"Alright, what was it you wanted to show us?"

Katrina pulled her friends, each by one hand, towards the Forbidden Forest. "Just come on, and I'll show you!"

It was a few weeks after her short talk with Dumbledore, and every few nights she snuck out of bed and down to the forest to morph. Now, she felt it was the time to show the twins. If they didn't run away in horror.

"Okay, whatever you do, don't freak out." She had led them to the edge of the forest.

George grinned. "From the sounds of it, Katrina, you'd think you have something scary to show us."

"That depends on your point of view." It was too late to wait any longer.

Morphing into the large, elegant silver wolf was easy enough. What was hard was waiting for the twins' reactions.

"Wicked!"

"That's fantastic!"

Katrina cocked her head to the side. Whatever reaction she had been expecting. It was certainly not this.

"What are you? An Animagus or something?"

She nodded, then turned back into a girl again. "A naturally-born one."

"Isn't that impossible?"

"Technically, yes."

The twins' smiles grew even bigger, then together they said, "Brilliant!"

"Hey, Kat, guess what we got!" George sing-song interrupted her concentration on her Charms studies.

Katrina looked up, an eyebrow raised. "Another detention notice?"

It had been three weeks, and the Weasley twins had already had six detentions, three of which had been with Severus Snape, the Potions master. Katrina had managed to stay out of all but one - unfortunately, one with Snape. She never meant to cause trouble, but being best friends with Fred and George kind of put you in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time.

"Nope - even better." The twins sat down on either side of her. "Go on - guess!"

"Oh, wow! What could be better than a detention notice?" Her voice dripped with sarcasm. "Could it be a-"

"Wrong!" Fred sang out. "Wrong, wrong, whatever you guess, it'll be wrong!"

The twins gleefully spread their catch out on the table in front of her.

"Oh, wow - blank parchment."

"We filched it from Filch's office this morning. It does something, right, because we were walking along the hallway, trying to figure out what it would do -"

"- when I was holding my wand against the map, trying to steady it, and I said something like 'good', or something -"

"- and the parchment jerked, like it was alive or something. I tell you, Kat, it scared us half out of our trousers -"

"- but when we figure out what it does it'll be -"

"- bloody brilliant!" The twins finished triumphantly, grinning at her a pair of Cheshire Cats.

She rolled her eyes. "Alright, but if this is a practical joke, Mrs Weasley's not going to be very happy when you two come home with your spleens missing and -"

"No, no, no joke. Just help us figure out how to unlock it..."

So passed two hours of fruitless guessing. They tried nearly everything from 'open says-me!' (something George thought he recalled from a Muggle story he had heard once) to 'open up, you damn paper!' The parchment had actually replied to the latter saying, and as the ink spread across the parchment, they eagerly leaned over it, convinced they had gotten on to something, only to be promptly discouraged once again: 'Messers Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs cordially greet you and ask that you try again, maybe with some nicer language, you bunch of first-year -"

But at that point, Katrina had turned away, blushing at the words on the parchment.

As the ink dissolved, Fred cursed. "We are never going to work this out!"

"Three more tries, then we give up," Katrina decided.

George first. "Duck, duck open up?"

The other two stared at him.

"What?" He glared defensively back.

"Wait, maybe we aren't trying the right set of words." She leaned over the parchment. "I swear that I am doing... 'good'?"

Nothing, for a moment. Then the parchment jerked, and Katrina's heart jumped with it.

"That was... almost it. Fred, your go."

"Um...I...swear... that I am up to no good!" he finished, pointing his wand over the parchment.

Nothing. Then, the ink sprawled across the page once more.

Messers Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs Proudly Present - The Marauder's Map.

"Wicked," the three of them breathed together, as they opened to find a map of Hogwarts, complete with moving footprints of Snape in the dungeons, Nescio Malfoy, along with three of his goons, along one of the hallways, Trewlaney in the Divination tower, and Dumbledore, pacing, in his office. There were many more footprints as well, including their own, all over the parchment.

Fred stared at it. "Whatever I said, it was close enough."

Katrina grinned up at the twins. "Boys, I do believe we're going to have some fun this year."