academic curiosity

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"Ms. Evans," McGonagall began again, sharing a exasperated glance with Professor Flitwick and Madam Pomfrey, all who lined the infirmary bed across from Lily.

"I have never encountered a person whom I have used the word `perspective´ to describe so much... Tell us once more what you threw at the dark thing that crossed the carriage."

"What was that thing?" Lily asked stoutly, crossing her arms. "And what do you mean by `perspective´?"

"I have never known you to be an obstinate student, Evans," McGonagall continued, unfazed. "But you are behaving quite unusually for someone who has just had an encounter with a menace-"

"C´mon!" Lily interrupted pleadingly. "Can´t you just give me a hint? Is it man, mineral, liquid?"

McGonagall was undoubtedly going to ignore her question again, but Professor Flitwick said quickly before the other teacher could open her mouth, "It was a Dementor. It is a creature that exists on the pain and misery of humans and not one has been seen by any wizard in this land since Grindelwald´s time. In fact, the only staff member at Hogwarts that has seen a Dementor in person is Dumbledore himself," Flitwick continued, rather nervously eyeing McGonagall.

"That is both entirely too much information and untrue!" gasped Madam Pomfrey, white with shock. "I say we end this whole infernal interview and you two allow me to do my job and-"

"Please," Professor McGonagall made a hand motion. "Evans, now that you have had your question answered, why not answer mine." This was not a question though.

"I threw the cat at it."

At this all three exchanged worried glances and the two teachers gazed at Madam Pomfrey for a long time until Lily continued, "I mean to say, I threw a plastic cat at it. It´s a muggle artifact..."

"Muggle? What purpose did this plastic cat serve then, I mean of course, in the muggle world?" Flitwick asked politely.

Lily blinked. "Purpose?"

"Was it one of those silly charms for luck?" McGonagall offered suggestively.

"No, I got it at Harrod´s..." Lily replied very slowly. Were they completely dense? Were they going to wax philosophical and historical all night before they let her have a bite to eat in the great hall with the rest of the students who had been run down by the thing- The Dementor on the road outside the school grounds?

"Okay, great, and when you saw the Dementor in the road by your carriage what did you do first?" Flitwick entreated with a pleading look.

Lily thought for a bit. "I stopped breathing I think. Then Alia, Bashir that is, she grabbed at my arm and wouldn´t let go and I was trying to tell her and Joe Leary that I couldn´t breathe, but they were busy looking out the windows and screaming their heads off... I had this stupid cat, that serves no purpose and is not very lucky if you ask me, out the window right at the mouth of this big drapery-looking thing that was standing by my head and reaching in... And it, the cat I mean, disappeared somewhere in it´s head, I think it´s mouth, I don´t have too shabby aim close up. Any way, it started making this hacking noise and then mucked off and everyone was hanging out their carriages screaming like mad in front of us. Then I fell over or something and kind of fell through the floor of the carriage I think and then I was here for some reason. I can smell the food on the other side of the castle, you know," she imparted sagely.

This speech was greeted with a confused silence and then McGonagall managed to say, "You must be hungry, why don´t you let Mr. Puggler help you back to the great hall? The feast is not half way over." she looked at the Gryffindor prefect who was trying hard to pretend he wasn´t listening in.

"Certainly, Professor!" he said motioning for Lily to come with him.

As soon as they veered off on their own into the empty corridor he snorted with laughter. "It´s a cat," he imitated Lily low, demanding words. `It´s from Harrod´s." he laughed some more and then said, "You got some nerve Evans, that´s for sure. I suppose you´ll be a wee bit more informative when the other fourth years ask how you heroically stopped the Dementor!"

"Funny , coming from a person who didn´t even know what a Dementor was until he eavesdropped five minutes ago... Why did they let you stay up here?"

"LET ME, you say?! Made me, is more like it. You owe me Evans, so tell me... What did that thing look like up close, and why did it leave the carriage you three were in so fast?"

"I heard the same that you did on the subject, Corky. And as for the second part, sometimes I use charms without realizing it..." Lily remembered the first couple times she had used the charm to animate dead things. Almost every time she had performed the spell it seemed that she had begun without thinking about it. Did she maybe do the same thing to the cat? But that was stupid, she decided for quite a few reasons.

Lily said, "What I want to know is why one of these Dementors, that are so rare and dangerous was just hanging outside Hogsmeade?"

He gave her a dark look, "They say that The Dark Lord had passed through Scotland with his Death Eaters. They also say that he had enlisted the help of all the dark magical creatures. That he has an army of trolls, centaurs, giants and grindylows-"

Lily started laughing. "Grindylows!"

"Yes!" he replied indignantly. "I would have thought you would be interested in this, seeing as how you and that odd chap in the muggle suit," (Dale! Lily thought with amusement) "started up that whole club last year."

"I´m sorry Corky," Lily soothed. "Are you saying that you think that this Dementor thing is in league with Voldemort then?"

"That was the point I was going to make, yes. And I was gonna give you some advice."

"Shoot," Lily said.

"Don´t start thinking you stopped that thing single-handed. That´s the line of thinking that The Dark Lord started coming to AND Grindelwald. And if you ask me, the two are one in the same, though if you ask nearly any other wizard they´ll go on and on about `wizard rights´ and `the muggle problem´."

Lily was so impressed that she couldn´t find a word to say in reply as he walked on ahead of her when they entered the great hall.

*    *    *

"Well it´s like this, see... Tomoko Satori biffed Jones right on the head during the match. Which is why Mulkey made an allowance for Potter to catch the snitch instead..."

The talk in the library was a low hum of conversation since Madam Pince had disappeared into the restricted section for a book a fifth year needed to take out.

"Grindylows?!" Dale sobbed with glee. "I swear, Corky Puggler should be a professional comedian!"

"And before we were attacked I was just saying how you had been smart for staying at school for the holidays," Lily said, ticking off a few things on her Potions notes. They had an important exam tomorrow morning, which meant that it would be both long and boring.

"I wasn´t invited," Dale shook his head. "My dad turned up a few weeks back and my mum wanted him to herself for a little while longer..." he made a shuddering that told Lily that he thought his mum could have at it.

"Have you met your dad before?" she asked.

`No, not in the conventional sense. My mum thought he was the reason I was a wizard. But it turns out that he´s even more mugglish than she is."

"How dreadful," Alia said, shaking her head. "I couldn´t imagine my parents being non-magical... It would be so weird..."

"You´re so weird," Lily said.

"But a swell quidditch player," Dale added quickly. "I particularly admired the way you got Amos Diggory right smack in the jaw last match!"

Lily agreed wholeheartedly.

Alia sang, "I cam, I saw, I hit him right there in the jaw..."

"When´s the following match and who´re we playing?" Dale asked in a more hushed voice as Pince came out of the restricted section dusting cobwebs off herself.

"Next week- and Slytherin. We lost the last match with Ravenclaw but we´re still in the lead. Potter was furious when we lost. He´s made us practice five days a week for three hours... I think I hate Quidditch now!" Alia whispered, staring intently into the massive book she cradled called, Apalling Magical Mishaps.

"I´m nervous about Slytherin... I can´t stand to see Osman Shodwick happy," Lily whispered back, twirling her sugar quill.

"Well were not nervous at all, so don´t fret. Slytherin has a awful team this term what with Bellatrix run off to join the Voldemort circus-"

She couldn´t finish as both Lily and Dale were racked with silent laughter at this analogy.

"What´s so funny?" A fellow Gryffindor, Oscar Bodin joined them at the table.

"Slytherin´s Quidditch team," Lily explained.

"Oh, yes. Quite."

"Potter is always very clear about how to handle them, he´s got a special loathing for the Slytherins. And speaking of him, he wanted me to tell you thank you for feeding all that garbage about us being unpracticed to Diggory!" Alia said to Lily.

Lily looked surprised. `How did he find out about that?"

"I don´t know at all dear, but he just said to say thanks for that."

"He might have used that pet rat of his!" Oscar suddenly suggested much to the hilarity of the other three.

"His what?" Dale gasped.

"His pet rat... He´s got a rat sometimes, with him. Some times I´ve seen Sirius Black with it. They send it to the Slytherin table often. I figured it was one of those magical transmitter rodents you see at the Magical Menagerie."

Alia and Dale thought this was pretty funny news, but Lily was curious.

*    *    *

"Potter?" Lily called after a black haired boy a few yards ahead of her in the dungeons. He was flanked by both Black and white-haired, little Pettigrew, an odd trio.

"Black?" she continued, and the three boys turned around.

"What are you three doing down here?" she asked, trying to sound as if she was just making conversation.

"Oh, we were just going to use a secret passage we know about down here to sneak into the village of Hogsmeade so we can look for The Death Eaters. We´ve decided to be spies for Dumbledore. Oh, and visit a werewolf on the way back in, and you?" Sirius said.

"What an imagination you have," Lily scolded in a way that she had seen her mum scold her father. "I dropped some notes for the exam down here yesterday I think, I was just looking around for them."

"Oh, well, if we see them we´ll keep them for you, won´t we Prongs?" Sirius answered quickly. "We should be going now, we have a bit of a deadline what with the full moon tonight and all."

"Oh, yes that... Are you bringing that rat of yours with you?" she joked, "to spy on Voldemort?"

The three boys focused on her rather cooly and she wondered that maybe she should have been less forward.

Potter, eyes narrowed, asked Sirius, "Hmm... What´s that sound mate?"

After a second Sirius replied jovially, "Sounds to me like a cat fleeing a bag."

Lily felt like they were telling an inside joke and she was pretty confused now. At any rate, the three boys seemed to be quite amused by her.

"Is that what happened to the rat then?" Potter asked.

`Yes, the rat ate the cat," Sirius said.

"No! The cat ate the rat, Padfoot," Potter corrected.

"Where´s this cat now?" Peter looked around, horrified, causing the other two to start laughing.

"Well, if the rats survived the encounter with the cat, could you perhaps let me borrow him sometime?"

At this the two boys became wide-eyed.

"Borrow our rat?" Potter pronounced loudly, turning to Peter. "Did you hear that mate?!"

"Yes!" Lily started. "I wanted to use it to find out some more about the Dementors. I haven´t been given clearance for books from the restricted section, McGonagall put her foot down. And there´s not a peep about them in the rest of the library... So... I could pay you, or give you something as collateral so you know I´ll bring it back to you."

"Evans," Sirius said while the other two stared at her dumbstruck. "I don´t know where you got the stupid idea that we´ve got a `spying rat´, but I can assure you that it´s completely bogus. Completely..."

"Bogus!" Peter squeaked.

"Who told you this about a rat? Snivellus?" Potter asked.

"Yes, Snivellus and I are quite close," Lily snapped. She didn´t know who he was referring to. She felt they were being awfully rude and she had a pretty good feeling they were lying as well. There was no worse troublemaker than a self-serving one! They couldn´t even share their rat for one night? For something as important as finding about a creature that can suck out a soul? "But I saw the rat myself," she made up. "The day I told Diggory those lies about the Gryffindor Quidditch team."

She hoped this would serve to remind Potter that she had done him a sort of favor.

It seemed to work because all three stopped laughing and squinting at her.

"If you don´t trust me with your pet, I understand. But maybe you could send it off to find out information yourselves? And let me know something of what you learned? I´m interested in knowing as much as I can for the next time one of those things tries to kiss me-"

"Kiss you?" Potter was astounded. "It tried to give you the kiss?"

She was a little amused at his reaction. "Well, it was awfully close to my head for a while there... Perhaps it sensed that I have the worst sister in all of England and it knew that I had the most misery to feed on?" she joked.

But now even Black and Peter looked horrified. "It really tried to kiss you?"Peter said, shaking.

"We don´t have a magical rat," Potter said.

"But we´ll get you a book from the library," Sirius finished.

"Copacetic," Lily replied, a bit surprised that this whole plan had panned out so well. "But the only book is in the restricted section, how-"

"We´ve been to the restricted section loads of times," Potter said, messing up his hair a little, which Lily found a bit funny. Maybe that was why his head was such a rat´s nest all the time?

*    *    *

Sure enough, Lily found a ancient text leaning on one of the legs of her desk in Charms the following morning.

It was smaller than she was expecting, though quite heavy. She lugged it on to her lap under the desk and looked over at the table Potter and his friends occupied.

The three boys- Lupin was still away for a family illness- were busy catapulting beetles in to a boy´s long stringy hair in the front row.

She turned back to the book and tried to find a table of contents, but there was none. Nor was there was a appendix in back to go on. She leafed through the first chapter and to her amazement found that the whole book was about the Dementor!

"Fantastic," she breathed. She felt the excruciatingly wonderful pressure on her chest that came when she had stumbled into something both forbidden and curious.

She looked over at the other table and this time caught Potter looking over. He glanced away fast and she waved to Peter, who squinted and accidentally marked up his face with his leaking quill.

"Listen to this," Lily said reading aloud from the old tome, "Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you!"

"Wild," Dale muttered. "Frankly, the less I have to know about these things, the better. It seems like there´s no way to fend yourself at all from these freaks of nature!"

`But that´s not true at all," Lily assured, glowing. "There´s always a charm! Albeit, a rather difficult one, but nonetheless!"

"Are you a nut?" Joe Leary said. "Against that thing that was in our carriage?"

"Yes! It´s called the Patronus charm!"

"Hmm..."

"It requires a great deal of skill and power, but even a low-scale version of the Patronus charm can help fend off a single Dementor until more help comes..."

"And what exactly does a Patronus charm do?" Dale asked.

"It conjures a protector, something that is particular to you and is very special. A corporeal patronus," Lily went on excitedly, "will take the form of an animal and will literally charge down a attacker, not just a Dementor but anything that threatens-"

"So... theoretically we could use a patronus on Bellatrix?" Dale laughed.

`Oh, sure!" Lily said.

"How long does it take to learn?" Joe asked.

"Well..." she looked doubtful. "That´s the major hang-up about the Patronus charm, really. It´s well beyond N.E.W.T. level magic. Most adult wizards have not mastered the ability to conjure a full patronus."

"Well, it´s the thought that counts," Dale patted Lily on the shoulder.

Lily wasn´t sure how to get the book back into the restricted section after she had read it front to back, so she found Peter Pettigrew in one of the lower levels. He was standing by a funky statue of a one-eyed witch.

"I wanted to bring this back." she said quickly as he looked at her, shuffling nervously. And thank you, it was very informative-"

She was interrupted when the witch statue behind Peter moved and three boys came crawling out, talking animatedly.

They all stopped and stared at Lily. "Hullo," Lupin greeted.

"Oh, hi..." she trailed off. She shook herself and moved on,"Uh, I was just bringing this book back to Peter. Here." she handed it to Potter and he took it.

"Was it any help?" Sirius asked with a toothy grin which suggested that he doubted any book could be a help. The statue closed with a grating noise and his grin widened.

"Yes, it was terrific. I´m going to start practicing a spell from it. It´s good to have you back Remus, goodnight!" she shuffled off before her better sense took over . She did, after all owe them for getting her the book and it wouldn´t be very nice to get them in trouble just for a little ol´ thing like a secret passage and Remus being a werewolf... She wondered if other students knew about it. It was so obvious, that she figured that they didn´t.

*    *    *