Unfortunately for "A Friend," the Lovegoods were used to cranks reading the Quibbler and responding hysterically and with extreme paranoia. So when their daughter showed them a letter addressed to her, their principal reaction was anger. It was all well and good to send your crank ideas for spell-crafting to Pandora, or your conspiracy theory to Xeno, but their daughter was out of bounds.
The problem was, the tone of the letter wasn't deranged. In fact, talent at Divination ran on both sides of Luna's heritage, and the writer felt authentic. Still...
"What does she mean by "Nargles," mommy?" Luna wondered. When she'd opened the letter and Pandora had finally turned around and noticed Luna reading it, she'd panicked for a bit. But she seemed unharmed and there was no trace of magic or potions on the letter.
Pandora looked at her husband, who fancied himself a cryptozoologist. He shrugged.
Pandora thought for a minute. "Xeno," she asked, "didn't you ask Luna about her invisible friends and write it down in that journal? Wasn't one of them called something like that?" Referring to a project he'd started to take childhood fantasies seriously, since sometimes they might reveal some sort of magical secrets. Xeno's head shot up, and he nodded. Without further ado, he went into the library and found the notebook in question.
Pandora took it from him and put it next to the letter. Sure enough, both Nargles and Wrackspurts were names Luna had given to the creatures she said she could see. She'd barely been talking a few months, though, and she promptly forgot most of it.
"Luna, I promise this isn't me having Wrackspurts confusing my mind. Your family is in imminent danger. It may be caused by the backfire of a spell your mother is crafting. Or maybe bad people are going to do something bad and make it look like an accident."
"If I remember correctly, this isn't like an infestation of Nargles. More like an invasion of Heliopaths."
"Heliopaths are real," Xeno said. Pandora looked at him, but he had a stubborn expression, so she went back to the letter. She would be hypocritical to blame him for being more open to fringe ideas.
When he first started the Quibbler as a muckraking journal, they'd faced vandalism, death threats and legal action. Pandora lost her internship at the Department of Mysteries and had to become an independent spell-crafter.
They changed the Quibbler from the Daily Prophet's broadsheet size to a tabloid, and always included mythical animals, exaggerated government conspiracies, and even some Witch Weekly-style gossip. Most of that had been Pandora's initiative, though Xeno turned out to be scarily good at it. Pandora had contributed a runic puzzle that had to be solved by turning it at a right angle three times as you went on (and couldn't be fully solved unless you had three copies of the Quibbler page layered on top of one another), and because it was so easy for her to do, she had enough saved up to last the next several years.
"Your family won't survive your mother's death, Luna. Your father can't raise a child alone, especially with only the income from the Quibbler. When you get to Hogwarts you'll be an outcast. In my vision, I saw you kicked out of Ravenclaw tower without your clothes, and no one to help you if bad people came along to hurt you in the middle of the night, and no blanket to keep you warm."
That certainly wasn't an image the Lovegoods wanted to envision.
Pandora decided to suspend disbelief. After all, her cousin Sybil Trelawney sounded more deranged than this, but if you got her drunk, you could usually get a good reading in some form of divination or another, eventually. It was funny, though. The writer definitely felt like a female, but much younger than Sybil. Luna was so bright, if she'd had the time, she might even have suspected her of writing the letter as a game.
What, she wondered, does this "Friend" want us to do about this?
Well, actually.
Never working alone again, was fine. Increasing the warding to at least double the protection might be doable. She'd made enough money lately spell-crafting that they'd considered giving Luna a sibling, but that could be put off. To replace the lost income from not performing rapid, high-pressure spell-crafting, she was offered a unique proposition. The "Friend" would negotiate(!) with Harry Potter, who was not much older than Luna. If he agreed, then they would send the Lovegoods to get a Potions book that had Lily Potter's notes on potions and spells, along with those of a friend who was a Master Potioneer. Some of the methods were still unreleased. It might, she thought, just be enough.
The Friend warned her against the usual suspects - the Ministry, the surviving Death Eaters. But most dangerous of all, she asserted, was Albus Dumbledore. They should put their wards further from the house and try to figure out how to tell when he or his "Order of the Phoenix" were around. Xeno told her that not only did they exist, and he could and would write down all the members he knew of, but their existence was very secretive nowadays. It lent plausibility to the letter.
"We take this to your cousin, and we have a nice dinner and play with Luna," Xeno declared. Suiting his actions to his words, he put some powder in the fireplace and said "Sybil Trelawney's tower room."
When her cousin answered - already a bit tipsy, but not badly - Xeno asked her to hold and read the letter, then tell them what she could read from it.
After dinner, the Divination professor flooed them back. "Whoever wrote this may or may not be a Seer. It's quite unclear. But this is true seeing. Everything in the letter is true."
They gave the letter back to Luna, who put it on her wall. While Cedric would sometimes talk to her, and Ginny had at one time been something of a friend, it wasn't like she had so many that she didn't treasure making another.
