Rated: Fiction T - English - Humor - Chapters: 75 - Words: 74,437 - Reviews: 125 - Favs: 81 - Follows: 79 - Updated: Dec 16 - Published: Jan 18, 2016 - id: 11739934
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"She looked so tiered and so sad." –OMGThePotatoQueen, "The Colors of Magic"
"Um… Stella?" Mandy Brocklehurst called, cocking her head quizzically at the immense confection sitting on her Housemate's bed. "Did you order a quintuple-tiered wedding cake with black icing and meringue tragedy masks?"
"It's me, Mandy," came Stella's voice from the centre of the cake. "I'm right here; this is me."
"Oh." Mandy blinked. "Transfiguration accident?"
"No," said Stella. "I'm just brooding about my midterm grades; when I'm depressed, I like to cast elaborate glamours around myself to match my mood. It helps take my mind off things."
Mandy considered this, and a grin spread over her face. "Sure, all right," she said. "As weird as you are, I should have guessed. Everyone else in the world sheds tears when he's feeling sad, so of course Stella Simmons would put on tiers when she was."
"Cute, Mandy," said Stella tonelessly. "Very cute. Now get lost, won't you?"
"After collecting all of the puss from the Bubotubers, Draco and Hermione were still talking quietly . . ." –Mrs.T Felton, "Love or Lust"
"I just don't understand," Hermione murmured, wrapping the fragments of the stray tabby in a sheet that Professor Sprout had provided. "What is there in this greenhouse to make a cat explode so violently? It almost looks as though someone cast a Combustion Jinx on it."
"Maybe someone did," Draco muttered, glancing out of the corner of his eye at his former girlfriend. "It did look rather like that ginger monster of yours, you know – and, if I know Pansy, strewing little bits of a rival's pet across Sprout's bubotuber patch is exactly the sort of thing she would do. She and that friend of hers are probably working on a backup lesson to teach you right now; if I were you, I'd take a swig out of Potter's Felix Felicis when I got back to my dormitory."
Hermione's eyes widened – not with fear, as would have seemed natural to Draco, but with outraged pity. "You mean Parkinson killed an inoffensive dumb beast just because it happened to look like Crookshanks?" she said, and pressed the blood-stained bundle impulsively to her breast. "Oh, the poor puss!"
Draco rolled his eyes. "See, this is what Pansy and Arietta hate about you, Granger," he said. "That should not be the first reaction of a future Malfoy bride." (But the admiring affection in his voice quite belied his words.)
"'They aren't even read heads!' a kid from the Ravenclaw table piped up." –Crakaboom, "The Day of Pranks"
Luna turned sharply to the Weasley twins, her usually dreamy eyes alive with shock. "Aren't you?" she said.
"Alas, no," said George. "Your young Housemate's quite right, Luna; our parents were so dreadfully disadvantaged, they could never afford to attend Professor Gosselin's special courses on phrenology, and thus we don't get to hear the classic stories encoded in wizards' skulls. We're read books, and magazines, and the occasional Martin Miggs comic, but never heads."
"Well, we must correct that," said Luna decidedly, and grabbed the student to her immediate left (Caesar McDermott, second year) and ran her fingers over his cranium. "Gather 'round, Weasleys – yes, you too, Ron, Ginny. Are you all listening?" She cleared her throat, and began. "'There is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs…'"
"'Ron,' Harry asked airily. 'Have you ever known [of] Hermione needing to learn the same lesion twice?'" –S'TarKan, "Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past"*
"Well… no," Ron admitted. "But you have to admit, this is something special. I know Hermione has a photographic memory for magical disease symptoms, but still – recognising an extinct sub-species of dragon pox by a slight variation in the colour of the lesions, just from a description she read once back in third year?"
"Sure," said Harry. "Doesn't surprise me a bit." He paused to take another swallow of perindeus serum, and then added, "Now go on, get out of here before she finds out you've broken quarantine."
*Sorting-head tip to thrawnca for locating this passage - and also a similar one, later in the same story, that provided the basic concept for "Pus".
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