The family friendly part of the New Year's party took place at the Shafiqs', which meant Harry had an opportunity to hang out with a crowd he hadn't seen properly since the summer. He came across Horatio Yaxley and after a bit of catching up, he asked: "How's Hermione Granger doing? I haven't really spoken to her since something like October at the latest..."

Horatio chuckled. "How is she doing? She is the best in her year, and probably better than most second-years. There is a person or two in my year who think she could give them a run for their money, at least in some subjects."

Harry blinked. "Wow, really? I mean, I thought she was clever, but..."

Horatio grinned at him. "She's more than just clever. She has crazy work ethics and absolutely incredible memory. And heaps of magical power. It's the kind of combination you don't came across every day."

Harry considered this. Mostly, he tended to hear about how irritating she was from people, so it was good to see the other side of the story as well. "I see that maybe I shouldn't have convinced her to go to Ravenclaw," he remarked. "She would have certainly gotten us lots of points."

Horatio shrugged. "Yeah, but she would have also driven you spare. I know there are people in her year who find her studying enthusiasm a little exhausting, and we are Ravenclaws for Merlin's sake. I can't imagine what you would have done with her."

"Made use of her in some daring plan, I'm sure." Not that Harry had that many daring plans under his belt – the one thing that could maybe be considered, the whole business with Riddle, well, he would have never risk Hermione's life by taking her along, just as he hadn't taken his other friends.

"Ha!" Horatio seemed very amused. "You wish. One of the things she would have really hated about Gryffindor is all the rule-breaking. She loves rules."

Harry noticed that his friend seemed to know an awful lot about Hermione, considering she was two years below him. He knew from experience how it was sometimes hard to find time for people from other years. "You talk to her a lot, then?"

"Yeah." He shrugged. "I've kinda taken her under my wing. I could see her potential the moment she said she'd learned all the books by heart and that all the spells she tried at home worked for her. I don't know if you know this, Harry, but that is bloody incredible."

"Yeah, Abdulaziz said something like that when I mentioned it to him."

"And he was right. So I really encouraged her to be a Ravenclaw, and then when I saw that some people were treating her not that nicely – nobody's perfect, after all, and what she has in talent, she lacks in social graces – I took it upon myself to explain to them why exactly that was not a good approach. So now she comes to me when she can't figure something out on her own...usually, that means I get to break a sweat trying to do it, too!"

"That's really great of you, you know," Harry said, appreciating how Horatio obviously didn't care at all that Hermione was Muggle-Born.

The older boy shrugged. "Not really," he said. "She is going to be a force to be reckoned with when she is older, and it will be very good and very useful to have her on my side."

Harry frowned. "So if she wasn't that talented, you wouldn't have helped her?"

"Harry, if she wasn't that talented, I would have told her to stick to Gryffindor and she wouldn't have been my problem."

"True, I guess."

Harry wandered away, thinking about it. Ravenclaws. They were fun to talk to, but he just couldn't see eye to eye with them in their approach to life. He wondered what Draco, as his ultimate Slytherin friend, would have thought about it. He would have probably had more understanding for Horatio's approach than Harry, but at the same time Harry knew that if Draco really disliked someone, no amount of advantageousness of the relationship could convince him to cultivate it. But he didn't know if that was a Slytherin thing, or just a Draco thing. Daphne didn't really seem to look at people that way at all, and Theo...Harry actually didn't know about Theo. The boy kept his cards co close to his chest Harry had no idea how he approached the people he met.

So he changed his tack and considered the Ravenclaws he knew. Alexandra and Alduin were both rather like Horatio in this – or at least, perhaps not quite out for what they could get, exactly, but absolutely able to put away their personal feelings. Alexandra apparently spent the last few months making friends with Mrs. Weasley, for crying out loud! Harry knew perfectly well that she didn't enjoy the company. But she still did it, because she thought it would help them, and indirectly Harry.

Harry tried to imagine spending so much time with Pansy or Zach and shook involuntarily. Yeah, he was pretty sure that Ravenclaw wouldn't have been the house for him.

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Harry sat with all the Gryffindors on the train back to school, but his other friends never got a chance to say much, because Ron took the floor for himself. The Romanian dragon reserve was, apparently, the coolest place in the world.

Not that it was hard to believe. A place full of dragons, and people who actually could control them? There were probably not many more impressive jobs to be found. Harry had never met Charlie, Ron's dragon-taming brother, but now he wished he had.

"Will Charlie be home during the summer?" He asked Ron when the redhead paused in his story to take a breath.

"He doesn't know yet, but he hopes he will be able to get here for at least a week. Mum misses him, I know, especially with Bill being gone too."

"And what about him, will he be home during the holidays?"

"I think so. He always comes for his vacation sometime during the school break, so..."

"It would be great if he came this time, too. I'd like to meet him."

Sophie was frowning. "It's not fair!" She said. "I want to meet them too, but because I'm Muggle-Born, I don't get to do anything fun."

Harry shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He would have liked nothing better than to invite Sophie to stay with him during the summer, but it wasn't his house, and he didn't know how thrilled his cousin would be. He knew Alduin was not one of those completely prejudiced against the Muggle-Born, but well, not calling them any derogatory terms was one thing and asking them to his house was another, wasn't it? Especially Sophie, who didn't exactly have the best manners. He couldn't really recall any visitors who weren't rich purebloods. He would have to ask about this during Easter – perhaps Sophie could come at least for a day or something…

Dean, meanwhile, was saying: "Hey, I resent that! We get plenty of fun at home."

Sophie grinned. "Yeah, you're right. Sorry."

Neville added: "And what about your brothers? I'm sure you get to do fun things with your brothers. And you don't see them all year, and you see us, so shouldn't you spend time with them?"

Sophie shrugged. "I guess you're right," she said. "It's just that I haven't been at Hogwarts that long, so for me, it's still 'same old brothers' and 'new exciting wizards and witches'. I guess it will change in a couple of years. I was really happy to see them after almost four months at school, anyway."

Harry nodded. "Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I really missed the Traverses too, and I've seen my cousin a couple of times during the school year, and I've only known them for a year. It must be hard leaving your brothers behind."

Sophie shrugged again. "Well, they can be a real pain sometimes too, so I actually think it's great to be able to relax and get away from them for a while. Then I'm all the more happy to see them!"

The others laughed, and Ron said: "I kinda know what you mean. It was better in many ways when Fred and George left for school for most of the year. Their jokes were much more funny when I only had them three months per year." He shrugged. "But it's better at Hogwarts, anyway. They have lots of people to concentrate on. At home, it was mostly me – and Percy sometimes, too."

"Were they very vicious?" Sophie asked curiously, and a little gleefully, or at least it seemed so to Harry.

Ron frowned. "They changed my teddy bear into a spider once, when I was three."

Even Sophie had to admit that that was vile. "On purpose?" She asked, shocked.

"I don't think so – I mean, they were five – but still. It was terrifying! And they keep experimenting on Percy's rat, too."

"Percy has a rat?" Harry was surprised. "I thought he had an owl, like you..."

"Yeah, he has both. Scabbers – the rat – is really old, though. He's had it for ages, and he didn't have the heart to give him away when he got his owl for becoming a prefect. But he's ashamed of it, I think. He always hides it..."

"So why do the twins experiment on it?"

"Well, Percy's had it for a really long time, like I said. Ever since I remember. And that's much longer than rats normally live, see? So Fred and George became convinced it's some kind of extra special magical rat, and they keep trying to get it to show its powers. Or that's what they say, anyway. I think they just really want to irritate Percy."

"Why use an innocent rat to do it, though?" Lavender protested.

"Right?" Ron agreed. "Especially when there are so many other ways to get to him!"

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Harry knew that Mrs. Leartes Yaxley, Horatio's grandmother and Alexandra's aunt, was meant to be their new Defense teacher, but he had never spoken more than a few words to her, so he was curious to see what she would be like as a teacher. Though, after the first class, he thought that he really could have guessed. She was one of the Ravenclaw crowd, after all.

She was poised and strict and demanding, and managed to convey so much disdain in one look that everyone scrambled to do their best in her class. She gave them pop quiz in the first class, to see how much they have learned, and later stated, dismayed, that obviously Quirrell must have been absolutely useless when it came to Defence. "Yeah," Harry muttered to his friends, very quietly, "he was more the offensive type."

The sniggers earned them a disgusted look from Professor Yaxley.

Soon after she started teaching, Harry was accosted by Hermione Granger in the corridor. "Harry," she said, a little breathlessly, "Horatio told me it was your cousin who convinced his grandmother to teach here. Can you please give him my thanks? She is a brilliant teacher!"

Harry was a little taken aback. "I guess," he said, "though the main thanks should go to her, I think, for agreeing to it."

Hermione frowned. "Yes, well, but I can hardly go to her and thank her for taking over for Quirrell, can I? It would look like I was trying to suck up to her."

Harry's astonishment grew. Apparently, Horatio really did take her under his wing, and taught her quite a lot about manners. And about ingratiating herself with the right people too, if he wasn't too mistaken, but he didn't mind. Hermione would probably do well among Alduin's intellectual friends once she was older, and if Horatio taught her manners, she'd fit right in. He remembered what Alduin had told him about Dumbledore. Perhaps Hermione could become something like that, sponsored by the rich Ravenclaws in her research?

"No, I guess you can't," he said aloud. "Okay, I will pass on your thanks, though I'm sure my cousin will say that it was his duty to help save our education in Defence."

"That only makes it better!" Hermione assured him as she rushed away, probably to study.

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Once Harry was back at school, Alduin had time to research Harry's mysterious connection to Riddle properly, and he acted with more urgency now that he knew how ready to act Riddle was. He spent weeks on it, and finally narrowed it down to two options.

Either it could be an alert mechanism, or it could be some kind of residue connection to Riddle.

All of his research showed that an alert mechanism like this could not appear accidentally, and since it was highly unlikely Riddle would have created in on purpose, the only other option was that whatever spell or ritual Lily Potter had used to save her son, this was a result of it. He would have to look into the possibilities of that.

The other alternative, a residue connection, was much more troubling. Try as he might, he could not come up with any solution that would not, effectively, be a form of partial possession. Even more astonishing was that Riddle was apparently unaware of it, otherwise he would have tried to make some use of it instead of just trying to kill Harry, Alduin was almost sure of that. Still, a possession where the possessing was unaware of it? That seemed extremely unlikely, and gave Alduin some hope that the first option was the true one and that Harry's scar was merely a result of Lily's protective magic.

He would have to ask some of his transcendental sciences friends over to try and help him solve this riddle, and he would have to think very carefully about how much he would tell them.

And there was another business that needed attending to, too – the prophecy.

Alduin was unable to make sense of what Dumbledore was doing this year, and he thought the prophecy had to be the key, since it was, as far as he knew, the only large unknown factor in this. So, what he had to do was talk to Croaker and convince him that it was a good plan to let him hear it.

Normally, only those whom the prophecies concerned could listen to them. Alduin had no intention of letting Harry do that unless he knew what the prophecy contained in advance, but fortunately, he just happened to be Harry's guardian, which gave him the right to act in Harry's name until the boy was of age. So this part should be easy enough.

Consequently, he Flooed to Croaker's house on Saturday to discuss the matter.

He was not quite so uncouth to start off with that, of course, so they shared a glass of whiskey and talked about their lives and work before Alduin finally got to the point.

„I've been wondering when this request would come, ever since I heard you were Potter's guardian," his friend said, toasting him with his almost empty glass. „Yeah, of course, it's not a problem. Drop by any day during business hours and we will do it."

Alduin drained the rest of his drink. „Can I come on Monday?"

„In a hurry, are you? Sure, but what's the rush, if I may ask?"

Alduin hesitated for a moment. „There were...strange things happening at Hogwarts last term, strange things engineered by Dumbledore. I struggle to understand why he did what he did, and think that knowing the prophecy would help in this respect."

„You've piqued my curiosity, but I won't plague you. I can see you're uncomfortable talking about this."

„Sorry, Thomas. After Riddle's over and done with, I'll tell you all about this, but at present, I have to be very careful." Alduin trusted Croaker, but he also knew his friend was an employee of the Ministry and certain loyalties went with that, loyalties he didn't wish to test.

„Sure. No hard feelings. See you on Monday, then!"