"She emerges from the Slytherin common room and makes her way to the dinning hall for dinner." – Zombie .Spit630*, "Hogwarts & the Half-Blood Scandal"

"Cloud?" Scorpius Malfoy said. "There's no cloud in here today! The ceiling's clear as a bell!"

"No, loud, I said!" Alora Giffard shouted. "It's a little loud in here today!"

"Oh!" Scorpius nodded. "Sure, of course! Every 24th of April, the Great Hall starts dinning the noise of the Battle of Hogwarts into our ears, lest we forget the mighty deeds done that day! Never mind, you'll get used to it!"

"Who's a loose twit?" Alora demanded.

"No, used to it!"

"Huh?"

"Oh, forget it!"


"'. . . That's why they all had to look alike.' 'And why he was so bloody androgenous,' Theo muttered." –murkybluematter, "The Malignant Masquerade"

"Are you sure Spartacus was the right choice, Archie?" said Harriett Potter uneasily.

Arcturus Black frowned. "What else?" he said. "If the three of us are going to infiltrate Professor Burbage's Muggle-movie-themed masquerade in identical costumes, there's only one character it makes sense to go as. You remember that film's classic scene, right?"

"Yes, of course," said Harriett. "I'm just worried about your brother. You know he's always had an inferiority complex about the weakness of one particular feature of his; I can't help feeling that a Kirk Douglas mask is liable to go to his…"

Before she could finish, Rigel Black himself strutted into the room in full costume, and thrust the lower part of his mask toward his brother and cousin. "Hey, guys!" he said. "Notice anything?"

"Um…"

"I've got a manly chin!" Rigel exclaimed, and started dancing around and waving the famous Douglas dimple hither and yon.

Harriett sighed. "I knew it."

"Look, Rige," said Arcturus, "in a few hours, we've got to sneak into the Great Hall and expose a ruthless gang of Carcinogen-Draught smugglers before they figure out which of us is which. Can you please calm down so we can discuss logistics?"
"Hmm…" Rigel stroked his new prosthesis in mock thought. "Nope! Know why? Because I have a manly chin!"

"Can we just kill him now?" said Harriett testily.

Arcturus sighed. "No, let him enjoy his few hours of androgenia, I guess," he said. "We can always hope the novelty will wear off after a while."

"I have a manly chin, I have a manly chin! Ho! Ho! Ho!"


"I hate flubberworms." –Niacin, "Take On Me"

"Who doesn't?" said Dr. Bellatrix Lestrange, lunging with her sprayer at a particularly swollen green caterpillar hovering placidly in the corner of the laboratory. "But if you want to experiment with anti-gravity polymers, you have to put up with the pests that feed on them. Hand me the broom, would you, Draco love?"

"But why bother working with flubber in the first place, Aunt Bella?" said Draco. "You're a roboticist, aren't you? Why would a robot need to defy gravity?"

"You might be surprised," his aunt replied. "At the scale my nanobots operate on, every little bit of force not distorting their circuits is an advantage. Besides, we can't let those yahoos at Muggle Labs get ahead of us in any field; if Vernon Dursley's concocting an army of flying zombie clones the way rumour says, the Voldemort Institute has to be ready with something to oppose to that.

"All right, I think that's the lot," she added, scooping the last few flubberworm bodies into a bell jar and sealing it up. "Be a dear and run these down the hall to Dr. Dolohov, would you? He likes to have them on hand for his tissue cultures."


"Her glaze stops behind the Slytherin's table, where his ghost is looking darkly at everybody, unnoticed." –Nibinlotwen, "Taking Over Me"

The late Tom Riddle glowered at the Slytherin first years obliviously chatting and exchanging Christmas cards at their House table. Once – not long ago, by ghost standards – that had been his table; once, he had been the undisputed king of Slytherin House, the vanguard of all pure-bloodery's hopes incarnate in a single youth. And now, what was he? A footnote to history, an object lesson in the dangers of presumption, a junior spectre in a castle already overstuffed with them – in short, nobody. Had he still possessed internal organs, it would have made him sick – as sick as that ghastly mustard-and-maple stench issuing from… no, wait, not the kitchens, it was too strong for that… hang on, what went on here?

He blinked, and glanced down at the Great Hall floor. A thick stream of steaming, yellow-brown fluid was trickling from under the kitchen doors, and meandering down toward the space behind Tom's old table, where it pooled to a stop in the crack of a broken flagstone just below his hovering feet.

As he was pondering this unexpected enigma, the kitchen doors burst open, and a red-haired, mop-toting meteor streaked out towards him. "Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh!" Ginny Weasley exclaimed, making a valiant if apparently futile effort to stanch the flow. "Fred, George, a little Evanesco help wouldn't come amiss here, you know!"

"No, I'm not sure I do know," said one of her twin brothers, as the two sauntered carelessly out behind her, one on each side of the tangy brooklet. "If a little frantic mopping can reinforce a lesson about not trying to teach the house-elves their business, we'd hate to interfere with that, wouldn't we, George?"

"Oh, come off it!" Ginny snapped. "You were as much in favour of teaching them Mum's special ham glaze as I was, and I didn't hear you telling me not to add the extra pinch of Cornucopia Powder, so don't go getting all Percy-ish on me now. –And as for you," she added, thrusting the mop handle up at Tom, "if you've got nothing better to do with your afterlife than float there gawking at me, could you at least do it a little bit higher up? The last thing I need is a frostbitten scalp on top of everything else."

Tom sighed softly. Sic transivit gloria mundi


*See footnote of chapter 59.