"So," Ginny said as the Dreemurrs sat down for lunch the next day, "Has our 'Grand Inquisitor' appeared in any of your classes yet?"
Frisk shook her head as she reached for a sandwich. She didn't think much of this particular proclamation. "Not mine. Though, I have to admit, I'm kind of hoping she shows up in potions, just to see how how Professor Snape treats her. I remember when the headmaster came in in my first year, and the Professor just barely held it together," Frisk told them. "Of course, that was just after he covered Professor Lupin's class and had us write that assignment on werewolves."
"I remember that," Ginny said. "He did the same thing for our class."
"And ours," Opal said from behind them. "Ms. Pince was so unhappy that we were all looking for werewolf books at the same time."
"So, the answer is actually yes," Chara said, rolling her eyes. "She actually showed up in history of magic."
Asriel's muzzle broke out in a wide grin as everyone around them turned and stared, with everyone other than Chara sporting open mouthed in astonishment.
"History of magic?" Ginny said, waving her half eaten sandwich incredulously. "What did she think she could have learned about Professor Binns? I mean, the class hasn't actually changed since she took his classes, has it? Did the 'Grand Inquisitor' actually do anything in the class?"
"No, not really," Chara said. "She sat in the back, I think she was taking notes."
"Maybe she has to watch all of the classes, and just decided to start with History in order to get it out of the way," Asriel hypothesized, refilling his pumpkin juice.
Frisk shrugged. It made as much sense as any idea she had thought of.
"Actually," Opal said, turning around from the Hufflepuff table to look at them with an impish grin on her face. "There's one important question I'd like to ask about that." She waited for the others to pause in their conversations. "Did she stay awake during the entire class?"
There was a roar of laughter across the tables, with even Frisk reduced to helpless giggles. She didn't particularly like laughing at it, but everyone she knew had tried, and almost certainly failed, to control the urge to fall asleep in that class at least once, even her.
The bell rang, telling the students that they had five minutes before afternoon class began. "Meet you by Firenzie's home after class," Asriel reminded them.
Frisk walked out of the main door into the late September sun. There were a few other students out enjoying the last of the summer weather. Sooner or later, that weather was going to change, so it was a good idea to take advantage of it while it lasted. She didn't need any reminders of the first quidditch match she attended, which was in the middle of a fall thunderstorm.
"Any further sign of Ms. Umbridge?" Frisk asked, hurrying to catch up to her sister.
"No, thankfully," Chara said. She looked at Frisk for a moment, as if catching on to something for the first time. She seemed to think about for a second, smirked to herself, and moved on. Asriel was already in front of them, waiting impatiently at one of the two huts that sat near the Forbidden Forest. After deciding his sisters were close enough, Asriel went ahead and knocked on the door.
By the time the door opened, Frisk was close enough to see the clean shaven, smiling face of Firenzie the centaur. Behind him, not quite as tall, not quite as... 'long', so to speak, and sporting a very wide grin was their friend Dubran. He had his jet black hair loose, and his attentive dark eyes were zeroed in on his human and monster friends. Much like Firenzie, he wore a tunic of leather, the better to fit in with the humans of Hogwarts.
"Dubran!" Asriel called. Firenzie smiled as he stepped slightly backward to let Asriel by to see his friend. "How have you been?"
"Bored," he admitted, grinning like a madman. "I've wanted to come visit since I heard you came back a few weeks ago. What would you like to do? Play your card game? Catch? The ball and stick game?" He was speaking a mile a minute, and Frisk took a step back.
"Relax, Dubran," Firenzie said calmly, placing a hand on the child's shoulder. "Take a breath. You have all afternoon."
Dubran glanced backwards at the elder centaur and then took the advised deep breath. "I'm sorry, I... really have been bored. It's really good to see you. I've been looking forward to it all summer." He kicked at the ground with a hoof, then looked back up. "So, what have you been doing?"
"It's alright," Asriel grinned, and they talked about the Dreemurr's explorations in the human world, concluding with their adventures with dementors.
"Dementors..." Dubran said. "I remember them from... a little over a year ago, wasn't it, Firenzie?" he said. "I think we saw them, on the edges of the forest. I remember that their presence made father really upset."
"I can't blame him for that," Frisk said, "Headmaster Dumbledore didn't like them either, and seemed to just barely consider the chance they would catch the fugitive to be worth the trouble of having them around."
Dubran nodded. "I remember your headmaster came to camp a few days before your school started for..." he paused to search for the word.
"Term," Firenzie supplied, "School term."
"Term, right," Dubran said. "He told father that there was a possibility that Dementors were no longer taking instruction from the ministry, and to please let him know immediately if there was any signs that they were in the Forbidden forest, so he could help father remove them post haste."
Frisk wondered for a second if it was the case that Dementors weren't taking orders from the ministry. But then, why would Dementors have come for her family specifically? Bad luck?
"Do you have a way to deal with dementors?" Chara asked, interrupting Frisk's thoughts. "I understand there's a spell that does it, but how do other magical creatures fight them?"
Dubran looked like he'd been caught off guard by the question. "The same way we would deal with anything else, by filling them with arrows?" he offered, hesitatingly.
Firenzie made a waggling motion with one hand. "Kind of. They wouldn't normally feel anything you shot at them. But there is an unguent, made with herbs in the forest, when applied to arrows that will set their cloaks alight with fire." He gave an almost feral looking smile that looked foreign on his face. "They don't like it very much."
Frisk suddenly remembered something like that happening at the lake, the night she found Sirirus, a beam of fire striking one of the dementors. Was that unusual? She wasn't sure, and she certainly wasn't going to ask the professor in charge of the subject. She'd figure it out later, it really wasn't the time to talk about wand magic. "Is your leg better?" she asked instead.
"It is," he said, stomping his foreleg on the ground.
Frisk smiled, and tried to think of anything else she wanted to talk about, but came up empty. There was the proverbial elephant in the room of her former family, but she didn't really want to talk about that at the moment.
"Should we take advantage of the warm weather then, while we have it?" Asriel asked after a notable pause in the conversation.
"Please," Dubran said. "Let's go!"
So, for the next hour or so, the four children did so. They tossed around a quaffle, with Asriel passing along tips for throwing that he'd picked up from the Gryffindor chasers. They practiced hitting the quaffle with beater bats. When they'd exhausted that, Dubran had presents for them: bows that had been sized for them.
"It is Magorian's way of thanking you," Firenzie explained. "For helping with Dubran in the forest. Perhaps it is a slight apology as well, though he would never admit that." This was a long way from the way their family had been expelled from the Centaur's village.
"He asked me to teach you, if you still wanted to learn," Dubran added.
Considering that was what they were doing when Dubran... pulled away from them, Frisk thought there was... a bit of symmetry to that.
"I'd still like to learn," said Chara, Asriel nodded enthusiastically, and Frisk was willing to go along with it, after seeing how excited Dubran was to have permission to do this. They spent the last half an hour or so before dinner being taught how to align their body, how to properly place the arrow in the 'nock spot', and how to look down the shaft to aim.
More than once, though, the snapping of the string caught one of them in their arm. While Asriel's fur protected him against the whiplash, Frisk and Chara had the starting of bruises on their arms before they were done. "Arm-guards," Firenzie observed. "We should get them some archery bracers."
Dubran looked abashed, looking down at his own arms. His skin was still unblemished... but he hadn't actually fired that many shots, either. "I forgot," he admitted. "I wore them when I was first learning. Father said the pain helped you remember to do it the proper way, so I didn't wear them for long."
Firenzie gave a soft smile. "Yes, I have heard him say that. It is not a philosophy I personally follow." He looked up toward the sun for a moment. "With that said, I believe the time is coming for the three Dreemurrs to get towards dinner, and for you to head back home."
"Oh..." Asriel and Dubran said together. "I... was hoping we'd have time to play a game together, still," Dubran said. "Dominion, the card game you'd lent me over the holiday."
"I'd forgotten you borrowed it," Frisk admitted. "Did your father enjoy it?"
"Not at first," Dubran told them, "He thought it was a silly human game. At first, he played it only to humor me, and to spend time with me. It was only later that he began to catch on to the strategy within it, and then to enjoy it." He smiled, and attempted to affect a deeper voice. "Perhaps this game is not so silly."
"That's good," Frisk said. "Our dad really likes it. Maybe he'll start to see he has more in common with the other races than he thought."
"I hope so," Dubran said. He held out his hand, looking at Firenzie questioningly for a moment. The elder centaur gave a nod to him, as the three Dreemurrs each stepped up to shake his hand. Then they turned away toward the castle.
As they left, they could hear Firenzie tell Dubran that he would walk with him through the forest until they met Bane, who would take him the rest of the way.
A few days later, over breakfast, a pair of letters dropped onto Frisk's plate of scrambled eggs. One of them was from her parents, the other from the Oxtobys. Frisk took out her pocket knife, and slit open the letter from home.
It wasn't a particularly long letter, but it was very consoling, stating how sorry they was for her family (..not her 'other family', not her 'prior family', just 'family'), saying they were proud of her for taking advantage of the opportunity to see them again. "But please," the letter read in the neat, balanced script she recognized as her mothers, "don't be offended when we come up that weekend to visit Asriel and Chara, and go to Hogsmeade with them."
She wasn't offended, of course. She looked up to see her siblings reading their own letters, probably discovering something similar.
Looking back down at the letter, she read further of the preparations that had been made. There were details about St. George's School for Girls, which is where Frisk was, ostensibly, getting her schooling, along side her adopted sister. There were some things to memorize, the subjects, the teachers who taught each one...
She was just about to turn around to ask Opal a question, but realized before she did that it might not be something to ask about in the middle of the grand hall. Fortunately, she had Herbology that day, and like she had every year, she shared the class with her fellow Hufflepuff students.
It wasn't... quite... the right day to have a conversation in class, though. "Be very careful. You are taking the defense – and feeding – teeth of these plants. While the teeth will regrow, it makes them extremely agitated. Be sure you have your heavy gloves on and face shields down."
Defanging vampiric vegetation certainly wasn't the most nerve-wracking thing Frisk had ever done, but it was certainly something that required a good deal of attention. Frisk and Opal worked as a team, one of them pinching the round green bulbs of the vegetation, holding it still, the other reaching in, collecting the thorny 'teeth', depositing them in a small bucket. The teeth, they had been told, they would seen again in a future potions class.
"What kind of potion do you think they're going to be used for?" Opal asked, taking off her facial shield and wiping her brow.
"I'm not sure I want to know. Maybe a blood replenishing potion?" Frisk said warily, looking at the growing collection of small, sharp teeth. "Uhm, I wanted to ask you something, Opal. About this weekend."
"Oh?" Opal asked, lowering her voice. "What about this weekend?"
"I'm supposed to be your sister," Frisk said. "Where will I be sleeping? I mean... I'm supposed to have a room, right?"
"I got a letter from my mother today," Opal told her. "They're literally taking everything from your own room at your house and putting it in our guest bedroom. It's smaller than mine," she said apologetically, "But it was either that or put you in my room," Opal finished. "Our mothers seemed to think this was the better solution."
Frisk nodded. She was still nervous that she'd accidentally get the room 'wrong', and expose their entire charade...
"Look, don't worry," Opal said, correctly guessing at Frisk's thoughts. "They want to see you, not investigate you. Frisk... it'll be fine."
"I'm... just..." Frisk stumbled. "I'm worried about," that wasn't right either. "I'm scared, he... she..." Frisk floundered a bit longer, then gave up.
"Don't dwell on it, Frisk," said a voice behind her. Frisk jumped about a foot in surprise, then had to dodge backward as one of the plants tried to take a bite out of her arm. "I'm sorry," Madam Sprout said apologetically. "Frisk, can I give you some advice?" she asked, crouching down among the plants, to meet Frisk at eye level.
"What?" Frisk asked.
"There is nothing you can change right now," Madam Sprout told her. "If you dwell on it too long, you will only get more and more anxious. Find other things to think about over the next few days. Go watch a quidditch practice, relax by the lake, do homework if you have to..." she winked, "But... if it absolutely won't leave your head, I know you have some friends who are amazing listeners." Frisk could see Opal nodding along. "And. if you're really worried about something, please feel free to ask me, your own head of house, or even the headmaster."
"Thanks," Frisk said, looking at the herbologist with half-lidded eyes. "Thank you, Madam Sprout."
She smiled back at Frisk, then she straightened up, "For right now, however, how about those teeth? We do have some work to do."
Frisk blushed, and turned back to the plant, ready for Opal's next attempt at defanging.
Frisk woke Friday morning with what felt like a rock in the pit of her stomach. She had never been one for getting nervous. Even quizzes and exams hadn't caused the butterflies like this had.
The previous day, she had gotten a very official looking letter from the Ministry telling her she would be taken to catch the Knight Bus, then take a mundane train from Cambridge into London. For non-wizards, it would have been about a six hour train ride, so it was being arranged that they would be coming into London about seven... with the idea that they would have been released from afternoon classes in order to meet Opal's parents at a reasonable hour. The train tickets had already been purchased, and were included with her letter.
Not that they'd actually been released from classes. The stone in her stomach had only gotten heavier through the day. The occasional glances she was getting from her Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, even though she'd been directed to 'read silently' was doing nothing to improve her mood, either.
She was sure she'd read the same dry passage about "de-escalation" multiple times when the bell rang, marking the end of class. Frisk stood quickly, causing Ms. Umbridge to fully focus her froggit-like gaze on her. She looked like she was about to say something, the way she was narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips. At the last minute, however, she appeared to think better of it and turned away.
Frisk felt a chill go down her spine, and she wasn't quite sure why.
That said, there was no time to worry about it. She had to rush upstairs to put away her books. She was to keep her school bag – it wasn't identifiable as magical in any way. There was only a few things that she was going to keep a hold of: Her mundane clothing (she was to change on the Knight Bus), some non-magical reading material, like her mother's algebra book, and her wand, which she was still expected her to have on her in case of emergency.
Hurrying down the stairs, she found Opal and Professor McGonagall waiting for her at the main door. With a deep swallow, which only made the stone more solid, they headed through the Hogwarts ground, all the way into Hogsmeade.