Chapter 12 - Luna Loves Glitter
Disclaimer is in the first chapter. R.R at the bottom.
To anyone who might have found their way into the Chamber of Secrets on the day after the second task, the place would have appeared to be the illegal hide-out of a mafia gang. In some ways, it was. Sure, nobody was being thrown into the lake with cement shoes, but there was a young girl being heavily interrogated, a large book listing laws, their circumvention, and their establishment, a large amount of objects illegally owned, a decent quantity of cash, and an overzealous servant.
"You see," Luna chattered, "Mad-Eye Moody used to have blonde hair the colour of straw and a nice round face. Now it's all ugly and he has a peg leg. I don't trust him, you know. He's rather odd, and not an Auror."
"Ah HA! You – wait, was that the truth-telling trial or the lying one?" Fred asked, turning around, a slight frown on his face as he paused, quill a half-inch away from the clipboard.
George frowned slightly and picked up the empty bottle, squinting as he looked at the label. "Uh, this is Vial 13B, so truth," he reported.
"Huh. That guy gets weirder and weirder. What do you mean he's not an Auror?"
"Never mind that," Hermione grumbled, picking up a box of assorted potions and flicking through them. "Crookshanks has mixed up the vials again."
"Are the ropes really necessary?" Luna asked good-naturedly as George swore and levitated the bottles into his hand, sorting them back into their groups.
"It's for psychological pressure," Hermione said practically. "We need to replicate real conditions."
"Oh. You should probably make them tighter, then," Luna replied amiably. "I undid the knots fifteen minutes ago." She pulled her arms out of the ropes and wiggled her fingers at Hermione.
As Hermione groaned and got to work re-tying the ropes, over at the main table, two miscreants were at work bending the law and a third was caring for some deceptively cute-looking plants. "Wizengamot meeting soon?" Ron asked, nibbling a chocolate frog and scribbling down a note on the Act for the Preservation of Blood Purity of Canned Anchovies. "Merlin, who would inject strawberry jam into anchovy veins? There's a bloody ten galleon fine for it."
"No idea," Harry said absently. "Maybe we could frame someone for it, I bet Percy would help us with the conviction… Hey, look at this, the Act for the Protection of the Scandinavian Snarling Sunflowers… says it's illegal to kill the buggers, they're protected in Sweden and the Swedish Ministry is real touchy about it."
Neville frowned, stole a frog from Ron's pile, and gently patted a Flitterbloom Bush, which squeaked happily. "You're saying," he said slowly, leaning back against a table leg, "We should cause a diplomatic incident?"
"Not now," Harry assured him, putting away Laws of 1748 and picking up Laws of 1749. "Maybe later."
"I'll write it down," Ron said eagerly, splattering ink slightly as he scrawled the note in a book. "I've never caused a diplomatic incident before. Sounds fun."
"It does," Harry agreed, beaming.
Neville rolled his eyes and picked up a pot of Orpheus's Orchids, wandering over to the third and final group present in the dark cavern. "You needed some of these?" He asked, holding out the bot and sending a slightly puff of sweet, flowery scent through the air.
"Ah… yeah! Yeah, we did," Lee confirmed, reading off a piece of parchment. "Okay, so, a bottle of Gillywater, two Orpheus's Orchid petals, five venomous tentacula seeds, half a pint of snake blood, and a drop of bee bile… why was that stuff so expensive, anyway?"
"Because extracting bile from bees is an easy task," Neville chuckled. "You do realise most of that stuff is illegal to own, right?" he added, turning over the some tentacula seeds.
"All of it," Ginny corrected him, from her spot sorting various packets of silvery powder. "The snake blood is illegal if you own more than a quarter pint and the Gillywater was bought using fake ID."
"Right," Neville replied, as Lee plucked two pale grey-blue petals from one of the orchids and dropped them delicately into a soup pot. The mixture inside went from glossy green to dull, milky white in an instant. "What's in the packets?"
"Well," Ginny sighed, "Half are dried doxy droppings and half are powdered dragon claw. The doxy droppings are important for one of Fred's potions and the dragon claw would make a good combat boost, but…"
"We're never letting Crookshanks in here again, even if he does provide a decent source of kitty dander," Lee said flatly. "Plus, he keeps trying to eat Michael."
Michael was Lee's hairy, fanged, dinner-plate sized tarantula. It would have been tea-saucer sized, except George got it into his mind to feed the animal a growth potion.
"You brought Michael down? Ooh, let me show him to Ron," Ginny begged.
Ron was saved by a sharp crack that heralded the appearance of Dobby on Salazar Slytherin's nose. The house elf arrived with a big grin, one pink sock, one green sock, a strange contraption, and a small bag.
"Back already?" Harry called out. "How'd it go, Dobby?"
"Very good, Master Harry Potter Sir!" Dobby chirped. "Dobby is having acquired the Wheezy's moneys!" He held out the bag in the air for the teens to see.
"Ah, brilliant!" Fred beamed. "Thanks, Dobby. We've been bugging him for ages…"
"How did you do it?" Hermione asked curiously, pausing from attempting to wrangle Crookshanks.
"Missy Luna Lovegood is telling Dobby that Bagman is being scared of goblins attacking. So Dobby is bringing along his own weapon," Dobby explained matter-of-factly.
"That's just a vacuum cleaner," Neville observed.
"No it's not," Harry muttered. "Trust me, you don't want to know how that thing gets the dust out of the carpet…" He shuddered slightly at the memory.
"Why do the Blacks have a muggle thing like a vacuum cleaner anyway?" Ginny asked. "That sounds more like Dad's kind of thing."
"It's probably Sirius's fault," Ron mumbled. "Let's face it, everything weird in that house is Sirius's fault."
"What about the goblets, the attic, the grape juice and the instant ramen?" George asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I thought we agreed to forget that?" Hermione asked, confused. "We must have, because I can only remember what that involved and not what it entailed…"
Luna cleared her throat, wiggling her feet slightly. "Can I get off the chair now?"
"Fawkes," Dumbledore asked seriously, turning to the phoenix that was making itself at home squeezed into his bookcase, "Do you think something's up?"
Fawkes chirruped and wriggled into the gap between The Modern Approach To Duelling and Alchemy Made Simple.
"It bothers me, I must admit," Dumbledore commented. "These recent pranks have been rather disconcerting. It does the children no harm to have fun, but I worry they may be trying something subversive."
Fawkes trilled and knocked Transfiguration Weekly Issue #1853 onto the floor.
"Of course," Dumbledore sighed, "I would not be so worried if I could access Mister Potter. But, alas, his mind has slowly clouded itself, and I cannot risk breaking in more violently."
Fawkes chirped twice, snuggling down satisfied into the little gap.
"I worry Harry may not be ready to meet his destiny," Dumbledore fretted. "He is such a good child, but I cannot be sure."
Fawkes made a noise reminiscent of an owl.
Dumbledore sighed. "You're right, of course," he told the bird. "He is a good boy, and his mind is probably trying to protect itself from further pain. I'm sure it's just children messing about. An old man may get paranoid, you know."
"Harry?"
"Mmm?"
"What's this?" Ron asked, turning the pen in his hands over.
"A permanent marker," Harry said amiably. Sneaking over to the Muggle side was breathtakingly easy as a grown-up, so when he had time, Adonis had taken Circe on an expedition into London to acquire supplies. Said supplies had included twenty permanent markers, a small basket, three muggle comic books, and a large container of glitter that Luna wouldn't stop staring at until he bought it for her.
"A what?"
"Muggles use them instead of permanent ink charms," Harry explained. "We also let Hermione and George loose on this, so in theory, it can't be spelled off. Not easily, anyway."
"Right," Ron said, popping the cap off and looking at it. "You just press it like a quill?"
"Yeah," Harry said.
"Smells like – well – awful," Ron commented. "You sure letting George at it was a good idea?"
"That's actually a left-over from the Muggle side," Harry told him.
"Will you boys stop yammering on and help?' Ginny yelled from across the hall.
"Right," Ron said, taking his pen. "Sorry, Ginny."
Harry put down his basket of Sharpies, took a plain black one for himself, and wandered over to Neville, who was humming to himself as he doodled a flower on Professor Sprout's cheek. "Starting at the top?"
"Oh, no," Neville replied. "I already drew on Mulciber, and MacMillan, and Johnson. I just thought a Flitterbloom might look nice here."
"I see," Harry chuckled, drawing a round pair of glasses and a moustache (quite badly) on Dumbledore's face. "You and Lee did a good job with this."
Neville blushed. "It wasn't too hard. We just spliced together the Draught of Living Death, Dreamless Sleep, and a few extra things I'd read about."
Harry hummed noncommittally, watching Ron cheerfully scrawling 'Gryffindors Rule' in red marker across Malfoy's forehead. "Even so, you had to find a way to get it through us without leaving an effect."
"That was mostly Lee," Neville murmured, quickly sketching out a set of vines around the Professor's neck as Harry, on a whim, wrote 'I Love Goats' on Dumbledore's face. "Wish we had Dean here, he's amazing at drawing. My Flitterbloom looks like a cabbage."
"That's okay," Harry said. "Professor Sprout loves cabbage."
"You might have to drag Ron away from the Slytherins." Neville indicated the table with his left hand as he finished of a particularly curly vine. "He's going a bit ham."
"Hermione'll stop him," Harry said absently.
"Hermione's drawing eyes on Trelawney," Neville said flatly.
Harry turned around to see Hermione was, indeed, drawing eyes all over their divination teacher. "Oops. Oi! Ron, Hermione, swap!"
"Spoilsport," Ron muttered, though he complied.
The danger, Harry had thought before they began, was that each person had their own fights to pick. While sometimes it was okay or even part of the point to vent their anger, it wasn't exactly fair to completely target someone, hence he'd have to keep away from Snape himself. While Harry was angry with the Headmaster, the old man at least had good intentions. Snape was… exceedingly questionable. In fact, the only person allowed to draw on Snape was Luna, who didn't really seem to mind the acerbic man too much (at least, not in the same way everyone else did) and was perfectly content to draw a cat nose and whiskers on rather than scrawl something offensive. The only reason Ron was allowed near Malfoy was because he'd sworn on his big toe not to write anything other than Gryffindor slogans on the irritating boy's face. Fred and George were banned from going near the Slytherin Quidditch Team – or their relatives, for that matter; neither twin was allowed near Pansy Parkinson either, for reasons unknown but vouched for by Lee. Luna was banned from Ravenclaw house, since her house-mates often weren't the nicest to her; Harry, at Hermione's insistence, was not allowed to write offensive things on Ernie MacMillan's forehead, 'No matter how irritating he was in second year!'.
By the time they were done, Hannah looked like a panda while Nott had quite a magnificent cobra wrapped around his neck and face. Angelina and Michael both had 'Hot Stuff' written on their faces, though the actual veracity of these statements was unknown. Luna had, quite inexplicably, written 'I don't like you' on Mad-Eye's forehead, while, courtesy of Neville, Justin had bright pink cheeks and drawn-on lashes like a doll. Su had the entirety of her skin coloured in a solid blue colour, a Beauxbatons girl had stars across the bridge of her nose, and Cho had spontaneously decided to barrack for Puddlemere United. A boy from Durmstrang had acquired a number of scars and an eye-patch similar to a pirate's, while a full nine people were sporting signatures of each troublemaker across their face (Miss Pebbles with the 'e's written backwards was the most misleading; Mister Silver written in bright purple made multiple people wince horribly). At the Marauder's strange request, McGonagall's face proclaimed her name was 'Minnie'; the fact both men had begged for this made Harry unsure whether he should be concerned or comforted. To top everything off, Ginny and Neville had carefully drawn crowns on the faces of each of the champions (Harry included) in addition to a number of strange declarations such as 'English food is awesome' and 'I Love Vicky'. For some reason, Luna had also decided to sprinkle her glitter all the way around the hall, dumping the rest of the container over Cedric's sleeping head as soon as she had done a full circuit – and rubbed it into twelve different students' cloaks for good measure.
Job done, the Gang did a quick job on each other's faces (Ginny became lovestruck, Lee acquired crosses over his eyes, and Hermione got two frankly unsettling red lines from the corners of her mouth up into a smile), threw their leftovers out the window, put their heads down on their breakfasts, and pretended to be asleep.
R.R
Loveandpower: Great! Thanks.
CoolFanfictionLover: Actually, Dobby was the backup, in case something went wrong, so Sirius could duck out and the prank could still go on (albeit with a pouting Padfoot and Lupin looking far too irritated for his own good).
ScoutGinevra: I'm glad you think that!
Update: No Longer On Hiatus. Halfway through the next chapter. Expect it by Sunday. Harry is dating a Slytherin now. Dunno who yet. I love you for sticking around.