Ch. 10 — Toad Squashing

To Harry's surprise, Seamus came up to him after they got back from Easter Hols, and asked to join the D.A.

To say the wizard was amazed would be an understatement. Like the other newcomers, he was completely gobsmacked at the view of Uranus, and what they were doing. Being an ardent Trekkie, as he said he was, there was no way he would ever think of giving this up. The next day he wandered around the ship in a daze, only attending Potions and D.A.D.A., before throwing himself into learning the runes that evening. He also began to sneak real alcohol — beer, wine, firewhiskey, etc. — into the conjurator room to store their patterns. How he was sneaking it past Pink Toad was anybody's guess.

Actually, the real question was, where was he getting the stuff in the first place?

After the meeting, and everyone setting off to work on their projects or for bed, Marietta Edgecombe approached him with a request for a private chat. She looked so worried and troubled that Harry didn't even hesitate, and they retreated to one of the two rooms immediately behind the Bridge.

"Captain, you should make this a private office," she said, looking around, "or maybe a small conference room. It's real convenient to the bridge."

"Maybe. But that's not what you want to talk about, I'm thinking," Harry said, looking at her inquisitively.

She hesitated, fidgeting a bit. She took a deep breath. "Alright, here's the thing," she said in a rush. "My mum works at the Ministry."

"Okay," Harry said slowly, and nodded.

"Well . . . the thing is, my parents saw my command stone at Easter, so I told them about the D.A. — not about the Requirement because that's . . . that's something else," she said hastily. "But I told them about the lessons. And, well, I'd already told them that the Ministry has banned student clubs, and . . . they're . . . they're telling me to quit, to tell Umbridge about you guys," Marietta said rapidly, and then looked at her toes. "And, uh . . . if it was just the D.A . . .. I might've done it, too. B-but it isn't. And . . .." She was twisting her hands anxiously.

Harry waited for a moment after her voice had trailed away to make sure she wasn't about to say anything else. He cleared his throat. "Is you mum's or dad's job at risk?" he asked gently.

"Not my dad's. He's muggle-born and works for a muggle company. But my mom's? Maybe? Probably?" Marietta winced. "She's just a low-level clerk, but . . . well. Neither of them makes very much and we really need her to keep her job. And my mom's a half-blood married to a muggle-born, so . . . she doesn't have much job security."

Harry considered that for a moment, and folded his arms, frowning. "It's a special sort of wrong when a child's legal activities are a risk to a parent's job," he murmured.

"Yeah." Marietta faintly agreed. "I don't want to hurt my mum's career or her job, but . . . the Requirement is something special, isn't it? It's something huge. I . . . really like what we're doing, here. I . . . I don't know what to do, Captain," she said plaintively.

She looked close to tears, just as she had looked all the time back in September and October.

"What does your mother do? She's a clerk — what sort of clerk?" Harry asked softly.

"It's just filing stuff, I think," Marietta shrugged forlornly. "I'm not really sure."

"Is she . . . I don't mean this as any sort of insult or jab, or anything, but is she in her dream job?" Harry asked quietly, and rubbed the back of his neck. "Is being a clerk what she wants to be, is she loyal to the Ministry?" Harry watched her carefully.

Marietta blinked. "Huh?"

Harry sighed and said it plainer. "If she got a better job offer, would she take it?" He raised his eyebrows at her.

"Maybe?" Marietta said slowly, looking at him worriedly. "Do you . . . do you have something in mind, Captain?" she said, a bit hopefully

"It has been brought to my attention that D.S.S. Requirement is probably going to be a career — a life, even — for some people. Unless something bad happens, this," Harry motioned around them, at the ship. "This is what I'm going to do with my life. As such, we're going to need . . . infrastructure, inside and outside the ship."

"What, like a company?" Marietta said. "For . . . what reason? Selling the stuff we make here?" she said, confused and not really understanding what he meant.

"Dunno yet; maybe," Harry said with a shrug. "Maybe also for recruiting, for training, and things like that."

"Oh," Marietta said, her eyes widening a bit. "You mean like . . . oh." Her eyes opened a lot wider, and her mouth formed a little 'o'.

"Maybe one day we can tell people about the ship and what we've learned on it, what we can do here," Harry said thoughtfully. "We're pretty sure we could probably manufacture other ships. We're already making spacesuits and things, you know. Doesn't that seem like a good basis for an organisation?"

"A wizarding world space agency, like on Star Trek and Star Wars?" Marietta whispered, stunned at the possibilities.

Harry was sure visions of the miraculous things she had seen on those shows, and visiting other worlds, filled her head.

Harry shrugged. "It's a thought."

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The first wizard to spacewalk was actually a witch. It was partly because no one wanted to let the Captain of D.S.S. Requirement personally test it himself — no matter how much he pouted. And partially because she plain just beat Harry to it. The sneaky witch went behind his back, in other words. Hermione, Lee, and the twins had her fully kitted-up before Harry even knew she was about it.

Ginny Weasley's spacesuit was in Gryffindor colours — the suit was golden-yellow, and the very many armoured plates were Gryffindor-red with golden-yellow trim on each. The armoured plates, Harry had to admit, made a bloody impressive visual. They covered the entire under suit, fitting together like puzzle pieces and sticking to the suit with magnetic locks that could resist ridiculous amounts of force. The nanotubes made the pieces extraordinarily flexible, which made things much simpler — they weren't absolutely rigid plates. Anything strong enough to knock them loose would probably kill the wearer. However, all it took was a mild pull at an edge to remove them. A lot like removing a suction cup from a window.

While that might have been a deadly fault on regular armour, as any wizard past the O.W.L.s could cast accio, the spell-resistant properties of the armour Lee and the twins had designed meant it would take a ridiculously over-powered spell before the armour would even notice the magic. And spells like that tried to remove the entire piece they were aimed at, not pull lightly at a specific edge.

To Harry's surprise, there was also an armoured helmet that went over the spacesuit's helmet — it covered her face entirely, hiding her features beneath the very solid and opaque faceplate.

"How do you see?" Harry asked, fascinated.

"Cameras, apparently." Ginny shrugged. Harry expected such a move to make a lot of noise, considering her chausses, cuisses, breastplate, and all the rest of the plates. It didn't. Not being made of metal was what made that possible.

"We've turned the suit visor into a screen, basically, and there are cameras all over the suit's armour," Fred explained

"We'll still need to figure out the controls, but eventually people wearing these things will have eyes on the back of their heads and the bottom of their feet," George said excitedly, as if he couldn't wait to see what was under his feet.

Hermione's second-generation hoverboard had dozens of micro-thrusters along with the electromagnetic cushion, and thus worked in zero gravity.

The whole D.A. watched the relayed video and held their breaths as they watched Ginny's every move. She cautiously ventured through one of the ship's many airlocks and outside the ship. She carefully set her board on the air lock's "porch." This airlock was recessed into the ship and had a short section to stand on that was protected from all sides before anyone stepped out onto the flat metal that was apparently a multi-story tall "fin". She stepped onto the board. They could hear her take and release a deep breath.

"She has used the hoverboard before, right?" Harry said worriedly, and glanced at Hermione.

"She's my test pilot," Hermione said proudly, "She knows how to control the board better than I do."

"I'm suited up, just in case, though," Fred said.

"If she loses control, he can retrieve her with an accio," George assured Harry.

Indeed, Harry now saw, Fred was already out there. He was also in Gryffindor colours, though he had no armour on.

Fred gave her a thumbs-up. Ginny shifted her foot to activate the hoverboard, and then, carefully, she lifted off the airlock's porch and tentatively pushed out into the emptiness of space.

"Okay," Ginny said, shakily. "Whoa, I'm a lot lighter than I thought. Whooa there," she added as the hoverboard very nearly sent her into a spin. "Too much thrust, there. Okay, I got this."

"Her boots have magnetic clamps, as does the board," Hermione said in a strained voice, her hands white-knuckled as she twisted the fabric of her robe in her hands. "So, it can't fly off. As long as she stays calm . . . it should be alright," she nervously reassured them, and herself.

It was nerve-wrecking to watch. And amazing. After a few tentative movements, Ginny grew more confident and added speed, first a little, then more. She tested changing directions and braking, and she summersaulted, on purpose, in zero gravity. Harry wasn't sure how that worked.

Next thing they knew, she was racing along the ship's side, her delighted laughter echoing through the ship. "I'm probably gonna be sick, but this is amazing! Whoo-yeah!" The metallic material of the ship made a "ground" for the hoverboard to reference when she was standing. Farther away from the ship, the board changed over and became a platform under her feet. She looked like she was flying headfirst through space.

Harry could only shake his head in amazement — first surfing along the side of the ship, and then flying through space like superman. In-credible. They would need to make sure the board could be stored alongside the suit's power/air disc without interference. Maybe even reshape the disc to accommodate the board's position on their back. Keep everything low-profile and as unnoticeable as possible. With an appropriate dock on the armour, as well.

There was a thought — make the accessories with a mild notice-me-not keyed to the crew so they could always see them. It should be possible. If you have a command stone, the field doesn't affect you. Just like the muggle notice-me-nots used by the ministry on places like The Leaky Cauldron didn't bother wizards or witches. Or squibs. He'd suggest it to the twins.

It was unspeakably good to hear her — any of the Weasleys, really — in such high spirits.

She hadn't even returned inside before everyone with any sort of head for weightlessness wanted to have a go. Harry had told the twins to make spacesuits for every D.A. member, even those who didn't actually want to go into space, as a precaution in case something went disastrously wrong with the ship.

After seeing Ginny and Fred, though, everyone wanted spacesuits, and they wanted them in their house colours, as well. Harry upgraded his suit to Gryffindor red-and-gold. It was due, his original suit had been only a prototype, after all. And the way the twins and others were coming up with improvements, they would all probably have to upgrade their suits every other week. Not including size changes because they were all still growing, of course.

"We made three versions of armour pieces," Fred explained when Harry had asked previously about armour.

"The light armour can take the usual hexes and jinxes," George had said.

"The medium armour can take pretty serious curses."

"And the heavy armour can take pretty much all the attack spells we could think of."

"We haven't tried the Unforgivables on them, though."

"Haven't quite got the . . . necessary hate, you know. At least, that is, not yet."

Their faces' had darkened in anger. All three had looked at their right hands.

"Pink Toad is getting us there, though."

Harry had sighed and nodded thoughtfully, and examined his choices. The twins had conjured up test pieces for people to choose from, the final ones would be conjured specially for each person. The heavy armour ones were, well . . . heavy when taken all together. "How do they stand up against things like transfiguring?" he had asked, weighing the heavy breastplate in his hands. "It's all well and good if they protect us from curses but if someone can just transfigure them into butterflies, they're not much good. And what about featherlight charms? These are rather . . . heavy."

"You wound us, Captain," George had grinned.

"Do you think we didn't consider that?" had said Fred.

"There's just enough silver in the materials that you can't transfigure them without a huge amount of power."

"You can't charm them; you can't spell them in any way."

"You can't enchant them either, which is why they don't have the featherlight charm on them already."

"But . . . well, at this point they don't need enchantments to make them sturdier, anyway."

Harry had glanced at them. "So, you can't spell silver easily?" he had asked thoughtfully. "I didn't know that."

"We got the idea of adding them to the armour from dragon hide — our first idea was to make the armour out of dragon hide, you see."

"But that was before we got a bit of it under a scan here and figured out why it's so spell resilient," George had admitted.

"They eat gold and silver, you know, if they can get it, and that silver goes into their cells, into the hide — which is why it's so resilient against spell fire," Fred had explained.

"You learn something new every day, right?" Harry had said, weighing the breastplate in his hands. "So, the heavy armour is tested against everything but the Unforgivables?"

"Yep. Powerful cutting curses can scratch the surface materials, and you can scorch them a bit," George had said.

"But we've got lots and lots of layers on these."

"Polymers and carbon nanotubes and a lot of stuff we found from the library."

"The heavy armour ones have bits on them that the spaceship's hull is made out of.

"Really sturdy stuff. You can throw it into lava and it won't care."

Harry had looked up, suddenly very interested. "The ship is spell resistant?"

"Well," the twins had exchanged cautious looks. "Almost."

"We made a piece of the hull and threw everything we could think of at it, just like the armour." He had nodded at the piece Harry held.

"It would take two or three wizards as strong as Dumbledore to even scratch it." They had both nodded.

Harry had wondered if they could make the pieces look like brick and shingles, and then line the outside of a building with them. If the Death Eaters tried the same tactics they had in the first Wizarding War, it would certainly slow them down, for sure. He'd mentioned it, later, to Hermione.

"Hmmm," Harry had said and nodded firmly. "Get me heavy armour everything."

"It weighs almost twenty pounds," George had warned him.

"Then I better start getting used to wearing it sooner rather than later," Harry had said determinedly.

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It was . . . a treat? A thrill? Impressive? Harry settled on amazing when he saw all the members of the D.A. in their suits and armour. Some had opted for lighter armour, some for heavier. Terry Boot was hurriedly working on adding his cloaking device to the armour. Almost all of them were also kitted-out with hoverboards, which they carried on their backs. And on top of that, Lee and Hermione had moved onto a new project — adding personal energy shields to the armour.

Gryffindors in scarlet and gold, Ravenclaws in blue and bronze, and Hufflepuffs in yellow and black. They all looked amazing. And the extra bulk of the armour somehow made them look more like uniforms.

"Well," Harry said, as they all arranged themselves in front of him. They had sorted themselves by House now that they had coloured armour. "Now, we definitely look like a space faring people."

"Can we wear this stuff all the time?" Dennis Creevey asked eagerly. "And can we keep these? This is coolest stuff I've ever seen!"

Several others appeared just as enthused and excited at the possibility.

Harry laughed. "That's why I had them made!" He looked around. "Just wear your robes over it, but don't wear the helmets out in Hogwarts," he cautioned.

"Actually, speaking of robes, Captain," Lavender Brown left the formation, with Luna Lovegood, and stepped up to him. Lavender carried a bundle, which she shook out, and then threw over his head.

"What is this?" Harry asked as Lavender and pushed and pulled at the cloth. It was, he realized, a new robe. It looked like a Gryffindor robe, black on the outside with a red inside-lining. It was larger than his own robes were — he never would've fit his own robes over the heavy armour he was laboriously wearing. The shoulders would've been torn right off. But this one wasn't just bigger, he noticed, there was something else that was different. It felt, oddly, a bit both tougher and softer, among other things, he noted as he ran his hands over the outside and them the inside of them. They just felt . . . different. He looked at Lavender curiously.

"People who want to wear armour in school will need new robes to fit over the armour," Lavender said, as she stepped back and looked at Harry thoughtfully before nodding. "And since we're making robes with the conjurator, why not make them a bit . . . special?"

"What's special about them?" Harry asked suspiciously.

Luna hummed softly behind him. She reached under his "school" robes' deep hood and hooked something under the back plate of Harry's armour and into his spacesuit. Now attached to the power system of his suit, it turned on the new features of the robe.

"Ah," Harry said, looking down as the outside of his robe changed through a rainbow colours. First the solids, then stripes, and finally plaid before settling back to black. "That's special."

"It's programmable nanofabric," Lavender explained, tugging at her own robes — and the entire lining in them lit up in a golden glow. "You can do pretty much anything you want with it. You can change the colour, the shape . . . make it spell out rude things in glowing text. You name it."

"Okay," Harry said slowly. "Right. Good." He totally did not see any advantage to this.

"Puts a whole new twist on flashing, huh?" Ron commented, and Hermione slapped him on the back of his head.

Luna giggled, and walked over to a wall. Her robe suddenly changed to match the wall behind her and, except for her face and hands, she became very hard to see.

"Ah!" he said, echoed by many in the bridge. That was useful. It wasn't as good as Terry's cloaking device, but it used far, far less energy and would be more than adequate for places where you didn't want to be invisible but wanted to be difficult to notice.

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Sadly, for all the amazing things they could do on the ship, they couldn't do everything on their want-to-do list. Despite the weeks and weeks Hannah, and Angelina and her team, had spent combing through the ship's computer systems, they couldn't find anything to help Mr. Weasley or Neville's parents.

"There is medicinal stuff in the library — loads of it," Hannah admitted, downcast. "It's just that we can't make heads nor tails of it. It's the language, Captain." She looked up at him. "British Healers use Latin and Ancient Greek in their texts and healing spells. The aliens who made this ship, they used their own ancient language for medicinal terms, transliterated with runes, of course, and we just can't figure out what the words mean. Even if we did, we still probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. For example, would you know that a 'diastolic reading' meant the blood-pressure between heartbeats when the literal translation of 'diastolic' is drawing asunder?"

"And, for example, how would you know that a Pepper-up potion cures colds if no one told you that?" said Angelina.

"Basically, we need a healer to go through the medical library. One with an intimate knowledge of ancient runes," Zacharias Smith said glumly.

Harry frowned, eyeing the console in front of them, ancient runes filled the screens. "So, we need a healer," he murmured. "Somehow, I don't think Madam Pomfrey would amendable to helping us instead of doing her work at the school . . .."

Hannah, Angelina, and Zacharias looked at him expectantly as Harry considered the matter.

"Can we conjure this stuff into a book?" Harry asked. "And then give that book to some healer who we can pay to figure it out?

"It would take billions of pages," Zacharias said unhappily. "Or about a million books with a thousand pages each. There is . . . really a lot of stuff here."

"Ah," Harry murmured, and sighed. "Well, you tried. I'll . . . figure something out."

The easiest thing to do would be to recruit a healer, somehow — and that was a problem in and of itself. They had no way to contact a healer while they were in school. Also, because they were in school, no healer would take them seriously. They needed adults on the outside who could help them.

Plus, Lee, the twins, Angelina, and Alicia would all graduate at the end of the year, but they seemed more interested in working on the ship rather than acting as go-betweens and staying mainly in the wizarding world.

Harry had toyed with the idea of somehow turning the Requirement, and all it entailed, into a business to explore space and solve problems. But so far it had been only a thought at the back of his mind. With Voldemort and the war looming ahead, making that thought into a reality would probably take some time. At the very least, they would have to be extra cautious in everything they did outside of the ship.

And that didn't count the active interference in their affairs by both Voldemort's supporters and other half- and pure-bloods who distrusted change.

But it was doable, despite all the difficulties he could foresee.

Harry called together everyone in the D.A. familiar with the Order of the Phoenix.

"Well, we kind of planned on starting a business as quick as we could after finishing Hogwarts," Fred admitted.

"We planned to start a joke shop, fresh from school," said George.

"The gold bars from Christmas really took care of all our financial worries."

"But now it's different."

The Weasleys exchanged saddened looks.

"How do you go about starting a business in the wizarding world?" Hermione asked, fascinated.

George shrugged. "You set up in a shop and just start doing it."

They had obviously taken the time to look into it, at some point in the past.

"We were going to rent a place in Diagon Alley as soon as school let out."

"There's not much into it, really."

"But . . . I thought — aren't there forms you've got to fill, places to register?" she said, confused. "What about taxes, how does that work in wizarding world — I've never figured that out." She frowned as she finished her last statement.

The pure-bloods exchanged looks. "Taxes?" Ron then asked. "What's . . . taxes?"

The twins just shrugged, after a moment. "The Ministry gets all the money it needs," Fred said.

"On the import and export duties* it collects on things shipped to and from England," finished George.

Hermione stared at them in gobsmacked, white-faced horror.

Harry thought about it. If it was really that easy — you just set up shop somewhere and start working, then maybe it wasn't as difficult as he had imagined. Nothing like his uncle complained about. Or his uncle's clients, rather. Grunnings Drills was a well-established firm, after all. But they still paid VAT on the things they sold. And the government did collect a fee on tellys and radios.

If starting a wizarding business was that simple . . . maybe he could rent a place in Diagon Alley, and then hire someone to sit behind a desk and . . . see if Harry could hire people for the D.S.S. Requirement or something like that. A shop in an eternal state of to-be-opened-soon, or open-but-still-setting-up, with a Now Hiring sign perpetually placed in the window.

"I guess it sort of makes sense — with magic, things are easier and cheaper in general than they are in the muggle world," Hermione mused, still faintly horrified. "I just . . . how does the Ministry function with only those as income? Where do they get funds for anything, how do they pay their employees?"

"Bribes maybe?" Harry asked, and stared at the cat sitting on Hermione's usual work station. How'd Crookshanks gotten in? He shrugged. "Also isn't there a thing about Gringotts having to pay the Ministry loads of money each year because of the rebellions or something?"

"Wizards," Hermione muttered, lifting the cat to her lap and petting him distractedly. "I'll never understand wizards."

Harry stared at the Hedwig, who, he had just noticed, was perched on the back of the throne at the rear of the room. She was giving him the evil-eye. He hadn't been sending any owl-mail, lately. Perhaps Sirius could use her services while the Pink Toad was in the school?

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On Thursday, while the Toad taught the Fourth Years and Harry was free, he talked with Fred and George about the process of starting a shop. That was when Umbridge made a move directly against one of the D.A. members. Ginny Weasley — who, despite being so slim and small in stature, had also opted for heavy armour — had been caught "not wearing appropriate school attire," the Toad claimed

It wasn't exactly a secret that the D.A. members had started to wear new robes, and that they had some interesting clothes underneath. Even the stones affixed to the inside of their collars had started to attract attention. Despite the new robes hiding the armour, the neck of the spacesuit was visible past the robes collar if one looked close enough — even with being skin-coloured, there was that thin line . . ..

In addition, of course, the armour itself bulked up its wearer. Not a tremendous amount, but the shoulders were a bit higher and wider, and the wearer looked as if they had gained about fifteen or so pounds, despite the armour being as nearly form-fitting as the twins could make it.

It had been a source of curiosity and wonder for the most observant of the Hogwarts students, but as every D.A. member wore their new robes over the armour, no one, except their dorm room mates, had seen anything but the nearly invisible collar of the suit.

And then Umbridge, in the middle of class, had marched up to Ginny, ordered her to stand, then interrogated her about the 'odd' gloves she was wearing. She had then torn Ginny's robes right off, easily overpowering the surprised Ginny, revealing the armour underneath. And then stripped her of her armour as she stood there, leaving her wearing only her pants over the skin-tight spacesuit.

Later that night, in the Gryffindor common room, she had explained how Umbridge had confiscated her armour. And then tried to take the spacesuit, too — except she hadn't been able to figure out how to remove it. Ginny had refused to tell her. The Toad, however, had found and taken her communication stone, which everyone was now simply calling the link or comm.

"Right," Harry said as he examined the scar forming on Ginny's hand and the furious look on her face. Hermione pulled a small container of dittany out of her bag.

"Right," he repeated. "That's enough. Hermione, a word. Ron, call up a meeting — after curfew tonight. I'll meet everyone on the bridge. We're doing something about this." They couldn't leave the armour in her hands, nor the link-stone she had taken, as well. Sure, the wizards would never be able to figure out how any of it was made, nor how it worked, but they would have a clue that something very odd was in the works. And they would start paying an unhealthy amount attention to the Requirement's crew. Attention which they absolutely did not want to be receiving, now, or anytime in the near future.

They put Terry Boot's invisibility tech to the test later that night. Though every member of the D.A. wanted to join the so-called mission, Harry only selected six: Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, Cho Chang, Zacharias Smith, Dennis Creevey, and Michael Corner. They were the fastest members of the D.A. when it came to moving on foot — and with his luck, they would end up having to run.

They were all equipped with the tech-cloak, of course, and the seven of them, invisible to the naked eye, headed out into Hogwarts with dark thoughts on their minds.

They were headed, specifically, to Professor Umbridge's office.

It was almost too easy. The armoured helmets' built-in link prevented anyone without a comm from hearing them. It allowed them to easily talk in the armour, while, to an outsider, they were silent as church mice. Thus, they could coordinate the operation without fear of being overheard. Plus, being invisible meant they didn't need to sneak around with magical invisibility cloaks, of which Harry was the only one of them with one. And even though they couldn't silence their footsteps — spell resistant armour — that wasn't a problem as they all had hoverboards, which, on their electromagnetic cushions, didn't make any sounds at all. They had left their new robes behind, so there wasn't even the swishing of the material as they moved. The only evidence of their passage were the brief eddies of air currents.

The hardest part — which wasn't all that hard — was breaking into her office, and they got in with a simple alohomora. It was almost embarrassingly easy.

"Find the armour," Harry said, and looked around the office in disgust. He'd been there many times, and had the scars on his hand to prove it. It had never stopped being . . . disgustingly pink.

"What's your view on property damage?" Katie asked darkly.

Harry considered it, and then smiled just as darkly. He wasn't the only one who had had writing scraped into the back of his or her hand. Every member of the D.A. — bloody hell, most of the school who wasn't a member of Slytherin house — had at some point felt the black quills that the Pink Toad favoured. None of them had much love for the office.

Then he shook his head. "As much as I'd like to see it, let's not raise unnecessary alarm bells. Just get the armour and link, if they're still here."

They were. Dennis found the stolen armour and link in a locked trunk. They also found her hoard of Blood Quills. As tempting as it was to blow up the whole office, they managed to hold back. After reclaiming the armour, they simply retreated, muttering various imprecations all the way back to the ship. Not simply taking the whole trunk had been a bit of a dispute.

Umbridge was livid the next day. She had no clues as to how the armour had disappeared, but she decided that it must have been Ginny. She went out of her way at breakfast to confront the witch, loudly, about the armour, which she claimed Ginny had 'stolen' from her office. She gave the girl detentions for every weekend until the end of school.

Ginny decided she wouldn't attend a single one. In fact, she went one further, she decided to stop going to Umbridge's lessons entirely. She wasn't the only one. The rest of the D.A. also dropped out of the classes taught by the so-called "professor." The professor would find her next fifth-year non-Slytherin classes sparsely attended.

Umbridge spent the weekend stalking around the castle searching for the missing items, and angrily awarding detentions at the slightest excuse, not matter if they were trivial, absurd, or imaginary.

The following Monday, an article ran in every magical paper and magazine that could be easily bribed — which was basically, all of them. Only the headlines were different. Rita Skeeter was more than happy to write it, for the standard charge of a small block of gold. Rita's article was cutting, derisive, and rather interestingly written — and nearly the complete truth regarding what had happened. Pensieves were ever soo useful in assuring that.

Earlier in the year, the crew had managed to acquire the Headmaster's pensieve for a few hours while he was out. Such a thing was just too useful not to have one. They took it to the conjugator to make a pattern and immediately returned it. The pensieve's abilities were due to a score of spells and enchantments that had been cast on it. So, with the help of an old text from the Hogwarts library, they worked together casting magic into the rune-covered duplicate as teams until it began to work as intended. It took ten of them several days.

Dumbledore had undoubtedly questioned the portraits in his office, but they hadn't seen or heard anything. Nothing was missing, and no listening spells of any kind had been placed in his office. There was a triangular stone with rounded corners under the cabinet with the pensieve. But it tested negative for any sort of magic, either active, passive, latent, or hidden. It had a pleasingly neutral appearance, so he placed it among his many trinkets, and promptly forgot about. He never suspected it to be of muggle origin, as in technology, because he knew, as every wizard and witch did, that muggle electronic toys didn't work in Hogwarts.

This incident meant they had to give Rita a pensieve. They wanted her to have the memories of what had actually happened. She had agreed to write several puff features about Harry and muggle-borns over the next few months as payment. No other reporter had their very own pensieve. She was ecstatic.

With the fame she was getting, the articles would be well-received.

"MINISTRY HIRES SEXUAL DEVIANT FOR HOGWARTS," read one magazine. "UNDERAGE WITCH FORCED TO STRIP BY MINISTRY," read another. They even got it into The Daily Prophet — albeit on page twenty-eight where it was made a small side-article: "MINISTRY INQUISITOR'S DARK SIDE."

The article might've been embellished bit, that was Rita Skeeter's style, but there weren't any lies in it. The accompanying pictures revealed that the claim she had been stripped to her underclothes was not an exaggeration. Umbridge had tried to strip Ginny bare — and she would've, if she could've figured out how. And she had done it in front of a classful of witnesses, who were unafraid to share their memories with Rita — a handful of galleons might have propped up their bravery for some of them.

After the first paper arrived at Monday morning breakfast, every witch in Hogwarts refused to attend Professor Umbridge's class. That, of course, meant Umbridge had to dish out detentions to the missing students to punish them for their rebellion.

It had rather the opposite effect to what she wanted to happen, though.

They refused to attend the detentions, too.

The next set of articles after that didn't even need bribes or blackmail to make it to the front page.

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A.N. * Prior to the 1929 Wall Street bank collapse in the U.S., and subsequent financial disaster, the U.S. government subsisted entirely on collected import duties, not by taxing individual's incomes.