“I’m going to Dumbledore!”
Hailey, Ron, and Hermione waited patiently, just around the corner, for Filch to leave. “What do you think got him so mad?” Ron asked, looking between the two girls.
Hermione shrugged. “Donno. But something tells me we might be about to find out.”
Hailey, meanwhile, looked up at the passage walls. “This is… Yes. I wonder if Myrtle flooded the passage again?”
“What?” Ron asked- then a distant door slammed, so he peered around the corner. “Oh. Yup.”
“I wonder why?” Hailey asked, as all three of them rounded the corner and walked towards the small lake that seemed to still be oozing from under the door. Filch’s chair was tipped on its side, a book lying open in the puddle; Filch had obviously been manning his usual spot when the flood started.
Hermione trotted over, splashing straight through the puddle like it wasn’t there, set the chair upright, and moved the book onto it, before drawing her wand to dry off the pages with a quick spell.
Then Hailey reached her, moving much slower through the miniature lake, and opened the door to Myrtle’s bathroom. “Myrtle?” she called. “What’s wrong?”
“Who’s that?” Myrtle cried. “Come to throw something else at me?”
“It’s us,” Hailey answered, splashing her way up to Myrtle’s stall, where her voice was coming from. “And who threw it at you?”
Myrtle practically exploded out of the toilet in a great big rush of water. “How should I know? I was sitting in the U-bend, thinking about death, and it fell right through the top of my head!”
“Sheesh, no need to yell,” Hailey told her. “We’re not going to throw anything at you. Did you… hear anyone out here?”
“Not until you came in,” she wailed.
“Then it probably wasn’t intentional,” Hailey told her. “Filch was guarding outside, so unless he threw it…” She scowled. “Musta been caught or stuck someplace, and fallen in after the thrower left. Though I suppose that could be intentional too.” She looked up. “What was it?”
Myrtle stared at her. “A book,” she answered, and pointed. “It got washed out. It’s over there.”
Hailey looked. “A book?” she asked. “I wonder who was trying to throw it away?”
While Hailey walked over to meet Ron by the soggy book under the sinks, Hermione instead stepped in front of Myrtle’s stall- and, once again, silently thanked Pinkie for the waterproofing spell. She was sure they would investigate it well enough, but something more important had just come to mind. “Myrtle?” she asked.
Myrtle looked up at her, despite being positioned a good two feet higher up. “What?” she pouted.
“Do you… collide with water?”
Myrtle stared at her. “Do I… what?”
“I mean, you’re a ghost, right?”
She nodded slowly.
“Yet you’re able to splash the water out of that toilet?”
“Yes?” she asked, like it was obvious.
“But ghosts can’t interact with water,” she stated.
Myrtle looked down, into the toilet, then scooped a double handful of water out of it. “I can,” she stated simply. “Whenever I want to. And… And whenever I’m not paying attention.” She gave a small shudder, and dropped the gathered water straight through her hands to the edge of the toilet, from where it splashed onto the floor.
Hermione scowled. “But ghosts can’t interact with anything physical, no matter how hard they try… and poltergeists- like Peeves- are just as solid as you or I- er… as just me, I guess. Which means…” She scowled.
“Hangon,” Ron said, splashing up next to Hermione to look at Myrtle. “How come that toilet’s always got water in it to splash out if nobody uses this bathroom?”
Myrtle let out a small snort of laughter- possibly the first time Hermione had ever seen her laugh. “It’s got a self-flushing charm on it,” she told him. “Sometimes, if it flushes when I’m not paying attention, I’ll find myself all the way down in the lake.”
Hermione scowled thoughtfully. “Is there anything else you can interact with?”
Myrtle smiled. “Polyjuice Potion,” she answered brightly. “I think I actually managed to die a second time.”
Hailey appeared behind Ron, peering over his shoulder, the book in her hand. “How’d you manage to do that?” she asked. “I was under the impression that ghosts were immortal. Especially after Nick got…” She shuddered.
Myrtle giggled. “It was dreadful!” she announced. Then she paused. “Well, maybe not. I found a dropped hair of Silver’s, and used some water to transfer it to the cauldron, then scooped up the potion, and swallowed it.”
“You… Swallowed, it,” Hermione said. “Just like that? And it worked?”
“Yep!”
She tilted her head. “What effects did the potion have? Er, if any?”
Myrtle shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I passed out. When I came to again, a week had passed, and I was in the lake.”
Ron tilted his head as well. “Did the merpeople have anything to say?”
She shook her head. “They don’t go near where the pipes let out,” she told them. “Too stinky. And no currents go through there either, so that’s where I was.” She scowled, folding her arms. “I didn’t notice anything different.” Then she grinned, glancing up at Ron. “Ronelda.”
Ron’s ears turned red. “I hated that,” he told her calmly.
“In any case,” Hailey interrupted, “how did you die the first time?”
“Good morning,” Bonbon greeted from the head of the long table when Applejack appeared, letting herself into the ‘empty’ classroom that they used for the Student Instructor Program Management Meetings every Saturday morning. “How’s that flu coming?”
“Better,” Applejack answered, her voice a little rougher than usual. “Not nearly as bad as last year. Madam Pomfrey says mah farm must be warded or something- but mah immune system is catching up fine.”
Bonbon scowled. “Or something, I suppose.” She waited patiently for Applejack to make it to her seat, then lifted the inch-thick deck of pages in front of her and tapped the end on the table, to get them to align. “Alright then, Twilight, when you-!” She froze, looking down the the table at Hailey, seated at the far end.
Hailey, who was usually cheerfully smiling at everyone, seemed to have spotted something. She was staring up into a corner of the room, a scowl on her face.
Everyone else at the table followed Bonbon’s gaze down to Hailey, then up into the corner as well.
Sunset Shimmer was the first to speak. “Is it that beetle?” she asked, pointing.
Right at that moment, the beetle took flight. It dove down, and dodged between three different people on a fairly obvious avoidance course.
“Accio beetle!” Hailey barked, wand in hand. She was easily the fastest draw in the entire room.
The beetle, wrenched from its flight, shot straight towards her- then froze, in midair. Hailey was obviously casting multiple spells at once, with silent incantations- because she hadn’t spoken the incantation for the Impediment Jinx, which was fast becoming her signature spell.
Instead, without so much as a pause to take breath, she spoke a very different incantation. “Homorphus!”
Just seconds after it had taken off from the corner, the beetle, freshly frozen in midair over the table, grew rapidly into a grown woman, lying face-down in midair.
Bonbon just barely had time to draw her own wand before the woman unfroze and crashed to the table.
“Ow,” the woman complained- then froze again, though this time not because of magic. Rather, Princess Luna had drawn not her wand but her sword, which she carried everywhere, invisible most of the time, ever since the Changeling Invasion. Invisible to the woman, everyone else in the room had also drawn their wands.
“Animagus,” Hailey clarified. “A witch or wizard that can turn into an animal or, apparently, insect- but only one. Anyone can learn to become one.” She scowled at the woman, wand still drawn. “Heavily regulated by the Ministry too, and you’re not on their registry.”
“You’re going to be an amazing duelist someday,” the woman told the table, without moving.
She snorted. “Already am. How about you start by telling us who you are?”
“R-Rita. Rita Skeeter.”
Bonbon raised an eyebrow. “Why is a journalist sneaking into Hogwarts?”
Luna snorted and sheathed her sword.
“I-! I-!” She stopped, took a deep breath, and tried again. “I need a story,” she muttered. “There is a rumor going around that Hogwarts got a lot more students than usual, but…”
“A rumor?” Twilight asked, incredulously. “We’re hardly a rumor!?”
“Everyone agrees there’s been some growth,” she said. “But the rumors are blowing it way out of proportion. There’s no way Hogwarts’ attendance jumped by five hundred students in a year- there’d be an uproar.”
“Thirteen thousand nine hundred seventy three,” Bonbon stated. “Last year.”
She looked up. “What?”
Bonbon nodded. “Total attendance last year was thirteen thousand nine hundred seventy three. This year, it’s twenty-nine thousand six hundred forty seven.”
There was a pause.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Dead certain,” she answered. “You were looking for headlines?”
“Uh… Yeah.”
She grinned. “How’s ‘twenty nine thousand three hundred sixty seven students hiding in plain sight’?”
“That’s… That’s a different number.”
“That’s how many of them are beyond normal attendance.”
“... Oh.”
“How about,” Lyra injected. “You’re a journalist, right?”
Rita nodded.
“Well, with quite so many students, there’s quite a lot of stories waiting to be told- and, as a matter of fact, there’s usually at least a dozen or two of them that Dumbledore doesn’t read because he doesn’t have enough time to read nearly so many pages.” She gestured around, at the decks of pages in front of almost everyone present. “See them?”
Rita glanced around, and let out a snort of laughter.
“How about we strike a deal, then?” Lyra smiled, putting her wand away. “Stay on our good side, and you can be our exclusive media outlet. Maybe some of these stories can see the light of day.”
“Really?” She looked up at Lyra.
She chuckled, leaning back in her chair and grinning wickedly. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“My… Reputation. Ahh, yes. And your ‘good side’...?”
Bonbon shrugged. “We all know you’re famous for twisting our words, but we do want to appear friendly to the general public. At some point, we’ll probably also want to start name-dropping things like our homeworld- that’s been completely secret up to this point, so we’re just ‘The Foreigners’ to most of the rest of the staff and students.”
She slid off the table, and rose to her feet. “You’re all… Foreigners, then?”
Bonbon nodded. “All except Hailey, she’s British.”
“Who?”
She smiled. “She’s the one that caught you.”
“Hailey?”
Hailey looked up, at where Bonbon was jogging towards her in the otherwise empty corridor; she was on her way to Defense Against the Dark Arts with Professor Lockhart, so she had her Invisibility Cloak out as well. “Mm?”
“Can we talk for a minute?” Bonbon asked.
“Sure,” Hailey agreed, glanced to the sides, smiled, took Bonbon’s hand, and stepped through a painting.
Bonbon blinked as it parted before them, revealing a small little cubby hole with two couches and a coffee table. “Convenient,” she muttered.
Hailey nodded. “Hermione found it last week,” she told her. “You have to be thinking about bananas to get in.”
“Ahh,” Bonbon nodded.
“But anyways, how can I help you?” Hailey asked.
Bonbon nodded sharply. “Yes. Well, I’ve been wondering… How did you know the beetle on the wall was a person?”
Hailey paused uncomfortably. “Ahh… I have a friend, that, um, happens to be a changeling. She’s nice, I promise.”
“A changeling?” Bonbon asked, eyebrows raised. “You know we screened for those before we let anyone through the portal, right?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know, but she got through anyways, so…”
“Huh. And you’re certain she’s friendly?”
“Yeah. She said her last contact with Queen Chrysalis was something like six or seven years ago, not too long after the invasion.”
She blinked. “Okay then. Um… Tell her to keep her head down for now, but let us know if she hears from Chrysalis again?”
Hailey smiled. “Will do.”