10

The kids Patronus charms were, as might be expected, not very good at all. So, it was not a tropical vacation site we ended up selecting.

But there was loads you could learn in the USA.

Everybody had enjoyed their second trip to Diagon Alley. Moria had her new school books (Harry and Hermione already had theirs) and supplies, including a brand new wand, with a dragon heartstring core - twin to Hermione's.

Their mother had also purchased a wand, and though it was another dragon heartstring, it was of a far different animal than her daughters'. She'd smiled and made an excuse to Ollivander about having left her wand in Italy. But no one truly knew if the old man believed her or not. Not that it mattered in the end, she had her own wand!

The portable potion labs they had sprung for were also quite remarkable. The basic set required by Hogwarts was a 'you can get by on this... mostly' only alright if you didn't venture too far afield, or have anything too difficult in mind, and even then you were supposed to have the school's resources on hand to get any good use out of it. But we'd already passed the point where to fully use or improve our skills we needed better.

Hey, you like what you're good at, and so far Potions was the most developed subject any of us had.

Rather remarkable, that.

Our next endeavor was going to be, naturally, absorbing those memories of the Marauder's Transfiguration classes (and certain other interactions for which she'd been present) that I'd gotten from McGonagall... er, Minnie. This would be valuable to us in several ways, not the least of which was increased knowledge of Harry's parents, of which we all were growing rather fond, but also vital knowledge covering yet another core subject of Hogwarts study.

Every little bit helps, and I was determined to erase my incompetence.

The procedure with the Jello and everything was the same as before, with different flavors for everyone this time around lest they choose to think those had some special significance. But otherwise things went remarkably like the first time we'd all done this sharing of memories.

Even down to Ted going off on his own, renting a boat and fishing.

After the experience, all of our previous Marauder Memories were more complete, and instances that we couldn't understand before made sense, as we had more material to judge by, filling in gaps or holes.

However, without the surprise of how wonderful were the Marauders (even Pettigrew - I was still shocked over that), there was more comparative delight in our newly acquired Transfiguration knowledge, and we immediately set about to test it, changing all sorts of stuff into all sorts of other stuff.

Two things this did that surprised us, but ultimately shouldn't have: One was that our newly increased understanding of Transfiguration sent us all surging leagues ahead in our study of animagus transformations. Actual achievement of our goals of becoming animagi now seemed something we might do before the summer was out, when it had seemed a dim and distant thing earlier.

The other was that, those three of us who were metamorphs found our skills in that department enormously improved, with better control, easier results, improved holding power, the whole deal.

This was a good thing. A VERY good thing to our minds!

All of these new skills caused us great joy.

Even Tonks was surprised at her own increase in morphing skill, and voiced a complaint about her own previously shoddy study habits, wishing that she hadn't just coasted through Minnie's class the first time, barely getting sufficient grades for her aim of entering the Auror program.

The Aurors.

Once more, I knew more obscure details about stuff than I knew what to do with, and one of the ancient aims for founding the Auror corps was to stamp out the use of Blood Magic - yes, the same stuff that Dumbledore said protected Harry.

You see, it had a nasty reputation. One it well deserved, it must be said, as most blood magic was icky, icky stuff.

And the reasons for that were, well... ignorance as much as anything.

Curse Breakers had to know a great deal about the most obscure forms of magic in order to do their jobs with any reliability. They were actually one of the few professions officially allowed to study such ancient and horrid things as Blood Magic, all in the course of learning how to destroy those few relics that once hated art left behind.

So, having absorbed Lockhart's entire collection of curse breaker memories, I knew probably as much as any man living about it.

And... it was a sad, sad tale indeed.

Like most forbidden things, there was both a tempting benefit to be gained if you submerged your morals and indulged in the practice, and a terrible price to be paid. Also, in this case, there was a very real danger even in success as well, since no one seemed to know beforehand who would die from even a successful use of one of those ancient Blood Magic spells or rituals.

However, the evil in this case was not so much inherent to the art as in the way they'd used it, and how in their limited understanding they chose to pay the required price.

A child's jumprope can be a terrible thing if you run around strangling people with it. Tools were not so much evil, as what was done with them.

Blood magic could do things no other art could accomplish. Some things many would call terrible, yet others that none could fault. The protection Lily gave her only child was one based on both love and blood. She must've deliberately invoked the effect and knowingly sacrificed her own life also, yet her act destroyed the Dark Lord and was celebrated by all of magical Britain.

Besides, arresting her postmortem for knowing and using a forbidden spell was hardly in anyone's best interests.

Voldemort had also used blood magic. Once (that I knew of) to seal the entry to that chamber reached by the cave near the sea, and where he'd hidden one of his horcrux, before Regulus stole it. And one other time, when he used Harry's 'blood of the enemy' to create a new body for himself. Other uses by Riddle were not only possible, but likely.

Yet, strangely, I was actually guilty of the practice myself, though I did not know it at the time I'd done it.

The Grangers were too, for that matter.

Our simple transfusions, using muggle equipment, actually came close to the functioning core of some of those ancient blood magic rituals. The trappings were entirely different, but magically it functioned the same way as some of those ancient, forbidden rituals.

I hadn't known that at the time we'd done it.

One major reason Blood Magic was abhorred was because of the price that must be paid to invoke it, always in blood, sometimes heartblood, others not. And in quite a few cases the magic required transferring blood between two people.

The sad thing about it all was that the only way those ancient wizards who had first delved into this branch of the art could think of to move blood from one person's veins to another required sacrificing the original person, or at least doing them a grave injury.

And without blood typing they hadn't known why so many people died doing it, even from successful transfusions, or 'rituals' as they called them.

I had no idea how many spells and rituals were dark and hard to perform

because the magic world didn't know about transfusions and blood typing. They based those arts on murder and bloodshed because they hadn't known about needles and syringes. (Granted, at the time they came up with this art muggles were still using leeches, and those would digest enough of the blood to render it useless for rituals.)

Oh, it must be said, some of those guys who'd come up with this were sick bastards, twisted enough to have known and not CARED. But.. this stuff had been forbidden LOOOONG before even the muggle world knew about blood types. And, being both in disuse and very hated, virtually unknown outside of a few old grimories, no one had thought to update it when muggles came up with an answer solving those difficulties that had made the art so terrible.

Blood magic had a well deserved (aye! WELL deserved!) reputation as one of the sickest arts that anyone could perform. But much of the icky stuff that'd earned that terrible reputation was entirely and totally unnecessary!

Much, but not all, so there was still quite a bit of that art worth avoiding. But I wouldn't be surprised to find that there were quite a few options available with that little bit of muggle knowledge.

One of the things Blood Magic was best at, indeed, it was the only form of magic that could do it at all (and thus a major reason for it being hated and reviled) was in stealing magical gifts, things like being a parcelmouth, or an empath... or a metamorph!

Well, we had a friendly metamorph on hand (or three, but neither Harry or I could give blood to the Grangers, and we didn't know yet if Tonks couldn't) and...

As the last book showed, it didn't matter much if Harry could be disguised, if he was known to be running around with some people who were recognizable that alone would mark him.

So... if our friendly Granger family could be metamorphs also...

On that thought I very quietly blood types Dora, but it turned out she was another strong A, so no giving to the family who were all Bs.

Shucks! And it would have been so useful, too!

OoOoO

On our vacation, trying to settle my disturbed mind, I learned something.

I had underestimated something, my own fame, really. People LIKED Gilderoy Lockhart, and those things I'd been doing with his face and name had only increased that markedly. More people who hadn't liked him before now grew converted as they heard of those extra exploits, and those who'd liked him before now felt great confirmation and support for those feelings, and so now liked him even more.

And, the story had just gotten around rather famously about how I'd hired a private tutor on the strength of Snape's hatred for her alone. I'd thought it a marvelous joke, but as the crowd of eager Hogwarts graduates came off the train, some number of them mentioned in their applications for posts that Snape had hated their guts. And, they were being met and considered by people who were often my fans.

As a direct result, MORE students began to get hired on the strength of having been hated or abused by Snape, to such an extent that a handful of Slytherins even began to consider lying about it and claim hatred by their head of house in hopes of achieving a good position, as they were seeing all the time their former rivals from other houses getting good positions on the strength of that singular recommendation.

Now the adults of this world had often had Snape as a classmate, and either liked or hated him. Those that hated him would hate those whom he liked, and the reverse was true as well. So certain pairings up began to happen, where those who opposed Snape and his ideals found good apprentices and workers among those applicants he despised, and those who supported him often began to pair up as well.

And, as strange as it may seem, the pairing up of two like-minded individuals had better results, more often that not, than simply choosing to hire by OWL or NEWT scores.

In a strange sort of way, this began to work for the magical world.

However, it turned out my own worst estimates had nothing to do with how bad my fame had actually grown - in the muggle world!

This came at me a bit by surprise, as the first I'd heard of it, it was from a camera crew from a local television station that had tracked me down at the dude ranch where I was staying with the Grangers, asking for an interview.

The books and manga I'd prepared were flying off the shelves at an unheard of rate, unbelievable to the present world's publishing houses. The reporter lady offered to pay any price that was reasonable in return for an interview.

I grinned, still half mad and getting a mischievous thought.

My price was this: the loan of her camera crew for one week. Her station would pay for all of their salaries, upkeep, etc as usual, along with enough raw film to keep us rolling for that time, all of the permits and so on, plus development costs for said film. But everything we filmed belonged to me.

There were a few protections against 'gotcha!s' in there, but that was the nuts and bolts of it.

The lady reporter got on the phone and off of it two minutes later. Her boss had agreed to the deal - some guys down in accounting had crunched the numbers a bit and said this actually cost them less than they'd already been prepared to pay.

Well and good, everyone was satisfied with this unusual arrangement.

It was all I could do to not cackle and rub my hands together in glee as we conducted the half hour interview with the lady - who stuck around afterward to see what we were going to do with her camera crew.

I had an idea.

A most terrible, excellent, wonderful, nasty idea!

We were going to film Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It was NEARLY within these people's present abilities, they'd just never done it. Not had the creative energy, I supposed.

I had the experience of dozens of curse breakers, guys who ventured into tombs, braved traps, and gathered treasures. Sets would be no problem, as between my know-how and six wands all skilled at Transfiguration, they'd not only be accurate, they'd cost us nothing!

Costumes would cost us nothing, too. We just had to do it when the muggles weren't looking (and stunning and Obliviation made that easy!)

I was a martial artist of considerable skill and talent. Plus, I'd seen the films before so I knew what character I'd be emulating, so I could do a credible, heck, an excellent Dr. Jones! And my near Multiple Personality Disorder from having absorbed waaay too many memories not yet resolved now came in as a positive boon! Seeing as how I'd effectively been people who acted like him naturally, down to that wide, cocky grin.

Casting the rest of the family was easy.

Ted became the French Archeologist, our main antagonist. This wasn't hard, as it was the largest other male role, and he spoke fluent French, plus he'd loved to vacation in that country so could pull off a Frenchman act fairly well. And (better yet) he had acting experience! He'd done Shakespeare in college, which was a big part of how he'd wound up meeting his wife.

Anyone who could do Brutus would have no problem with this part!

Miranda also had acting experience, obviously, as she'd first met her husband doing it. So, she pretty much had to handle our next main role, which was the big bodied and cheerful Egyptian Archeologist, except we recast the role as that of a Proper English Lady who happened to be an archeologist in Egypt so as not to strain her acting skills unduly.

Besides, and more to the point, Egypt was one of those Muslim countries that requires its native women to wear the full head-to-toe 'hiding under a sheet' getup, and it would have inhibited her acting ability unduly to be fully concealed behind the veil. And easier for my part, as well, not to have her thus, as otherwise it would be too much like acting alongside Cousin It from the Addams family.

Brrr! Just scary!

For our female lead... well, it hadn't been acted all that well the first time. Pretty much all you'd need to do as well would be to be emotional and female and remember your lines. Dora would do fine for us there.

It took a bit of juggling to cast parts for the kids, who all wanted to be involved. But it wasn't hard to give them small, undemanding parts here or there, mostly as the English Lady's proper but brainy English daughters who helped and assisted with her research.

Harry could even borrow a bit from the part of Short Stuff in the second movie to be piloting the get away plane in the initial jungle chase scene.

After that, all we'd need was a museum curator (easily enough performed by Dora using her metamorph abilities, who could also do the part of the girl in class with 'Love You' painted on her eyelids) and one Nazi torture specialist - a part which our lady reporter was happy to take!

Grant us some extras (which the dude ranch and a neighboring reservation were both happy to provide) and we were already filming that afternoon!

That evening I'd be dropping into my pensieve with a couple of magic pens, one to record the dialog and one to write down the soundtrack, as I dredged up from memory and watched Raiders all over again.

Heck! I'd even send the score off to the London Philharmonic Orchestra to see if they'd be willing to do it for us. Why not?

A remake is always less hard to do than an original, and that was perfectly true in this case as I knew exactly what I wanted to do. We did not do this as professionals would, which made perfect sense as none of us were actors by profession, and especially not filmmakers!

But we had enough of the various specialties to make it work out alright.

The initial scene, that first tomb Jones raids on film, set in a jungle was easy enough to do, as I ran over to a nearby cave and got cracking, giving us a functional tomb within moments. It wouldn't last, seeing as how it was all transfigured out of raw sticks and stone, but I was no longer quite so much a transfiguration novice so it would last a couple of days, which was plenty long enough for our purposes.

The hardest part was getting the camera crew settled in their places and ready to film as I recited lines I knew by heart, bypassed traps I'd built myself based on the original movie ones (plus a few more I couldn't resist adding, based on curse breaker experiences 'I' had had), encountered spiders (transfigured ones this time for sure!) and 'lost' three guides from the dude ranch to the various perils as they 'died' to show the audience how dangerous it all was.

Then, get chased through a bit of jungle by spear-wielding natives, on to my getaway plane.

Everything we needed was right there on hand or instantly available (planes are surprisingly easy to transfigure - much easier than pigs anyway) so even with all of the hassles of being novices and having to do some scenes several times (or even more often) we had suitable footage in stock that first day.

Then came the respectable teacher bit, with the museum curator interaction and the guys from the army in to tell us the real mission of the whole movie. We got that done in one take, even.

We were really going by Hong Kong rules here, where films are done under budget and in a hurry, even if they are lacking a little polish in parts.

Then again, Hong Kong's best made Hollywood's finest... well, opinions varied according to preference as to which was best, but they were close. And the worst of Hong Kong's films faults are, fairly often, in sets and other costly accouterments which we had to spare!

The two guys coughed up by the dude ranch to serve as our army types were even both former military, so there wasn't even terribly much acting in their roles, they just did what they were accustomed to do.

There were a lot of arcane details to do with directing all of this stuff normally, trying to get the perfect camera angles and so on, but for me, for this, that was the easiest part! As I'd already seen the original movie, I knew which angles to take which shots at, so we had no need for the multiple cameras filming for just the right angle to get each scene the most visually stunning way possible.

Heck, with the now-multiple accomplished painters and artists and whatnot in among my pool of memories, I had a fair amount of expertise on how to frame a shot in there on my own!

And it was no trouble at all for Tonks to act out the ditsy and distracted curator (who was, in our case, a female role, seeing as... how did she put it? Oh! 'You can change what bits there are, but you don't get nothing new, or lose what's already there' - so a female metamorph was always going to be a female, regardless of morphing, a fact I found interesting).

No, the hardest bits about this were getting the camera crew to keep up with us, but they were pros too, in their way, and seemed to figure out what we wanted soon enough - not everything had to be a head shot!

But several of them had degrees in this, and those had covered potential for film. They weren't all just news. No, they were a talented bunch of boys, even if we did have to secretly resort to mild Sonorus charms to get the sound to work out right, seeing as we didn't have a proper boom guy (reporters always expecting to be able to shove the microphone right in your face).

But, perversely, not having to avoid catching the boom mike in their shots, filming went even easier.

The scenes in Tibet were a bit more tricky than the others done before that, as we had to end up reworking most of it, seeing as how we lacked a large store of stocky Tibetans on hand to do the backdrop properly.

So it became a Chinese coastal club instead, as we'd found a Chinese tour group wandering nearby and dragged them in to our film. That turned into a far larger fight scene than seen in the original, as a couple of those old guys turned out to be practicing martial artists of fair skill.

And, well, we just had to include that.

But, dude ranchers to serve as our Nazis, and the lady reporter to lead them as the terrible (and yet sexy) officer and interrogation specialist, a few guns loaded with blanks, all transfigured out of random junk, and we filmed!

Oh! Boy did we film!

There was a regrettable lack of ordinary safety apparatus they'd normally have on hand for these kind of things, and we were far more rough and tumble than most American producers would like on set, as choreographing the fights proved to be difficult so the dude ranchers and Chinese mostly winged it, picking up bruises and contusions while doing so.

But nobody minded, in fact they were thrilled! Most of them were happy to have roles whose main job was to get punched, kicked, shot or maimed realistically, and unlike a real punching bag, they were getting paid pretty good for doing it!

By our third day of this the TV studio wouldn't leave us alone, and had sent several extra crews to film 'the making of' this glorious hit, an unparalleled work of the filmmaking art - Well, at least they were happy calling it that.

I was just having fun as much as anything.

We'd just finished up with our Cairo scenes when our week ran out. I was all ready to pack it in, tired and exhilarated from a whole load of fun, but I was met with the disbelieving stares of everyone else involved.

Wasn't I going to finish?

Well, I explained that our time with the film crew was now up.

The station volunteered to re-up the agreement, all the film crews we could want in exchange for sole rights to the 'making of' footage they'd already taken, including some casual interviews with the cast. Not only that, but we'd also (I didn't know this, having dodged the phone all week) been getting a raft of calls from people who wanted to invest in the film as backers and from outfits that wanted to bid on exclusive distribution rights.

I was frankly amazed.

But perfectly willing to continue to film. After all, that was fun. So, with those necessary details put to rest behind us, we took another week and finished things up at the same rapid pace we'd started.

The hardest part now was sneaking away to do our sets for the city of Tanis, as transfiguring a proper Egyptian city, then burying it, then starting to dig it back out again, took a little of our time and by then it was hard to get any privacy. But we were swarmed with eager extras to work the site for us as our Nazi's team of excavators, once it was completed.

Heck, I think we startled a few actual archeologists who came to help on the site by how accurate it all was. But hey! I had the memories, why not use em? It was actually easier to transfigure copies of real stuff rather than think up fakes, so our heiroglyphs were even authentic, as were the tales and prayers they told, except for all of the 'here lies the ark' stuff.

Of course, our most intricately detailed set, the Well of Souls, got pretty badly smashed up during filming, causing not a few of those gentlemen to nearly die of apoplexy.

A few wax dummies got killed here or there, carved apart by plane rotors or burned by divine fire. We had to do some real skullduggery to get the cast and crew convinced we were faking that last action scene, the one where the fire of God from His ark kills all of the Nazis, when we actually used magic to do all of those effects.

But the flamethrowers and whatnot we rigged up to make them THINK we faked it were all pretty involved. Heck, between the flamethrowers, mirrors, searchlights, smoke... they could even have worked, they just wouldn't have done as well, I'm thinking, especially since we got actual ghosts from Hogwarts to play the parts of those spirits set free during the fiery destruction. Nearly Headless Nick even got his own moment of snarking at the camera with his head nearly pulled off.

Pressed to explain that point, I clamped my lips together and claimed 'trade secret', and actually got away with it!

A few memory charms here or there to clean up our mistakes when folks had actually noticed something was wrong, or caught us transfiguring equipment or costumes or charming fires to move about and the like, and we were done!

The biggest job of cleanup was in concealing how, instead of spending hours each day in makeup, everybody got ready with a few wand flicks. But Miranda and her two daughters did land additional screen credits as makeup artists.

Two weeks of actual shooting was not a record for Hong Kong action movies. Some had been done in half that time, complete with martial arts scenes.

Trailers for our own little version of Raiders were actually being shown to film audiences before the shooting was finished! Public excitement for the film was at a hitherto unseen peak already, just from those thirty second blurbs showing in theaters now worldwide.

It was being taken as THAT exciting!

I guess their entertainment really was that bland before. Hey, their MUSIC was boring and toneless enough that the soundtrack was already a real hit.

They'd never even had ELVIS here! So music was... no, not advanced.

Post-production would take about three weeks before it hit the theaters, but that was not my problem. Actual professionals were scrambling over each other in their eagerness to handle it. I, being somehow the director/producer of this whole thingamabob, had to look at stuff and give opinions at places (and even fix up a few errors here or there by transfiguring bits of film to show what I really wanted or needed them to, then transferring those images to new stock via muggle means before the transfigured pictures faded, and I had to do those 'rolling map overlaid by flying aircraft' scenes myself - and would you believe they couldn't do rolling credits? Only flash past one card at a time) but overall things were...

Well, let's put it this way, somehow someone got the bright idea to shield me from all of the real headaches involved in this, and leave me to the creative stuff; which was a good thing, because if I'd had to deal with all of the calls and boring meetings and nasty bureaucratic stuff I would've walked away and left them with an unfinished and unfinishable film. As I was the one holding all of the contracts of the actors and actual footage of the movie there was no way they could've completed it without my cooperation.

So it was a good thing they'd taken that load off of my shoulders, ensuring that once we had an actual film it could make it out into theaters with all of the legal bases covered. Some very talented people got assistant director and assistant producer slots in the credits for all of that work on their part, but there was no way I was going to mind! They'd earned it!

Still, after two weeks of very intense filming our whole little family was ready for a vacation from our vacation, and we spun back that extra week to go back to the boring, humdrum, ordinary routine of being British citizens and ordinary folks, for the most part.

I got to deal with Fudge chasing me around, wanting to heap awards all over me again, for magical world stuff I'd practically forgotten by then.

Oh, don't worry. They were all too glad to remind me.

But there is an old saying 'a change is as good as a rest', and by the time we got done with our very intense filming I was almost happy to deal with Fudge and the magical world's concerns again.

OoOoO

On getting back to Merry Old England I looked in on Sirius only to find that he was off making preparations to help Remus deal with his little 'furry problem' - so I hung around long enough to Obliviate the wolf form down to nothing.

Simply, lycanthropes in Rowling's world had two minds, the human and the beast, struggling against each other for dominance.

Well, it ought to be easier on Remus' human mind if its animal opponent was a vegetable, and effectively lobotomizing the wolf part of him was not only fun, it was easy! So, even if he did continue to transform, he'd lay down drooling instead of being a danger to himself or anyone.

And, as was proven in the case of Fenrir Greyback, the less you struggled against the beast within the less those transformations hurt or exhausted you. So, with the wolf mind effectively brain dead, but the human half just fine, I was expecting Remus to have to struggle less.

I also left them with a dose of Wolvesbane potion to use on the following night, just to see what happened with that. Because, you see, a potion for allowing the human brain to take control of the wolf during a transformation, in spite of the wolf mind's objections... well, it could lead to good things if he managed to learn how to do that without a potion. It was by no means certain that he'd learn to do it, but with the wolf mind effectively gone and a dose or two of the potion to show Remus what it felt like so he'd know what he was trying to achieve... again, it could lead to good things.

Then I skipped on over to Hogwarts to move along some other plans.

Raiding the Potions classroom and taking with me all of Snape's old notes and school books was easy, he'd already left the castle for the summer, and I knew I could put these into good hands. The Grangers especially would love them. Well, except for the dark curses. But that part I could study to create counters for, as I knew that DEs would be using them!

But what I was really there after was the research material Tom had used, and in a very short time I had found it, Salazar Slytherin's secret information network.

It was simple. In the prefect quarters of the Slytherin dormitory there were several images of snakes, obviously. Well, hidden among the more readily apparent ones was a small silver one embedded into the room designs in a very non-obvious place. You had to really search to find it.

But that one, unlike all of the others, spoke when you addressed it in snake language. And, if you spoke to it in such a way as to convince it that you had the appropriate qualities, namely pure blood and naked ambition, it gave you clues on how to find another small, silver snake embedded elsewhere, after promising hints of power and those other things that serve as bait to lure ambitious people into doing an incredible amount of work and study.

The trail of these was really quite amazing, as each one of these was placed to make you prove you truly had no respect for rules in order to chase down the chain of them. They were scattered all over, one in a staff lounge, many in several teachers' private quarters or long forgotten parts of the castle ranging from towers to dungeons, different bathrooms of either gender and covering each of the House dormitories...

It was really quite remarkable how long a merry chase they led, including one snake each in the Headmaster's Office and the Room of Requirement, all quietly forgotten as they lay innocuously concealed in among the ancient stonework's many other decorations.

You had to be amazingly determined and resourceful to find them all.

I could see how such a chase could easily have taken Tom five years to complete, just getting access to all of those places, not to mention moments of privacy there where he could be free to address those silver signposts in snake tongue to learn his new clues and gain some answers.

Riddle was lucky he'd started so early in his first year.

Or perhaps lucky wasn't the word for it. As Salazar was screening for all of the traits he loved among his descendants: rule breaking, resourcefulness, cleverness, determination and ambition, he'd want one that would sneak into those prefect rooms early. Thus, his leaving behind a quest that no one who'd gotten prefect status honestly would have time to complete in their remaining years at Hogwarts.

Clever, ruthless but clever. It did serve to ensure that only someone like Tom Riddle, who had no respect for rules or authority, would be able to follow the whole trail to its end during their tenure as student.

And staff? Heh, only during modern times could a male wizard enter female living quarters unaccompanied like this, even during summer when they were empty. Attempting to sneak into all of those private rooms, not to mention bathrooms and shower stalls, would have gotten any teacher, of EITHER gender, fired not long ago. No, those precious silver snakes were carefully scattered about so that no one, from the Headmaster on down, should have had the rights to just walked the path as I had done, at least anciently.

It required resourcefulness, determination and breaking rules, and not just a few of them, to do this.

So, yes, Salazar had left behind a network that screened for naked ambition first and foremost, and he had done such a bang-up job of it that no one had found all of his little clues until almost a millennia after he'd left the school. On that, he'd almost outsmarted himself, as what would his plans have come to if no one had ever opened up the Chamber of Secrets?

For me, with a house elf supplied map (and, after the initial discovery of the one in the prefect quarters, and knowledge of the make and composition of the same silver snake at the end of this long quest, I had quickly refined the elves' search parameters to find me only small silver snakes embedded in some out of the way yet permanent places - and, doing so, I'd almost missed the one concealed in the floor of the Great Hall under the Headmaster's chair), well, for me it was a simple afternoon's worth of work.

But then, I suppose that any puzzle is easy if you already knew the answer.

Then, after having followed the snake signs to the third floor girl's lavatory, I realized that I hadn't learned all I needed to know, and went back carefully questioning each of the snakes I'd passed before, and this time learned of the special stuff I'd started this quest for - the passcodes and the secret lore for both controlling a basilisk and protecting yourself from its deadly gaze, as well as other secrets never hinted about in the books.

It turned out that parcelmouths are not immune to a basilisk's gaze by default, nor can they control one as Tom had done without extra help. To do both of those required special potions and spells, all of which required the person to be a parcelmouth in order to have the spark to light it off.

Fanfiction often spoke of spells, or entire classes of magic spoken in snake tongue. It existed, but they would have been disappointed with its scope. If it wasn't an effect closely related to snakes, parceltongue wasn't good for it.

So, no superpowered killing curses (because loads of things killed, not just snakes), or awesomely overpowered shields (the best defense of any snake is biting you first, then escaping) or anything at all general purpose. Basically if it could be accomplished any other way, parcel-magic couldn't do it as well, being less powerful on average than ordinary magic.

Which left it very little it was good at, all of it focused on snakes.

There were more spells in a quarter of the first year Charms textbook than in all of parcel-magic. Heck, HERBOLOGY had more spells than the entirely of parceltongue did (which did make sense on reflection. If you pause a bit to think on it, there had been very few people to create spells for parcel-magic, in comparison to other arts).

And most of what they did were permanent self-transfiguration rituals to become more snake and less human, basically the snake-faced Voldemort we knew from the books. Apparently, our latest Dark Idiot was just following along in Salazar's foot prints as he did that to himself.

It did offer some slight advantages: a small resistance to curses, the ability to sense heat, and thus pierce through most glamours and invisibility cloaks, but overall it was just a freaky way to disfigure yourself.

Tom Riddle had once been charming, and he had used charm to achieve great success on a large number of matters. But later he had traded that charm for a fearsome appearance and the ability to invoke terror, which, in the end, hadn't done as much for advancing his cause as charm had.

I'll stick with charm, thank you.

Although, there were promises laid down in hints and pieces by those same silver message serpents, that there were secrets down within the Chamber that would only yield to those who 'saw with the eyes of a serpent', not just spoke its tongue.

So the whole 'turn yourself into an ugly snake creep' thing was encouraged, as Slytherin had promised his heir power for doing so. What powers he didn't say, but they were presumed to be glorious, by Salazar's standards anyway. And those were probably what Moldyshorts was seeking those times he'd tried to return to Hogwarts, as he'd only begun his snake transformation after graduation. So there was more power waiting if he could come back and presumably follow a whole new trail of clues only now visible to him.

Once again, I'll stick with charm, thank you.

But on the plus side, I knew what potion to take and what spell to cast that, in combination with parceltongue, would get me control of the pet basilisk - or indeed any basilisk. You had to cast it new with each one for the control spells to work on it, but immunity to a basilisk's gaze was universal once you had achieved that protection.

That put me in the dementor destroying business.

Two weeks of not acquiring any new memories, save by life experience, had done a great deal to calm my disordered mind. However, I wasn't fully sane yet, not by a long shot.

Actually, acting for so long had done a fair deal to disturb my weak emotional balance, as not 'being myself' for that time period was, in retrospect, pretty harmful to my delicate, recovering psyche.

Thus, I was vulnerable to being touched off in an entirely new method of madness as I invoked the ancient magic to take control of Slytherin's pet.

Fortunately for me, it was a functional sort of madness, a drunkenness, if you will. My judgment was impaired and I didn't think too clearly, still dealing with bringing order out of the chaos within my mind.

But it led to my doing some fairly odd things, perhaps unwise ones as well.

Like, for example, morphing back to Gomez Addams dressed up in cowboy attire done in an Addams-ish style, and riding Blinky, as I decided to call my thousand year old king of serpents, out of the Chamber of Secrets.

We petrified several ghosts on our way out, including poor Myrtle, who had some traumatic flashbacks after she was cured, poor dear. I picked up the thousands of empty sherry bottles Trelawnry had been hiding in the Room of Requirement for the past dozen years or so on our way out, then rode out into the Forbidden Forest on a lark while I transfigured the empty sherry bottles into a host of animated glass spiders.

I may have hooted and whistled while riding Blinky into the depths of the place, but after turning our first centaur to stone (it saw our reflection in a pool, lucky thing), I had enough good judgment left in a corner of my mind to head Blinky over to the acromantula exhibit.

We killed hundreds, if not thousands, of those things!

It was fun, too. They so many eyes, you see. And I sent my glass spiders all over the place unhooking all of the anchors for their webs, so it was raining long strands of silk. After wondering briefly what kind of spaghetti it would make, I had enough of the original me surface through the madness to run into the idea of collecting it.

So I pulled out the rods I purchased for this purpose, and soon I had giant spindles collecting a few tons of acromantula silk (not sold in any stores).

On that note, I had my glass spiders begin to dissect the corpses of my defeated foes, consuming them back into the bottles that had been their original bodies. They even specialized, some sucking up venom, others collecting eyeballs, and so on!

Spider meat could even be tasty, a memory told me.

After having wrecked havoc on that part of the forest long enough, glass spider bodies bloated to several times their original volumes with all the ingredients they now contained, and far more silk on my spools than I knew what to do with, we adjourned from causing more carnage there among the acromantulas and rode back to Hogwarts.

There, after sending down the glass spiders to the kitchens with a note instructing the house elves to see to it that their contents were properly preserved and placed in the DADA office, we slithered inside of the Vanishing Cabinet.

I'd already placed the other end at Azkaban Island, inside of the fortress, as that was where I needed it for this little scheme, and I didn't want it traced back to me by any of those Addams' who'd paid for it.

So, slithering out the other end, we began to slay dementors, as it turns out that they DID die upon sighting a basilisk! It was even worse for them than usual, as apparently whatever 'prey sense' they had to determine humans were near counted itself close enough to sight, and, while they couldn't tell much about animals or even humans by it, a basilisk is a higher order magical beast and stood out like a spotlight on those senses.

And, for the ancient magic of Blinky, that was enough.

Turning them all into happiness sucking statues that we could then give to giants to pound into pebbles we could then drop to the bottom of the deepest sea would have done, too, but killing them off was better. So I was glad that it worked out that most died that way (although we did net a few statues).

We'd slaughtered every dementor on the island in a little less than half an hour. Aurors, warned by my hoots and shouts, and watching the dementors around them crumple like popped balloons, had largely started to run away in panic. Although, at least at first, I'd had to transfigure some moss into curtains so the first few to spot us were turned to stone instead of dead.

That, and my joyful shouts of an adapted song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" adjusted for basilisks, pretty much warned off the rest, who fled in droves.

Although the prisoners did not have that luxury.

If I'd had Legilimency or Veritaserum on hand I would've questioned them on guilt or innocence, as plainly the Ministry did a pretty crappy job of it in at least some cases, but I had neither resource, nor truly any time. So I just slaughtered every Death Eater in there by having Blinky peer in their cages.

Well, all except one.

Bellatrix LeStrange had a vault I wanted to visit, and here she was! Why, how convenient! She was heavy, so I allowed Blinky to carry her in its jaws, fangs carefully retracted of course, her legs kicking outside of the great serpent's mouth causing a certain amount of distress to her fellow Death Eaters just before they died.

Leaving Tom destitute for recruits behind us, we left Azkaban the same way we'd entered and, instructing Blinky to return to the Chamber of Secrets and wait for me there, I stayed behind to close and shrink that most wonderful cabinet, putting it in my pocket before hauling out a magical boat I'd bought, unshrinking that, and making my way away from the island at high speed.

Once safely on the coast, I carefully shrunk and stowed away my boat, then apparated as close as I could get to Malfoy Manor, as it had occurred to me that we'd probably need Bella's wand, and they most probably had it, seeing as how Rowling had shown that it had never been destroyed.

Then it was once more back to Hogwarts, and once again I was riding my pet snake through the cabinet to come out on the Malfoy property, just outside the gates. Those big iron things they had there formed into a face to demand in imperial tones who we were and what we wanted, and I calmly (and in a remarkably good Gomez impersonation, I might add) informed them that it was Bellatrix LeStrange and guest, recently come from Azkaban.

To my pleasure those gates actually opened, and I slithered in on the back of Blinky, Bella's legs still kicking out of her mouth - For, you see, according to Rowling, a male basilisk has a red cock comb, and Blinky here did not have one, so, therefore, she was a girl.

And a good girl, too!

I patted her on the ridge at the top of her head as I rode her up the long, straight drive to the prestigious Malfoy Manor, a house whose diamond shaped windows were all alight with some kind of party.

My confused memories automatically matched names to faces as the guests of Malfoy's party who'd come out to greet us dropped dead on sighting us.

Avery, Carrow, Crabbe Sr., Goyle Sr., Greyback, MacNair, Mulciber, Nott Sr., Rookwood, Selwyn, Travers... yup! It was Death Eater night at the old mansion. Everybody who wasn't in Azkaban was here, more or less (And that included a few who really ought to have been at prison still).

Strange, no girls or female Death Eaters were present, nor were the children - but then I saw the strippers inside, and that explained it. They were having a stag party with the old crowd. Maybe somebody was getting married? Oh well, it made no difference to me. Why they'd have cast Imperious to get a goat, a dog, and a bull to put on clothes, then strip them off, was no concern of mine, nor was the octopus chained to the ceiling or the emus spread eagle on the floor. And, to put it bluntly, I didn't WANT to know!

A few in the back, including Snape, who'd been closest to the stage and thus farthest from the door, saw what had happened to others who'd gone before them to greet the returning Bellatrix, so beat a hasty retreat out the other way, avoiding meeting Blinky's gaze. Well, most of them did, anyway. Many caught sight of her in glimpses through mirrors and chandeliers and silver plates and so on, but a surprising few just jammed their eyes shut and ran, crashing into things, it's true, but also escaping.

So we just had to go charging in and bite them, dropping a saliva-covered Bellatrix in the process (whom I cursed so she couldn't get away).

The slaughter was tremendous, but in the end many of them escaped via floo or running off the grounds and apparating. Blinky sniffed out the rest, the ones who tried to hide.

Such FUN you could have with a basilisk!