The Reticulation

"Ouch! Ginny, that's my foot!"

"I'm not Ginny..."

"Luna, get away from me! You're driving me crazy!"

"Both of you, stop arguing. Let's try to figure out what's happened here."

"Well, everything suddenly went black."

"Thanks, Ginny. That's very perceptive of you to notice."

"Well, you did ask."

"I didn't ask, Hermione did."

"Oh, honestly, why didn't someone think of this before? Lumos!" Hermione's wand illuminated a dark, circular chamber with walls made of hard black stone.

"Harry, Seamus, Dean and Neville aren't here," she observed.

Ginny heard this, but her attention was more firmly focused on the only object in the entire room. It was a jade mirror with images of serpents carved along the edges. Ginny felt rather tense--they reminded her all too well of the Chamber of Secrets--but she approached it without saying anything. At first her reflection was rather pale, but then its cheeks became tinted slightly reddish when she realized how nervous she looked.

"This looks very 'Slytherin-ish,'" she said eventually. "Why d'you think it's in here?"

"I dunno," Ron said, "maybe You-Know-Who reckons that we'll want to look at ourselves while we'll we're trapped in here."

"Oh, I can't believe you, Ron!" Hermione snapped. "We're being confronted by the most feared wizard of the century, who you can't even say the name of, and you're making jokes about it! It seems a bit off, don't you think?"

"Well, we've been in worse situations than this, haven't we?" Ron replied hotly. "Besides, you wouldn't want to be stuck down here with someone who doesn't have a sense of humor, now would you?"

"What d'you mean 'down here?'" Luna asked vaguely.

"Well, it's dark, so I assumed we were in the dungeons," Ron said rather sheepishly.

"You assumed," Hermione told him. "We can't just assume things like that."

"Don't tell me you didn't assume we were in the dungeons," Ron replied. Hermione paused before answering.

"Well, that's not the point," she said quickly. "The point is you can't just make assumptions based on so little evidence."

"Well, if this isn't in the dungeons, we aren't there any windows?" Ginny asked cleverly.

"Maybe he's trying to trick us into thinking we are in the dungeons," Ron suggested.

"Well, why would they build a room like that in the first place?" Ginny asked.

"If you control the Reticulation, you can create rooms at will," Hermione explained. "Nobody's every transposed himself--or herself--over the Reticulation before. I didn't think it was possible until twenty minutes ago, but it's the only explanation for what's going on."

"So, he could just suddenly make the floor disappear or make this room collapse on top of us whenever he felt like it?" Ginny asked. Hermione bit her lip and nodded solemnly.

Umbridge and McGonagall were still outside talking when they saw Harry bolt out of the castle doors and run past them into the Forbidden Forest.

"Now, where d'you think you're going, young man?!" Umbridge yelled after him, but Harry paid her no mind.

"Potter, come back here this instant!" McGonagall shouted, but he ignored her too as he disappeared into the forest. The two women stared after him for a moment.

"I'm going after him," McGonagall said strictly. "I want you to stay right here."

"I am senior undersec--"

"I think you will find I'm in charge here," McGonagall told her sternly.

"No, I think you will find I am," said Umbridge, her wide, toad-like smile in place as she held a piece of parchment with the Minister's signature written at the bottom of it. "Therefore, I will be coming with you, McGonagall."

"Fine," McGonagall said tartly, "If it means so much to you to discipline a student running off the grounds."

"Oh, it does mean so much to me," Umbridge replied, "when that student is Harry Potter."