Thank you Guest for the lovely review! The review hiatus is not over, this is merely a reprieve. Anyway. Thank you RM for your late-night brain storming last night. JKR still owns HP and its expanding universe, RM and I still own the idea for Neglected and a handful of characters. I hope everyone in Florida and Texas and everywhere else is ok, try to stay dry guys. Enjoy. Whoops! Got a date wrong. My bad!

Riddle Me This

Late Summer

Before 5th year, 1993

The girls were in Jo's room at her mom's house, Jo was tossing the pilfered diary in her hands.

"So! We know Riddle became Voldemort, but who was Riddle?" Jo said.

"Obviously, a Hogwarts student, judging by the uniform. I don't know how long ago."

"50 years."

"How did you know that?" Leili asked, surprised and puzzled.

"That talk with Aragog," they both shuddered. "Harry asked what killed Myrtle 50 years ago."

"Oh, yeah, I remember that now."

"So Hogwarts student, 50 years ago, T. M. Riddle." They'd found the name embossed on the back cover. "T blank M blank Riddle, Voldemort. …I wonder…maybe it's an anagram?"

Leili scribbled the names on a piece of paper, "You may have a point there, tons of writers anagram their names for their books."

"We're going to have to work this backwards… So let's see, we know his first name starts with 't'," Jo took the pen and turned the paper around to cross out the t, "and we know his middle name starts with 'm'," she scratched out the m. "There's not enough letters."

"Add Lord, that's what he calls himself, Lord Voldemort," Leili practically swallowed the name.

Jo jotted down the title.

"So his name's either Tom or Todd."

"Mm, no, can't be Todd, you need those 'd's for Riddle," Jo crossed out the corresponding letters in Riddle. "We need an 'i'."

"So add one."

Jo did. "Tom M blank Riddle, that leaves one 'r', a 'v', two 'o's, and an 'l'. Rvool? Voolr? Vrool? Loovr? Volo? Lovo? I don't think any of these are names."

"What if… what if it's a sentence? I mean, 'I Lord V' doesn't make much sense, what if it's 'I am Lord V'?"

Jo added the word and tried to scramble it into something that made sense, "Rvoolam, voolarm, marvolo, malorvo?"

"I dunno; they all sound made up to me. Marvolo probably sounds the least made up but it's not a name I know. When we get back to school, we can try finding him in a Slytherin family tree."

"We may not have to," Jo commented, almost flippantly.

"You've got that look on your face again."

"What look?"

Leili did her best to pull the face, half cunning and clever and half 'I didn't do it!'.

"What face is that?" Jo guffawed.

"It the one you get when you're about to do something that you pulled out of a hat. It's the 'I've got a crazy idea' face. So what's the idea?"

"Ask the ghosts."

"The ghosts? The school ghosts? What makes you think they'd help us?"

"Well, they've been around for, basically, ever, they've got to know things. And face it, there's no way we could ask any of the teachers."

"Point there. Dumbledore keeps secrets from Dumbledore; no way he'd help us. Snape is out of the question."

"And we can't ask McGonagall, it'd tip our hand about stalking Harry, Professor Sprout would tell Dumbledore, Professor Flitwick would-"

"Also tell Dumbledore. I think they'd all tell Dumbledore, honestly."

"Right, so that leaves the ghosts," Jo said, her point firmly made.

"But which ghosts would we even ask? The Bloody Baron won't talk to us, being Slytherin House's ghost he's the most likely to know. Nearly Headless Nick is more concerned with joining the headless hunt, I don't even know where we'd find the Grey Lady; she might know, being Ravenclaw's ghost and all."

"Yes, the Lady might know but you're forgetting someone: The Friar. He's our ghost! Not only will he probably know, but he'll probably tell us!"

Deadpan, Leili said, "Did you know that he was killed after the Head Priest or somebody got suspicious of his ability to cure peasants of the pox by poking them with a sick?"

Jo blinked, "No. No, I did not."

Suddenly there was a cracking noise in one corner of the room. The girls looked at each other and then at the makeshift incubator that sat in the safe in Jo's wall. They had decided that the ill-used wall-safe was the best place to put the Occamy Egg. It was safe, secluded, well insulated. They looked back at each other and then scrambled to the safe.

"It's hatching!" Leili said with an air of panic.

"I can see that!" Jo retorted.

"Is it supposed to be hatching already?"

"How should I know? The books didn't say how long till hatch-date!"

"Well, what do we do?"

"We're going to need bugs."

"Do you happen to have any?"

"No. No I don't."

The girls looked at each other and then scrambled to their feet, literally tripping over each other in their haste to get into the back yard.

Jo's little sister paused on her way to the kitchen, hearing garbled voices and occasional shrieks from the back yard. She slowly moved to the sliding patio door to peek outside only to have her vision completely eclipsed by Jo's dirt-streaked face and frazzled hair.

"Keep walking," Jo said before slamming the door shut and sprinting back to the far corner of the yard where her best friend Leilani appeared to be… digging?

Jillian decided she'd rather not know.