"A dueling club?" Flitwick looked surprised.

"I just thought that it was a waste," Hermione said. "Hogwarts has a dueling champion as a professor, and we aren't taking advantage of it? It's an unused resource."

I was letting Hermione make the pitch for multiple reasons. First, he was her Head of House.

Second, although her connection to me was well known, it was better that the request didn't come from me. It would give us a measure of plausible deniability. Flitwick was sure to be questioned about who had originated the idea, and I wanted him to be able to be honest about it.

While the man had many sterling qualities, an ability to lie didn't seem like one of them.

Of course, that might simply mean that he was a better liar than everyone else. The best liars cloaked their lies in truth, giving them a aura of respectability.

"I hadn't thought…" Flitwick said. "Do you think that people would be interested?"

"I've asked around," Hermione said. "I thought there wouldn't be a point in bringing it up to you if nobody was interested. There are a lot of Gryffindors who would like a chance to show off. The Ravenclaws think it's an interesting idea. I'm sure we can get the Hufflepuffs to come around."

She didn't say anything about the Slytherins; we hadn't canvassed them for multiple reasons.

For one thing, we weren't sure that we wanted to empower people we might be facing later. Secondly, those who chose to join the dueling club on their own would be those who were probably more open minded.

After all, this was going to be a club in which mudbloods were going to be participating. The pureblood hardliners would likely refuse to participate, unless they saw it as an opportunity to hurt mudbloods with impunity. Those we'd find ways to weed out.

The ones who remained would be those who were willing to overlook their pureblood prejudice, which meant that they weren't so firmly entrenched in Voldemort's camp. That would give me an opportunity to know who I might eventually suborn.

The only way that things were going to change in the Wizarding world was if we could change hearts and minds. One of the problems with the Wizarding world was that people lived twice as long as ordinary muggles.

Even worse, they remained active for much longer than muggles. Dumbledore was over a hundred, and he was busier than any three people. There were wizards who were in their sixteenth decade who were still out and working.

It had the effect of concentrating power in the hands of those who were old, and this meant that ideas that had long since died off in the muggle world were deeply entrenched.

The best chance to change things was to change the minds of the children. New ideas spread in Hogwarts would propagate out, and they would last potentially for two centuries.

There would never be another opportunity to have as much of an impact as right here, and right now. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot in the way of political capital.

I'd been focused only on survival for months now, but if I was going to be successful, I needed to do more than that. I needed to be proactive, and work at changing the situation that was making my life so hard in the first place.

This was the world I was forced to live in, and so making it someplace that was pleasant to live was only going to make my life easier. Assuming that I wasn't murdered in the meantime, there was a chance that I was going to have to spend the next two hundred years living here.

Spending that time living with a group of racist assholes was only going to make my life miserable.

Changing their minds wasn't going to be easy, though. As I'd told Snape, Hitler had preyed on preexisting prejudices, riding them to create the world he'd wanted. Voldemort was doing the same thing.

That was the easy way.

Actually, changing what people believed was a lot harder. It was going against the grain, and it took a lot more groundwork. Furthermore, it wasn't the sort of thing you could just throw in people's faces.

People would fight back against that.

Accusing them of being racists simply made them stop listening to you. Once people had made up their minds, it was very difficult to get them to change it. People loved being right, and even more, they hated being wrong. When they were confronted with the idea that they were wrong, they tended to resist and double down on the original idea.

When people had anecdotal evidence that they were wrong, they often ignored it. There was a tendency to remember the things that confirmed what you believed and to deny the things that did not conform.

Sometimes people went through mental gymnastics to keep their beliefs.

Muggleborn weren't good at magic but Taylor Hebert was?

Then that meant that something was unusual about Taylor Hebert. Maybe she was some sort of mutant, or maybe she wasn't really a muggleborn at all. Wizards weren't always discriminating in their entertainments with muggles after all.

The dueling club would help because it wouldn't just be me.

Hermione would be decent; I'd made sure that she had a leg up with our study group. I suspected that there would be other muggleborns who were anxious to prove that they weren't duffers.

We'd all heard the whispers after all, and I'd seen the looks on the faces of those muggleborns who'd heard them. We'd all heard the jokes that were whispered when people thought we weren't listening. Sometimes the jokes were made deliberately in earshot; far enough that people could pretend to be appalled if we said anything.

It didn't happen much around me, for obvious reasons, but it happened to the others. I suspected that this was creating an undercurrent of anger. It would eventually lead to problems further down the line. Right now, the muggleborn were too afraid to do anything, but people would eventually find ways to repay the constant insults they were being given.

I blinked as I realized Flitwick was speaking again.

"I never realized you had such an interest in dueling Miss Granger," Flitwick said. "This wouldn't have more to do with your friend, Miss Hebert?"

The man was short, but that didn't mean he was stupid.

"Would that be so wrong?" Hermione asked. "For a muggleborn to be interested in bettering themselves? I'm sure you've heard what has been happening to us. What's wrong with making sure that we have at least a chance at defending ourselves?"

"So this would be a club just for the muggleborns?" Flitwick asked.

"I think we all need to learn to defend ourselves," Hermione said. "Pureblood, halfblood, muggleborn, in the end we're all going to have to stand up eventually. If not for this dark lord, then for the next one."

"I'm surprised that you didn't ask Mr. Travers," Flitwick said.

"You shouldn't have to be worrying about such things at your age, Miss Granger."

"Taylor talks all the time about wanting to be just an ordinary student," Hermione said. "By the same token, I think we would all wish that these were ordinary times. They aren't."

"It's a good idea," Flitwick said. "I'll speak to the Headmaster and to Mr. Travers and we'll see what we can do. I expect that I'll have an answer by this weekend."

Hermione nodded.

I wasn't anywhere in the room, of course. Being seen going in would be a tacit admission that I was behind the whole thing.

Hermione came out of Flitwick's office.

"He went for it," I said. "That means that we have a lot of planning to do."

She didn't even ask how I knew.

"Isn't it going to be up to the professors?" she asked.

"You think they won't kick it down to the people who suggested it?" I asked. "Flitwick's one of the better professors, but none of them like to take work that they don't have to take. Offering to help will buy us points too; not house points, but it makes them think better of you."

She nodded.

"Being a Slytherin is complicated," she said.

I shrugged. "It's mostly about thinking about what people want, and getting that for them. If you can do that, then you are more likely to get what you want."

It was strange; listening to the Slytherins all these months had slowly changed my way of thinking.

I'd never been particularly socially adept; when I was young, I'd lived in my own little world. When I was older, I was focused, first on the bullying, and then on my career as a supervillain. Later I'd been focused on saving the world.

Emma had always been the one who'd been focused on being popular. She'd paid attention to what was in style, to who was interested in what. Being popular took as much work as being good at academics. It was just a different skill set, one I'd never been that interested in acquiring.

But listening in on their conversations, I'd begun to understand things I hadn't before. Doubtlessly, the children weren't anything as skilled as their parents in the art of social manipulations. But compared to me they were much better.

Ideally, I'd get the loyalty of someone who knew more about social manipulation than I did to act as my propaganda minister. None of the people in my inner circle currently were particularly skilled in that. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to trust someone like that with my plans either; it would be easy for them to turn out to be a mole. That assumed that anyone assumed that I would be important enough to make that kind of an effort.

So far the attacks against me had been blatant and open, but I couldn't trust that this would always be the case.

Voldemort was likely busy right now with his current problems. If he thought of me at all, he'd likely have his Death Eaters send their children against me.

Most likely it wouldn't be a blatant attack; instead they'd test my supposed seer's ability. They'd try to see what its limits were, and they'd poke and prod until they found something they could give to the people who would make the actual attacks.

"What can we do?" Hermione asked.

"Look up dueling clubs and find out what the generally accepted rules are. Even if Flitwick doesn't want any help, it might give us a leg up over the others. We'll start practicing with the Weasleys so that we make a good showing when it actually starts."

As we went down the passage, I was glad that Potter and I had spent a couple of weeks figuring out how to enter from the girl's bathroom. The solution turned out to be simple; parseltonque was useful as a code because it wasn't spoken by hardly anyone.

It had turned out to be the solution to several of the other secret passages in the castle, some of which turned out to not have been entered in what looked like centuries. Some of them were dangerous and others were still well preserved.

According to Hermione, what we were facing was Slytherin's monster. It was a basilisk. Given its size, it was very old; they grew throughout their lives, much like lobsters and they usually didn't age.

The ways to kill it were relatively simple; it involved using a rooster. Like lobsters, this was part of the reason that there weren't many that were very old. Otherwise this was considered a wizard killer.

"We shouldn't be doing this," I muttered.

"You want her to get hungry?" Potter asked. "She might come looking for something to eat, and that wouldn't be good."

I'd told him about the monster's size and about what I'd discovered.

A monster like this would be useful, but only if it was unknown that we had it. Given preparations, wizards could deal with it fairly easily. We were wearing blindfolds now, even though the Chamber beneath us was pitch black. The possibility that someone might turn on the lights was too strong to be ignored.

It took more walking this time; apparently this entrance wasn't directly over the chamber the way the hole we'd fallen into had been. I used bugs to keep from stumbling, although I could feel their instinctive fear of the monster within.

I could smell it now; without the distractions of the last time I could recognize the light scent of snake.

Snakes tended to have a stronger scent when they were stressed. The fact that the smell now was light was a good thing.

I could hear it now, rustling up ahead of us.

Practicing what I'd been taught, I hissed "Bringers… food, we."

Gamp's law was something that in the normal course of things we wouldn't be learning in first year. However, it had been in Maegaret's book of household spells. Apparently, wizards couldn't simply create food out of thin air; it could be summoned from elsewhere, or replicated however.

Apparently, a template was needed for something as chemically complex as food. It didn't matter if a wooden chair was off a little chemically; as long as it help most of the properties of wood that was good enough. Something that you put in your body was a lot more finicky, and small variations could lead to poisonous or otherwise disastrous results.

The books Hermione had found didn't have a lot of information about the dietary habits of Basilisks, so we had to make some assumptions.

The snake said something I could not follow, with Potter responding.

"She asked if you were stupid," Potter said. "I explained that you were just learning."

I grimaced. Having a snake think I was an idiot wasn't flattering. It had been difficult learning as much of parseltongue as I had, which was probably why most wizards didn't bother. It was probably because Speakers were rare to begin with, and so it was hard to find anyone who could speak it.

Still, I'd get better.

Pulling out the package we'd brought from dinner, I set the roast beef from dinner on the floor. I cast the spell from Maergaret's book over and over again.

A pound of roast beef became something else, a hundred, two hundred, four hundred pounds. It required multiple applications of the spell, but that didn't bother me.

Ordinary snakes could go without eating for weeks at a time; hopefully this thing was the same. I assumed that was the case; otherwise we would have heard about people and animals going missing. It was possible that the exit we'd found to the Forbidden Forest wasn't the only exit but I doubted it.

Hagrid was in contact with the centaurs in the forest; the holidays had offered several chances to talk to him, and he'd been open about the likely dangers in the forest. He'd had no inclinations about a giant snake, and presumably the intelligent denizens of the forest would have had at least some idea.

Eight hundred pounds, sixteen hundred.

The snake slithered forward, and we could hear the sounds of scales against stones. We both took a long step back, and we heard the wet sounds of food being devoured.

"Thank…." The thing said; I couldn't understand much of what else it was saying.

"She says that it hasn't eaten since the last speaker came to feed it, decades ago," Potter said. "She's not clear about how long because it's not like she has clocks down here, or a calendar."

"Can you ask her about the speaker?" I asked.

"A boy," he said. "Smelled like parchment and ink, like both of us."

"Another student?" I asked. I had an uneasy feeling that I knew who the last speaker had been.

My luck wasn't good enough for it to have been a random student. It seemed almost inevitable that Tom was the one who had done it. He'd almost certainly gone to Hogwarts like everyone else, and decades ago would have been long enough for him to have been a child.

"She didn't know his name; I don't think snakes care about those as much as humans do," Potter said.

"I have a bad feeling about that," I said. "Ask her if she's still loyal to him."

There was an exchange that I could not quite follow.

"She was put here by Slytherin," Potter said. "And she's supposed to follow the orders of the heir, who was going to be a Speaker. She thought that was the boy, but now she's not so sure."

I was going to have to work hard to make sure that the thing switched allegiances to me and Potter then. That meant feeding it fairly regularly, although it was possible that the summer break might not be terrible. It had been down here for a thousand years after all, and presumably it had spent a lot of that time sleeping.

"You are the heir of Slytherin," I said.

"What?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter whether it's true of not. I'm betting that the boy was You-Know-Who, or at least somebody that worked for him. Do you really want them in control of a giant murder snake right beneath a school with a thousand helpless students?"

He was silent for a long moment. I couldn't see his expression, of course, but I could imagine his confusion.

"I guess I am the Heir."

"If you say something long enough, eventually it might come true," I said. "We need her to work for us instead of him, and we need her loyalty."

I considered.

"It might actually be true. How much do you know about your own genealogy? I'm willing to bet that almost everyone in the Wizarding World is pretty much descended from one of the founders. There have been fifty generations between us and them, which means that everybody but the muggleborns is probably related to everybody else."

It might even apply to the muggleborns.

I'd heard theories that muggleborns were actually the descendants of squibs who had interbred with the muggle population.

It made sense to me.; presumably the wizarding gene was either a mutation, or the result of interbreeding with almost human magical species. There had been legends that Merlin was the son of a human and a demon, and maybe that was just the origin of the Wizarding race.

In either case, it was possible that it had come from a single origin, either a mutant, or a fertile half-breed.

I didn't bother telling this to Potter.

Just because the snake spoke Parseltongue didn't mean it couldn't understand English. That only occurred to me now, which was possibly a disastrous mistake.

"Parseltongue is pretty rare, though," I said. "So the odds of you being the Heir are pretty high."

He was silent for a moment.

"I've never been the Heir to anything, really."

"Well, all hail to the king," I said without irony.