Detention

Hogwarts, DADA

October 21st​, 1972

Bellatrix popped a bubble. She leaned back in a comfortable seat Professor Chaoskampf had conjured for her and was enjoying a bit of his confectionaries he'd deemed 'safe' to eat. Bubblegum that was a vibrant metallic black, popped once more, and she chewed it back again. It had a flavor that she really couldn't place, but for some reason while she chewed it, she couldn't help but think of shadows, cold darkness, and a comfortable relaxation in a merciful grip. It was a relaxing feeling, if a bit nerve wracking for a bit, with Bellatrix thinking Professor Kampf could obtain a killing by selling the recipe.

Speaking of the Professor, he was grading his papers as he always was during detention. "The Slytherins won the Fall Game." She pipped into the dead silence.

"Quidditch talk, really Bella?"

"What, it got quiet?" She defended herself.

"If you want to talk Quidditch, I know an entire house of boys that'd drool over the opportunity."

"They couldn't handle this." She stretched out in the sinfully soft 'beanbag' chair, practically purring as she flexed.

"Hmm, sure."

She snorted, "Confident?" She asked.

"Careful." He warned strongly, looking at her from the corner of his eye, "You're playing with fire."

She snorted, and didn't push, instead doing what she'd been doing for the past three weeks; enjoying the sights. When she first started attending, it was just peeks over a stashed book, then it became long conversations into their daily lives, with Bellatrix realizing truly how badly Professor Kampf needed a break. The man was spending an utterly insane amount of time organizing lectures, reading materials, writing those materials, producing school supplies, fixing the atrophy of poor educational standards or outright instituting missing ones, and was running himself thin acting as a professor for Math, Science, DADA, English, and Physical Education.

Each lecture he gave during the Physical Conditioning Class had students bringing notebooks, much of the morning being taken up by anatomical lessons that students who were going to study under a Master Healer were practically throwing themselves at the DADA professors feet for. Healing wasn't a subject taught within Hogwarts, after a fiasco involving a cabal of nascent Necromancers being taught by the Professor of Healing. The possibility of learning even a bit of healing knowledge from an effective Master at healing magic would give them an edge as they applied to learn the healing arts at St Mungo's.

English and Math were self-evident, with Professor McGonagall obtaining a record-breaking landslide of switching electives as people rushed into Professor Akot's classroom. It was a paradigm shift within Hogwarts reacting to the meteoric rise and expectations placed on students by a single professor not balking at Howlers yelling at him from aggrieved parents and barking back at the Board of Directors with well-structured evidence, and what she later discovered to be hefty bribes.

The latter filled her with disgust that it took a well-meaning man's gold to move things along in a direction that was only barely satisfactory in Kampf's own words. Shaking her head, she once again took in the sight of her professor. Black hair full of volume, sharp looks, pale skin that seemed unhealthy with only a bit of life to it. It reminded her of porcelain, with an utter lack of veinage to be seen. He was like something cut out from a painting, walking around in reality with the stylistic intonations of an artist's brush periodically coming to life and squirming at you.

It was eerie and strange, odd in another word. She knew the man to have undergone rituals, but she was starting to realize what sort of rituals he'd undertaken. The likes that would get one in deep trouble with the Ministry. Under lobbying from families and houses like her own, there were laws in place to halt the spread and proliferation of alien bloodlines and magical traits within the population. Such were only allowed within the noble houses of great history, and the knowledge to obtain those bloodlines like her own house's history of Metamorphagi were scrubbed from the books.

She didn't find the man's strangeness off-putting; Morgana knows she'd seen her own bits of off-putting pieces of magic.

Bellatrix idly remembered the moment the man in front of her erased a baby rabbit from reality. Shivers ran down her spine at the memory. The echoes of the magic used during that class utterly reshaped the politics within House Slytherin and had changed people.

They were all witnesses to what the Sixth Year Slytherins and Hufflepuffs would agree to call the 'Sundering of Innocence'. The baby kid, a tinny rabbit child, was brutally eviscerated from reality. It was the destruction of the Rabbit on all conceptual levels; the death of its soul, its mind, body, and the concepts there of. Its purity, its virility, its innocence. Something the students speculated on was that the echoes of magic that so impacted them during their witnessing of the event would've only been a million times more impactful if the creature impacted was something like a child or baby. They shuddered to imagine what that would feel like, with Slytherin's house mumbling dark things about the Killing Curse, about how some things in the world were just sacred.

Many believed the Unforgivables were just overly regulated and restricted magics, but witnessing the Killing Curse being used by their professor like that; well, it changed people's outlooks a lot. While separated from the Knights of Walpurgis due to her refusal to attend meetings, the group itself had internally splintered, many losing the drive that had pushed them towards the group as they rethought their approach and perspective on life. They still held their name and touted their way around school, especially since many of the students within weren't all Sixth Years; but core supporters like Lucius Malfoy had started to chafe against other members within the org. Even with this divisiveness, people like the Carrow twins were still members and proponents; downplaying what happened in the Sixth Year DADA classroom. It was something of a poorly hidden notion that the Carrows were pressured by extenuating circumstances to join the Knights of Walpurgis. Not to say they didn't support the message the group put forward -the eradication or oppression of the Muggleborn- but where Lucius Malfoy was within the group for social connections like a proper Slytherin; others were being forced into it by their parent's own allegiances and ideological goals. The Malfoys were always a somewhat mercenary group, tossing their hats in rings that were to their benefit and making friends and allies, but their political goals were just as nebulous as their business dealings and utterly dependent on self-serving benefits.

Professor Kampf admitted to her during her detentions that he wanted the Wizards and Witches of Britian to learn how to think on their lonesome. He said straight to her face that the traditionalism and resistance of change within their society was going to end it, gruesomely at that.

She frowned at the grim future that laid ahead, told to her by a literal prophet considering the man himself stated he'd seen the future and the progress the Muggles would make with their technologies. She didn't underestimate such things, not after learning what in Professor Kampf's own words were the introductory levels of science and was nothing near what applied sciences looked like within the mundane world. The current population of the world alone had shocked her, and that it'd effectively double within the turn of the millennium was insane. Nearly four billion muggles to nearly seven billion at the turn of the century. It was an unfathomable number, and one that made her, and the Wizarding World, feel small. What was their magic compared to the hordes of flesh that such numbers represented?

She was startled from her thoughts as a knock at the door sounded out.

"Come in." Professor Kampf called.

In stepped Professor McGonagall, the woman carrying with her a tower of tomes. "'Ello Ebon." She stated as she wheeled her way over to the desk and set the books down. She shook her head, "I'll be entirely honest, Mr. Chaoskampf, every other sentence in these books made not a slightest bit of sense. I had three books always open, flicking through to find head bleeding theory that only allowed the slightest understanding of your theories."

"Ah, you finally finished them?" Ebon smiled, taking the books from the Professor as he looked over them. "I see. Perhaps I will need to dumb down the theory and create several introductory chapters. My apologies."

McGonagall sighed, slumping her shoulders and posture. "That would indeed be prudent. If you could summarize The Nuances of Atomic Transfiguration and Physical Chemistry into more digestible textbooks, I could imagine giving them to my seventh years. Honestly, if I didn't know any better, I'd think you after my job." She gave a rueful smile.

"Do you see how many papers I have already? And I'm teaching DADA!" Professor Kampf growled, "If I had your job these stacks of paper would be thrice as high and three-times as long." He chuffed.

Professor McGonagall shook her head, "You're a mark to educators the world round, Professor. It is my understanding that you're going on a short break during the weekend? Is there anything that I could help you with?"

"Unless you want to sit a detention right now?" He jerked his head towards Bellatrix.

"Oh? I knew Andromeda managed to get into your bad graces, but you too Bellatrix?"

"Hi, Professor McGonagall." She waved.

The Professor snorted and rolled her eyes, but frowned, "Sadly, I'm a bit rushed for time right now. I just remembered to give you those books, and then I need to head to Diagon to pick up some transfiguration supplies." She sighed. "Then there's a few Midterm items I need to organize, and well…"

"It's no worries. I'll figure something out." He waved the subject away.

"Very well. Enjoy your weekend, Ebon."

"You too Minerva."

That drew a derisive snort from the woman.

Professor Kampf sighed and stood from his desk, cracking his back and then his fingers as he stretched from his chair.

Bellatrix stood too, wondering if they were going anywhere. Professor Kampf fiddled with his drawer, then pulled out an orb. "Now then…" He muttered. Within the murky orb various sights and vistas flew by, eventually reaching out towards a verdant forest, then a snow-covered mountain. "Where too…" He mused. "Greenland, maybe? Although, I am feeling a bit home sick." He mused, eventually the orb fell into the flat deserts of the United States. "Eh, why not. It'll be fun for a bit, I guess. For the Nostalgia."

Her professor glanced back at her, "I'll be heading out. You have everything you need?"

Bellatrix nodded.

"Then adios." He tapped the orb, and with a crack of the air displacement, he vanished.

Bellatrix sat back down in her beanbag, and as the clock on a wall clicked through, she got bored and went over to her professor's desk. She sat in his chair and kicked her feet up, a grin crawling on her face as she stared over the classroom. Casting a glance over the desk, she grew curious and started to tentatively poke around the drawers. Some were warded and she didn't bother trying to open them, and instead found where he kept his candies, but knowing they were poisonous she shut that drawer closed. Then she leaned over the chair, feet kept on the desk, she tried to open the bottom drawer.

"Ah, shit." The chair tipped dangerously, and her legs swept over the table, knocking stacks of paper over, including destabilizing an orb. Bellatrix spilled onto the floor with an 'oof'.

Something round rolled atop the desk, and as Bellatrix laid on the ground, her eyes widened as an orb precariously balanced on the edge of the desk. About to fall, and not wanting to break an expensive scrying orb, Bellatrix reached out to try and grab it.

The Orb, a personally enchanted item made by Ebon, was designed as an omni-directional portkey directed through remote scrying.

The Orb landed in the palm of her hand, but a decorative ring on her hand clacked against the fragile surface of the crystal. The Orb sparked, and in a pop of air; Bellatrix Black vanished from where she laid.