She rubbed her hand furiously over her sullied sleeve and did her best not to think of all the bugs that could be crawling over her skin without her even noticing. Her mind helpfully supplied images of those green beetles Luna made earrings from, ants, some the size of her perfectly polished nails, aphids, ticks... No. Do not think about it.
She stood, shuddering, and focused on the note she had recovered. It read:
I'm proud of you, brave like a Gryffindor!
Task 4: I always dreamed of having you learn the names to all the models in my study. Well then, the next task can be found hidden in the fearsome jaws of a thylacoleo carnifex.
Pansy squinted at the unfamiliar words on the dirty paper. Then a thought crossed her mind. She knew not one of the names of the countless models of animals and their skeletons Hermione's office held, but she would be willing to bet a good three thirds of her inheritance they were all meticulously labeled.
Exactly three thirds, she was a very confident person.
She thus resisted the urge to hurl the note in Hermiones lovely face and rushed upstairs, nearly knocking over Harry. He called something after her that sounded very much like 'Just so you know, the one cleaning the kitchen will be you', but she didn't particularly care, now that, for the first time in this game, she felt like she could actually solve something herself.
Oh, a Slytherin's ambition.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs below her told her that the others were following and she decided to wait for them in front of the room - an audience would make her moment of triumph even more dramatic.
The evil grin that spread over Hermione's face as she saw Pansy's confident little smirk was positively terrifying.
She pushed open the door cautiously, half expecting to walk right into one of Hermione's ridiculous traps and have her hair turned yellow or the likes. That had happend before, and the aftermath had been horrible.
Pansy would not have confessed to it if someone was torturing and killing every last one of her friends in front of her, but she had actually enjoyed the temporary colour a little after Hermione had told her it made her look 'like a dragonfly with a yellow bowtie', whatever that meant. But she had said it with such an adorable grin...
However there was no trap.
In fact, it was far worse.
The study looked as it always did. Atrocious scarlet curtains with a pattern on them Pansy could never quite make out. The large, heavy desk in the centre of the room. Tables and boxes strewn all over the place in seemingly random patterns, filled to the brim with unidetifiable stuff Hermione sometimes left around the house and that Pansy made sure never to touch - for her own safety, of course, not because she feared she could destroy them on accident, which would make Hermione sad, which she did not care about.
It was on these tables that the models sat. About twenty, maybe more. All of them animals she had either never seen before or that seemed only vaguely familiar, even though she couldn't quite put her finger on it.
Yes. Everything was normal.
Except that all the labels had been carefully removed from the models.
Pansy turned around slowly to face the girl giggling behind her. Hermione raised her hand, Pansy could see she was holding something now, and opened it, letting the small labels fall to the floor one by one, like the people in those 'films' she had been made to watch showcased the bullets they had stolen from their opponent.
There was a beat of silence, before a rather odd, bell like song rang out as Pansy's hexes collided with Hermione's protego.
*Thylacoleo carnifex, also known as the marsupial lion, (the 'marsupial' part is true, the 'lion' only describes what we think it looked like) is an extinct australian mammal that livedin the late pleistocene.I suggest asking google about it, most reconstructions are rather adorable in my opinion.[I'm using it here because it deserves attention and I'm obsessed with paleontology]