After the commotion of Floo powder travel died down, Mungo saw that he was in the pub, the Leaky Cauldron. Standing in front of one of the tables was a red-haired boy, showing a newspaper clipping to a very annoyed-looking witch with a broom and mop.
"See, there, that's my family. My dad won the Daily Prophet Galleon Draw, and we all went to Egypt." He was saying.
"That's nice." The witch said, walking away as quickly as convenient. Mungo raised an eyebrow and shook his head as the boy grabbed some other random person and showed the clipping to him. After a minute, Mungo recognized him as Ron Weasley, Potter's friend. Mungo shrugged and dismissed it. He would see more than he wanted to of them at school anyway. Mungo climbed up and decided to go and look for his family.
An arm clasping his sleeve stopped him. Mungo looked, and saw a bald old hunchback. His eyebrows raised in shock. This was the landlord of the Leaky Cauldron, known as Tom. But only last year, he had perfectly been normal, if only a bit bald, and now he was a distorted monster.
"Tom? What happened? Ye didn' use t'-" Mungo stopped, afraid of hurting the feelings of the landlord. "Ye were taller."
"Eh, sometimes we get rough customers in here. Ol' Galloping Greg tried to turn me into a camel when I told him I didn't accept credit from him any more. Haven't gotten around to getting it set right. I say, are you Master Gorsson?" Tom asked suddenly.
"Well, aye." Mungo said cautiously.
"Good, there was a party waiting for you. The Abendroths. They went on in to Diagon Alley, but they told me to send you along if you came, and to notify the Ministry if you didn't." Tom said, pointing to the door that opened to the courtyard to Diagon Alley.
"Ah, thank you." Mungo said, going though. He drew out his wand, and tapped the right brick.
As the pathway opened, Mungo strode into Diagon Alley. He loved being there; it was so full of surprises and nice little wizarding surprises. There weren't any magical folk in miles of Altnaharra, except for the Gorssons of course, which gave Mungo a sense of excitement whenever he entered a magical place.
Mungo walked along the street, looking for the Abendroths. He was peering into Quality Quidditch Supplies when a girl's voice called out.
"Hey! Mungo!"
Mungo looked around, and saw a small, brown-haired figure running towards him, Mr. and Mrs. Gorsson hurrying up behind.
The girl stopped in front of Mungo and beamed. Penoria was always good at beaming, Mungo recalled. She was always happy and vigorous, and nearly always had her hair in a braid. She wore glasses, but her face was just so happy and joyful that they were rarely ever noticed.
"Hi! I thought we'd never find you! Uncle Bungo's combed nearly all of Diagon Alley looking for you, and then he went and met the Abendroths and your friend, Duncan, and he nearly had a fit when he learned that you didn't end up here with Floo powder!" She chattered happily.
Mr. and Mrs. Gorsson finally caught up, panting slightly.
"Oh, thank goodness you came here at last. I hope you didn't go too far?" Mrs. Gorsson asked, digging in her pockets for something.
"Actually, I wound up in the Croatian branch of Gringotts." Mungo said.
"What!" Mr. Gorsson said, shocked.
"Wow! That far? You're accent's gone way out of hand, if you manage to screw up 'Diagon Alley' like that, Mung." Penoria said, giggling. Mung was Penoria's nickname for Mungo.
Mrs. Gorsson found what she was looking for, a large green brush, and started dusting the soot off of Mungo's robes.
"Well, you're a mess, there's no doubt of that. But at least you're here, in one piece." She said.
"Really, Mungo, you have to work on your enunciation. Honestly! Croatia!" Mr. Gorsson said, reeling.
"I didn' mispronounce it, I bumped me head and sneezed at the same time." Mungo explained.
"Mungo! Look at my wand!" Penoria said, getting out a long box. She fumbled a bit at the wrapping, and got out a longish, thin wand.
"Twelve inches, oak, phoenix tail feather in the core. How do they get feathers and all that stuff in there? Whatever. And Mr. Ollivander said that it was really odd that I got this wand, and he looked at me with some kind of weird look. He's creepy." Penoria said, flourishing it around.
"Penoria! You really shouldn't do that, you might put someone's eye out." Mrs. Gorsson said, laying a restraining hand on her shoulder.
"Oh, all right. Say! We should probably find the Abendroths now." Penoria said. "They'll want to know that you're here and all."
They found the Abendroths at the bookstore. They were staring transfixed at some kind of cage in the center of the store, and only noticed Mungo and Penoria and Mungo's parents when they came up and talked to them.
"Oh, hullo. Glad you managed to make it. We were getting worried. I say, look at those books." Duncan said, pointing back at the cage. Mungo peered over Duncan's shoulder, and saw a large amount of books, moving rather violently.
The bookstore clerk came out from around the counter with some kind of net. He sighed wearily.
"You don't need these books, do you? Not Hogwarts third year or more?" He said hopefully. "Please," He whispered under his breath.
"Erm, no, no we're not." Mr. Gorsson said, rather taken aback.
"Ah! Thank heavens! They're devils in print, that's what they are. Take my advice, and never buy one. Never stand close to one, for that matter. Take your arm off in a flash." The clerk said, warming up to his criticism of the book. "The Monster Book of Monsters! If I never stock them again, it will be too soon!"
"Erm, yes, quite, well, we need-" Mr. Gorsson started to say, but he was interrupted again by the clerk.
"Did I tell you yet about the Invisible Book of Invisibility? What's the point of a book that you can't see? They'll publish a Deadly Book of Death or somesuch before too long, you mark my words!" The clerk raved on, his tirade growing louder. Mr. Gorsson cleared his throat with an assertive noise.
"Quite. All we need is The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two and the first-year set."
"Oh, yes, of course. Just a moment." The clerk walked off, slightly put out. Mr. Gorsson wrapped his hands in his cloak, and Mungo, Penoria, and Duncan wandered off to look at the books.
They did not have long to look, as the clerk soon returned with the proper books. Mungo thumbed through his copy of The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two as they left the shop, just looking over them. Mungo sighed. They were even more complicated than last year…
The group ate lunch at the Leaky Cauldron, and then went back into Diagon Alley to finish their shopping. They still had to get Penoria's potion ingredients, and Mungo had used nearly all of his over the summer in practicing making the potions that he had learned last year. Even though Potions was perhaps one of the most disliked subjects amongst the average student population of Hogwarts, it was Mungo's favourite class, second only to Transfiguration. He had inherited no small degree of talent in those two subjects from two of his grandfathers six generations ago, as well as strange memories that sometimes bobbed to the surface of Mungo's conscious.
Mungo, Penoria, and Duncan went to the Apothecary while Mr. and Mrs. Gorsson went to buy Penoria's cauldron. Mungo walked right into the middle of the shop and breathed in the, well, to him rich air. Penoria was coughing slightly from the stench that Mungo refused to detect.
"Mung, let's just hurry up and get the stuff. It smells weird." Penoria said.
"Quite right. Let's see, ye're gooin' t' need lots o' lionfish spines… Well, actually I didn' need it all that much in my first year, but, th' more th' better. Oh, look, a sale on beetle eyes, never have too much of those…" Mungo muttered, going from barrel to barrel and shelf to shelf, his hand cupping his chin in a thoughtful manner.
"Tha' should just about do it." Mungo said, after a good thirty minutes' worth of closely examining nearly everything in the shop. Penoria breathed a sigh of relief, and hurriedly grabbed the various bags and bottles from Mungo and went to pay for them.
"I say, what do you think about Black then?" Duncan asked Mungo suddenly while Penoria was gone.
"Eh? What do you mean?" Mungo asked, oblivious.
"Oh, don't tell me you haven't noticed!" Duncan said exasperatedly, rolling his eyes. "Don't tell me you haven't heard about Black's escape!"
"Well, then I won't." Mungo said, slightly miffed.
Duncan was nonplussed. He had expected Mungo to say sheepishly that he hadn't heard all the big news, apparently.
"Erm, right. Well, there're posters everywhere… And I read a copy of the Daily Prophet today." (The Abendroths did not get the Daily Prophet, as they could not risk having large owls seen in daylight bringing newspapers. Their neighbour, Mrs. Rescotty, was an exception; she told all the Muggle neighbours that she was a biologist who studied owls.)
Duncan coughed nervously.
"Anyway, a few weeks ago Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban!" Duncan said.
Mungo staggered a bit. His parents had told him once or twice about Sirius Black, and what they had to say of him was not good.
"Escaped! But no one's ever, ever escaped from Azkaban!" Mungo exclaimed.
"Who's escaped?" Penoria asked, finished with her purchasing. "Let's discuss it outside, it's smothering in here."
Reluctantly (at least on Mungo's part) they left the Apothecary and walked along the street towards the Leaky Cauldron.
"The wizard who escaped from Azkaban was Sirius Black." Duncan said. "He was imprisoned for killing thirteen people with one curse."
"Awful!" Penoria gasped. "Who'd do that?"
"A mad man." Mungo said, shaking his head.
"Anyway, he's escaped, and the whole Ministry is on the hunt for him, dead or alive. Even the Muggles have been told about him, that he's carrying a gun." Duncan said as they passed the cauldron shop.
"Well, I do hope they find him soon. Just awful…" Penoria said, shuddering. Mungo patted her shoulder, and she brightened up fractionally.
When they reached the Leaky Cauldron, there was a bit of a racket in the pub. Weasley, Potter's friend, was clutching something grey and shabby in his hands and shouting at a bushy-haired girl holding a rather snub-faced orange cat. Duncan's eyes glittered at the sight of the cat, but darkened when he heard Weasley's words.
"You call that a cat? More like a pig with hair if you ask me."
"Well, that's rich, coming from the owner of a grey scrubbrush." The girl retorted. Suddenly, Weasley looked up at the stairs and said,
"Hello, Harry!"
Mungo (and most of the other patrons of the pub,) looked up at the staircase and saw a black-haired boy in glasses. The Weasley and Granger (for that was who the bushy-haired girl was, Mungo realized) immediately stopped arguing.
Mungo lost interest and sat down at a table. Penoria and Duncan joined him, and Penoria gasped.
"Wow! Harry Potter! Imagine him staying here, eh, Mung?" Penoria asked.
"Believe me, Penoria, ye see him so much at Hogwarts the novelty wears off." Mungo said, watching the door from Diagon Alley intently.
"I guess so. Like that time Gilderoy Lockhart came to our town and gave a book-signing."
Mungo shuddered.
"Never, never, never remind me of" Here Mungo paused to employ just the right amount of disgust into his voice, "Lockhart, ever again. You know what he did, jus' as I was climbin' oot o' th' Chamber o'-"
Mungo was interrupted by a painful kick on his shins by Duncan, who was twisting his face into a series of positions that were clearly meant to be warning glances, but falling short of the mark.
"Eh, long story. But he was an ignorant git." Mungo finished, thumping the table.
"I know. We had a rather violent ghoul in town, and it had been a real nuisance for weeks. The Ministry was too busy to deal with it, and then here comes Gileroy Lockhart, acclaimed author of Gadding with Ghouls and Voyages with Vampires and all that trash, and so we asked him if, after the signing, he could deal with it, and he says, 'Erm, no, it's a late night. I'll deal with it tomorrow.' And next morning, he was gone with the first light of dawn."
"Hm. Rather picturesque." Duncan muttered.
"It was craven! I got so angry and upset that I went and threw Holidays with Hags at that ghoul. It hasn't jiggled so much as a jelly since then." Penoria said happily. "Daddy was so proud, he bought me a cat."
"A cat!" Duncan exclaimed joyously.
Penoria obviously mistook Duncan's excitement for derisiveness, and her face darkened.
"You don't like cats?"
"Penoria. Ye are talking to a lad who loves cats more than kith and kin, more than… Well, I can't say books, that would be exaggerating, but… He loves cats more than a rather hefty amount of other things." Mungo interjected.
At that moment, the door to Diagon Alley opened (keep in mind that I mean the door to the grungy little spot just before the actual gateway) and Duncan's and Mungo's parents came in. After that conversation was, well, dispersed into less important matters.
They talked of many things, mostly advising Penoria on Hogwarts and its many passageways and staircases. Mungo's interest in the conversation began to wane, and he looked around the tavern. He saw a tall, red-haired man take Potter aside for a moment, and they began talking and walking along behind some columns, which all had posters for the capture of Sirius Black. They were slowly drawing nearer, and their conversation was beginning to look serious.
Mungo was not, of course, the type to eavesdrop, but he couldn't resist straining his ears to hear.
"Harry, you must promise me not to go looking for Black."
"Mr. Weasley, why would I want to go looking for someone who wants to kill me?"
At that point, Mungo was violently brought back into the conversation by a sharp poke by Penoria. He said whatever was wanted, and slipped into a state of thoughtfulness. Sirius Black was searching for Harry Potter? Why?
Mungo reviewed as much as he remembered, every mention of Sirius Black. He had been a big supporter of You-Know-Who, Mungo remembered that… But he also remembered his parents saying that Black was a traitor… He was probably a traitor to the Ministry of Magic.
All in all, Mungo could not conjure a connection between Sirius Black and Harry Potter. He went to bed disappointed, not a little to the confusion of his friends.
((All right! Finally finished with the third chapter. I'm sorry if I got some of the lines from the movie wrong, but, there you are. Next chapter is coming up soon.))