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// Chapter 16:  Professer RW 
// Story: The Girl who Didn't Just Live 
// by computerneek 
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Zephyr Breeze- no relation to the Element Bearer of Kindness' brother of the same name, she was tired of telling ponies that- jumped awake quite suddenly when her…  what had the management team called it?  Communicator?  Yeah, that sounded about right.  When it delivered a message.  It was strange, almost like someone was talking inside her brain, and she expected that she would never get used to it, despite the eventual plan for the system that she’d been told.  Apparently, it would eventually allow her to contact her Instructors for assistance without having to locate their offices- and with no risk of finding said offices empty when she did so.  They had promised that it wouldn’t wake her for anything unimportant, only for items of critical importance- such as the Monster of Slytherin being on the loose, as she was one of the Investigators.
Such as now.  The voice was perfectly nondescript, and the Communicator didn’t give her any source identity information alongside the message, so she knew who it was:  It was the anonymous Royal that had made the whole system possible.
“The Monster is on the move.”
A second later, her senses came back to her- and she let out a gasp of surprise and pain, in response to the strange stabbing sensation in her right arm.  She clenched her jaw as she recalled why her arm hurt that much.
She was the Gryffindor seeker- and quite a talented one at that, apparently.  Only, when she’d won the match for Gryffindor the day before despite the Slytherins riding brooms that outmatched her team’s to a broom, she’d somehow failed to notice that the Bludgers didn’t suddenly fall out of the air when the game ended.  It might also have been because one of the two Slytherin beaters- she didn’t remember which- had clubbed it straight at her the moment she’d caught the Snitch.  The resultant foul had been taken by Alicia Spinnet, one of the three Gryffindor chasers, who had almost casually put the Quaffle through one of the three goal hoops; the Slytherin keeper had been too confused by the turn of events to block it.
When the bludger had snapped Zephyr’s elbow like a twig, she’d- rather admirably, she understood- kept her hand closed on the Snitch, even as she subsequently crashed into the ground.  It wasn’t all that unusual for her- as a pegasus, impacts like that were pretty ordinary…  though her human body didn’t seem to be as durable, and that was going to be a problem.
Then of course, Gilderoy Fraudhart (that was the nickname basically the whole school had for him now, only ever used when he wasn’t present) had shown up, and gone to mend her elbow…  and instead managed to vanish all the bones out of her entire arm.  Fortunately, Madam Pomfrey would only need one night to grow them back; she was in the middle of doing that, as a matter of fact.
Speaking of Madam Pomfrey, she came bustling out of her office in response to her pained cry.  “Are you okay?” she asked.  “How bad does it hurt?”
“Not too bad,” Zephyr answered her.  “Mostly just surprised me when I woke up- you were right, it is making for a rough night.”
At the same time, she thought about the message from the Royal, and her duty in response to it.  She was one of the investigators- and her job as such was merely to record where she was and who was in her immediate vicinity anytime the monster was active.  She’d then report that list, as complete as possible, to the Investigation Management Team, which consisted of a few people from the Student Instructor Program’s management team, the Royal…  and the Investigation Team Lead, a girl named Morning Sun.  That girl wasn’t a member of the Instructor Program’s management team, only a Lead Student Instructor, but she also already had a Special Award for Services to the School to her name- which she had tried to refuse as ‘just doing her job’.
On top of that, in no event was she allowed to let anyone around her get even a hint of what she was doing- for which reason they had connected a database to the network.  She could stream her senses to it, creating a ‘file’ for her to review later, in the event that she didn’t think she could positively identify every student she saw- and that memory would be accessible only to her until and unless she ‘unlocked’ it for the rest.
She didn’t expect to need that this time, though.  Madam Pomfrey was here…  and her sensitive pegasus hearing (apparently only pegasi carried that over into Britain) told her that theirs were the only two heartbeats in the room, so there weren’t any other patients.
She quickly contacted the database and submitted an ‘electronic’ report through it, the way she was supposed to report since paper could be seen, that reported as much.





Professor McGonagall paused suddenly, then walked closer and cast her wandlight over what she’d seen in the corner of her eye; the alert for Slytherin’s monster had gone out while she had been visiting the bathroom.  It was…  It was a student, camera held up to his face.  She sighed, and called up that telepathic network thing- she was still really new to it, having received it from Dumbledore just three hours before, and connected to two separate…  networks.  One was the investigation network, which was almost entirely student-managed- and the other had no students in it at all, connecting Dumbledore and the Heads of House so far.  Tomorrow, some of the other Professors would be invited to receive them as well.
“Found a victim,” she announced onto the investigation network- which Dumbledore was on too.  “Colin Creevey, near the Hospital Wing.  Petrified.”
“Madam Pomfrey is confirmed safe,” Hailey- the Student Instructor Program Management Team Lead, and one of the members of the Investigation Team- answered promptly.  “Will you need help bringing him to her?”
She paused.  “No, I’ll be fine.”
“Say what now?” Dumbledore began confusedly, eliciting a sigh.  Like many of the investigators, he’d been awoken by the alert- though she’d already been on her way downstairs for some hot chocolate.  Unlike a lot of the investigators, though, Dumbledore was very much not an earlybird- he was basically useless after waking until he had finished at least two mugs of Professor Snape’s special not-coffee.  She attributed it to just how little sleep he got on a regular basis; the poor man was severely overworked, and had been long before the colorheads had started appearing, so she expected it was all he could do to keep things from spiraling out of control.
But aside from that, being able to telepathically inform her colleagues of things like this was already quite convenient…  though it was still very unfamiliar to her.
And still fell under the heading of ‘Top Secret’.





Zephyr Breeze was just starting to drift back towards sleep when another message came in.
“Thank you everyone; even with just the preliminary reports so far, you’ve helped us narrow it down to less than half the school.  We’ll have a meeting in the afternoon, please come.”
That was Morning Sun- and as usual, she paired it with one of the more interesting features of the Communicator network.  It presented the exact time and location of the suggested meeting in an easy-to-understand way…  and also told her what exactly to ask the Database to get that same information.  It was going to be at two o’clock sharp, in just over twelve hours.
She’d have to ask Madam Pomfrey if she was allowed to attend an important meeting- if she wasn’t already released by then, that was- but for now, she allowed herself to drift off back to sleep.





The following afternoon, Zephyr paused, briefly, before entering the conference room that had been assigned for the meeting.  She’d been pleasantly surprised to be discharged from the infirmary in the morning, once Madam Pomfrey had satisfied herself that her bones had been properly regrown.
Then, upon entering the room, she paused again.  It looked like four classrooms had been stitched together in a square- there were even four blackboards, two on either side of the huge square room.  The clocks placed strategically around the room told her she was about two minutes early, and much of the room was filled with chairs facing one wall; in the middle of that wall was a lectern with Morning Sun leaning against it, and the rest of the Investigation Management Team seated on a row of chairs behind her:  Hailey Potter, Student Instructor Program Management Team Lead; Ginny Weasley, a first-year Lead Student Instructor; Bonbon, the previous SIPMTL, and now just Head Student Instructor for Potions; a bushy-haired girl named Hermione Granger, Head Student Instructor for Charms; and a bright silver-haired girl named Silversong, a Lead Student Instructor and one of Zephyr’s own Potions instructors.
“Good afternoon, Zephyr.  Your seat is up front, with the rest of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.”
She blinked at the unexpected message through her communicator- sounded like it was from the Royal- and followed the line on the seating plan that had been sent with it to her seat…  which was, true to the message, with the rest of the Quidditch team.  There was a sign resting on the table in front of her chair, identifying it as hers- even though she already knew.
The silence held for another couple minutes or so before Morning gave a sharp nod.  “Alright then,” she called- and Zephyr immediately noticed that she was mirroring her speech over the communicators so that everyone would understand clearly, even without her needing to yell.  “Now that we’re all here, let’s get started.  So.”  She sighed.  “At this point, only about ten percent of all of our investigators last night have submitted reports- and yes, I’m aware that some of you are new investigators as of this morning.  But even with only eighteen reports, we’ve been able to narrow it down by quite a bit.”
There was a dramatic pause while people muttered.
“This was in large part thanks to Professor Severus Snape!”  She held out one hand towards one end of the front row, where Professor Snape looked somewhat stunned, then chuckled.  “Yes, I know.  You’re all asking, since he wasn’t even an investigator during the attack, how did he clear the names of every single student in his House?”
Even Snape looked confused by that.
Morning chuckled.  “In short?  He took his duty to his house seriously in a way that none of the other three Heads of House have.”  She paused.  “It’s really amazing how much effort he has been putting into this school, even at the cost of his own health. I’m told that last year, when he found out he was failing his Potions students, he went almost a hundred and thirty hours without sleep, grading assignments and working on his curriculum by night and searching for those that could help him with the latter by day, until he found them.”
Professor Dumbledore blinked and turned to look across the room at an embarrassed Professor Snape, straight past Zephyr (pegasus situational awareness was so convenient), his expression showing that he was both stunned and impressed.
“That diligence does not end there.  He takes his duties as Head of House just as seriously, spending just over an hour every night this year, counting students.”
“Uh…”  somebody muttered, somewhere in the crowd.
Morning chuckled.  “I know what you’re thinking.  ‘This year?  What about prior years?’”  She chuckled again.  “In prior years, it didn’t take him as long.”
A wave of gentle laughter crossed the room.
“But that count, recorded on a special chart every night after curfew and sealed with an Oath given outside the Slytherin common room, is what allowed us to clear every Slytherin’s name.  Few know it, but when the Headcount Oath is given properly, as he did, it activates a passage detection charm on the entrance to the common room in question, which will record which students depart into the rest of the Castle from the moment that Oath is given.”  She paused.  “Last night, his headcount sheet reported every student accounted for, and that charm reported that no student had departed over the hour and a half or so between said headcount and when we queried it some fifteen minutes after the attack last night.
“That is what cleared all their names.”
Professor Snape sat up straighter, preening slightly.
Then Morning sighed.  “The most recent headcount sheets for the other three houses, unfortunately, are a full week out of date- and the passage charms still report graduated students from three years ago, meaning the Oaths have not been done properly in all that time.”  She paused, glancing at the other three Heads of House, who all had the grace to look ashamed.  “On the other hand, a few students were, ahh, not in bed at the time of the attack- and a couple of them were investigators.
“Of those few students we know about, only one was actually supposed to be outside of Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Towers at that time.”  She held her hand out towards Zephyr.  “That being Miss Zephyr Breeze here, Gryffindor seeker, who was bedridden in the Hospital Wing and submitted a report that cleared Madam Pomfrey’s name.”  She chuckled.  “And here I was expecting our matron to be one of the last people we were able to cross off, not one of the first.
“Next up comes Miss Angelina Johnson.”  She gestured at Angelina, seated right next to Zephyr.  “Gryffindor Chaser, and clearly more Gryffindor than anyone gives her credit for.  Caught stealing food from the kitchens, according to Mr. Filch, who was shouting at her and her friend in his office for the entire attack.”  She chuckled.  “While I hesitate to encourage any student to break school rules, her report did clear Mr. Filch’s name.”  She paused for a long moment while chuckles swept the room and Angelina blushed furiously.  “Now…  there’s a big difference between being supposed to be in Gryffindor Tower and being supposed to be outside of it- and between the two, there’s a third category, which very few students are aware of:  The Student Instructor Program Management Team is exempt from curfew, and allowed to roam the Castle at all hours.
“Exactly what Miss Ginny Weasley here was doing at half past midnight we may never know, and she certainly isn’t required to tell us- but what we do know is that, whatever it was, she was in a position that enabled her to trace the Monster of Slytherin back to the exact sink that had been used to summon it.”
There was a roar of applause, and Ginny Weasley put her bright red face in her hands, causing Hailey Potter- seated next to her- to put an arm comfortingly around her shoulders.
“Now, unfortunately, our Horcrux had already left, so we weren’t able to identify them- but the sink showed signs of being used multiple times.”  She paused dramatically.  “Perhaps, had Professor Flitwick taken his Head of House duty as seriously as Professor Snape, we would know who the culprit was, or at least have a very good idea; that sink just happened to be the nearest sink to Ravenclaw Tower outside of the dormitories.”





Morning never told anyone that she actually knew what Ginny had been doing; she had been talking to the girl, in the Chamber of Secrets, when the Monster had been summoned.  Neither of them had been fast enough to stop its exodus up to the Castle- the summoning magic sure was fast- but they had been able to follow its exit path.  As she had told the room, the Horcrux- and its victim- had already disappeared when they had arrived, just in time to capture and question the Monster itself on its return, and find out that it was the sink it had been summoned from the first time as well, though it’d been summoned from the main entrance in Myrtle’s bathroom for the attack on Mrs. Norris.