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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"When I think about heaven[,] then I think about angles." –pumkin98, "Rain"*
"Really?" said Professor Vector. "And would you care to tell the rest of the class why that is, Miss Granger?"
Hermione blushed, and cast her eyes downward. "Oh, I don't know," she murmured. "It's just hard for me, sometimes, to believe that people from completely non-Christian cultures can really be intended to find their ultimate fulfillment in a Christian afterlife. But then when I think of how an angle of π/3 radians always has a cosine of 0.5, even when it isn't part of a triangle and doesn't seem as though the concept of 'adjacent side over hypotenuse' could even apply to it, then the idea that people might also have universal qualities and destinies independent of their circumstances doesn't seem quite so absurd. I know that must sound ridiculous, but it's just how my mind works."
A quiet smile lit up Professor Vector's face. She was going to enjoy teaching this one.
"'Did I mention my Slytherin housemates? Some of them are libel to kill me as well?' Regulus said." –Yemi Hikari, "Mulling It Over"
"How do you mean?" said Lily.
"Well, take Hiram Musgrave," said Regulus. "You know how the Daily Prophet said I had cornered him in the common room, force-fed him Veritaserum, and extracted everything he knew from his mother at Gringotts about the secret goblin rituals – the ones no outsider may ever know, under pain of death by slow torture?"
Lily nodded.
"Well, there is no Hiram Musgrave," said Regulus. "There never was. A pure libellous invention, that's all he's ever been – just like Susie Moffig, and Renatus O'Hanlon, and all the other Slytherins to whom I'm supposed to have done things worthy of death during the past term."
Lily chewed her lip, and pondered this. "Wow," she said. "This Skeeter woman must really hate you, mustn't she?"
Regulus groaned. "You have no idea."
"Without thought, she pushed open the mahogany door and stepped forward, into an empty room filled with unusually thread-barren furniture and a world of memories." –asouldreams, "I've Come Home"
"Granger, are you mad?" Bellatrix hissed, grabbing the young Muggle-born by the collar. "Wait!"
She withdrew a turnip from her robes, and tossed it onto the acrylic ottoman that Hermione had been about to ascend. She waited five seconds, and then exhaled in relief. "Nothing," she said. "The Chilling Charm must have worked after all; had things been usual, that cushion would be gendering all-devouring spores from the Rukbat system like nobody's business." She cocked a sardonic eye at Hermione. "Seriously, Miss Smartest-Witch-of-Our-Time, you know how the Wreaker protects his house when he's out; what possessed you to start climbing his furniture without making sure that it was truly Thread-barren?"
Hermione flushed. "Sorry, Mrs Lestrange," she said. "Just wasn't thinking, I guess. I'm still so worried about Harry…"
"And you think I'm not anxious about the Dark Lord?" Bellatrix retorted. "That's why we're here, so we can have a hostage of our own to ransom them out of that mad Futurian's clutches. But, in order to do that, we have to keep our heads on our shoulders. Here, give me the note, I'll do it."
Hermione handed her a scrap of parchment scrawled with ransom terms, and she leapt up onto the ottoman, snatched the five-dimensional cube containing the planet Solaris from off the mantelpiece, and laid the note in its place. "Right," she said, jumping back down. "Let's get out of here, now; we'll want to be as far away as possible when the Wreaker gets back and finds his pet ocean missing."
"When pensioning gets popular this happens." –Orange Mojito, summary to "Snape Can Spin"
"I am sorry this happened, Severus," said Dumbledore sincerely. "But what can one do, with a board of governors so enslaved to fashion?"
"Fashion," said Snape bitterly. "Yes, of course. Never mind the contract we signed, or the solemn word of honour I received from at least two of those oh-so-ancient-and-noble old gawks; it's fashionable to pension off Potions masters on their fiftieth birthdays, so ta-ta, Severus, old boy, it was nice exploiting you while it lasted."
"Indeed," said Dumbledore with a sigh. "That is, I fear, the world we live in today. Still, you do seem to have gotten a useful skill out of your forced retirement," he added, glancing at the heaped-up skeins of yarn about Snape's spinning wheel.
"Well, I have to do something with my time, don't I?"
"Yes, of course," Dumbledore murmured, as visions of thick, woolen socks danced unbidden through his head. "Tell me, Severus, how much do you charge for your output, exactly?"
*An attempted quote from "When I Think about Angels", lyrics by Jamie O'Neal. (Maybe; there are three credited songwriters, and I can't pin down any source that identifies which were composers and which were lyricists.)
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