Open Season
Upon returning to the Scamander common room, Harry reported to his sister that her birthday was on April 22nd. He also relayed an apology from Brandt that he assumed she knew and didn't want to bring up any bad memories. It was something that the two of them shared and didn't realize. It was less than a year ago that Harry had his first birthday party and swore to himself that Lyra would have an equally impressive, if not greater one than he did.
Before going to sleep, Cedric gathered the house together for an announcement.
"As promised, I have an announcement on the lineup for next year's quidditch team," everyone looked hopefully toward him.
"I will be starting as the keeper. Chasers will be Yuri, Sue, and Megan."
The three girls cheered and hugged each other as Cedric continued, "Beaters will be Harry and Greg."
Greg gave Harry a determined look and saluted him with a punch to his own shoulder. Harry returned the gesture.
"Finally, Lyra will be our starting seeker." The house collectively cheered the full lineup.
Cedric raised his hands for attention, "I worked with Madeline Gorgon on this quite heavily. Many of you who will be on the reserves have stronger skills in some areas, but we chose this lineup based on balancing all the skills, especially coordination and adaptation. For our reserves, I have quite a few of you in multiple positions until you find what suits you best. Arthur will be the reserve keeper, but I want you to practice as a beater to try to get over your fear of bludgers. Colin, I want to be a reserve chaser and seeker, your eye for detail may be a good skill for a seeker as well as being able to capture the big picture. William will have the same reserve positions and I think being quick as lightning will be beneficial in both places. Neville, you need to work on your flying, but you could be either a good chaser for spearheading formations or a beater once you build your strength a bit more. Millicent, you will be a great reserve beater as you have the strength, but need to work on your coordination. Patricia, I want you to be a reserve chaser as well and work on your teamwork skills."
He surveyed the group, "This is not the final lineup. We will be allowed to draft from the first-year students next fall, and anyone can move up or down before then. For now, we will be practicing every week on Wednesday evening before dinner. Make sure to eat a big lunch before, if you have any questions, try to catch me at breakfast as I'm sure we all need a good night's sleep."
The following morning, during breakfast, all of the teachers were in attendance, signifying an announcement of some kind. Halfway through the meal, an Auror entered the room along with Vincent Crabbe walking behind him. He looked a bit pale but defiant as he entered the Great Hall, wearing a cloak that covered his whole body. The boy was welcomed with cheers from most of the Slytherin house, but with dark looks and sneers from the rest of the school. The auror, who Harry recognized as Yaxley from before, escorted Vincent to a spot next to Draco. He then approached Dumbledore and passed him a note before walking out of the hall without waiting for any sort of response.
The headmaster reviewed the paper and bowed his head in sadness. There was no announcement, but he spoke quietly to the teachers at the table. Harry saw Vincent in the halls, still wearing the heavy cloak, and stared daggers at the boy who seemed to just want to keep to himself even though he had an embarrassed but angry look everywhere he went. Shortly before dinner, Newt and Tina gathered the students of their house together for an announcement.
Newt spoke first, "All of you have seen that Mr. Vincent Crabbe has returned to school since the attack on his person weeks ago. He is to be left alone to recover and catch up with his school work."
His words were met with silence as Harry tried to reign in his anger. Newt continued, "Over the spring break, Mr. Crabbe was deposed by Aurors who questioned him, under veritaserum, regarding his role in the attack on Miss Granger. Under truth serum, he testified that he had nothing to do with the incident."
Harry tried to call out something but found that his movements were slow and he couldn't speak. He looked towards his sister who seemed to be nearly frozen in place as well. In a panic, he looked towards Newt and Tina to see the former American auror standing with her wand pointed down and a silver glow at the tip. She slowly shook her head from side to side. Harry bit down hard on his teeth and waited for Newt to finish the announcement.
Newt was a bit angry as well as he told the students, "There is to be no hostile action towards Mr. Crabbe by any of you as he has a physical disability now and because he is the same as the rest of you in terms of culpability for any hostility towards other students. Anyone who disobeys this ruling will be met with severe punishment. Now it's time for dinner."
Harry felt the magical restraints on his voice and body release as he turned and stomped out towards the great hall for dinner. Quite a few grumbling students were staring at Vincent and the Slytherin table as they entered the room. There was fury in the eyes of Penny and Hermione as the two of them entered the room. Harry could feel it rolling off Hermione specifically, and it gave him the shivers. He grabbed Lyra and the two of them went to sit with her for the meal.
"They told your house too?" Penny asked as they all sat down and Lyra nodded. "He probably had his memories erased before he testified," she said. "That would be the easiest way to beat veritaserum."
"Or they just didn't give him the real stuff," Harry added. "It's not like they did it publicly like I did."
"Either way, it doesn't change what he did," Lyra said quietly.
Hermione said nothing, but it was clear she was stewing and her anger was boiling. Harry patted her on the back and asked, "Were you able to work on the study guide for me?"
That seemed to break her out of her dark deliberations and she perked up and pulled a stack of papers from a satchel on the floor behind her, "I've got them here. They are organized by class and have all the questions that were on last year's exam highlighted." She pulled one more paper out, "These are all the books I used for my self-study of runes. We can meet in the library on Thursday evening to go over everything."
They set the appointment as they finished breakfast, and when leaving the room, Harry flagged down Fred and George and took them to an abandoned classroom.
Once they were inside, he told them, "I'm cashing in all my pranks. All of them on Vincent."
"We figured you might want that," Penn said with an evil smile, and Teller nodded along with him.
"I don't know what you'll do, but make sure to use lots of snakes."
"Yes sir," they both said while saluting him.
The next morning, at breakfast, there was a scream from the Slytherin table. Vincent had picked up a fork to eat his breakfast and it transformed into a snake and wound its way up his arm. He was on the floor hyperventilating as other students pulled it off him and turned it back into a utensil again.
Harry didn't see it, but later in the day, he tried to eat a chocolate frog only for there to be a chocolate snake inside that attacked him, its chocolate fangs breaking off as it tried to bite him. There were numerous times when he could hear hissing all around him and was in a constant state of panic. Other students seemed to jump on the bandwagon and would just whisper "hiss hiss" when they were near him to see his reaction. This was all on the first day, and Harry hoped it would go on for a long time.
The first Scamander quidditch practice was held Wednesday evening and many students from other houses tried to sit in and watch as Tina Scamander chased them all away by conjuring a dragon made out of purple smoke to scare them all away. They were all wearing basic helmets, as Penny and the others hadn't perfected the power venting yet, but assured them that as long as they didn't get hit continuously for five days, they would be fine.
Towards the end of the practice, Cedric released real bludgers for them to practice with and told them that Madam Pomfrey was standing by in case of injuries. Harry noted that the real ones felt more aggressive and required quite a bit more strength to knock away. The bat he had been given by Gwenog Jones seemed to bend more when hitting them as well. He remembered that the manager of the Harpies had asked Penny if she had made stronger bats before she showed off the helmets. Maybe that would be something to look into later.
The feeling of being around the more aggressive and also more dangerous bludgers seemed to fuel his desire to play harder. Greg was also pushing himself to fly faster and hit harder as well. As he swatted a bludger away from Cedric, he understood that his intention to protect was stronger when defending from a real threat instead of just playing a game with the practice bludgers.
After dinner, Harry met up with Fred, George, and Lee. He smiled at the twins and said, "Nice work you guys have been doing."
One of the twins shrugged and said, "I'm sure we have no idea what you're talking about."
The other said, "Nope, no idea. Also, that was a nice book you gave to Lee. I think our dad has warned us about a few of the rituals in the book that mentions the consequences. How do you think we should proceed?"
"Well, we have an idea board in our common room for sharing ideas," Harry told them. "It seems that a lot of people are planning on stewing the mandrakes. That gave me an idea."
"Do tell," Lee prompted.
"A mandrake screams when you pull it out of the ground… why?"
"Does it like being underground?" Lee proposed.
"Maybe?" Harry said. "What if it was underwater? Or in the mud? Would it scream if it was in a stew?"
"Are you talking about drowning a mandrake?" One of the twins asked.
"Sounds to me like he wants to boil them alive," the other twin told him.
"We've got more rats, we can try it out," Lee mentioned.
All four of them looked at each other and simultaneously declared, "To the laboratory!" and ran off.
The entire evening they spent experimenting on what happens when you try to drown a mandrake. The first thing they discovered was that the scream wasn't like a human in the sense that it didn't require air to be projected. If one of them tried to scream underwater, the ugly baby-shaped mandrake just released noise. Furthermore, even though it had something that resembled a mouth, they could see reverberations in the water coming from the entire root, not specifically the mouth analog.
Submerging the mandrake in water increased the amount of time that it would take to kill a rat outside of the water. None of them wanted to try to drown a rat at the same time the mandrake was underwater to see if that made a difference. Furthermore, being underwater didn't drown the mandrake, unless it took more than ten minutes for it to drown. Initially, they thought it didn't like the daylight, but tried keeping the lights out while it was underwater and it still screamed. It just seemed to like the dirt.
Lee then brought up that they were assuming that the scream was a negative response, but they had no way of testing if that was positive or negative. However, Harry told them that if they would use the mandrake in a ritual, they would need to kill or injure it while it was screaming. It wouldn't matter if the scream was a positive or negative reaction, it just needed to be emitting the noise while they did whatever they conducted the ritual that killed it.
The next test they performed was to see what would happen if they just added water to the planter it was in. Would it scream in the mud? The answer turned out to be yes, it did, but the mud needed to be very watery for it to start screaming. They didn't have a way to test for the exact concentration of dirt and water but estimated that they needed about three times the volume of water in comparison to the dirt around it, mixed up before the strange plant started to scream.
By the end of the night, they had killed another dozen rats and needed to stop as they had no other way of seeing if a mandrake was screaming while under muddy water since they had to wear ear protection to keep themselves from hearing the scream and fainting or getting injured.
On the way to meet Hermione on Thursday night, Harry felt like he was being followed. It was just like being back on the island and dealing with the unruly snakes. Finding a corner, he jumped inside, turning invisible. He waited there for a minute before a small snake slithered down the corridor and turned to him, tasting the air where he stood.
Carefully, Harry pulled out his staff and placed it down in front of the creature. It seemed to be afraid instinctively but didn't call out in fear of the Usurper. Harry jumped to the conclusion that it was conjured. When he experimented with the snake conjuring spell, he found that they were completely blank slates and wouldn't know the fear of things he didn't instruct them about. They knew to fear the Usurper because he knew to do so but weren't afraid of Lyra casting spells at it because he wasn't afraid of Lyra casting spells at him.
This conjured snake in front of him must have some instinctual fear of the kingsbane, simply by being a snake, but whoever conjured the snake must not know of it to pass the appropriate amount of fear onto their creation. It was all weirdly complicated even if it made perfect sense to Harry. Knowing that it was conjured, Harry drew his wand and tried to vanish the tiny snake. Since it wasn't his creation, the magic in it resisted and he had to channel more magic into his spell until it turned into smoke and sunk into the floor.
He hesitantly looked around for more snakes but didn't feel anything following him, so he continued to the library.
Hermione was already set up in a corner, with a huge spread of her notes in front of her. Harry looked around hesitantly before joining her and starting on the review of all their work. The two of them made excellent progress through all the theory work for transfiguration and charms, stopping when they reached the severing and repair charms as he would be starting on them next week. However, despite his reluctance to continue to subjects he hadn't studied, Hermione just started him on the theory herself.
Her explanations seemed to start directly from the textbook but then branched out more easily to clarify in her own words. A severing charm would act like scissors right at the wand tip, separating whatever it was pointing at. It was very important to visualize the division of the material as being cut, regardless of whether it was a hard or soft target. Focusing on a harder surface being cracked or broken rather than cut would often end in the spell reflecting and cutting the caster's hand or arm.
Hermione told him that while Professor Flitwick would instruct them that the severing and repairing charms were opposites in function, they were completely different and the magic shouldn't be looked at as inverted. A repairing charm required knowledge of the targeted object as a whole and how all the pieces of it fit together. An adult or powerful wizard might be able to repair something without this knowledge, just letting the magic of the spell put something back together without knowing what it was in the first place, students would be unable to do so. Hermione also cautioned him not to repair anything that didn't have all the pieces available or it would come out looking funny as his magic wouldn't know what to do with the empty spaces.
Harry thanked her at the end of their study session and started to head back to the common room. Along the way, he felt like he was being followed again. Instead of waiting for whatever was tracking him to catch up, he drew his wand and went on the hunt. Almost back at the library, he saw a disillusioned snake peeking out from behind a suit of armor. With a quick flick of his wand, he blasted it into nothingness. Looking around, no one made a move to reveal themselves as the caster.
The following morning, at breakfast, Vincent went to take a drink from his pumpkin juice only for the cup to explode into confetti and turn into tiny snakes as they rained down on him. The skinny boy screamed and waved his arms in the air to get them away from him. The flapping of his arms knocked the cloak off him and everyone saw what was left of his arm underneath.
Vincent's left arm had a silver framing around it with small needles starting outside the metal and penetrating his skin underneath. The arm itself was almost white with small blue discolorations of his veins visible through the skin. At nearly a dozen points along the arm, one could see pairs of small black dots which Harry assumed were where his snake had bit the boy. Quickly, he grabbed his cloak and covered his arm, wrapping it as tight as possible.
It was quiet throughout the hall as everyone stood up to get a better look at Vincent. Finally, a Ravenclaw that Harry didn't know called out, "Hey, some of us are eating here, try to keep that thing covered up."
Vincent looked embarrassed and ran from the hall as quite a few people laughed at him. Snape gave detention to the Ravenclaw student who had yelled at Crabbe.
On the way out of the great hall, Harry ducked into an empty classroom with the twins and paid his compliments to them for the prank. They denied any involvement but also provided him with a bag of confetti that might do the same thing as what just happened and said it was activated by movement.
Later, in the middle of the night, Harry, Lyra, and Whispers snuck down to the office over the Slytherin common room. When they got in, they saw Tracey, Daphne, and Blaise all standing around the well and looking down into the room.
Tracey must have heard them enter and looked up, "Harry! Lyra!" she waved them over. Whispers waved at her, "Yes, you too furball."
"What are you doing here?" Blaise asked.
"I need to use the well," Harry told them. "I have a present for Vincent." The three Slytherins flinched.
"That's you torturing him?" Daphne asked.
"Harry hasn't done anything to him… yet…" Lyra said mischievously.
"I did the writing on the door," Harry admitted.
"You snuck down the well?" Tracey asked. "He was freaking out the first night when he saw someone had written on the inside of his door. Snape had an inquisition to find out who did it."
"We actually went through the front door," Lyra smiled, then said, "Only the Worthy."
Blaise looked shocked, "How did you find out the password? Can you tell me? Please?"
"We overheard it," Harry told the Italian boy, "from those two adults that visited; McNair and Yaxley."
"Oooh, juicy," he said with a smile. "That will be perfect to tell Professor Snape."
"So what are you three doing up here?" Lyra asked.
"Digging up gossip," Tracey told them as she scratched Whispers's head. "Somehow someone else is getting all the good secrets before us and we can't figure out how. Also, the snakes aren't afraid of Blaise anymore."
"Do I need a new piece of the skin?" he asked Harry. "When I get near the snakes now they just stand up straight and hiss at me."
Harry looked confused, that shouldn't be happening. He brandished his wand and cast, "Serpensortia!"
He had been training the spell quite a bit since learning it, and now a small cobra shot out of his wand and onto the floor causing the three Slytherins to jump back in shock.
"Take out the skin," Harry told Blaise. Cautiously he followed the instruction and the small cobra jumped back and curled up at Harry's feet.
"Now it works," Blaise said, with more confusion.
"Can you go down and let us see what happens with the other snakes?" Lyra asked, knowing Harry would want to see that.
The group pushed the well over towards Blaise's room and used some of Harry's rope to climb down. They followed him back out into the empty common room and watched as he pulled out a bit of the Usurper's shed and waved it at a yellow snake in a terrarium.
It rose to meet him and hissed, causing many others to rise as well along with. Harry understood the first one immediately,
§We only bow to the King and his Emissary.§
Quite a few others hissed insults and he heard another say,
§His time is short, ignore him and wait for the King to deal with him.§
They let Blaise climb back up through his room, and he asked, "So what do you think?" Harry looked afraid and didn't know what to say. "What's wrong?" Blaise asked nervously.
Lyra answered for Harry, saying, "We've never seen snakes unafraid like this. We don't know what it means."
The three Slytherins looked at the two of them suspiciously, but Daphne broke the silence by asking, "What were you going to do to Vincent?"
Thankful for the respite, Harry pulled the well over to the spot above Vincent's room and looked down. He couldn't tell if the boy was asleep but couldn't see any movement below. Carefully, he poured the entire bag of confetti down onto the canopy over his bed, then stood back up.
"That's going to be like the confetti from this morning?" Tracey asked.
Harry nodded, "It's motion activated, so when he gets up, it will rain snakes on him."
"Yeah, there's no way you made that stuff," Daphne told them.
"However, if I had two guesses, I bet I would need only one guess to get them both right," Blaise said with a smile.
They all shared a laugh and returned to their respective dormitories.
Vincent wasn't at breakfast the next day. It eventually got around that he had a breakdown before breakfast and was in the infirmary. Draco was looking furiously around the Great Hall, obviously trying to sniff out the perpetrator of messing with his friend. It felt a bit bad to engage in the same kind of bullying that Hermione had been the subject of, but Vincent needed to feel the same fear and hopelessness that his victim felt before he would be motivated to change.
There were no pranks on Vincent while he was staying in the infirmary. Apparently, there were quite a few people who had been messing with him since he got back to school and they were all grumbling about him being untouchable now in Madam Pomfrey's domain.
In good news, Lockhart finally brought back productive lessons. Since learning the chilling charm with Flitwick, that meant they could start working with Ashwinder eggs. Once the fire serpent was spawned through an unattended magical fire, it would wreak havoc on the surroundings and eventually lay up to a dozen eggs, then settle down until it had the energy again to go on another incineration spree.
The fire serpents themselves were sterile, which meant their eggs didn't hatch into anything. It was more accurate to say that they laid tiny firebombs. If left alone, the eggs would burn their surroundings or possibly explode, doing even more damage. However, if they were frozen, they were used in potions of every kind. The most common potion they were used in was the Pepper-up potion. It was used to treat the common cold by giving the immune system a huge boost, nearly burning the virus out of the system and causing steam to erupt out of the ears of the drinker for several minutes.
The eggs could be used for pretty much any potion that needed an extra kick and as a result, there was at least one Ashwinder farm in every wizarding community. Most professional potioneers would even farm their own as well. The farms themselves were very dangerous due to the fire and explosions and required a license from the ministry.
Harry was looking forward to the lesson as he would finally get to see if the ashwinders could be understood. When they got to class, Lockhart started the lecture by starting a fire with purple flames on a podium at the front of the classroom, then proceeded with the lecture on the uses of Ashwinder eggs. As he spoke, he also collected various objects from around the classroom and placed them in a box at the front.
After the first break, they returned to find a white snake with red eyes sitting in the middle of the flames on the podium. Professor Lockhart continued the lecture while tossing the objects he had collected, one at a time, onto the fire and watching them ignite as the snake slithered around.
Harry gave Lyra a nod as he listened to the snake talking, though gave up after only a minute as it seemed focused on one thing, repeating it over and over,
§Burn, burn, burn, burn, burn, burn.§
By the time the students had returned from the second break, there were three eggs next to the snake and it was laying a fourth. The students gathered around to watch as a glowing red egg came out near the tail of the snake. As soon as it was out, they could see a small orange glow from inside the white snake get bigger and bigger until the egg started to push on the sides of the snake's body and then get squeezed out. Once it had laid a total of nine eggs, it stopped repeating its favorite word and then simply said,
§Rest.§
Using gloves, all of the students got to handle the eggs before they were put back with the ashwinder.
Harry had a question about the eggs, and asked Lockhart, "Why does the snake not care that we are taking the eggs?"
"You mean like a mother defending her children?" the Professor responded. "That's a question for a magizoologist, but I would suspect it's because the eggs will never hatch. The snake is an elemental, so it doesn't reproduce and probably doesn't care if we take its eggs."
That made sense. The snake also didn't make any objections when Lockhart cast the freezing charm on the eggs and placed them in a jar with blue liquid to keep them cold. He told them that, next week, he would bring in more fresh eggs and they would take turns freezing them. To deal with the ashwinder that was in front of him, he extinguished the fires it was relaxing in and cast a more powerful freezing charm on the snake. This caused it to slow down until its eyes turned from red to blue, and then the whole creature shattered like it was made of glass, putting an end to their class time.
Harry, Lyra, and Whispers snuck out that night to check up on Vincent. With his brother and sister keeping watch for him, Harry stayed invisible and silent as he entered the infirmary. The only beds in the room that had students in them were Vincent and Gabriel Truman's. There was a curtain around where Gabriel was as they couldn't have him lie down, due to the position he was in when he was petrified, so he was just placed on a table with ropes to keep him from falling over and a curtain was put around him to keep people away.
Having recently replaced the feather on his necklace, Harry expanded the silencing field to surround Vincent's bed, and took his wand from the side table, placing it under the bed. Then after looking at the sleeping boy with disdain, jabbed him with his wand.
"Wake up Crabbe!" he ordered in an obviously disguised voice as the boy jumped up.
The boy went for his wand on the table next to the bed, but Harry just waited patiently as he couldn't find it and started looking around for whoever had woken him up.
"Who's there?" he asked with fear in his voice.
"Have you learned your lesson yet?" Harry asked him with his voice deepening to a comical level.
"I didn't do anything! Why are you doing this to me?"
"You did!" Harry cast a small pinching jinx at him, causing him to yelp. "You testified that you didn't, but we both know you did!"
Vincent's eyes widened. Then, like he was reciting from a script, said, "I have no memory of being involved in an attack on Hermione Granger, other than when I took her cloak in the last term."
Harry growled, "So you did have your memory erased. Though I think you still know what you did, even if you don't remember it. Don't you?"
Vincent missed the opportunity to hide the guilty look on his face, then looked towards the invisible presence by his bed, "What do you want from me?"
"You got my message," Harry told him. "I want you to suffer. Someone wiped your memory to keep you from getting punished, but you will get punished all the same until you make a public confession."
That was all Harry wanted to say, so he snuck back out of the infirmary, leaving Vincent to call out to him in the dark, not knowing he had left.
Over the weekend, Brandt updated Harry on the situation. The Usurper did not like the water where they were traveling. Down near Antarctica, it could only stay in the cold ocean for a couple of hours at a time, so now they were just trudging along on the slow pleasure carpet with the kingsbane coiled up on the heated rug, at a slower speed than they had estimated they would be traveling with the great snake conserving its warmth.
The Usurper informed Harry that there was a great deal of delicious fish in the waters that it would spend a few hours every day filling its stomach before returning to the carpet to keep warm in the freezing climate close to the southern continent. Both Brandt and the Usurper spoke of a few nights where the aurora danced in the sky in vibrant colors in the sky above them after the sun had set.
Despite the urgency of the journey, and being alone with the monstrous serpent that was supposedly going to kill a basilisk, Brandt was enjoying himself. He couldn't make the rug go any faster than it was going now, so he just made sure that the Usurper was eating well, occasionally cooking up fish to see if it would enjoy different recipes, rather than eating them raw. It did seem to appreciate his efforts but didn't seem to care about the difference.
At the beginning of the trip the serpent had been distrustful of him and he woke up a few times at night to find it watching him from the doorway to the villa on the rug. However, after a few days, he found himself talking to it and pointing out various things around them as they traveled. That was mostly to keep himself busy as there was no one else to talk to. On the previous day, the Usurper had started to speak to him as well, though he had as much understanding of the hissing as it had of his English, German, or Norwegian.
The rug had a very sophisticated navigation system, so Brandt just had to check on their course every three or four hours, then go do something else. A lot of his time he was experimenting with potions. There was a small lab in the villa on the carpet on the second floor so it had a venting system to the outside. The whole carpet was incredible and he had essentially bought a flying mansion with an extra-large patio.
Right now, he was experimenting with a chipped piece of the red crystal that formed the border of the Scary Tree. Without crossing the inner circle, he had chipped one of the large crystals and then collected the pieces. When Lyra and Harry were back there for the summer, he would need to find out exactly what made this tree so dangerous.
For now, he went back to playing with the chunk he had collected. From his education, he knew that crystals were great ways to store magic as a way to power wards, enchantments, or magical devices. His new business partner Ricki, had a wand that integrated a purple crystal into the design. While discussing other business, Ricki had told him the story of that wand, which had been made for him by a lesser-known wandcrafter in Madagascar when he went on a world tour after his father had disowned him. The purple gem on the wand was a crystal called Morganite, and he claimed it helped to cast more complicated magics without needing to channel as much of his own magic on the spot.
The red stone he was playing with seemed to be able to contain a great deal of magic and he had managed to carve a few runes for general protection into it before charging them. Once anchored in the ground, this crystal could probably absorb no more than four full-power explosive curses before breaking down. He would need a diamond, three times the size to provide similar protection. Diamonds that size were nearly impossible to obtain.
As he was working, he heard the Usurper push its way through the window behind him. With most of its massive body hanging out the window, it looked at the red stone in front of Brandt and let out what he interpreted to be an angry hiss.
He looked into the terrifying eyes of the creature, held up the stone, and asked, "Do you know what this is?"
The Usurper retreated from the stone, hissing more. Brandt dug through his files and pulled out a picture of the Scary Tree and held it up for the snake.
"What is this?" he asked.
The snake backed up even more, so only its head was inside the cabin. It was strange to see the fearsome creature hesitant even towards a picture of the tree. It did help to underscore the danger that Harry and Lyra told him this tree represented to them. However, it also meant he needed to get to the bottom of that situation as soon as possible.
Back at Hogwarts, Monday morning rolled around, but Harry was awoken by a canon-blast charm from the floor of the common room. People stuck their heads out of the dorms to see Patricia standing in the middle of the room.
"The exit door is locked again! All girls up to my room. All boys up to Cedric's. No one leaves until a teacher comes!"
Everyone rushed to get dressed and moved to the top dormitories and huddled inside.
On the boys' side, William stated the obvious, "I bet there was another petrification."
"I wonder who it was now?" Greg pondered aloud.
Everyone else continued to speculate on the situation until they heard Newt call out to them from below with an amplified voice, "I need everyone down here now." All the Scamander students started to filter out of the top rooms to see Newt and Tina in the room below by the firepit.
As they got closer, Tina asked Cedric, "How did you know to hide this time?"
"Patricia found the exit locked again," he told her. "She woke us up and we all retreated to the top rooms."
Tina nodded, "Five points to you Miss Stimpson." Looking at Harry, "Your crab didn't warn you?"
"It's been anxious," Harry replied. He had gotten a terrarium from Professor Kettleburn for it to live in now that it was awake. "It hasn't been as crazy and skittering around like the first night when it woke up though. It just hides under a bunch of rocks in the tank most of the time."
"Was there another petrification?" William asked.
"Yes," Newt nodded. "The Professors found Mr. Crabbe petrified in the middle of the Great Hall this morning."
"No! Not Vince!" Greg called out for his childhood friend, then slumped to the ground.
Newt walked over to comfort Greg as Tina continued, for him. "My preliminary investigation has determined that he wasn't petrified there, that he was moved to the Great Hall afterward. He was frozen while he was on his knees and looked like he was begging for something. His lips even look like he was trying to say the word 'please.' I know some of you have been bullying the boy this past week for his supposed involvement in the attack on Miss Granger. Can any of you who have been following him around provide me with information about his petrification?"
Harry didn't think his talk with the boy was related to his petrification, so he kept quiet.
Breakfast was so quiet you could cut the tension with a knife. All of Ravenclaw seemed to have smug looks on their faces while Slytherin had a mix of fear and anger. Everyone just ate in silence before leaving for class.
In charms, they began to work on the repair charm. Everyone was given a coffee mug and was told to drop it on the floor and then recover the pieces to their desks. No magic was performed at first and Flitwick instructed the class to try and put the cup back together by hand to see where each piece fit together. As they had no glue, they could only see how the pieces fit together, and couldn't reassemble the cups. After finding how each piece connected, they let all the pieces fall on their desk and began the spell.
The wand movement for the spell was a triangular spiral, going inward. Each corner of the movement was supposed to add a boost of power to seal the fragments together and return them to their original state. Having paid attention when Dean and Ron fixed their chess pieces, Harry was the first one in their class to accomplish the spell.
His reward was two points for Scamander and Flitwick knocked his cup back onto the floor for him to try again. As they had all been working hard on spellwork for the whole year, the learning curve for new spells was much quicker and by the end of the short class, every student had performed the spell to a reasonable degree. Their homework was to take their cups and continue to smash and repair them until the charm failed. The charm would only work so many times on the same object before it would not be able to be fixed with magic.
When they had settled in Herbology, they were instructed to meet at a classroom in the castle. Upon arriving at the seldomly used classroom, they were greeted by a large clay pot on the teacher's desk, and earmuffs of different colors on everyone's desks. Harry looked around and saw that Lyra and a little less than ten students seemed to recognize what they were about to do.
"Good morning class," Professor Sprout addressed them. "I have heard that many students are attempting to tackle the project the Unspeakables left for you. Even many of the first-year students are joining groups of older students. From the look in many of your eyes, I can see that there are at least a few of you who know you will need to be attempting to brew the mandrake draught. Today we are going over safety precautions for handling this plant as those faceless idiots at the ministry have thrown you all in the deep end to fend for yourselves."
A few people looked a bit guilty, but Harry had been taking plenty of precautions already.
"Who knows what mandrakes are used for?" the Professor asked. A few students raised their hands, and she called on Lyra.
"A mandrake…" she stopped to think for a moment, "also called Mandragora is used to return those who have been transfigured or cursed to their original state. A mature Mandrake's cry is fatal to anyone who hears it."
"Correct, Miss Black. Two points to your house. Does anyone else want to add to that?"
Harry was the only other to raise his hand and was called on, "An immature mandrake will make a wizard faint, but it is deadly to smaller animals over a long period. The leaves are used during the first part of the animagus ritual."
"All correct, Mr. Potter. Five points to your house." Harry shot a smug grin to his sister who stuck out her tongue. The professor continued, "The earmuffs on your desk are yours to keep and should be added to your school supplies for the rest of your time at Hogwarts. We will be working with the plants as a larger portion of the curriculum next year. Please put them on now."
Once all the students had them on their ears Harry could see the professor's lips moving, but no sound came out. One of the students in front of him raised her hand and the professor came over to adjust their earmuffs before returning to the front and approaching the clay pot. She grabbed the mandrake firmly by the leaves and yanked it out of the pot.
Harry could see the face screaming even though he couldn't hear it. Looking around the room, many of the other students were seeing the disgusting, brown, carrot-like, baby plant for the first time and looked a bit repulsed. After she had it held up for nearly ten seconds, she placed it back in the pot and covered it completely before taking off her ear covers and the rest of the class following suit.
"Does anyone have any questions?"
Elisa Sweetleaf raised her hand and asked, "How do you stew them? Do you know what temperature we need to use?"
"Any questions about safely handling the mandrakes?" Professor Sprout clarified.
Harry raised his hand, "How did you know when to take your earmuffs off? Is there a way to be sure that the mandrake has stopped screaming?"
"Two points for a good question. As long as the top is completely covered by dirt, the mandrake will be comfortable and won't scream."
"But how can you be sure?" Harry persisted. "If you don't get it just right, you could be knocked out or killed."
"When you've been working around them long enough, you can feel the subtle vibrations coming from the plant so you'll know if they are still making noise, Mr. Potter."
"But we haven't been working around them at all."
"You shouldn't be working around them at your age either," the professor said firmly, then exhaled a long breath. "However, I am doing this lesson to teach you proper handling." She screwed up her face in thought, then pulled out her wand and incanted "Repertum Sonus!"
A bubble popped out of her wand, which shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow and floated in front of her. The class stared at it in silence.
"That was a sound detection spell," the Professor told them. As she spoke, the colors of the bubble shifted to orange and it seemed to vibrate. "Everyone put your earmuffs back on and we can see if it works."
Once all the students were prepared, Professor Sprout gripped the mandrake by the leaves again and yanked it out of the pot. The mouth analog opened and it began to scream, causing the bubble to cycle through a multitude of colors, and then pop. Professor Sprout shrugged and put the mandrake back in its pot and covered up the top with dirt. Once she was done, the detection bubble was cast again and after a few seconds of it not popping, everyone took off their ear protection.
For the rest of the class period, they all worked hard on casting the spell. It was difficult as the professor didn't remember the casting movement for beginners and they were all just brute-forcing the spell with extra magic. No one got it perfect, but a few of them were able to hold it for a couple of seconds. Luckily, when the spell failed, the colors of the bubble turned gray before popping so they could tell the difference between a mandrake scream and the spell stopping because they hadn't perfected it yet.
Professor Sprout told them that she would get them the proper wand movement by the next class.
In the evening DADA class, they worked hard on freezing ashwinder eggs. There were a few magical fires set up in the corner of the classroom to spawn the elemental serpents and students fed them with various pieces of old furniture until they laid eggs. Once that had happened, Lockhart gave them a few eggs and had them practice freezing them.
After everyone had a semi-successful attempt, he ended up turning it into a game for the first-years so it wouldn't be as boring. He set up three bowls with the blue liquid they needed to put their frozen eggs into and divided up the students by their houses. Giving them each twenty eggs and a set of dragonhide gloves, they made a relay race of freezing the eggs one at a time and then carrying them to the other side and placing them in the liquid.
There were a couple of incidents where an egg wasn't frozen properly and exploded inside the palms of someone carrying them with the gloves. However, dragonhide was able to withstand such a low level of fire with ease, and the professor was able to put out any flames that spilled out of their hands.
The Scamanders in the group managed to finish first, but only got fourteen eggs to the liquid, while the Ravenclaws got sixteen and finished second, and the Hufflepuffs got all of them and finished last. Just to wind up the exercise, Lockhart had all of the students freeze and kill the ashwinders that had been producing the eggs.
It had been a fun activity that everyone enjoyed and gave a level of practical work that they normally didn't get in a lot of their classes. Lockhart smiled at the group chatting away up until the bell rang for their next class.
However as everyone started to gather their things, he held up his hands, "One moment before you leave." Everyone froze in the process of exiting, "We are in some dangerous times at Hogwarts, with students getting petrified. Due to the situation at hand, many of you might be looking to defend yourselves from an unseen threat. To that regard, I have received authorization from Headmaster Dumbledore to restart the old Dueling Club that existed when I was a student here."
A lot of wide eyes came from the students as he continued, "Everyone is welcome to come, it doesn't matter which house you are in. I am an accomplished duelist myself and I came out of the House of the Rowena when I attended Hogwarts. So I expect as many students as possible to attend on Saturday in the Great Hall after lunch. Now, off you all go."
Lyra went back to the common room while Harry took Whispers and went to see Professor Snape. He heard many students in the hallways leaving their last class, talking about the dueling club next weekend. He hadn't had a good match with anyone since before the King started petrifying students, so he made a mental note to talk to their friends about training up a bit before the weekend.
On the way to the dungeons, he passed by a group of Slytherins including Draco who gave him a strange glance. It confused Harry for a moment because he normally sneered, growled, or looked unpleasantly towards him. Now he just looked… curious. Finally arriving at the Potions classroom, he knocked and waited for Snape to answer.
After a minute the door opened suddenly and Snape appeared with darkness all around him as he demanded, "What do you want?" Seeing Harry standing there, the darkness around him vanished, and he continued, "Mr. Potter, what can I do for you?"
Harry focused hard on blocking the emotions that wanted to make him laugh at the man who was trying to scare off whoever he thought was knocking on his door. He felt the humor start near his shoulder blades for some reason and he could see inside his mind that the emotions were heading toward the corners of his mouth to make him smile. He didn't want to look relaxed, he wanted to look serious, so he channeled a memory of Professor McGonagall standing sternly over students in her classroom and put it there to block the humor his body was trying to make him feel.
The laughter got absorbed into the memory of the Transfiguration teacher and he looked towards the master chef he was there to visit, "Professor, Lyra's birthday is on Thursday. I was hoping you could help me bake a cake. Like the one you made for mine."
A brief smile made Severus's face twitch before he escorted Harry and Whispers into the classroom.
Author's Note: If it's been hard to tell, the date at the beginning of this chapter is April 11, 1993, and the Hogwarts Express takes students home on June 19th.