CHAPTER 25: ONE STEP CLOSER
One time when James and Sirius asked if they could borrow Shishi the kappa real super quick please, Remus replied with a very immersive story about the veiled bog lady.
The veiled bog lady haunted a nearby bog. In a jealous fit of rage her fiancé had killed her there. She could only be appeased with sauerkraut.
James and Sirius couldn't find any sauerkraut so they got a jar of maraschino cherries instead. They also borrowed one of McGonagall's cats.
Long story short- the veiled bog lady could not be appeased with maraschino cherries and it all ended with a bog mummy flying into McGonagall. And now James and Sirius were constantly picking maraschino cherries out of their shoes.
The punishment: Testing slides for a coming talk.
The talk was going to be a Great Hall event.
About werewolves.
The pictures from the Werewolf Research Institute were pretty brutal.
"Well I've lost all appetite now," said James when they had gone over them all. "Quality Street?"
He sat down and opened a brand new purple tin.
"Why are the faces blurred?" Sirius asked. "I thought the talk was going to be about how to avoid them."
"No idea."
"The talk better include a segment about how to identify one. Like, for example, did you know that shifters only have one nostril?"
"They do? Then I am sure Mr Teller-Penn is not a shifter."
"Have you counted his nostrils?"
"No but I think I would have noticed if he only had one nostril."
"Aha! So you didn't!"
"At no point were you ever counting nostrils! You made me prod Mr Teller-Penn with a needle!"
"You have to take responsibility for your own actions man."
"Besides I was always told that shifters actually have three nostrils but the third one is very small and easily missed. Also, you know the lip dip under the nose? They don't have that apparently."
"Nah you're confused. They actually have two lip dips."
"Oh."
Sirius switched off the magic projector and sat down to paint his nails.
"I'm a verified expert. I have more experience than McGonagall. She should let me do this talk. Do you think I'd get a lot of points if I gave a good talk?"
"I don't know. Maybe. If you let me write it for you." James whipped out a fluffy goose quill and began to doodle the Graven Slypuff logo everywhere.
Sirius went to a cupboard and returned with a notepad and a fluffy goose quill. He, too, got doodling. He tore out page after page. Then at last he drew a square in the middle of a page, a tree in the corner and a path leading between the two.
"I see what you're doing!" said James.
"I was thinking, like, what if, somehow, we could track him?"
"You mean with lemon juice?"
"Why lemon juice?"
"Lemon juice is a kind of make-shift invisibility ink. We pour lemon juice on the steps. The shifter will step in it and make tracks. With a special light we can unveil those tracks!"
Sirius frowned.
"What will that achieve?"
James shrugged.
"We could figure out his shoe size?"
"And then we knock on every door in Hogsmead asking to measure people's shoes? Come on!"
Yeah, pretty stupid idea. James hadn't thought that one through.
"There is such a thing as tracking runes." Sirius thought. "If we-"
"Can they be mixed with lemon juice?"
"You can be mixed with lemon juice! Ugh damn it not another one! Damn you, Annalena Scholz!"
Sirius put away the notepad to remove yet another maraschino cherry from his shoe. James could feel a maraschino cherry in his shoe as well. He removed his shoe irritably and threw out maraschino cherry. It struck him as he did so how dirty the sole was and removed it as well.
And then it struck him that he had bubblegum in the shoe. A pink bubblegum circle that had been hidden under the dirty sole.
"How did I ever get bubblegum in the shoe?"
He peeled off the bubblegum, which had dried and hardened into a flat and greyish coin, and noticed yet another thing: it bore some mysterious symbol.
"Look at this!"
Sirius looked, exclaimed that it was a tracking rune and removed the sole from his own shoe.
"Who would want to track me?" James felt personally flattered for being so important. "Is it Damian Graves, my quidditch rival who formed his own mixed house team full of closet Slytherins?"
Sirius removed from his shoe a hard bubblegum coin with a tracking rune on it.
"Who'd track me? Did my mother do this?"
Then they recalled the time they had fallen asleep in the dungeon garden and woken up to find their shoes switched. They speculated that either Dumbledore or the cabbage patch kid was behind it, or perhaps the tree itself since the tree had switched their shoes. They couldn't believe it was Dumbledore because why would he not give them their right shoes?
But more important than all of that, they now knew how to catch the Hogsmead werewolf.