Chapter 2

[Vincent Crabbe]

"Was about time!" a voice called once they made their way back to the Common Room. They had decided to come back relatively fast. They couldn't afford to draw too much attention to them and being found studying at the library certainly would do that. Maybe once they were more caught up, they could do something.

'That's new,' he thought, looking at the tall, lanky kid that had greeted them. Vincent hadn't even realized that he'd been talking to the two of them until he saw the beaming smile looking at them. He paused and blinked. 'That's Nott, right?' he thought, trying to remember. He knew the names, but he was still working on placing the faces to them.

"Wow, they are so slow," Nott said, looking to the world like a kid at a zoo watching a display. "It's kind of sad, that these two are the best you could get, don't you think, Malfoy?" the boy added, sending a mocking grin to the blond.

Off to the side, Vincent caught Davis shifting on her seat. She was a half-blood, which meant that she didn't do or say much so that she could blend into the background. Why she didn't just stay in the girls' dorms instead, since she was the only girl in their year around, was a mystery though.

Vincent shifted his focus back to the present. What was happening was surprising, but what was even more so was that Malfoy stayed silent, face red and glaring at everyone, but silent. That wasn't normal, he was pretty sure. Something must have happened while they weren't around.

Wordlessly, he walked forward, Gregory in tow.

"So, Crabbe, Goyle," Nott said when they joined the gathering of Second Year Slytherins. The ones that hadn't gone away for Christmas, that is. "Your glorious leader lost not so gloriously, I'm afraid to say," he announced, while Vincent looked between him and Malfoy. "So, now you two have to play chess. Easy, right?"

'A bet?' Vincent guessed. It was humiliating, frustrating. It seemed like they'd been bet, like they were some… property. '... Better get used to this shit until we can actually do something about things,' he thought, holding back a sigh.

"Sure?" he replied, not even having to play dumb all that much. This was coming a little out of the blue, so he was still kind of processing. Then he shrugged and moved to sit on one of the free seats on each side of the board. 'Just a year or two, that's the most it should take' he thought to himself, counting backwards from ten in his head.

Lashing out at that moment wouldn't end well. They were likely at the bottom of the totem pole and they didn't know a single proper spell yet. Doing something rash could see them in very bad situations.

Gregory looked at him, probably trying to ask him with his eyes if this was supposed to happen or something. Alas, he wasn't exactly sure himself. The books didn't hold that much information about the inner machinations of Slytherin House. Hell, they didn't even have that much about Gryffindor, and the main character was there.

They were going to have to improvise a lot.

"Just like that," Zabini commented from the side, a lazy smile on his face. He was easy to identify. Not only because he was black, but also because he'd been confirmed the previous day when someone called his name.

"Well, get started," Nott urged them, looking very excited to see them play.

"Uh…" Vincent feigned hesitation as he looked at the pieces on the board. It was a little weird to be stared back by them, but it was also fascinating. "You," he called, pointing at the E Pawn. "Two forward?" he commanded, more of a question than an answer.

"Well, that's already better than I expected, I gotta say," Zabini commented dryly.

Vincent didn't really pay him any mind, instead looking up at Gregory. As he did, he tried to decide if he should play this badly or just play normally. He'd never been a master player, but he knew how to play. Maybe it could be a good first step, mostly harmless, to improve their image… 'Or maybe I'm just already tired of these little shits,' he acknowledged in the privacy of his mind.

It was very annoying to have children mocking him like this, especially when they held actual power over them… if not how they thought they did, for the most part.

"Uh, you, knight?" Gregory said uncertainly as he pointed at the piece which responded by reading itself for the order. The action made Gregory flinch at the animated piece, eliciting a round of guffaws and giggles all around them. Even from those away from their circle.

God, he hated kids.

"I wouldn't laugh too much, Davis," Malfoy hissed, making the girl lock up. "I remember you doing worse," he added with a snarl. Vincent wondered if that was true or if he was exaggerating for the sake of mocking her. Either way, Davis didn't say anything to that.

"Move to F8," Gregory continued after the shock passed. The piece easily obeyed his order and jumped over the lines of pawns, positioning itself at the front and threatening the pawn that he just moved

"He knows how to read the board?" Zabini asked from the side.

And it continued from there, with everyone more or less commenting on their moves. To point out how dumb they were, that is. That is how most of the ordeal went. The little snakes sneered and laughed at Gregory when he squeaked as one of the pieces got brutally destroyed. And they jeered and laughed at Vincent himself when he failed to notice a sneaky bishop. 'I'm rusty. No surprise there,' he thought, annoyed.

As they played though, Vincent purposely did some questionable moves himself just to be safe, but Goyle seemed to be playing normally. Or at least what he remembered some of his friends playing like. He knew the rules, just not the strategies.

'Might as well,' he decided with an inner smile. Even if he'd played in tournaments and such he'd never been anywhere close to the best. They wouldn't be showing a master class of anything, but at least they could give a decent showing, at least. Not enough to stand out too much, but maybe enough to give them some minuscule points, hopefully.

Maybe he was being too optimistic.

Through the commentary provided by the other kids though, Vincent tried to make the most out of it. Thus, he tried to understand the plays going on here. Who was friends with whom? Who was above whom? Who was the outcast? Who was the most popular?

He knew names, yeah, but most of these people either didn't get an actual line of dialogue in canon Harry Potter or he'd forgotten about them, which meant basically the same thing. He knew fanfic tropes, sure, but those were unreliable at best and completely wrong at worst.

So, he needed to figure out what they were dealing with.

[}-o-{]

[Blaise Zabini]

Watching Crabbe and Goyle play, Blaise was noticing something odd. The others might have been too busy mocking them and just generally trying to have fun at their expense, but the game was… Not terrible. Hell, he saw Crabbe make some moves that Nott should be jealous of and Goyle was holding his ground fairly well. They should have been terrible, delivering a cringe-worthy display.

'"Remember, Blaise. The body-," his mother said as her finger trailed up his body from his chest to his chin, making his head unintentionally look up to her gray eyes. "-often says much more than what words can convey. Everyone can learn to lie with their lips, very few can truly learn how to deceive with their mannerisms."

His eyes went to Nott. The lanky kid continued his verbal beating towards the two, yet his eyes always kept both Malfoy and the gathering of students in his range of vision. His hands went up and he howled in laughter at a misplay from Goyle. His cackling tried to elicit a laugh from the spectating peanut gallery. Something he succeeded at, partially at least.

Just, not as good as he hoped it seemed.

Nott's reactions might appear to be born out of amusement. Blaise knew better though. The grandstanding, the shakiness of his eyes, meant he was afraid. He was confused as to why it wasn't working as well as he hoped and desperate to change that. He didn't understand why this ploy thinly veiled as a game of chess wasn't giving him the raise in popularity he wanted.

It was what this was truly about after all. About the humiliation, the mockery, the showmanship towards peers and senior years to elevate yourself in their eyes. What better way to be looked at in a better light, than being compared to those inferior to you.

After Malfoy lost that game, they all knew what that blabbermouth, Nott – Desperate to climb the political ladder of Slytherin as he was. –, would ask for. Logically, the boy didn't have the balls nor did he lack the brain to try to shame Malfoy directly. Not after the social smackdown he got in their first year. So he went for the next best thing.

Having your own lackeys be humiliated can be its own form of dirt on anyone's reputation. It was how things were usually done in Slytherin House. It should have been the perfect opportunity for Nott to raise his value a bit by making a show of these two in the middle of the common room.

Draco would have to remain quiet as long as Nott didn't go too far. Lest he wanted to be known as someone who couldn't keep his bets. Especially when he was the one to initiate them in the first place.

Not that he was likely to get much out of that, really. Blaise caught one of the older years patting the blonde on the shoulder comfortingly in passing. Maybe trying to earn some subtle points with something very small? The rest of the upper years weren't likely to take kindly to someone pulling ahead of them blatantly. "People notice a lot more when they are touched, it is more likely to make you memorable in their eyes," his mother told him once. Maybe that upper year knew that, maybe they didn't, but it was good to note.

Back to the game though… Nott's "plot" wasn't what it was supposed to be.

Instead it was just… a normal game.

And that didn't fit Crabbe and Goyle at all.

Blaise tried to remember if he'd ever seen the two play but he couldn't for the life of him recall it happening before. Then again, they hardly did anything other than stand besides Malfoy. One could say whatever they wanted about Crabbe and Goyle, but they were dutiful to the place their families held as staunch supporters of House Malfoy. Other than that, they might as well have been well behaved dogs, if that. Not even crups, just regular dogs.

Or so Blaise thought, because this game of chess was weird on many levels. There was something going on there. He'd seen these two make fools out of themselves for over a year by then. This clashed horribly with that image, and that was… not annoying, but it was something similar.

If he could afford it, he might dedicate some more time to keep an eye on the two. At least so that he could forget about this weird occurrence if he was reading too much into it. He needed to know if he was missing something here.

"Always have a read on the room around you," his mother had taught him. Glancing to the side, he looked at the rest of his year as they watched and reacted to the "show" as if they were really paying attention. And maybe they were, but were too dumb to notice anything. Blaise wouldn't be too surprised.

That is, until he saw Davis watching the board with a small frown. She had obviously noticed something too, and that meant that Greengrass would hear about it later, when she came back. There was a reason why the girl stayed outside, surrounded by people that would have made her life impossible if not for her one ally, the Greengrass heiress. 'That might be interesting… and enough to justify watching Crabbe and Goyle by itself,' Blaise mused idly.

Looking around some more, he saw that none of the higher years seemed to care about the game much other than throwing a passing comment. Then again, they weren't part of the whole thing, they were outsiders looking in. They were waiting for a chance at the impressionable younger years that were heirs of powerful houses. What did they care about some nobodies' game of chess?

But maybe there was a reason to care, Blaise mused, glancing back at the playing duo.

[}-o-{]

[Gregory Goyle]

Gregory let out a shudder as a cold breeze came from the open archways of the inner garden. He took a moment to look at the snow covered trees before moving forwards through the east hallway that led to the interior of the castle. As he did so, his mind tried to recall the way he needed to go back…

Which was a bit of a struggle, really.

Hogwarts was a mess.

'Two rights. Half way through the hallway with the odd armor. Then take the second path to the left and turn to the right once more,' Gregory repeated in his head as he scribbled the path he had taken to reach here from the Mess Hall. After walking for a few meters he came across another 'T' intersection at which point he poked his head to both sides to see what was at either of them. One led to a set of old stairs while the other led… to more hallways and doors it seemed.

Gregory hastily took the small notebook he had taken with him and drew the newly found way in the form of lines. He might not be a cartographer, but at least it would make navigating through this maze of a castle easier. Not that he can complain too much, this is probably the most fun he had since being transmigrated in this world. There weren't any creepy ghosts, or a herd of psycho kids dressed in green running around.

There wasn't any sense of paranoia or fear at his every action, not knowing if what he was saying or doing was out of place or character. Just him and a bunch of empty hallways that if the book he read was correct might be more than a thousand years old. Just him and the notebook he was going to try and draw as much of said castle as he could.

Granted he still found that particular set of stairs creepy, but Gregory guessed that not all of the castle was filled with talking portraits and incredibly unsafe moving stairs.

Seriously, someone should do some safety inspection on those things. Most of them didn't even have handrails! If it wasn't for Vincent quickly catching him by the robe, he might have fallen into the void when one of the portraits decided that it wanted to act like a living being and greet them with a hollering 'Hello!'.

And wasn't that a surprise? The portraits in this place were alive too for some… odd purpose that he wasn't aware of. He knew that there were talking objects in Harry Potter – Gregory idly remembered a talking hat talking to Harry at some point in the movies – but he thought those were special cases. What made the hat so important then?

Gregory shook his head and focused on the task at hand. After the chess incident, Malfoy had dismissed them again in anger, something that both of them were very happy to comply with. After a hasty retreat from the dormitories that for some reason were in a dungeon of all places, Vincent had pulled him aside and told him they should start searching for a place called Room of Requirements.

He wasn't exactly sure what the importance of it was, and his fellow transmigrator couldn't exactly tell him much about it until they could be absolutely sure they were alone. However, the man-turned-kid seemed serious about the whole thing and seemed to know what he was doing. So without too much prompt, they started their search.

A search that had proven to be more difficult than they expected. While Vincent knew it was located on the seventh floor near the tapestry of a man teaching trolls to dance ballet, it was another thing entirely to find the way there. Because, apparently, whoever made this castle didn't want to make it so easy for them. Reaching the upper floors was simple enough by itself. However, it was more of a question as to which section of the seventh floor you arrived at.

Different sets of stairs seemed to lead to different sections of the next floor and sometimes, those sections weren't connected to each other. You might find the stairs to the second floor but only a small portion of it. Then you were forced to go back to the first and look for another set of stairs to access another. It was thoroughly inconvenient and convoluted, but at least it gave Gregory something to do.

… It was still an extremely complicated and frustrating mess, however.

The task wasn't made any easier with the amount of trick or puzzle-based passages and charms integrated into the castle proper. The timing of the stairs being one of them for example. They tended to change positions at determined times and lead to different sections of the castle. Unless you had some kind of magical permit that made them arrange themselves to lead you where you were supposed to go. Like how Griffindor's and Ravenclaw's students would have the stairs automatically arrange themselves towards their Common Rooms when they passed by.

Gregory finally reached the end of the old set of stairs that led to the second floor. With a quick scan, he noticed that they were yet again, completely devoid of life. There were only long hallways leading into the distance.

'Too far into the distance, actually,' he thought to himself with a groan as he looked towards the windows just to spot the sight of the inner garden he just gone through.

"From outside, this hallway shouldn't be more than 30 meters long…" Gregory looked at his map. It was filled with tiny notes both of notable landmarks and other types of information. He made a note of this very hallway from outside when he was at the gardens, it was a short one, around 10 windows long on.

Gregory took his eyes from the notebook again and looked towards his sides. He counted around twice that. Maybe a little less, but that didn't really mean much considering it was still longer than it should.

"Fucking mages and their space-altering bullshit." It turned out that the confusing construction wasn't the only problem. The whole castle seemed to be enchanted to be bigger than it seemed in some sections and smaller in others.

Before Vincent and him separated to cover more ground, they had thought it might take a day or two to get to the room they needed to. Even if the place was confusing, surely it couldn't be that hard, right? Now, Gregory was starting to wonder. It was a bit excessive when there were only so many students in the whole school and there was a lot of unused space by the looks of it.

At the very least, it was better than dealing with those assholes in Slytherin.

"Now, what way should I go?" he murmured to himself as he inspected both sides of the hallway. They looked about the same. The same Gothic architecture he was getting used to seeing through the stone castle. The pillars and ceiling were carefully decorated with odd designs that he couldn't identify due to the low amount of light coming from the thickly clouded afternoon sky. The floor was made of slabs of stone that formed symmetrical patterns that stretched through the whole section. Dark wooden doors that somehow looked as sturdy as the stone pillars themselves lay equally distant from each other on the inner side wall.

Honestly, beyond the tiredness of the endless walking, and the frustration of so many dead ends. Gregory had to truly admit the whole place was mesmerizing to look at. He wasn't an expert at architecture, but one didn't really have to be one to realize how majestic and well-maintained the whole place was. There was a feeling of history and wondrous mystery throughout the whole place if one were to observe beyond its immediate gloomy atmosphere.

'It's magical.' Gregory snorted as his own lame joke before picking the left side to continue his search. It wasn't like standing here would give him any answers anyway and it was already getting dark. He would have to return in an hour or two at most. If he was lucky, he would find stairs all the way up the sixth floor before that, surpassing his current personal record.

Gregory walked through the empty path ahead. The silence was only broken by the echo of his steps and the cold wind rattling slightly against the windows. It was an eerie atmosphere, one that he imagined fitted in horror movies that he used to watch back in his first life.

The thought brought him pause for a second before he continued forward.

It was odd to think about his previous life again. It hadn't even been that long ago, nor was it a life that brought him pain to think about. It was just that it didn't seem right for some reason.

He used to be a regular single man with a standard 9 to 5 job. Not an exciting thing by any means, he'd admit. The most outstanding thing that he remembered doing in recent memory, was taking a different route to work one morning where he woke up particularly early.

Yet, he hadn't disliked it, however.

While he couldn't say he was swimming in money, or that he gave himself many luxuries, he certainly never found himself wanting for anything. A roof, a car, and three meals a day. Overall, he was pretty grateful for his life, even if it was simple and some would call it boring. It had been his.

Even then, for some reason, whenever he thought about his old life, and what was left behind, all that came to mind was an odd sense of finality. He was fine with that loss, for whatever reason, and was already ready to move on even before he'd woken up. Something he was pretty sure wasn't normal given that he had been transported to a world of fiction less than three days ago.

If anything, he was more worried about catching up on his magic studies than he was about losing his past life.

Gregory took out his wand for a moment, already partially used to the feeling of "Not Rightness" it generated in him. It was odd and awkward like being paired for a project with someone you didn't know or sitting next to those relatives you barely knew of. Situations he had some experience with as someone with mild social anxiety.

"Lumos!" he intoned. He moved his wand in the pattern he remembered depicted by the book. Sure enough, a small ball of light generated at the very tip of the wand, waning slightly and threatening to turn itself off at any moment. It illuminated the badly lit hallway with a soft blue hue that looked almost ethereal in nature.

Were any of the other students to look at the spell, they would probably mock him. Professors would hold their heads in their hands or look at him in disappointment at the utterly atrocious feat that lacked completely in both power and finesse. For the people of this world, of this culture, it was normal, something even children could do with ease. It was the most basic of the basics.

Yet, for the first time in his life, Gregory couldn't care less about the opinions of others. He didn't spare a thought to the gnawing feeling of people pointing at him behind his back and laughing that had accompanied him all his life, making want to curl into a small ball. All he could do was look at the feeble light that flickered like a dying blue ember and feel amazed.

Gregory was just… mesmerized.

Sure, it was weak and he knew that it would turn off at the slightest distraction… yet, it was intoxicating to know that even if yet unformed and weak, he now could be something else, something more than what he ever thought possible. Because here, in front of him, the irrefutable proof that he could do something that not so long ago was unthinkable. This tiny feeble spell showed that he could be more than he'd thought possible.

So, with a wand in hand and the smallest of lights, he walked forward through the dark and unknown path ahead.

Gregory was a wizard, after all.

[} Chapter End {]

Arc: And with that, it ends another chapter of this story. These two are not getting things easy, I can assure you that. But at the very least, they are moving forwards, and in some cases that is all you can do to get out of a shitty situation.

Adrian: Don't know what you are talking about, man. They are having a great time.

Arc: Sigh Leaving Adrian alone with his coping self-delusions, I hope you guys enjoyed the chapter. You can share what you think with a review, I can assure you we read all of them!

Adrian: Seriously and any review is appreciated, from thank yous to reviews with feedback. We do appreciate those latter ones more, but anything is good to feed our addiction to ValidationTM. So, what are you waiting for?

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