Chapter 6 - W6

Stepping into the Great Hall, I was surprised to see that everyone became quiet as I entered the room. Heads snapped around to stare at me, and conversations petered off until you could hear a pin drop.

I could smell the bacon, and so I ignored the staring eyes to sit in my accustomed place. I'd debated trying to change seats so that I'd be less likely to be the victim of an attack, but everyone else tended to have their favorite spots, and I was already making enough waves by just being there.

As I sat, I began filling my plate.

Millie and Tracey were staring at me. "Did you really kill a troll last night?"

I shrugged; my mouth was full.

Apparently recovering a large amount of blood took its toll on the body's reserve; according to Pomprey, I was going to have to eat more for the next few days to make up for it. I didn't mind, really.

"Draco says that all of them helped," Tracey said.

I was surprised that he hadn't claimed credit for himself. However, he hadn't screamed and run away like most children his age would have done, so he deserved whatever credit he could accrue.

Nodding slightly, I reached for a piece of toast.

"Apparently it was a rogue male," I said, "The rest of the pack is on the other side of the forest. It was just one of those freak accidents."

"I heard that the Dark Lord himself sent it to kill you," Pansy said. "Because he thinks you plan to be the Muggle Dark Lord. That's so stupid though."

"Oh?"

"Like a mudblood could ever be a Dark Lord... who would follow them?" she asked. "And it's crazy to think that the Dark Lord would even know you existed.... like you're that important."

"How many times have the Goblins rebelled?" I asked.

"I don't know.... a lot?"

"And according to you, Wizards are better than goblins?"

"Of course."

"Even mudbloods?"

"...yes....barely."

"Then if goblins can rebel, why not muggleborns?" I asked.

"Because mudbloods don't have any power," she said, as though I was stupid to even suggest it. "They aren't even all that good at magic."

I used my wand to levitate a piece of ham and two pieces of toast from in front of her simultaneously. She didn't seem to notice.

"So why were you in the Infirmary?" Tracey asked. "I'd have thought that you'd have been either dead, or not harmed at all."

"The troll fell on me when I killed it," I said. I took another piece of bacon.

"What?"

Everyone was staring at me.

I shrugged.

"How did you let it get that close to you?"

"I killed it with a knife," I said. "And that requires close up work."

"With...a knife," Pansy said. "Not a spell... you didn't even use magic to drop something heavy on it. You killed it with a knife. Is that even possible? Trolls are huge?"

"The skin of their scrotum and the back of their knees is thinner," I said. "I probably should have transfigured a bigger knife, though. It would have died faster."

Some of the first years around me looked puzzled, as though they didn't know what I was talking about. The older students nearby looked a little green.

"So you used magic to make something to kill with non-magically?" Pansy was staring at me incredulously, as though I'd grown a second head.

"It seemed like it was resistant to spells," I said. "What else could I do?"

"Run away?" Pansy asked. "Scream for help?"

"Die you mean?" I asked. I shook my head. "I try not to do that any more than I absolutely have to."

"How did you know how to kill a troll with a knife?" Tracey asked, as though she was afraid of what the answer would be.

"I grew up in a tough neighborhood," I said.

"That's a muggle thing, isn't it?" Mildred asked.

I nodded.

That seemed to end their interest in the conversation, which suited me just fine. I'd said all I meant to say, and the last thing I needed was to seem as though I had secrets, even though I did.

I still caught several of my classmates staring at me when they thought I wasn't looking, and through my insect's vision, I could tell that other students where whispering all over the Great Hall behind my back.

At the end of the meal, Dumbledore stood up.

"Last night, you may have heard that there was an incident in the Forbidden Forest. Courage is what is usually attributed to Gryffindor, but last night several students in Slytherin showed great courage under a situation which would have cowed some adult wizards."

"For courage under fire, Terence Higgs, Miles Bletchley and Draco Malfoy will each be awarded twenty five points. For courage beyond that expected of any child of her age, and for risking her life to defend her classmates, Taylor Hebert will be awarded seventy five points, for a total of one hundred and fifty points for Slytherin."

There was a collective gasp from the entire room.

There were politics behind the decision, I suspected. Giving points to Malfoy would help ingratiate the school to his father, although truthfully he hadn't run, which actually was worth some kind of an award. I doubted that I would have been as brave at his age.

Giving me the largest proportion of points wasn't simply because I'd done most of the work. It was a way to emphasize my value to Slytherin, to make me more valuable to the group and to help push whatever agenda Dumbledore and the Sorting Hat had in subtly backing me.

I'd been thinking about Dumbledore lately, and it occurred to me that any overt support he gave me would be counterproductive with my House, because of his own unpopularity.

For a moment I wondered why they hadn't had Snape deliver the points, but it occurred to me that having Dumbledore do it prevented accusation that Snape was being biased and attempting to push his House to win the House Cup.

Personally, I didn't care about points at all; it seemed rather arbitrary and meaningless when the reward was a little bit of bragging rights at the end of the year. It seemed to work to keep the peace, though, and so I was willing to work within the system.

I glanced over at Draco, whose chest was swelled with pride. He glanced at me, and I gave him the slightest of smiles. He paled a little and seemed to deflate a bit, but that didn't keep those around him from clapping him on the back and congratulating him.

I didn't get any of that, but several of the older students did nod at me approvingly.

Dumbledore had done me a service, and I would remember that. What he expected from me wasn't clear; most likely his interests aligned with those of the Hat; turn Slytherin from a terrorist breeding ground into something that produced reasonable human beings.

The fact that this aligned with my own goals didn't mean that our goals would always be in synch. I suspected that he'd been delighted to have me in the House despite the fact that it was objectively the worst place for me.

He hadn't gotten where he was without being a master manipulator. He knew how to play the political game. Being a powerful wizard wasn't enough; there had been plenty of powerful Capes in the protectorate who had never risen to the top of their respective divisions. Usually it had been because of personality conflicts or an inability or lack of interest in playing the political game.

As the meal ended and the plates vanished, I stood up and I headed toward the exit. I felt three other people making a beeline for me.

"What do you want?" I asked.

Marcus Flint was standing behind me, flanked by Terence Higgs and Miles Bletchly.

"You saved the team, Hebert," Flint said. "The boys told us what you did, and we'd have been a Keeper and a Seeker short."

"Anybody can be replaced," I said.

"You've obviously never played Quidditch," Flint said. "I don't like your kind. I don't even particularly like you. But I respect you, and I never thought I'd say that about a first year. Most of you are snot nosed little nothings."

Was he saying I was worthless as a mudblood, or as an annoying kid?

"But not you. You're mean as a snake, and dangerous as one too. If you have any problems with anybody on the team, let one of us know and we'll take care of it... preferably before you do. Hopefully nobody on the team will be that stupid. I have a feeling that someone might be able to hurt you, but you'd make them pay later."

"The best way to get her is to drop a troll on her," Terence said. He was smiling slightly as he said it though.

"Nobody would ever be able to get a troll in the school," Flint said absently.

"I think if she drank a cheering charm, it would be like deadly poison to her," Miles said. He was smiling slightly as he said it, though.

This... didn't feel like the jokes that Emma had made. Was this what friendly teasing actually felt like?

Miles and Terence had seen what I had done last night, but instead of making them afraid of me, it seemed to make them... admire me? A little?

I couldn't tell, and that bothered me more than I wanted to admit. The strange warm feeling in my chest was probably a side effect from the potions I'd been drinking.

"You should try out for beater next year," Terence said.

"She probably weighs less than a bludger," Flint said. "Beaters have to be strong."

"She killed a troll with a knife the size of my forearm," Terence said. "Which means she can probably beat the Weasley Twins half to death without too much trouble."

Apparently my alliance with the twins was still a secret.

Good.

"She weighs half as much as a bludger," Flint argued. "I don't care how vicious she is, there's laws of nature. You try to hit something that weighs more than you, you're the one who goes flying."

"I think she could do it, and without cheating," Miles said, glancing at me.

They hadn't even asked if I wanted to try out.

"It's too bad that first years can't try out," Flint said, looking at me as though I would obviously want to try out for a sport I knew nothing about except that it sounded ridiculously dangerous.

I already thought that flying class needed more safety protocols; having kids flying around, beating each other with bats while a hundred a fifty pound ball of iron tried to slam into them sounded like a perfect receipt for a bunch of dead kids.

Yet somehow they made it work, which meant that there were aspects to it that I wasn't seeing.

I'd never been into sports, and I wasn't now. But letting them think I might try out next year was harmless, and if it kept the team's goodwill toward me for a few months while I grew stronger, I didn't have a problem with lying.

Terence and Flint argued, and I stiffened as I felt Miles hand on my shoulder.

In a low voice, he said, "Me and Terence.... we know what you did for us last night. You could have gotten away easy and left us to die, and nobody would have thought anything about it. But you put yourself at risk when you didn't have to, and we'll remember that."

"You helped," I said.

He chuckled bitterly. "Using a first year spell against a class XXXX creature? We'd have been dead sooner than later. The Defense teachers over the past few years haven't been good."

"The one we have now isn't bad," I said.

"He's the best one I've had," Miles said. "Most of them aren't worth a crap. You'd think Dumbledore would at least try to put somebody in the most important class, but they say the Dark Lord put a curse on the position."

"Oh?" I asked casually. "Is that something that can be done."

He stared at me for a moment, then paled a little. He removed his hand.

"That's seventh year or maybe further stuff. Don't go trying to curse the whole class if you stub your toe or something."

I smiled at him sweetly, then grinned as he paled some more.

"I remember my friends," I said quietly. "Even if they can't be my friends publicly."

He nodded and took a step back. Terence and Flint were still arguing about my potential skills as a beater, which Flint thinking that the physics of the task would defeat me, even if he didn't seem to know the word physics.

"I'll think about it," I said more loudly, and then I stepped away from them.

As I headed for class, I saw people staring at me and whispering everywhere I went. I listened in as I could, but there were too many conversations all happening at the same time for me to get more than a few fragments of each of them.

"--she's not really a witch. She's a creature pretending to be a witch. How else could she have killed a troll like that without magic?"

That was actually close to the truth; if it became a common rumor I'd have to figure out a way to direct people's attention elsewhere.

"She's a vampire."

That... didn't even make sense. It was already daylight, and I was clearly walking around in the sunlight right now, as they were staring at me.

"She obliviated them and made them think she killed it. Somebody else did it."

"Doesn't that make her even more scary?" A second voice asked. "If she can already obliviate people?"

"....yeah."

That was a rumor that I wasn't going to fight. Keeping people uncertain about what you could and could not do was basic Caping 101. Most Capes always held a little back, just in case. Having people uncertain might make them hesitate in attacking me.

It was going to make them less likely to overestimate me, though, which I did not like.

"I think she's kind of cute," I heard a boyish voice say. It wasn't a voice I recognized, so it wasn't one of the Slytherins.

"She'll stab you, mate. Just let it go."

I fought to keep myself from wincing. That was the kind of complication that I did not need. Just thinking about it made me a little nauseous. Kids that age shouldn't even be thinking about pairing up, and it was hard for me not to think about even seventh years as anything other than children, even though chronologically they weren't that far from my actual age.

Sometimes experience aged you.

Vista had always been a lot older than her age would suggest. She'd been through a lot of vicious, nasty fights, and it had made her into someone older than her age.

These kids were still kids. Their concerns were the concerns of children. They hadn't had to fight and die, and had to watch people they loved die in front of their eyes.

That was a good thing, although I doubted that all of them would stay that innocent by the time they graduated.

War was looming on the horizon, even if I was somewhat insulated from it here with the children. There were indications in the Wizarding Newspaper that some of the purebloods left lying around, if you were able to read between the lines.

Wizards were dying of accidents, and it was almost always a muggleborn wizard who had done well for himself. There weren't a lot, maybe one or two a week, but it was a pattern, especially as I'd been told that wizards tended to live twice as long as muggles on average, both due to wizard medicine and their own, innate magic.

It didn't make sense that there were this many accidents in this small of a population. The overall death rate per year in the United States (not counting Endbringer deaths or Golden Morning) had been less than one percent a year. That had included deaths from a lot of illnesses that Wizards could cure with a wave of a wand and car accidents, and most Wizards did not drive.

Old age should have been the main cause of Wizard deaths, and even if Wizards had simply died at half the rate of muggle deaths, there should have been less than fifty wizard deaths a year from all causes. Accidents simply should not happen as often to wizards.

You wouldn't climb on a ladder to get something and fall to your death. You'd just use your wand.

Poisoning?

Wizards didn't use caustic cleaning products like muggles did. Again, a simple swish of a wand meant there was no need.

There were spells to protect from being trapped in fires.

Of course, even Wizards could choke on a piece of food; I was surprised that some of the Gryffindor boys hadn't already died, given the speed with which they ate. Anyone could slip in the shower.

But when those things kept happening over and over to one class of people, it moved from being suspicious to being attempted genocide.

They were keeping it low key from now. I had nop doubt that aurors were investigating the deaths, and that sympathetic pureblooded politicians were obstructing those investigations. There was a battle being waged in the shadows, and for the moment at least, I was out of it.

Unfortunately, I knew that was a situation that wasn't going to last. Sooner or later I was going to be drawn into a war that was not my own, and then all this pettiness at school would seem like a distant memory.1691ShayneTApr 30, 2019View discussionThreadmarks InvitationView contentShayneTMay 2, 2019#8,741"That's not how you use a shield spell!" Fred exclaimed from the floor.

"Oh?" I asked casually.

Running toward him and smashing him with it had been fairly effective, but I suspected that it had only worked because he hadn't been ready for it. I'd felt feedback when I'd hit him, which meant that my size and weight were a limitation.

He rose to his feet.

"A wizard who has to get close to someone is a Wizard who's dead," he said. "Everybody knows that. You'd know that too if you weren't a crazy troll killing muggle."

I shrugged.

Working on shield charms was a major step forward in my evolution as a witch. I was still trying to work out creative ways to use shields, though. What if you could do more than just make a barrier in front of you?

Put a shield around someone's head, and not only could you suffocate them, you could prevent them from speaking spells. You could even fill the shield with something terrifying, like bees, and they wouldn't be able to get rid of them.

If you put shields around their hands, would they be able to gesture with wands?

I was still uncertain whether shields could be moved or shaped; I was still learning the basics. It was something I fully intended to find out, though.

"Can you reshape the shields?" I asked.

Asking a third year might not be the best option, but if something was common knowledge no point in doing a lot of research I didn't have to.

"What do you mean?" Fred asked.

"Change it from this basic shape to something else?"

He stared at me for a moment. We'd been working with each other for a few weeks now, and he likely knew that I never asked a question without having a reason behind it.

"Why would you want to?"

"Well, for one thing, have you heard of muggle tanks?"

The Weasley twins were purebloods, but their father was some government official who dealt with muggle artifacts. That meant they were a little more familiar with technology than some of the other students, although I was still astonished by their ignorance sometimes.

He frowned. "Those things that have water in them?"

"Yes, but there's another kind of tank... an armored vehicle, alike an automobile," I said.

I knew their father had one of those. I'd overheard the youngest Weasley bragging about it, right before Draco had made fun of him for it.

"Armored?"

"Think of a turtle, except with a shell made out of thick metal," I said.

He nodded slowly.

"Well, eventually they discovered that having armor straight up and down made it relatively easy to break through. But sloping the armor made it a lot tougher."

"Why?"

"If something hits sloped armor at an angle, there's a chance that it might bounce off, or be deflected," I said. "There's other reasons; you can get more armor for less weight or something, but it's kind of complicated."

"Attacks already bounce off shields," he said.

"But what if you could change the shape so that the spell bounces right back to the caster?" I asked.

He froze for a moment. "That would be a huge advantage... but there's no way to know what shape could do that. People are going to be attacking you from all kinds of angles, and in the heat of battle you aren't going to be able to figure out the exact shape that you need."

"But if you could," I said. "The shape could be changed?"

"Maybe..." he said. "I'd have to do some research."

"What about putting a shield on someone else?" I asked. "Like if one of you wanted to protect Ron?"

He frowned. "Without being in front of him? That's something I'd have to look up too."

"You could even use that for a prank," I said. "If you could make the shield hard to see."

"How?" he asked.

"Put a shield in front of someone's feet... a small one, and they'd trip."

"There's already a tripping jinx."

"But if they check you wand, what would they find?" I asked. I lowered my voice in a weird approximation of his. "Oh, no, Professor, I didn't cast a tripping jinx. You can check my wand."

He looked thoughtful. "I can see how that might be useful. There's probably other things you could do with it."

"Turn a shield into a sphere and fill it with water," I said. "Or something funnier...I'm not really good at pranking people. Then dismiss the sphere when they walk under it."

He stared at me searchingly. "Why do I get the impression that you don't want to know this for pranks?"

I shrugged. "Maybe I'm getting a sense of humor."

He smirked. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"What about a reverse bubbleheaded charm?" I asked. "One that would keep smalls in instead of out? That's make those stink bombs of yours a lot more effective."

It would also be perfect for more dangerous gasses.... and it would be something that they'd be unlikely to dispel because they were gagging and their eyes watering.

"It sounds like a lot of work for me and George," Fred said thoughtfully. "But you aren't wrong. I think people would rather have a specific spell for something because it usually works better, but for pranks, you might be right. Doing things people don't expect is key."

"Like hitting someone with a shield charm?" I asked sweetly.

"That wouldn't have worked if I was ready for it," he said irritably. He grabbed a towel and wiped his neck.

"I wouldn't have done it if you were."

He was silent for a moment. "Are you going to the Halloween Feast?"

"A girl's gotta eat," I said.

"Dumbledore is going all out this year," he said. "There's supposed to be dancing skeletons. I heard that he was going to wait until next year, but he's changed his mind."

He was probably trying to distract everyone. I'd overheard some of the students talking about letters from their parents. Everyone seemed worried, even the Slytherin parents, and many of the students had been told to keep their heads down and not make waves.

The older students seemed to be taking this reasonably well, but it was frightening the First and Second year students.

I wiped my own forehead with my towel. Wizarding combat involved a lot of running around, at least the way I did it. It wasn't as good as endurance running; I had considered asking Snape if I could have a treadmill delivered by owl, but I wasn't sure where I'd put it, and the last thing I ended was to have an object that I used all the time, a perfect target for curses.

In the past few weeks since the troll attack there hadn't been any more attacks on me. No one was particularly friendly with me either, other than my core group of acquaintances. The Quidditch team did seem to treat me with a modicum of respect, more than they did the other first years anyway.

"This has been good for me and George," Fred said. "We're getting faster, and it's good to practice with someone other than each other, even if it's just a group of firsties. It'll be good for the next time things get heated."

The school had managed to quiet the open battles in the halls, but there was a simmering tension that hadn't gone away. People were afraid, and in my experience, that fear was easy to turn to anger.

I was having them practice with me, Hermione, Millicent and Neville, although I was having extra sessions the others didn't know about.

"I'm glad you decided to work with us," I said. "And that you aren't just the jerks the Slytherins think you are."

"All the Slytherins?" he asked.

I nodded solemnly.

He grinned and threw his towel at me. I dodged it. "That just means we're doing our jobs right. The Weasleys are the bane of the Slytherins."

"Draco certainly seems to think that about your brother," I said.

Draco had been maturing nicely, although he still had times when bits of his former self showed through. This occurred most often around the youngest Weasley boy, although he seemed irritated occasionally by Harry Potter.

"We all think that about Ron," Fred said. "But that's brothers for you. You can't live with them."

I waited for the rest of the phrase and he just grinned at me.

"You should have some fun at the party," he continued. "After all, you're half monster yourself."

I bared my teeth at him, and he laughed.

He flicked his wand, and muttered and his towel went into his bag. "I'll see you on Wednesday."

With that, he was gone. I waited in the room for several minutes after he left. While I could tell if there were people watching, portraits were harder, and they tended to gossip. The last thing that I needed was for rumors to spread about what I was doing with an older boy, especially a Gryffindor.

I'd chosen a hallway that didn't have any portraits, but there were always wandering ghosts, and Peeves would be delighted in spreading nasty rumors, especially since he thought there was nothing I could do to him.

With my luck, they'd think that I was drinking his blood. The rumors that I was a vampire hadn't gone away, and there were even some people claiming that I was Snape's illegitimate daughter.

The weird thing was that I couldn't absolutely rule that out, because I didn't know a lot about my host bodies' family life. I could say that there wasn't much of a physical resemblance between us.

Maybe it was because we were both considered intimidating. I'd noticed that Snape purposefully worked at being intimidating, although it had never worked on me.

After facing Jack Slash, the Siberian and Scion, very little was actually intimidating.

As I stepped out into the hallway, I heard the sounds of weeping coming from one of the bathrooms. It was the one that seemed never to be used by any of the girls, even though I'd used it a couple of times.

Stepping cautiously inside, I said, "Myrtle?"

I was at least passingly familiar with most of the ghosts in the school. I had been paranoid enough about them that I had needed that information. After all, they were harder to watch out for than people, who my bugs could sense easily, or portraits, who were limited to one place.

The sobbing noise from the bathroom stopped.

"Go away!" I heard a voice echo from within a stall.

"All right," I said, shrugging. There was no point in going where I wasn't wanted, and I wasn't an expert in ghost psychology, especially as from everything I had read, they weren't actually the spirits of the dead, but instead were imprints, or copies of those spirits.

They were like magical portraits in a way; they couldn't experience physical pleasure, and their abilities to learn from new experiences were limited; that was part of what made Binns such a terrible teacher, although I suspected that he'd never been a particularly brilliant one.

The room was cold; even colder than the rest of the castle. I'd read that was something that tended to happen in the presence of ghosts, and it might be a way to detect them. My insects could sense cold, after all, even if a ghost was hiding.

The ability to see them at all was a Wizarding trait; muggles would have only felt a sense of discomfort, or coldness, or a shadow out of the corner of their eye. It was enough to make me wonder if there had been ghosts in my old world; most likely not because they were only generated from Wizards.

Some of the worst Pureblood bigots liked to speculate that this was because Muggles didn't have souls. Not all purebloods felt this way, but a few did.

"You don't want to know what's wrong?" she asked.

"You were murdered and are angry about it?" I asked.

I saw her head poke out of the bathroom stall and she glared at me. "That's just what I'd expect from a Slytherin... making assumptions about people."

"Oh?" I asked. "So I'm wrong?"

"Yes!" she said. She didn't elucidate, though, staring at me as though she was waiting for some kind of response.

"Well, I've got to get going," I said. "I hope you get over whatever is bothering you... and the dying of course."

I didn't tell her that I'd been dead before, so I could sympathize. That was the kind of thing that could easily get me dead again, or maybe worse. I'd heard about the Dementors. It took a cruel kind of society to make the death penalty the kinder option.

Having your soul sucked out, and all hopes of an afterlife snuffed, that was truly disturbing; I hadn't even known there was proof there was an afterlife. That was a piece of information that would have set all of humanity back on its respective rumps and made them question everything.

The Wizards didn't seem to know what that afterlife was; like the ghosts, it wasn't a question I could answer either. Maybe this was my afterlife and if so, I had a feeling that I wasn't in the good place. Purgatory maybe?

"None of the ghosts want me to go to the party on Halloween," she said.

"The party with the dancing skeletons?" I asked. "Isn't everyone going to that?"

"No! The afterparty... it's for ghosts and guests, a celebration of our collective Death's day. Halloween is supposed to be the day we're closest to being alive again, and we like to celebrate it."

"Weren't you invited to last year's party?" I asked.

"Yes," she said sulkily. "And that's why I'm not invited this year."

She started to cry again.

I could see why even ghosts might be reluctant to have her around; her constant complaining and crying would get on anyone's nerves. However, I could remember crying in a bathroom myself because of what others were doing.

Could ghosts be bullied? Were they even truly sentient, or were they simply simulacra?

Did it matter?

Getting them on my side would increase my influence by a great deal. My biggest limitation currently, other than my size and lack of magical ability was the fact that I could only concentrate on one thing at a time. That meant that it was inevitable that sooner or later I was going to miss something.

"Well," I said slowly. "You need to ask yourself what it would take for you to get invited. Or you need to crash the party."

"Crash...?"

"Show up without being invited. If you are good, people might not say anything. If you are bad, they'll chuck you out, but at least you'll have tried."

She frowned. "I couldn't do that... not by myself."

"Are you asking me to go to the party with you?" I asked. "Uninvited to a ghost party as your plus one?"

"Plus one...?" she asked. Finally she nodded. "That would be great!"

"And it's after the regular party?" I asked.

"The Bloody Baron didn't want to miss the Dancing Skeletons," she said. "He's invited them to the after party too, but nobody knows if they're going to show up."

"I'll have to get permission from professor Snape," I said. "Because it'll likely involve me being out after hours, but I'll go with you if I can."

She smiled, and what had been a very plain girl was suddenly just a little less plain.

Her smile vanished almost as quickly as it had come, like a summer rain shower. She started sobbing again.

"What is it now?" I asked.

"I wouldn't have to be bothering with all of this if I hadn't been murdered."

"Right," I said. "I'll be going now."

"You'll be there, won't you?" she asked, sounding suddenly insecure.

"I do what I promise," I said. "Good or bad. Whether I'll come back next year depends on how badly you embarrass me and how angry you make the other ghosts."

"Embarrass you?" she asked.

"We can talk about what happened last year, and how you can avoid offending the others tomorrow after dinner," I said. "I've got something I have to do right now."

She hesitated, then nodded.

I sighed and headed out of the bathroom. Turning this into a win was going to be difficult, especially if Myrtle made it harder for me with the other ghosts. Yet she was trapped here, and being trapped in school for all of eternity was my definition of hell.

I needed to go to the library to look something called Boggarts up; apparently Travers was going to have us face one tomorrow. We were going to be the first class that had seen one, and so I had no lead time from the rumors and conversations of the other classes.

Was that deliberate? Was there something about this monster that would give Travers some kind of an advantage?

I hadn't forgotten that one of my goals was to find out who was doing the killing of the muggleborn, and just as importantly, who it was in the school that had given out all the names.

It had to be a staff member because students had not been present at school when the letters were mailed out. However, I couldn't make the mistake of assuming that it had to be a human staff member.

The house elves pretended to be all nice and subservient, but sometimes I wondered if there was hatred in their eyes. After all, they were slaves, and of course slaves were going to pretend to love slavery. How they really felt might be a different matter.... or it might not. I wasn't discounting them though.

Even Mrs. Norris was a suspect; if McGonagall could turn into a cat, who was to say that some of the other pets in the castle weren't actually people too? She certainly liked to snoop around enough.

For some reason, I felt an underlying sense of dread about tomorrow.Last edited: May 2, 20191602ShayneTMay 2, 2019View discussionThreadmarks BoggartView contentShayneTMay 4, 2019#8,959"Boggarts are not beings," Travers said. "Does anyone know what that means?"

"It's a kind of spirit that created by human emotions," Hermione said after raising her hand. "It was never alive."

"That's important to remember," Travers said. "They were never born, and they cannot be killed. What are some other examples of non-beings?"

"Dementors," I said, even as Draco called out "Poltergeists."

"One at a time, please, and all of you are correct. A point to all of your respective houses," Travers said. He paused. "Being amortal, these creatures cannot be killed. That can pose a problem for certain kinds of wizards."

Was he looking at me?

"They can only be dealt with," he said. "And the means of dealing with them are different with each species. The one factor that all of the spells have in common is that they all deal with positive emotions. Because these creatures are created from powerful negative emotions, the way to drive them off is to use the emotions that are their opposite."

The entire class was silent. Although Travers sometimes showed signs of being a mild bigot, that wasn't unusual in the Wizarding world. He did have a powerful way of speaking, though. He actually wasn't bad as a teacher.

"The way to deal with the Dementors is the Patronus charm, which is a spell that is rather difficult even for many adult wizards. Fortunately, the spell to deal with Boggarts is much easier."

There was a wardrobe in the back of the room, and from inside there was the sounds of scratching. The silence of the class made that sound seem to echo. I saw fleeting moments of anxiety on the faces of many of my classmates, even the Slytherins, although they were better at hiding it.

"Boggarts are generated by fear," Travers said. "And as such, they are driven away by laughter. What other limitations do they have?"

"The size of the room?" Tracey said.

Travers nodded. "A boggart will shapeshift into your greatest fear, but it will size itself to the room it is in. Nundus are huge, but in here, it would probably be the size of a horse."

"It's weaker than the thing you are afraid of," I said.

He nodded. "It's a pale reflection of the genuine thing, although the fact that it can copy powers does make it somewhat dangerous. It is less dangerous in a setting with multiple people; it will be trapped, unable to decide whose fears are most pertinent."

"Some people think they are sentient; others think not. No one really knows, any more than any one knows what they really look like when there is no one to watch them. Ultimately, they feed on fear, and are strengthened by it. Most boggarts are not truly dangerous, but it is possible that given enough fear they could become so."

Everyone was silent, and I could see the wardrobe shaking. People in the room were growing more tense.

"Knowing what you fear is the first step in overcoming that fear," Travers said. "And that is what we are going to do today. I have shown you the wand motions for the Ridikulous spell. Given your young age, I do not expect that all of you shall be able to accomplish the spell at first, but I expect that all of you will be able to do it by the end of class."

"Who will be first?" he said. "Line up. The first three will earn points for their house."

Malfoy was the first to stand up. He stepped forward, his shoulders tight and a grim expression on his face. He glanced at me, as though he was wondering if I was his greatest fear.

I doubted it, and when Travers flicked his wand to open the wardrobe, I was proven correct.

A tall and skeletally thin man stepped out of the Wardrobe. He was wearing deep black robes, and he was bald. His face was waxy, and his eyes were a deep red. A hood covered his face.

Draco was pale and sweating.

"Remember the spell," Travers said, leaning down close to his ear.

"Ridikulous!" Malfoy said. It took him three tries before the figure began to slip and stumble before falling on his back.

Voldemort; it had to be. Was this a true representation of how he looked, or was this just the manifestation of Draco's fears?

Considering that his father had worked for the man, it was possible that Draco had a better idea than most about what he looked like, but it was just as possible that the elder Malfoy had protected him from seeing him.

Hermione was next. She stepped forward, and the creature shifted and changed shape before our eyes.

It's form settled, and I stared at what resulted in shock.

It was me.

My face was looking at her with a cold, dispassionate look. "I don't know why I bother with you. You'll never catch up with me, so why are you even bothering trying? You don't belong at this school anyway."

"R...Riddikulous!" Hermione said, getting it right on the first try. Her face was red, and she would not look at me.

My figure began to tap dance, grinning in a way that didn't seem quite right. I saw some of the other students shudder.

Goyle was afraid of Voldemort too, although his version wasn't as well formed as Draco's. This Voldemort ended up dressed like a woman, in a pink sundress.

Crabbe, though, was afraid of me. I saw myself standing in my pajamas with a bloody sock in my hand. My head was cocked, and a creepy smile was on my face. There was a lot more blood on the sock than I recalled had actually been; had he been one of the students who had seen me, or was this what his mind had created from the stories told by the others?

"Ridikulous!"

My figure was suddenly dressed like a circus clown; somehow that only made me look more disturbing. My grin grew wider, and it soon was unnaturally wide.

"Perhaps at the end of class," Travers said hurriedly. He stepped toward Crabbe, and the boggart twisted again. This version of Voldemort was much more detailed than Draco's had been.

Did Travers have personal experience of the man?

Half the Slytherins, as it turned out, were afraid of Voldemort. Four were afraid of me, as was one other Ravenclaw.

Pansy Parkinson's fear was a mirror that showed her as being ugly. Daphne Greengrass's fear was of herself in a hospital bed, looking deathly ill.

Blaise Zabini's was his mother offering him something to drink. Apparently not all fears had obvious meanings.

I'd thought of skipping this class; showing my fears to others ran the risk of outing me, or of weakening a position that I had worked very hard to achieve. Yet not showing up would also weaken my position. If people thought I was afraid of a boggart, or afraid to show what my fear was, they might think that I was safe to attack again.

So many students were afraid of Voldemort that I had to wonder what the point of the exercise was. If Travers was a Death Eater, it had to be difficult to watch his boss being humiliated over and over.

Or maybe he was like a House Elf and secretly wanted to see his boss fail.

His expression never altered throughout any of it, although he did take notes?

A quick look over his shoulder with several flies showed that he was noting our fears in a column next to our name. Why was he collecting that information? For his master? Of was it for some lesson further down the line?

I'd been working on a plan all night to deal with this. I'd push my emotions into my bugs, as much as I could. In the past, I'd only been able to push the expression of my emotions into my bugs, but I'd been working on doing it all night, and I'd thought I was able to manage it.

What was I afraid of, really?

Being discovered?

I had a plan to deal with that, beginning with my Peruvian Darkness powder and ending with the tunnel to Hogsmeade that the staff didn't think we knew about. There was a floo in Hogsmeade that I could use to get to Diagon Alley, and from there I'd make my way to America by slipping onto a ship.

Before I'd come to this school, I wouldn't have had the resources to have made it on my own, but things were different now. I had stolen several books from the library, books that I would return if this all went well. If it didn't, I'd use them to continue my studies on my own. I'd also looked up the location of America's version of Diagon alley, and I would be able to get supplies there to educate myself on my own.

Leaving Hermione and Neville behind would be painful, but they'd be relatively safe as long as they were at school. It wasn't like I would be able to protect them once they got home anyway.

I'd been storing non-perishable food in my fanny pack for a while now, preparing for the event that I was discovered. I'd heard preppers call it a bug out bag, which I found a little ironic.

In Earth Aleph, preppers were considered crazy cranks. In my world, Earth Bet, with Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine and other dangers, they'd been considered just a little more prepared than the rest of us.

What else could I possibly fear? Most of the fears of my past were things that I had dealt with, which meant that they probably were no longer my greatest fear.

Some of the Ravenclaws were showing obvious fears; being told they were failures, giant spiders, snakes, floating, flaming skulls. Some of them were afraid of Voldemort too, but not as many as the Slytherins, which made sense. Voldemort had to feel closer to people who had death eaters in the family. In some cases, he might even be closer.

Was this an exercise to see who wasn't afraid of Voldemort?

"Miss Hebert?" Travers said.

Sighing, I stepped forward.

The entire class was watching. I casually reached into my fanny pack and pulled out the darkness powder in my left hand, ready to throw it.

Shifting, the creature settled into a familiar form.

It was Lisa, wearing the costume I'd last seen her in; the black bodysuit with purple lines and the domino mask. She was leaning toward me with a look of terror on her face.

"Wake up, boss!"

What?

She reached out as though she was going to shake me.

"You've been dreaming. It's not over! If you don't wake up he's going to destroy everything!"

I felt a chill of horror go down my spine. Had my victory over Scion not been real? Had it just been the feverish dream of a dying brain?

Was this?

Which was more likely... that I'd woken up in another body in a world with real magic, and that I'd ended up going to a school for magic, or that I was hallucinating?

Why hadn't it even occurred to me before?

I'd thought that I'd resolved my issues about school, about Emma and Sophia and Madison. I'd had more important things to worry about for a long time now. Yet here I was in a school again, dealing with bullies in a world where I was no longer helpless.

Was this my minds way of trying to work through that trauma?

"You need to wake up!" Tattletale said. "He's coming!"

She looked behind her and she screamed, and a moment later a blast of light came from another place, hitting her. She reached out to me, as though to beg for my help, but the flesh melted from her skull.

I shook my head. I'd sent the Undersiders away. Lisa wouldn't have been there to try to wake me up. If she was, everything would have been lost anyway. If I questioned my very existence, then what would anything I did here and now matter?

For a moment I closed my eyes and I tried to wake up. Nothing happened.

Sighing, I opened my eyes again, and I lifted my wand.

"Ridikulous," I said firmly.

The form in front of me shuddered, and a moment later it shifted into another familiar form.

It was me... not the old me, but the new one. My own body looked incredibly small and vulnerable, weak now that I looked at it from the outside.

"I'm still here," she said. She looked at me entreatingly. "Why won't you let me go?"

It took me a moment to realize the implications. Was this Millie Scrivener? Was she trapped in her own body, living in an unending hell as she watched a parasite take over the life she should have had? Unlike me, she was actually an eleven year old girl, and she'd seen her family murdered in front of her. She'd seen me do things that had to have horrified her.

I felt an old, familiar feeling; it felt like the walls were closing in around me. Was that what it was like for her? Trapped in unending darkness, with no one who cared what had happened to her?

I'd barely even thought about her or her family, yet it was possible that she had been right there beside me all along. Just because this was my boggart didn't mean that the fear itself wasn't real.

After all, for all the children who were afraid of Voldemort, he really was a threat to them and their families.

"Ridikulous!" I said more firmly.

Both of the things the monster was showing me couldn't be true, not simultaneously. That meant that at least one of them had to be a lie, and maybe both of them.

The shape shimmered again.

It was me again; but this time I was standing over a pile of bodies. There were faces I recognized, including people who were in this very room. Hermione, Draco, Crabbe, Goyle...Snape, Dumbledore. I was standing over them with a bloody scalpel. My entire body was drenched with blood.

On the walls behind me, several of the students were pinned up, their torsos cut open with a fine precision. Some of them were skill alive, staring at us with a look of sick horror on their faces, even as their lungs were still moving and their hearts were still beating.

Some of them had been flayed, and thanks to my experiences tracking down the Slaughterhouse Nine, I knew exactly what that looked like. Blood was pooling toward the pile of bodies in the middle of the floor.

I'd seen this before with Bonesaw... no...Riley now. She was better, and I would never....

It wasn't like I'd ever do something like this; take my enemies apart so that I could figure out how they worked; how magic worked. Even if Scion really wasn't gone, I wouldn't...

I was staring down at them all with a dispassionate look, and then I looked up.

"It's a start," my voice said. It was cold and seemed to lack even the slightest hint of emotion. "But I'll have to do them all. It's for the best."

"Ridikulous!" I heard Travers say beside me.

The shape flew backwards, and a moment later the Wardrobe closed and locked itself.

"That was... a little more interesting than I expected," he said. He was staring at me like he'd never seen me before, and looking around, I saw that everyone in the class looked pale. Some of them looked like they were about to vomit, and I could hear a sobbing sound from the back of the class.

Hermione wouldn't look at me.

Was this because of what I'd seen earlier, or because of what she'd just seen? Did she really think that I was the same kind of maniac that I'd spent more than two years hunting down?

I was better than that. I'd done horrible things, but only to stop things that were even worse.

What else would have shown up if Travers hadn't banished the thing? A dead baby?

That would have done wonders for my reputation... knowing that I'd once killed a baby, even if it was only to save him from an unending torture. Boggarts didn't give context, and I certainly wasn't about to explain.

"Sometimes it is difficult to find a sense of humor about these things," he said, and for once his voice almost sounded gentle. "I will expect results by the end of term, but I think it might be best if you face the boggart on your own. I'm not sure the rest of the class would be... comfortable facing your fears."

It seemed that everyone in class was averting their eyes. I could still hear sobbing from the back of the class.

Maybe I would have been better to have skipped this class after all. It hadn't left me in a weaker position, but it had possibly damaged my reputation.

Worse, it had left me with some deep, disquieting fears.

Was this world real, or was it all a hallucination, the last gasp of a dying brain? Although I tried to push the thought away, it horrified me on a level that nothing else would have.

Even if this world was real, what about the other fears that had been revealed. Had I stepped into an empty body, or was I trapping a young girl in a hell from which she couldn't escape?

Last of all, was the thing I was most afraid of myself? I'd done a lot of terrible things in the name of the greater good; it got easier and easier to do them the more of them you did. At what point would I lose that last vestige of morality and become the thing I'd always been fighting against?

I'd seen what pragmatism had done to Alexandria, to Eidolon, to Contessa. Was I any better? Would I become even worse when I had much more power than I had now?

All in all, I found myself wishing that for just once I'd stayed in bed.1885ShayneTMay 4, 2019View discussionThreadmarks Interlude: Staff and studentsView contentShayneTMay 6, 2019#9,266"Riddikulous!" Severus shouted.

It was good that he was a talented occlumens; having Voldemort see what he had to do to dismiss his Boggart would likely have resulted in an extensive session with the Cruciatis curse.

Locking the boggart in the box, he turned the corner and glared at Travers, who was coming down the hall.

"You had to teach boggarts," he snapped.

Travers had the grace to look ashamed. "It seemed important."

Any other year, Severus would have applauded the effort; it was rare to have a competent teacher in Defense, and students would find a strong background in defense useful in the coming years.

"Then you should have excused Hebert. You were informed of her background."

"I expected to see her parents dead, not.... what I saw."

There was a certain cruelty to that, but Travers had always thought of the muggleborn as being a little less than human. It wasn't a sentiment shared by Severus, even though his own muggle father had barely been human. He'd been abusive enough that Severus had a fair idea of what his own Boggart would have been at eleven, and he knew that some of his charges would have similar boggarts.

Even without the present situation, had the man never considered privacy?

"You know how boggarts are created!" Severus snapped. "Which is why we're having to deal with... this."

"I had no idea the girl was so disturbed. I did notice that the muggleborn seemed somewhat less bothered."

"They've seen similar things on television and in movies," Severus said. "At least some of them, even if not quite to the detail of her vision."

The purebloods tended to live more protected lives, at least in some ways, although often what they most needed protection from was their own parents. Muggles did not generate Boggarts, any more than they generated ghosts... only Wizardkind did, and most often Wizarding children, because their fears tended to be more intense, and they had fewer emotional defenses.

There were now Voldemorts and versions of Taylor Hebert being seen all over the castle; along with Giant spiders and snakes. Travers had inadvertently spawned at least a half-dozen boggarts when he'd traumatized a class of first year by showing them exactly what was in Hebert's head.

Even the bits and pieces he'd managed to piece together from his glimpses inside her mind had shown him what a spectacularly bad idea that was. The girl was seriously disturbed; whether it was seeing the deaths of her parents, or brain damage from the Cruciatis curses she'd been exposed to, Severus didn't know.

It was odd that she seemed to have a strange sort of affection for him; it was something that he could read in her body language as much as from her mind. She wasn't afraid of him at all, no matter how much he tried to distance himself from her.

If it had been any other child, he would have assumed it was because he had rescued her from that culvert and the life she had been living. He hadn't seen anything like that in her mind, however. Instead, she had a strange feeling of... kinship with him. It was as though she recognized something in him in herself.

The thought gave him chills. He couldn't even begin to imagine what they might have in common, and if they did, what it might imply about his own sanity.

"We've caught half of them," Travers said.

They'd caught three. Half a dozen was only an estimation, and most of the ones they had caught had been in the form of Voldemort. The Taylor Heberts had been a great deal; more cunning and difficult to catch, which was concerning in many ways.

If they were a pale reflection of the real thing, but had some measure of whatever Seer ability she was using to seem to know a little bit about everything, they were going to be almost impossible to catch, other than by Taylor herself, and she was still having trouble with the counterspell.

Apparently not having much of a sense of humor was a crippling impediment at times. It made Severus wonder how Hebert would manage a Patronus charm. He suspected that she'd have even more trouble with that spell than with Riddikulous. Did the girl even have any good memories?

Severus scowled. "They're getting better at hiding; we have no idea how many of them there really are."

Were multiple sightings actually just the same boggart in different places, or were they different boggarts?

Even sending all of the students to their respective dorms wasn't enough to eliminate the danger. Boggarts were drawn to the taste of fear, and Travers hadn't had a chance to teach the rest of the classes the spell.

"And what will you be teaching them next? The Unforgivables? We'll end up with dead children in the hallways over schoolyard squabbles."

"I'm not that stupid," Travers said.

"I've seen your memories in the Pensieve... you should have shut it down sooner than you did. What were you trying to accomplish? The fears of the children in my House could be dangerous; if you had revealed that Mr. Malfoy was afraid of being beaten by his father for example and revealed it to all of his classmates, I suspect that your job would be the least of your worries."

"I'll take that into account for the future lessons," Travers said. He scowled. "Why do we even have that girl here? She beat three of her classmates with a sock, and then threatened to push others off the stairs. I don't understand why the pureblood parents aren't demanding her head."

"Because they don't think a muggleborn is ever going to be a real danger," Severus said. "After all, they're poor at magic, or haven't you heard."

"It's not her magic I'm worried about," Travers said. He grimaced. "I was hoping to get a clue as to what motivates her."

"I know what motivates her," Severus said. "I'm far more concerned about what she has experienced. That last memory was too... specific to be manufactured. I fear Ms. Hebert is damaged more than we first suspected."

"So you will help get rid of her?"

"If I got rid of all the students who inconvenienced me, I would be teaching an empty classroom. The Headmaster, in his... wisdom, has chosen to keep her in my House as an object lesson."

"That muggles are dangerous?" Travers said. "I couldn't agree more."

"That some of them are competent."

Travers snorted. "I'm not even sure she's really a mudblood. She's a little too talented, and her first vision showed a spell I've never seen before."

"There are strange magics in parts of the Americas," Severus said. "As well as other countries."

Something skittered at the edge of his vision, and Severus scowled.

"Deal with your mistake," he snapped, and he headed down the hallway.

************

"Do you really think we're safe?" Tracey asked.

"We'll be fine," Millicent said. "You know her. She was afraid that she might be terrible, but that means she's not, right? Do you think You-Know-Who would be afraid of what he might do?"

"The thing that scares me is... what if that wasn't what she was afraid of? What if that was the funny version, like putting a Death Eater in a dress or something?"

"The boggart didn't go away until the Professor sent it back," Millicent said. "It was what she was afraid of."

"And the rest of it? Worrying that the world isn't real? That's what people who are mental worry about."

People who didn't think things were real could do anything. Nothing would stop them because there was no sense that there were consequences. Part of the reason some people were so cruel to muggles was that they didn't see them as human.

The thought of someone who didn't think of anyone as human was terrifying.

"Are you talking about me?" Taylor asked, coming around the corner. She was wearing her pajamas, and she looked like she'd just brushed her teeth.

"No...no..." Tracey said. "We weren't. We were talking about... boys."

The terror in her voice made her want to jump up and run, but there wasn't any place to go. The girl seemed to know everything even before anyone had said it, and Tracey suspected that she wouldn't be able to hide no matter where she went.

Taylor stared at them, her eyes unblinking. Her head tilted to one side. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"

Her voice had gone flat in a way that was terrifying. There had always been something strange about the way she moved, like she was a preying mantis instead of a human being, but when she was angry there was something….

"No..."

Tracey's voice quavered, and she fought to suppress a grimace. Her bowels felt tight, and she felt like throwing up.

"That sounds like a lie," Taylor said. She took a step toward Tracey. "I don't like lies."

Her movements became even stranger as she walked forward. She stared directly at Tracey, and there was a look of almost predatory anticipation.

"You know what I do to people who lie to me, don't you?" Taylor asked. She smiled, and her smile seemed to stretch across her entire face. "I make them disappear."

She snapped her neck to one side, and there was an unnatural cracking sound. She began walking toward them, her limbs moving in an exaggerated, unnatural fashion.

"But before I do that, we're going to have a little.... discussion."

Tracey screamed, and a moment later a second Taylor appeared at the door. It looked as though she'd been rushing to get to the room, even before Tracey had screamed. Behind her was the Prefect, Gemma.

"Riddikulous!" Gemma shouted.

The Taylor who was closer to them was suddenly wearing a pink tutu and was singing a weird little song. It rushed to jump into their wardrobe.

"I'm not sleeping with that in there," Tracey said.

"I'm afraid of You-Know-Who!" Millicent said quickly to the real Taylor, who was staring at the both of them.

"I'll get the professors," Gemma said. "I've got your wardrobe locked so it can't get out."

She left, leaving them alone with the real Taylor.

"I'm not afraid of you," Tracey said.

"You should be," Taylor said. Her smile grew and grew, and her face turned into something inhuman, and almost insectoid.

She started walking toward them, her arms and legs twisting unnaturally with a strange cracking sound. "I've got to start somewhere, don't I?"

Tracey gasped and woke up.

**********

"We've got more than a dozen traumatized students," Madam Pomprey said. "And this Bevy of Boggarts is not making the situation any better. I ran out of calming potion three hours ago."

"It was perhaps unwise for Mr. Travers to hold his lesson in public," Dumbledore said. "Some of the students may have fears they would have rather kept private."

"And her?" Madam Pomfrey asked. "She's showing signs of serious instability."

"Is it any surprise?" Dumbledore asked. "What would you have me do? Expell her? She'd be dead within two weeks. You know what's happening out there, and she hasn't made any friends among the Pureblooded parents with the things she has done."

""I'm just concerned," Madam Pomfrey said. "I'm almost as concerned about the first two visions as the last. Someone who believes that the world is not real... if the world is not real, why hold back?"

"I believe that her last fear means that she doesn't really believe that she is dreaming," Dumbledore said. "As you say, why worry about killing everyone if they are just a phantasm? In a way, I am relieved to see the contents of her final fear."

"Why?" Madam Pomfrey stared at him, horrified.

"Because it means that she is not lost," he said. "That image is not one that Voldemort would have ever had, because he would not have believed that it mattered what he did to anyone other than himself. She is actively afraid of hurting other people."

"She's rather good at it for someone who is afraid."

"And that's why she is afraid," Dumbledore said. "Precisely because she is good at it. She has skills that are... unusual for someone of her age. Those do concern me. Yet I have seen hints that ultimately she is a good person. She protects the innocent, and the helpless, and she is not dangerous if she is treated with even a modicum of respect."

"This is a school full of children!" Madam Pomfrey said. "Most of them at an age where respect is the last thing they understand."

"Then perhaps it is time they learn," Dumbledore said. He expression tightened. "Being told that they are superior has given some of the purebloods ideas....ideas that make them vulnerable to certain outside influences."

"Miss Hebert is not an object lesson. She could have killed any of those students."

"But she didn't. She applied exactly the amount of force she intended to, and no more," Dumbledore said. "She has shown a level of restraint that is surprising in someone her age."

"If that is what you call restrait, I'm not sure I want to see what losing control would look like."

"I think we already have," Dumbledore said. "My greatest concern is the detail of her final fear. Had that been an image taken from muggle entertainment, there wouldn't have been the other elements."

"Other elements?"

"You didn't notice the smells?" Dumbledore asked. "To my regret, I have seen a scene like that once, when I was in Africa, and I will never forget how it smelled. Those smells were absolutely authentic, and if the Death Eaters have escalated to that level of cruelty, then we have much more to be concerned about than we thought."

"So you plan to speak to the girl?"

"I think I must," Dumbledore said. "If only to find out more about the crimes that have been perpetrated against her. It is something I should have done at the beginning of term, but I suspected that she was too traumatized to deal with it. However, now I am reconsidering. Some boils should be lanced, after all."

"Muggle quackery," Madam Pomfrey sniffed.

"They do the best they can," Dumbledore admonished mildly. "And their methods are much less barbaric than they were even when I was a child. Perhaps one day they will surpass us."

Madam Pomfrey sniffed. "As though that will ever happen."

"As soon as this situation with the Boggarts is resolved, Miss Hebert and I will have a chat,' Dumbledore said.

"Good. It's about time."

***********

"You didn't see it," Hermione said. "It's... I don't know what to think."

"You can't hold somebody responsible for what they're afraid of," Neville said, leaning close to her. "At least she's not afraid of Professor Snape."

Hermione laughed mirthlessly. "The only thing she's afraid of is herself. That's what everybody is saying."

"Well," Neville said. "That's good, right? If she is worried about killing you, that means she cares about you."

"She's afraid she's going to snap and kill everybody," Hermione said. "Not just me, or you, but all wizards everywhere."

"She couldn't do that, could she?" Neville asked, frowning. "It's silly to think that one wizard could do something like that."

"You-know-who wants to kill all the muggles, and they outnumber us six thousand to one," Hermione said. "I can think of a couple of ways to kill all of us, and if I can, I know she can think of ten times as many."

"Wait... how?"

"I'm not going to tell anybody!" Hermione said, staring at him. "Those aren't the kind of ideas that you talk about."

"Imagine that you had those kind of ideas all the time," Neville said. "Because you'd had to have them to defend yourself. Wouldn't that worry you?"

Hermione was quiet for a moment. "It worries me that I can even think of the things that I've been thinking about."

"How much worse must it be for Taylor? Even imitation Taylors are giving the Professors a run for their money, at least from what I hear."

The students were being escorted to and from class by Prefects, and otherwise were being confined to quarters. The library was one of the few places where students from other houses could still talk to each other, and so it was more crowded than usual.

"You're mate is mental!" Hermione heard a redhead say loudly from one table over. Apparently he'd been listening to their conversation. She needed to learn the muffling charm, sooner rather than later.

Hermione fought the urge to make a rude gesture. The last thing she needed to do right now was to lose house points. She was already getting pressure from older members of her house about associating with Taylor. The general consensus seemed to be that she was a dangerous, unstable loner.

If it was this hard for Hermione, how much harder was it for Taylor? To have the whole school look at her and think she was mental, or worse, a killer?

Taylor had always seemed above it all, as though the words people used didn't bother her at all, but Hermione knew that couldn't be true. The fact was that the boggart had proven that she had emotions, that she could be hurt.

She felt her face flush.

"What must she think of me? She saw my boggart!"

Neville patted her on her back, but it did nothing to eliminate her shame.1894ShayneTMay 6, 2019View discussionThreadmarks DetentionsView contentShayneTMay 8, 2019#9,685Over the past few weeks, I'd had my detentions with the various heads of houses spread out. I suspected that was partially because they hadn't wanted to deal with me. I'd ended up having a single detention a week.

Professor Sprout had been relaxing; we'd mostly worked with plants and I'd talked about my limited experience in gardening when I was a child with my mother. That hadn't amounted to much, but working with Sprout had been relaxing in a way I wasn't used to. She hadn't been judgmental, and she gave off the feeling that she would actually support you in whatever you did.

It actually made me a little jealous of Hufflepuff.

Snape was supportive in his own way, but it wasn't the same in Slytherin. There, even the first years had to be on guard with what they said to each other, lest it be used against them.

Professor Sinestra had me writing out star charts. I was still struggling to see the significance of her class, and so this was actually remedial work for me.

Homework didn't really influence final grades anyway; all that was important was the final exams. Homework was simply for keeping track of what students understood and where they needed help. I wasn't sure I liked the system; I really did believe that some students didn't test well, and it put a lot of importance on the result of a single test.

However, I didn't really care all that much.

My detention with Professor Flitwick had involved my teaching some of the remedial students some of the charms I had mastered. It had opened my eyes as to just how slow and recalcitrant some of the younger students could be. The fact that they'd been purebloods had been proof that the stereotype of muggleborn as not being good at magic wasn't true.

Detention with Snape had been the same as always; being forced to work with ingredients that most children found disgusting. For obvious reasons, cutting up flobberworms and dealing with insect parts didn't bother me at all, and I was careful enough in what I did that it didn't bother Snape all that much.

He'd done his best to ignore me during the detention, likely because he felt that my talking to him would make it less of a distraction. I'd spent much of the time mindlessly going through the motions while I was listening in to things happening in the Slytherin common room.

However, now I was supposed to go to detention with Professor McGonagall. I'd threatened her Gryffindors. She was better at hiding her bias against the Slytherins than Snape was in his bias against her house, but it still showed somehow.

Worse, now that the boggart issue had made things worse for everyone, I had a feeling that the professors were irritated with me. It was getting a little tiring having people pointing their wand at me and shouting Riddikulous all the time, even if I understood the reason.

The boggarts seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense what was around them, one that didn't have anything to do with bugs. It had taken me a little while to realize that their abilities had nothing to do with my own; what they had was the version of me that other people perceived.

It meant that they knew when people were coming, and it also seemed to mean that they could sense fear from a greater distance. They seemed to be feeding on that fear, and they stalked the halls because that seemed to be what people thought I did.

I was just glad that none of them seemed to be me in vampire form; apparently nobody had really believed that rumor in any kind of a real way.

The fact that they couldn't be trapped made it even worse. They had to be trapped and transported to a place where there was no fear to be had. Even muggle fear would be enough to sustain them, although it would be a pale imitation that would leave them sickly and weak.

It also wasn't something they could generate, since muggles couldn't really perceive them. To a muggle, a boggart only manifested as an uneasy feeling in the pit of their stomach when they saw an open dark closet at night, or heard a creak in the corner.

The boggarts would fade away eventually if they had no fear to sustain them. How long that would take seemed to vary from boggle to boggles, and wizards didn't seem to have any comprehension of a scientific study.

No one was even sure of just how many boggarts there were; I had a suspicion that there were more than the official count, because I could feel some of them at the edge of my senses with my bugs.

The boggart incident wasn't making me any friends, and it wasn't likely to make McGonagall happy with me.

Gemma was scowling.

"I'm not sure why I need to escort you to detention; clearly you aren't one the students who is scared of them."

"I still can't get the Riddikulous spell right," I said. "Apparently, I don't find my own fears very funny."

"Well, at least if you see another one of you coming down the hall, you know it's not you," she said. "I woke up in the middle of the night with one sitting on my chest. Do you know what that's like?"

"I heard the screaming."

"I'm a prefect!" she said. She looked a little frazzled. Lacking sleep apparently wasn't good for her. "I'm supposed to be the one that comes and takes care of the little ones when they have nightmares. I'm not supposed to be the one who needs help."

At least the one that had attacked Gemma hadn't been in my form. I'd taken note of the students who were most afraid of me, and just as importantly those who weren't.

"I'm sure I'd be just as startled," I lied.

Apparently I wasn't as convincing as I'd thought, because she looked at me skeptically.

"We're here," she said, with what sounded like relief.

"Miss Hebert," Professor McGonagall said. Her voice was cold, and conveyed none of the warmth I occasionally heard from her when she talked to some of her own house.

"Professor," I said, my voice as neutral as I could make it.

"After the things you did to my students, I was very concerned about your continued presence at this school," she said. "Which is why I chose to have my detention be the last of your detentions. That would give me a chance to observe you and overcome my own... biases."

"And what have you concluded?" I asked.

"Until recently, you have been an exemplary student. Your penmanship is beginning to improve, and you seem to have the writing skills and mind of an adult."

I fought to keep myself from wincing. Did she know what I was, and was she fishing, or was she trying to offer me the sort of complement that any other eleven year old would have been flattered by.

"That is why I feel that I can be honest with you," she said. "I am worried about you."

"What?"

"I saw the pensieve memories of your boggart," she said. "And those are not the fears of an ordinary, well adjusted girl."

"What's a pensieve?" I asked.

"Wizards have ways of extracting memories and allowing others to view them," she said. "To step into a memory and move around within them."

I stared at her in horror.

"That's.... that's a violation," I said.

"A certain degree of cooperation is required," she said. "Else the memory will not be reliable."

"So if someone goes to trial, they can just use this pensieve thing to prove they aren't guilty?"

She shook her head.

"It would be easy for a criminal to simply obliviate himself," she said. "To wipe his own memory of the crimes. Already criminals sometimes obliviate their victims to make tracking them more difficult."

There must have been something in my expression, because she grimaced.

"I did not begin this to give you ideas for further atrocities, Miss Hebert," she said. "I am here to speak about my concerns for you."

"Could a pensieve work on things that someone didn't sense?" I asked. "If their eyes were closed?"

"I'm not certain," she said slowly. "It is true that the pensieve sometimes allows the study of things that the original user does not remember seeing. It is possible that they actually saw these things, but were not aware of them, though."

"So if someone only had the memory of voices," I said. "Say, of their parents' killers, there might be something that could be done with that?"

"Pensieves are rare," she said. "Only the most powerful wizards have them."

"Like the headmaster," I said.

She stared at me.

"You said that you had viewed the memory; that means that the device is likely here, in the school. The most powerful wizard in all of Great Britain is the Headmaster. It's not a great leap of logic."

"I'm not used to children of your age using logic much," she said.

"Any wizards, really," I said.

She looked vaguely offended.

"Muggles don't have the same advantages that wizards do," I explained. "Which means that they have to think harder if they want to get anything done. Also they have the advantage of a greater talent pool."

"Oh?"

"Imagine that there were only ten wizards in all of Britain instead of ten thousand. The law of averages suggests that at least half of them would be idiots. Most of the rest of them would be normal, and there might be one or two of them who is exceptional."

She nodded cautiously.

"One person can't do that much by himself," I said. "And a genius surrounded by idiots is limited. Every genius needs competent people around him, or he will be stunted in what he can do."

She was silent, watching me closely.

"So ten thousand wizards will have five thousand idiots, and maybe one thousand competent people. That's barely enough to run a society. The muggles have more competent people because they outnumber witches and wizards by six thousand to one. There are a lot of stupid muggles, but there's also a lot of competent muggles out there, which wizardkind doesn't want to acknowledge."

It was why large high schools tended to field better football teams than small ones. It wasn't that the players on small rural teams were terrible; occasionally there were some really good ones. It was because the available talent pool left coaches with more to pick from. In a class with twenty boys, putting together a football team pretty much involved including everyone who wasn't actually in a wheelchair.

Wizarding Britain had the population of a small town. Worldwide, the Wizarding population would have had a third the population of Jamaica.

"Whatever your thoughts are about the Wizarding world, you have to live in it, dear," she said. "Perhaps if there are things you do not like, you will work to change them?"

"I will," I said. "As soon as I have the power."

"Preferably without murder and mayhem," she said.

I was silent.

She stared at me and then she sighed.

"Severus tells me that you tend to see these sessions as additional tutoring. These are supposed to be punitive, and although you have been doing better, you still have to pay for your crimes. After thinking about it, I think I will have you muck out Thestral stalls."

"The bone horses?" I asked, surprised. "Do they even defecate?"

She didn't look surprised that I could see them; supposedly only people who had seen death could see them, which made me wonder if I could see them better than anyone else. After all, I had seen more death than anyone in this entire world.

"Not as much as an ordinary horse, but they are living beings, dear. Hagrid has been reinstated as of yesterday, which means that the stalls haven't been mucked out in a month. I would like you to report to him at his hut and he will show you what to do."

"I like horses," I said. I smiled up at her slightly. "Thank you. You could have done something terrible, like having me dust the restricted section in the library."

She stared at me for a moment, and then gave a startled laugh.

"You'll have to wait for a naïve replacement of Mr. Travers before you get one of those. There's not a professor in this school who would be that foolish."

I shrugged. "It was worth a try."

I'd known she wouldn't go for it, but since she'd been this decent to me after I'd threatened to murder her students, I'd thought it would be worth a laugh.

"We aren't done speaking about this," she said. "Knowing what you've gone through, I can only imagine how difficult it might be."

"You can understand how I might not want to talk about it, either," I said. "I appreciate the fact that the staff hasn't spread around what happened to my parents, leaving it up to me just how much I wanted to talk about it... or not."

"I haven't heard that you talk about it at all," she said.

"Even so," I said.

"Sometimes it is good to talk about these things," she said.

"I understand the point of therapy," I said. "But there isn't anyone in Hogwarts, and maybe not anywhere in Wizarding Britain who is trained as a counselor, and a muggle therapist wouldn't be allowed to hear anything about this world."

She frowned.

"Professor Snape told me on the day that I met him. I don't know why some Squib or minimally competent Wizard doesn't go to school to get a degree ; it looks like Wizards could use counseling."

"More now than ever," she murmured faintly.

Was that a comment about me, or about Voldemort? Maybe both? I couldn't really read her meaning.

"Off with you now," she said. "Rubeus is expecting you sooner rather than later."

"All right," I said. Looking up, I asked her, "Is using a pensieve difficult?"

"They are difficult to make," she said. "But not to use. However, some skill is required to extract the memories. I do not believe that you will be able to break into his office and use the headmaster's pensieve without his assistance."

I looked up at her, startled.

"I have taught at this school for much longer than you have been alive," she said. "Which means that I know how young people think. For all that you are a Slytherin, I think you have many qualities of my house, including bravery, but that also means you can sometimes make foolhardy decisions."

Shrugging, I said, "My decisions seem perfectly logical to me."

"I'm sure they do, dear," she said. "The question is whether they will seem the same way in ten years."

"Judging that would require me to still be here in ten years," I said. "Which is what I'm trying to do. I'd love to just.... what do ordinary Wizards do, anyway?"

"They work for the Ministry," she said. "Or open their own shop."

"So government or the private sector," I said I frowned. "Maybe I could open a private security company? Bodyguards, protecting assets, that sort of thing?"

"It sounds like you'd like to be an auror," she said.

I shook my head. "They don't get paid enough and nobody likes them."

"The only people who fear aurors are people who have done something wrong," she said.

I smirked. "You still believe that. In the hands of a corrupt government, police become thugs and enforcers. In the worst cases, they become agents of terror, who make people disappear to be tortured and then killed. It's endemic in the muggle world, not just in past history, but right now."

"That wouldn't happen here," she said.

"Wouldn't it?" I asked. "Can you tell me that there weren't sham trials after the last war, where people who were rich were released because they claimed to be under some kind of curse, while the poor were killed or even worse, Kissed?"

She was silent, frowning.

"When the rich get to make the rules, people lose faith in the system," I said. "Why follow the rules if you do not think they apply to the fellow down the road?"

"The poor are usually not the ones who revolt," I continued. "But they usually follow those who are richer, and the problem is that if they win, they tend to become the rich ones, and then the cycle starts again."

"So cynical for someone of your age," she said.

"Family murder tends to do that," I said. "I think Hagrid is expecting me?"

She nodded and I stood up.

"If I need anything, I will call you," I said. "But I'm doing my best not to need anyone."

As I left the room, my bugs overheard her murmuring, :That sounds like a lonely life."

Shoveling thestral crap wasn't the worst detention I could have been assigned, and if I was lucky, I might even be able to find new kinds of bugs I had never seen before. Feces often had weird kinds of larvae in them, and magical feces might have magical larvae.

Or maybe it would just be crap. That was the story of my life, after all.