for her, she had just gotten through the upstairs window of Katia's house, when, as we remember, it turned into 12 Grimwald place. Amazed, she looked out of the window, but outside, everything seemed to be the same. So she thought that she was a little too tired from climbing all the way up to the upper window (we won't tire the reader by relating the painful process) and she just blacked out for a second.
She took one look at the room and immediately saw what she wanted to see. The flags! They were up on the wall. The hideous beings were using them as mascots, hanging them up on the wall! How dare they! What they were in reality were the curtains draped around the portrait of Sirius' mother, but Mrs. Starch didn't know this. She has never read Harry Potter, and she lacked an imagination that would make it possible to comprehend it at all. To her, the brightly colored curtains were nothing but Colorguard flags. She didn't know about the horror concealed behind them. With a triumphant shout, she sprang towards the curtains, and just as she was about to yank them off the wall, she heard a terrible voice behind her shouting:
"STOP! DO NOT TOUCH THE CURTAINS!"
Startled, terrified, and most of all, appalled at the fact that someone had the guts to call her precious flags "curtains", she turned and looked at the man who had apparently uttered the cry. What she saw almost smote her from her feet. She drew a sharp breath, and immediately her heart started to race. And suddenly, (if only her students could see her now!) she sighed dreamily and smiled. The man in front of her was Severus Snape.
* * * *
When Sirius woke up, Mrs. Starch and Severus Snape were still standing there, breathing hard, staring at each other. In fact, they have been standing there for quite a few hours now. Sirius groaned.
"Oh, God, not again. What a gushy moment."
Meanwhile, the loving couple was still staring into each other's eyes. And finally,
Severus found his voice, cleared his throat and said in the softest voice he could manage: "My dear. would you. would you marry me?"
With tears in her eyes, Mrs. Starch answered him. "Oh, Severus, dear" how she knew his name right away is yet another mystery we can add to our list. But then again, lovers always know each other's names before they ask. They gather it from dreams and visions.
Anyway, the vicious Colorguard instructor looked so unusually tender (oh, if ONLY Meghan, Katia, and Abi weren't asleep and could see this!), and she was so touched that she could barely utter the sacred word.
"Yes," she whispered.
Unfortunately for Sirius, he actually had to witness this horrifying scene. We will assure the reader that reading this is not even remotely as terrible as witnessing it. Shuddering with disgust, he stood up, walked over to the two star-crossed lovers, pulled out a flagpole out of nowhere, and whacked them both over the head with it.
The last words that were heard from him before he dragged them both off to the woods were: "Damn it all, why am I always the one to clean up everyone's romantic messes?"
* * * *
At precisely this same moment, a small origami ship made and set down on the water by some careless student at Hogwarts sank into the lake.
* * * *
Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering what happened to Katia, Abi and Meghan, they slept through the whole thing.
* * * *
Oh right, we forgot to add one thing. An ending. I suppose the reader cannot do without an ending. So we will assure the reader that everyone lived happily ever after, in a way.
