Terry Boot and the Masochist's Boulder

The next morning, Terry awoke to a new, bright shining world, which in Terry's mind was also full of promise. A promise, that is, of no pain. This was indeed the place for Terry; a place where he wouldn't get beaten, mauled, or abused.

Terry put on his Hogwart's robes, combed down his hair while looking in a mirror, and tied his shoes.

He descended the stone stairs, and entered the Ravenclaw common room. The study area was filled with comfortable, over stuffed blue chairs, and a fireplace with the Ravenclaw crest on it. There was a plush grey and blue carpet on the floors, and tapestries on the walls kept the room from being drafty. Surrounding three of the four walls were bookcases, which held a plethora of books, wizarding and otherwise.

When Terry got to the bottom of the staircase, he saw to his astonishment that Lisa and Mandy were waiting for him, so that they could all go down to breakfast together.

"Are you waiting to hit me?" Terry questioned, looking nervous in his new Hogwarts robes.

"Terry, I-" Lisa began.

"'...want to hurt you'?" Terry finished for Lisa, with a question in his big, blue eyes.

"No, no," Lisa added hastily, as Mandy grabbed Terry before he could trip and fall into the fireplace. "I'm going to tell you what an 'heir' is. You wanted to know, right?"

"I know what 'air' is," Terry said haughtily, as he had obviously forgotten everything the sorting hat had told him.

"Are you sure you know what an heir is, Terry? It's a person, you see..."

Terry watched Lisa give him the definition of an "heir", but he was watching her with a clearly vacant expression. Absorbing nothing of what Lisa said, he beamed at her when she was finished nonetheless, and exclaimed, "Thanks, Lisa! You're a pal!"

"You're welcome, Terry. Now, let's go get some breakfast."

Don't be fooled. Lisa knew that Terry had heard nothing of her explanation, but she figured he'd learn what an "heir" was one of these days. Most likely the hard way, as that seemed to be how Terry learned everything.

"I'm starving," Mandy whined, as they wandered down to the Great Hall. It took them quite a while to actually find the hall, seeing how the staircases moved and shifted with the changing winds.

When they reached the entrance to the Great Hall Lisa pondered aloud, "I wonder what we're having for breakfast this morning?"

"I hope it's not dirt!" Terry worried. He was sick of eating dirt. Most of his childhood had been spent eating dirt, grass, and other various fun outside organic foods.

Terry, Lisa, and Mandy headed for the Ravenclaw table, and took a seat next to a couple of other first years. The seat next to Terry was empty, and still was, really, after the Grey Lady sat down next to him.

"Do they serve dirt here?" Terry asked, worriedly. The fact that the Grey Lady was a ghost didn't seem to bother him. Obviously he had gotten over his sudden, but intense fear of the paranormal in one night.

"They won't make you eat dirt, my dear," said the Ravenclaw house ghost. "We only have nutritious things to eat here and maybe sweets later," the grey lady finished with a wink.

"My grandpa says that gruel and rocks would do me good," Terry told her, wide-eyed at the prospect of eating real food two days in a row.

"Hmm..." the grey lady murmured. She didn't like to argue with children about rules their guardians had set down, so instead she filled a plate with bacon, eggs, and toast, and pushed it toward Terry.

"Why don't we try this, hm?" she told him.

"I like real food. Sometimes it's hard to pretend that stones are eggs, because eggs are supposed to be runny inside, and stones are only full of pain."

As Terry was eating, he noticed the Bloody Baron waving something odd at him from across the Great Hall. As Terry squinted at the object, he suddenly became filled with a feeling of longing.

"That ghost has my phantom leg!" Terry shouted, and sprinted across the hall, only to lose the ghost as he floated through a wall. Suddenly, he felt Professor Kettleburn's meaty, sweaty hand on his shoulder.

"Won't do you no good, Terry, my lad," he said, shaking his head. "That Baron has my leg, too, but they're just phantom appendages. You can't put them back on, you know?"

But Terry didn't know. He didn't really know a lot of anything, so it wasn't an unusual feeling for him. However, if there was one thing Terry thought he knew, it was that he desperately wanted his leg back, in ghost form or not. It took a lot of coercing, but eventually Professor Kettleburn got him to sit back down at the table. He put him in between Lisa and Mandy, so as to distract him from his leg longing.

Distressed and without really thinking, as per usual, Terry took hold of his goblet, and drank his fill of the thick, orangey substance within. When he put down the goblet, eyes bulging, mouth full of the mystery liquid, he asked, "What did I just put in my mouth?" thusly spraying the entire Ravenclaw table with Terry saliva mixed with the mystery orange substance.

Luckily, the Ravenclaws were used to being spit on by then, so they just continued with their breakfast.

"That's pumpkin juice, Terry," the Grey Lady explained, refilling his glass. "Everyone at Hogwarts loves their pumpkin juice."

Terry began to cry.

"What's wrong, Terry?" the Grey Lady asked, looking at him with concern in her transparent eyes.

"Once again I'm different from everyone else."

"You don't like it?" she asked him, growing afeared. No one had never not liked pumpkin juice.

"How did they make it?" he asked, sniffing and gazing with amazement at the potent brew. He couldn't imagine people squeezing pumpkins to extract the juice. He could only imagine pumpkins being thrown at him at a fast rate.

"Well, it's a bit of a secret, but I think I can trust you, Terry, seeing how you hate it and all. Besides, no one would listen to you anyway, what with..." and she gestured at his absent leg. "You see, everyday Hogwarts buys a thousand pumpkin pies. The hired help, also known as the enslaved, picks the pie crusts off the pies, then takes the filling, mixes it with milk, and pours it into these goblets you see before you."

Everyone at the Ravenclaw table stared warily into their goblets.

"I can still taste the enslavement in my pumpkin juice," a fifth year whined.

"Can I have something else to drink?" Terry asked, thirst in his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Terry, but we don't go in for your Muggle fads, like water and pure milk, but here, have some butterbeer."

Terry didn't really mind the butterbeer too much. It tasted a lot like butterscotch, but with more alcohol in it. It really added a boost to your morning, Terry thought.

After breakfast, Terry weaved his way inebriatedly upstairs to History of Magic, where he proceeded to sleep off his drunken state, after the basic introductions. At the end of their first lecture, Mandy shook Terry, and both she and Lisa helped cart him off to Charms, after handing him the day's notes.

"I'm sorry I got drunk," Terry bemoaned. "I didn't mean to."

"We know, Terry. You seem to do a lot of things on accident," Lisa said, calmly.

"Are you talking about the polar bear?" Terry blinked and hiccupped.

"Why? Does your leg hurt again?" Mandy asked him.

"No. I just...always wanted...vegetables," Terry finished, and fell back asleep.

Charms was a big to-do for Terry, partly because of his drunken state, but also because wand magic just didn't seem to suit Terry. It was something with his hand-eye coordination that had him confounded.

Lunch woke Terry up, and refusing the butterbeer the grey lady offered him again, he managed to walk relatively by himself and normally to the Transfiguration classroom with Mandy and Lisa.

"Is Transfiguration another wand class?" Terry asked Lisa.

"Yes, it is," Mandy interrupted. "Didn't you know about what you were getting yourself into at Hogwarts? I tried to learn all about my classes before I came here."

"I didn't even know I was a wizard until a few months ago," Terry said, clutching at his textbooks.

"Well, I hear Transfigurations is the most difficult class, besides Potions," Lisa said. "I heard that Hermione Granger quoting some rubbish from Complicated Classes and Lasses: A Girl's Guide to Hogwarts."

"Well, I heard that Professor McGonagall is a real piece of work. I guess she had some kind of nervous breakdown last semester when Dumbledore released all the house elves only to enslave them again for gambling purposes," Mandy added in. "So, we best not be late."

The trio quickly headed up to McGonagall's classroom, basically carrying Terry half the way there. Once seated in the cramped classroom, Terry turned to Lisa, looking a bit green in the face.

"Lisa," Terry began, rubbing his head. "Why is this room spinning? Is it some kind of, special revolving room? This school seems quite fond of alliteration. So that must be it."

"Terry," Mandy said, vying in on their conversation. "The room isn't spinning, you are." And that was when Terry realized he was standing in front of the class spinning in circles.

Just then the door creaked open and Professor McGonagall entered, her emerald robes billowing behind her. "Mr. Boot, would you please take your seat," she scolded, which sounded in Terry's mind a lot like, "I'll gut you and paint my chambers with your blood."

So Terry sat down.

The rest of the class quickly filed in, and soon the class began.

"Transfigurations is one of the toughest classes Hogwarts has to offer. I expect quite a bit more from you Ravenclaws than say, those dawdling Hufflepuffs," McGonagall stated, seemingly unaware that half the class was filled with Hufflepuffs. "This class involves courage and loyalty, so naturally the Gryffindors will be getting higher marks than you. It has nothing to do with the fact that I like the Gryffindors more than anyone else."

The Ravenclaws weren't exactly buying this game of McGonagall's, but the Hufflepuffs were lapping it up like starving puppies.

McGonagall then demonstrated how much better she would always be than her students at Transfigurations by turning her desk into a pig and back again.

"Grudley!" Terry squeaked, as for a brief moment, he thought he was back at his grandparent's house on Privet Drive. The pig McGonagall and transfigured looked almost exactly like his pot bellied relative.

The class was full of more explanations and things not to do when waving a wand in the air, and then they were set free again for their last class of the day, Potions.

"Does Potions involve wands?" Terry asked Lisa, as they headed downstairs to the dungeons. Terry was really getting tired of waving his magical projector around. He just wanted to do something simple for once. With a shock, he realized something that had been brimming on the edge of his mind ever since the beginning of Transfigurations, "What if I'm not cut out for school and receiving and education?" Terry thought to himself.

"What's wrong, Terry?" Mandy asked, catching the dejected look on his freckled face.

"I don't think I'm ready for school yet," Terry told her sadly.

"Why?" asked Maggie. "Do you miss being home?"

"No!" Terry exclaimed. "I don't miss my grandparents or their pig. I just think that I'm never going to be able to keep up with all these two legged kids."

"Terry," Lisa said, dragging out his name. "Of course you can keep up. We'll help you, of course, and you're not dumb, just crippled."

"It's still a handicap," Terry told her, but he was frowning less.

"Yes, but it's not a mental handicap," Lisa pointed out.

"Which would be worse than being crippled, I think," Mandy jumped in. Lisa glared at her, but Terry didn't notice the ambiguity in Mandy's statement.

"You're right, Mandy!" Terry said. "Suddenly, I'm really looking forward to Potions. Let's get going!"

The Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs lined up outside the Potions classroom and in only a few minutes were greeted by the surly Professor Snape. He came walking down the hallway, robes billowing out behind him in his standard manner. His hair and face glistened in the candle light from all of the grease on his body, but no one would have thought to make fun of him...at least on the outside.

"Get inside, get inside," he grumbled, as the class filed in warily. Their Potions professor looked a lot more foreboding than the rest of the professors at the school. The students scurried into the classroom, and hoped that the Potions class wouldn't be as severe as its professor.

"Hiya, Professor Snape!" Terry said to him, cheerfully. "How are you?"

"I don't have time right now, you disgrace of a Ravenclaw. I have to teach you and your idiot friends Potions."

"Okay!" Terry said, and took a seat next to Lisa in the classroom. Mandy sat next to some other Ravenclaw in the seat in front of them.

"Class, I would give you some sort of introduction speech, but I spent all my energy on the class that really matters, the Gryffindors and the Slytherins. So let's just begin with a small potion," Professor Snape drawled, trying not to make his speech any more interesting than it needed to be. "You'll find the ingredients list on the board, so don't ask me any unnecessary questions."

The class glanced at each other, and with a strong "Now!" from Professor Snape, they were off gathering their ingredients.

While Terry was getting his ingredients, he managed to stumble into Professor Snape's desk, knocking everything over in the process, and setting small things on fire somehow, in that tried and true Terry fashion.

"Terry!" Snape bellowed, as his shoe caught on fire. While Snape was struggling to put it out, Terry noticed a headline in the daily newspaper that was delivered to Hogwarts.

Something Else Happened At Gringotts

"'Something from a vault we can't remember turned up missing today. Except we can't remember what it was, and we're pretty sure we're glad it's gone,' a goblin spokesperson told news reporters today. We would report more, but what's the point?"

Underneath this article was a picture of the news reporters and goblins sleeping next to an open vault.

"Hey..." Terry said, trying to put two and two together. "This sounds familiar."

Terry tried to remember exactly where it was that he had heard about Gringotts, or why it was an important place anyway. Once he had deduced it was a bank, he tried to figure out how it was that he recognized the open vault in the picture. "It couldn't be...," he started to think, but just then the paper started on fire, and Terry forgot about everything except the sound beating Professor Snape was going to give him.