Chapter 65
This time the one being attacked was Harry; the twelve year old targeted by a cursed bludger that repeatedly sought to kill him over the course of the match. Harry wasn't bothered by the bludger; he could easily avoid it with his Listening Skills. On the other, he had been greatly annoyed that someone had tried to kill him during one of the few pleasurable past times he'd found in this cursed game-world.
An hour into the game, Harry caught the snitch to end the game and would have died seconds later, if not for the golden shield that had sprang up around him at the last second to prevent the bludger from bouncing off the back of his head. The bludger exploded a heartbeat later when Harry struck it with a lightning bolt in retaliation; the seeker irritated beyond belief by that point.
He had also been more than a little depressed to learn that his immortality had apparently carried over to this new game and at the same time relieved as it meant he'd have a better chance of getting out of the game alive so that he could find Agil and the others (unless his relatives had actually left him to die but he didn't like to think about that possibility). That night, Dobby the House Elf made a second visit and Harry managed to learn that it had been the elf that had attacked him with the bludger during the game before Hedwig took a bite out of the creature's ear and chased it off once more.
December turned out to be an interesting month, starting with Neville informing Harry that he'd caught Hermione brewing Polyjuice Potion in the out-of-order girl's bathroom on the second floor. Polyjuice Potion was a class four restricted potion and unauthorized possession of said potion or the brewing of said potion without a license could potentially see one tossed into Azkaban for at least five years as well as being charged a hefty fine (depending on the circumstances with which you were caught with the potion). It was also a rather complicated potion to brew and the slightest mistake could kill the drinker (or the brewer if they made an explosive mistake).
Harry had immediately confronted Hermione about the potion and was startled to learn that she'd been brewing the potion to help him research the Chamber of Secrets. The four foot wizard (and oh how his lack of growth rankled Harry even if he hadn't really expected to grow in the game) had been stunned to learn that she was breaking the law for him (though a small part of him cynically pointed out that she must have been programmed to aide him, since NPCs couldn't really act on their own).
Upon learning that she planned to steal the remaining ingredients needed to finish the potion, Harry told her not to bother because it would be easier for him to raid Snape's supplies during supper than it would be for her to raid them during class. He handed her the purloined ingredients first thing in the morning two days later so that she could add them to the potion before their first class and avoid being caught red-handed with the stolen Items.
He then helped keep watch for prefects and professors while she worked on the potion to make certain no one attempted to use the bathroom she was brewing the potion in. The older second year was a bit flustered over the entire situation because it was the first time Harry had gone out of his way to help her or even associate with her outside of classes or their evening study sessions. That was also the day Harry was introduced to Moaning Myrtle; the rather weepy ghost that haunted the bathroom Hermione was using as a temporary potions lab.
Just over a week after they added the final ingredient and left the potion to stew for twenty-one days, the school was inflicted with the idiocy that was Lockhart on a larger than usual basis (his weekly classes usually more than enough to drive half the students up the wall while all the girls just sighed prettily over the flop). This time it was in the form of a dueling club. Harry would earn another two detentions that night because Hedwig had killed the cobra that Draco Malfoy had summoned in a duel against Ron Weasley.
In another reality (where it had been Harry himself that faced Draco in the duel), Harry would have stopped the snake by speaking to it. And he would have earned the entire school's enmity for possessing the rare ability to speak parseltongue at the same time.
Harry had lost his ability to understand and speak to snakes before he ever learned that he could though; the ability vanishing right about the same time the sliver of Voldemort's soul in his scar died (not that Harry was aware of that little nugget of information).
The next day, two third year girls from Gryffindor were found petrified alongside Moaning Myrtle. Harry found the logic of a ghost being petrified when a ghost was technically already dead more than a bit skewed but there was much of this game world he just couldn't understand. Such as the way a good portion of the adults in this game frowned upon him killing off any creature (even when in self defense) while at the same time they allowed and encouraged the students to purchase and use the remains of dead creatures to brew potions.
The bulk of the students would head home for the holidays on the twenty-third, leaving Harry, Hermione, and Neville with the perfect opportunity to use Hermione's perfectly brewed Polyjuice Potion to do some investigating. Hermione wanted to use it on Christmas day to disguise themselves as students in order to interrogate another student suspected of knowing a good deal about what was going on. Harry nixed that idea stating that their suspect (which happened to be Draco Malfoy) would be less likely to speak to another student because Malfoy wasn't the type to trust. Instead, Harry suggested that they pose as professors in order to intimidate the boy into squealing.
They chose three professors that were important enough not to be disobeyed and that the three of them were familiar enough with to impersonate and picked a day when they knew the professors they would be impersonating would be busy with other duties or out of the castle entirely. So it was on the twenty-seventh, that Harry sent Malfoy a summons signed by Professor Snape (the signature taken from a note that the man had signed and copied to the bogus summons with a spell that Hermione had found in the library) to meet him in an unused classroom near the dungeon. Harry then drank the Polyjuice with one of Snape's hairs, Hermione took hers with a hair of McGonagall (carefully filched while the witch was in her human form), and Neville took what was supposed to be one of Lockhart's hairs.
Apparently, Lockhart's hair was actually a wig made from the fur of a blonde rabbit. Or the man had a fetish for long furred rabbits. Poor Neville ended up covered from head to foot with long golden-brown rabbit fur, long floppy rabbit ears, and a fluffy white cotton tail. Hermione had escorted Neville to the Infirmary as his 'Head of House' and reported that he'd been the victim of a poorly thought out potions prank before she hurried back to the bathroom to wait out the transformation while Harry grilled Malfoy with Snape's silky tone (the girl had not wanted to get caught impersonating McGonagall after she had been seen in the Infirmary).
Harry had learned four important bits of information from the Malfoy scion. First, Snape was Malfoy's godfather and allowed Draco to get away with nearly everything. Second, Malfoy's father had a serious grudge against the Weasley family (and therefore so did Draco) and intended to somehow implicate one of the Weasleys in the attacks at the school in order to discredit the patriarch of the red-headed family. Third, the Chamber of Secrets had been opened once before fifty years earlier and that Lucius Malfoy personally knew the person who had opened the Chamber and knew that they had done so. And fourth, that a student had been killed by the monster during the first opening of the Chamber.
Harry had dismissed Malfoy at that point with orders to stop speaking of what he knew in front of the other students so that word of what he knew wouldn't get back to the authorities and implicate him and his family as being responsible for the attacks (he had a part to play, after all). Harry had then returned to the out of order bathroom using Teleport and bottled up the remainder of the potion (including the unfinished goblets containing McGonagall and Snape's hairs while the one Neville had drank out of was washed down the drain) while he waited the final fifteen minutes before he changed back to himself. He then slipped them into his Inventory in case they were needed later.
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