Korean Conflict

It all began one morning in September, a day like any other. The sun rose and began to eat away at the English mist, and the dew on the grass evaporated in tiny puffs of glass. The giant squid woke up from a nightmare about a frightening creature, half-shark half-boy, swimming right past his bedroom. Birds would have been chirping and singing up a storm had any birds lived there; as it were, the only trees around were those of the forbidden forest and one giant whomping willow, all of which made dangerous perches. The birds had long since given up and moved to Salisbury. It was on this fine still-summery morning in September, the third day since the students had returned to Hogwarts castle, that one Hermione Granger could not find her hair potion.

"Hermione?" came the voice of Parvati Patil, fellow fifth year. "Are you alright in there? We're going to miss breakfast."

Hermione was standing in the 5th year bathroom, staring at the tiny pink flowers that bordered the mirror. She raised a hand and touched her hair.

"Hermione?"

Steeling herself, she turned and opened the door.

"Herm-eek!" Lavender Brown was also standing there.

"Um, um," stuttered Parvati.

"I can't find my bottle of Princess Pressing Potion," Hermione explained, and strode past the two girls to find a hair tie.

"Maybe," said Parvati. "You shouldn't go to class today."

"No," said Hermione. "I'll be fine. I'm not shallow enough to care."

"That," said Lavender, who was shallow enough to care. "Is a fro."

"I'm quite aware of what it is," Hermione said huffily. "It's MY hair, after all."

"But, but-"

"It never used to be THAT bad!"

Hermione sighed. Madam Pomfrey had explained it to her the year before. Apparently her hair was a side effect of sorts of her magical ability. Harry's hair, for example, would grow back after being cut. Hers was much the same. As she began to grow more and more powerful her hair began to grow more and more unruly, and only "Princess Pressing Potion," which was meant to exterminate stubborn wrinkles from clothing, could actually control all the frizz.

So now it was fluffing out in an angry mass of brown curls. It defied gravity a bit, which made the effect quite eerie. She tried to hold her hair back with a hair tie, then another, then a few more, but none of them could go even one time around her hair, and snapped.

"Come on then," Hermione finally said, after the demise of the twelfth hair-tie. Where any other girl would have cried, she was just becoming a little angry at the unfairness of it all and resolved to stamp on the foot of the first person to mention it. This decided, she gathered her books and left the room.

Parvati and Lavender followed slowly, worried more about being seen with the fro'd one than making it to breakfast on time. These thoughts fled their vacuous little minds, though, when Dean Thomas, sexiest boy in the school, was spotted leaving the common room. They skittered after him, undoubtedly plotting another attempt at seduction.

Hermione was left alone. Stupid girls, she thought. Didn't they notice that Dean acted the same way they were acting, but towards his best friend, Seamus Finnegan? They didn't have a chance.

She was shaken out of these thoughts when her two best friends, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, stumbled down from the 5th year boy's dorm room.

"No," Ron was saying rather loudly to a worried looking Harry. "Just because I'm going out with him doesn't mean you have to stop liking him."

"But, I feel BAD..." Harry whined. They caught up to Hermione, not noticing her fro. At first Hermione had taken offense when her best friends, two guys, for god's sake, never really commented on her appearance. Was she not pretty enough? Was she too much of a tom-boy or a book-worm to catch their attention? But as they had both turned out to be rather gay, she forgave them. Ron shot Hermione an exasperated look.

"Ok," Ron said to Harry. "Let's ask Hermione."

"Yes," said Hermione. They exited the common room and began to walk towards the Great Hall. "Let's ask her."

"Ok, lets say, just hypothetically of course, that there was a certain redhead that was currently a 5th year at Hogwarts. For the sake of clarity, let's call him Nor. Let's say Nor had recently captured the heart of the resident sex god, a devastatingly pretty blonde in Slytherin."

"Which is a bit more than hypothetical," Hermione pointed out, "but continue."

"And just as hypothetically, Nor's best friend Speccy wanted to have a piece of that fine arse."

"Yes," said Hermione. She giggled and 'Speccy' looked a bit distraught.

"And it so happens that Nor and his blonde companion find Speccy rather snoggable as well, and are willing to share..."

"So what's the problem?" Hermione asked.

"I'd just be bothering them," Harry mumbled, not looking at all like his courageous Gryffindor self, as he was rather crap at relationships.

"You won't be," said Hermione in her wisest I-Am-Hermione-Omniscient-Fro-Queen voice. "Don't worry Harry, you're all hormonally charged boys. It's only natural for you to experiment and snog everything that moves. You have an excuse, take advantage of it. And while you're at it, take advantage of Draco Malfoy for me, I'd shag that boy silly if he didn't fancy the lesser sex."

Harry and Ron grinned at her and sat down, as they had just reached the Gryffindor table. Hermione was about to sit down as well, when she realized the eyes of almost all students were fixed upon her. This was worse than the beginning of fourth year when she had come back to Hogwarts with size D breasts and no boy except for Harry, who was sweet like that, had been able to look at her face long enough to notice that her teeth had been shortened. She tried to remain calm, but it was all she could do not to cast an incendiary charm on every last one of them.

Instead of doing anything quite so rash, Hermione settled for casting a venomous glare that encompassed the entire Hogwarts population. To give the right effect, she pivoted 180 degrees very slowly, staring at each and every student and staff member until each head had whipped guiltily to look at his or her plate or hands. All except one Draco Malfoy, of course, who she couldn't help but hate at the moment for the coolly amused, but at the same time vaguely worried look he gave her.

On turning back to sit besides Ron at the table, having effectively scared at least half the school shitless, she found herself standing face to face with one of the Weasley twins. Really, who cared which one? Her stomach growled loudly, and she may have actually growled as well, her hair crackled softly with a surgeance of magic that always came with strong emotions, and there would have been foreboding piano music playing in the background if she had been an actress in a drama series, but as she was not, there wasn't.

Fred or George, whoever it was, seemed oblivious to the dangerous position he was in. His freckles (as well as the sparkles on his white teeth, which Hermione couldn't completely ignore because her parents were dentists, after all) danced happily.

"Morning, Hermione!" He said. Hermione could have sworn she'd seen his gaze flicker to her hair a few times.

"What," she hissed. "Do you want?"

"Um," he said. He frowned a bit. "I just wanted to know what happened to your-"

"AAARRGGGHHH!!!" Came the battle cry of Hermione. She leapt straight into the air, looking for all the world like a Jack 'N The Box, except without the box and with more hair. She landed hard on the redhead's foot.

The boy yelped in pain and surprise, and collapsed onto the floor of the Great Hall. Hermione took a step back, feeling smug. That would teach him to ask about her hair.

"Fred!" cried Ron, at the same time that Harry cried "George!"

Hermione spun on her heel and exited the Great Hall.

"What was that about?" asked Seamus. "What did you say to her?"

"I just wanted to ask what had happened to her cat," Fred/George said.

- - - - -

"As much as I enjoyed the little show you and Mr. Weasley put on in the Great Hall, the task has been put on me to punish you."

"Punish me, Professor?" asked Hermione. She gulped, her eyes widened, and if it weren't for the giant puff of hair Professor Snape would have been swayed to let her off easy. Knowing this, Snape kept his eyes glued to the sparking fro and continued to speak.

"Yes, Ms. Granger. Punish you. Meaning make you regret your violent display by subjecting you to menial labor."

Hermione pouted.

"If I may ask, though, what was that all about?"

"He was about to ask about my hair."

"I see. And if I may make the same mistake..."

"I lost my hair potion. For all I know Fred or George was the one who did it, anyways, and he was just asking to make fun of me."

"Hm," said Snape, trying to ignore the way her eyes flashed an angry, yet regretful, green and how her lips looked much softer than McGonagall's. "Well, you'll be cleaning the potions desks for the next hour. Well, get to it, I haven't all night."

"Scrub with what, sir? A herring?" Snape looked at her blankly. "Never mind, a Muggle thing."

"Alright then, take this rag." Hermione took the proffered rag and bucket. She started at the farthest leftmost side of the room, where she, Harry, and Ron always sat, and began to scrub away the little hearts and flowers and "I love Draco Malfoy"s that she had always told Harry and Ron not to draw. Snape sat back in his chair, and looked almost relaxed. Any other student would have been surprised to see the school's most hated teacher looking so comfortable and borderline-human, but Hermione had often come after hours for tutoring sessions and was used to the idea that Snape wasn't completely dead. She knew, for instance, that he nervously rubbed his left thumb and forefinger together when he was thinking and that he had an almost unhealthy obsession with Muggle country music.

Her musings were interrupted almost forty-five minutes later when Snape murmured, "It was very funny, actually. Even Trelawny had a good laugh, and she's as dry as a monkey's mailbox."

Hermione giggled. "I do feel sort of bad, you know. I didn't mean to stomp on him quite so hard." She paused for a minute. "No, actually I did. But I'm just glad there was no lasting damage."

Snape smiled a bit. "Alright then, you may go now. You've thoroughly repented as far as I can tell. Now off with you, I have a new compact disc that I haven't been able to listen to yet. It was just owled to me this morning. Almost as exciting as the fro & foot fiasco."

"Professor, they're usually referred to as CDs. Just thought you should know if you really want to blend in."

"Ah, thank you Ms. Granger. Now, go. You must have better things to do."

Hermione nodded, and with a little wave, left the room. She was about to go whistling and skipping down the hallway, when a pair of hands roughly grabbed her around the waist and covered her mouth. The scary kidnapper impression that she was trying to conjure would have been much more believable if the hands were not so soft.

- - - - -

Dark dark dark LIGHT!

Dark dark dark LIGHT!

A fat feline was fumbling about under the floorboards. His name was Crookshanks, although not by choice. If he'd been given the option he would have liked to be called Margaret. As it was, the only one who called him this was Harry, the sweet boy, but only when they were alone, because it upset his owner.

Crookshanks stopped his thoughts from going any further and instead concentrated on the pattern of dark dark dark LIGHT! made by the three shadows followed by the tiny sliver of light that marked the cracks between the floorboards underneath the floor in the shrieking shack.

He was a soldier, he was. Colonel Margaret to be exact, but no one knew of his high rank in the British armed forces because if they did he would have to claw their eyes out or perhaps sit in a friendly fashion on their faces while they slept. Oh yes, Crookshanks had his ways. He would stop at nothing to keep his identity a secret. It would have all been much more exciting, though, if someone had actually suspected. But all the children at Hogwarts, including the unusually perceptive Harry and Crookshanks' intelligent master, Hermione, were too caught up in their little dramas, saving the world and whatnot, to notice the sneaking and plotting of the Gryffindor cat.

Aha, Crookshanks thought. A hole large enough to admit a rather roundly rotund cat, like himself, was before him. Dim light fell down in a spotlight of sorts and dust floated around in the air, giving the illusion of fairy dust and late afternoon, but Crookshanks knew it to actually be very early morning on the third day of the term at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

His muscles coiled as he sat back on his haunches. After a moment of tension he sprang into the air. A small pink bottle tied around his neck clattered along with the damn bell that Hermione had put on his collar so that he would not eat the other children's' rather dull and juicy pets.

He was now in the bottom floor of the Shrieking Shack. Soon the plan would be in motion, and there would be nothing anyone could do to stop it.

- - - - -

To be continued...