"He what?" Hermione blurted, only there were several other people exclaiming things at around the same time so she wasn't sure anyone heard her.
Dumbledore went on gazing at her, looking perfectly serious.
"I didn't know about Fawkes," Harry's voice said rapidly, "so he told me that Fawkes was a phoenix, while he was pointing to a chicken on Fawkes's stand so I'd think that was Fawkes, and then he set the chicken on fire - and also he gave me this big rock and told me it had belonged to my father and I ought to carry it everywhere -"
"But that's crazy!" Susan blurted out.
There was a sudden hush.
The Headmaster slowly turned his head to stare at Susan.
"I -" said Susan. "I mean - I -"
The Headmaster leaned down until he was face-to-face with the young girl.
"I didn't -" said Susan.
Dumbledore put a finger to his lips and twiddled them, making a bweeble-bweeble-bweeble sound.
The Headmaster straightened up again and said, "Well, my good heroines, it has been pleasant speaking to you, but alas, much else remains to do this day. Still, rest assured that I am inscrutable at everyone, not just witches."
The gargoyles stepped aside, the Flowing Stone rumbling like rock as it moved like flesh.
The huge ugly figures waited briefly with dead gray eyes staring out in silent vigil, as Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, smiling as benevolently as when he'd first emerged from his office, stepped back into the Enchantment of the Endless Stair.
Then the great gargoyles folded their wings back into place and stepped back into their former positions, only one last brief "Bwa-ha-ha!" echoing out before the gap closed.
There was a long silence.
"He really set a chicken on fire?" said Hannah.
The eight of them had continued protesting even after that, but to be honest their heart had gone out of it.
It had been established, after some careful questions from Professor Flitwick, that Harry Potter hadn't smelled the chicken burning. Which meant that it had probably been a pebble or something, Transfigured into a chicken and then enclosed in a Boundary Charm to make sure that no smoke escaped into the air - both Professor Flitwick and Professor McGonagall had been very emphatic about nobody trying that without their supervision.
But still...
But still... what?
Hermione didn't even know but still what.
But still.
After a lot of glances exchanged between girls none of whom had wanted to be first to say it, Hermione had declared the protest over, and the adults and boys had drifted off.
"You don't think we were being unfair to Dumbledore, do you?" said Susan as the heroines walked away to the sound of eight pairs of feet trodding on the stone paving of Hogwarts's corridors. "I mean, if he is crazy at everyone and not just at witches then it's not discrimination, right?"
"I don't want to protest against the Headmaster any more," Hannah said weakly. The Hufflepuff girl seemed a bit unsteady on her feet. "I don't care what Professor McGonagall says about him not holding it against us, it's just too much for my nerves."
Lavender snorted. "I guess you won't be slaying armies of Inferi anytime soon -"
"Stop that!" Hermione said sharply. "Look, all of us have got to learn to be heroines, right? It's okay if someone doesn't know right away."
"The Headmaster doesn't think it can be learned," Padma said. The Ravenclaw girl's face was thoughtful, her steps measured as she strode through the corridor. "The Headmaster doesn't even think that's a good idea."
Daphne was striding with her back straight and her head held bolt upright, looking more like a Proper Young Lady in her Hogwarts robes than Hermione could have done with her best formal dress. "The Headmaster," Daphne said in a precise voice, her shoes making hard, sharp tacking sounds on the stone, "thinks the lot of us are a bunch of silly girls playing games, and that someday Hermione might make a good sidekick but the rest of us are hopeless."
"Is he right?" said Parvati. The Gryffindor girl's face was very serious, making her look much more like her twin than she usually did. "I mean it has to be asked -"
"No!" spat Tracey. The Slytherin girl was stalking through the hallway looking ready to kill someone, like a miniature female Snape. Of all the girls, Tracey was the one who Hermione knew least. Hermione had talked to Lavender once before, but she'd never really seen Tracey except at wandpoint during a battle, until the Slytherin had jumped up from her sofa to volunteer. "We'll show him! We'll show them all!"
"Okay," said Susan, "that was definitely evil -"
"No," said Lavender, "that's a Chaos Legion motto, actually. Only she didn't do the insane laughter."
"That's right," Tracey said, her voice low and grim. "This time I'm not laughing." The girl went on stalking through the corridor, like she had dramatic music accompanying her that only she could hear.
(Hermione was starting to worry about what exactly the impressionable youths of the Chaos Legion were learning from Harry Potter.)
"But - I mean -" Parvati said. She still had a contemplative look on her face. "I mean, you can see why the Headmaster would think we were just silly girls, right? What does protesting outside the Headmaster's office have to do with becoming heroines?"
"Huh," Lavender said, now looking thoughtful herself. "That's true. We should do something heroic. I mean heroinic."
"Um -" said Hannah, which very much expressed Hermione's own feelings on the subject.
"Well," said Parvati, "has everyone already been through Dumbledore's third-floor forbidden corridor? I mean everyone in Gryffindor's been through it by now -"
"Hold on!" Hermione said desperately. "I don't want you doing anything dangerous!"
There was a pause while everyone looked at Hermione, who was realizing, much too late, why Dumbledore hadn't wanted anyone else to be a hero.
"I don't think you can become a heroine if you never do anything dangerous," Lavender observed reasonably.
"Besides," said Padma, a considering look on her face. "Everyone knows that nothing really bad ever happens in Hogwarts, right? To students, I mean, not to the Defense Professors. We've got all these ancient wards and so on."
"Um -" Hannah said again.
"Yeah," said Parvati, "the worst that can happen is that we'll lose a few dozen House points or something, and there's two of us from each House so that'll all come out even."
"Why, that's brilliant, Hermione!" said Daphne in a tone of great amazement. "The way you set it up means we can get away with anything! And I didn't even notice your cunning plan until now!"
"UM -" said Hermione, Hannah, and Susan.
"Right!" said Parvati. "So now it's time for us to become real heroines. We'll come for the darkness -"
"And make it face us -" said Lavender.
"And teach it to be afraid," Tracey Davis said grimly.
Chapter 71: Self Actualization, Pt 6
"Well," Daphne whispered, keeping her voice as low as she could, "at least now I don't feel like the only sane person in Hogwarts any more."
"Because now you've got the rest of us as friends?" whispered Lavender Brown, who was tiptoeing along at her left side.
"I don't think that's what she means," General Granger murmured from Lavender's own left.
They crept slowly and carefully through the corridors of Hogwarts, all eight of them keeping both ears peeled for the slightest sound of Trouble, just like it was a battle and they were looking for enemy soldiers to ambush; only in this case they were looking for bullies to Vanquish and victims to Rescue in the span between the end of breakfast-time and when Lavender and Parvati had to get to their Herbology class.
Lavender had argued that if one first-year girl could take down three older bullies, then eight first-year girls ought to be able to outfight twenty-four older bullies because of Multiplication.
Judging by her frantic spluttering and waving of hands, General Granger hadn't found this convincing.
Padma had stayed silent for a bit during the ensuing argument, and then observed thoughtfully that even in Hogwarts, beating up first-year girls probably wouldn't be good for your reputation as a bully.
Parvati had straightened up at this, exclaiming that this meant they were the only ones who could do something about Hogwarts's bully problem, which made it really truly heroinic. Plus the whole reason their parents had moved to Britain was so that the two of them could attend the world's only magical school with a 0% fatality rate, and what was the point if they didn't take advantage and try a few things?
To which General Granger had responded that Parvati didn't understand the point of a perfect safety record at all -
Lavender had said that if they were really all friends together and not Hermione's followers like Professor Quirrell thought, then they should vote on things like this.
Daphne had expected that hers would be the deciding vote after Hermione and Susan and Hannah voted no. And so Daphne had considered it carefully after her first flush of enthusiasm wore off. She was a Slytherin, after all, and that meant it was her responsibility to keep a watchful eye on their own interests while they were all running around trying to help people - her job to figure out how risky it really was, and whether it would be worth it for them, just like Mother would have done in her place. Always looking out for yourself and your friends like that, was what real Slytherining was all about...
Hannah Abbott, the nervous little Hufflepuff girl, had in a small trembling voice said "Yes."
And now Daphne and Susan and Hermione had to stay with the other five, they couldn't possibly let the others go off on their own. Because no Gryffindor would ever live down hurting the last surviving child of the Bones family, and no Slytherin would dare assault a daughter of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Greengrass. (Daphne hoped so, anyway.) And General Granger who'd started the whole thing... you didn't even have to ask.
The corridors of Hogwarts passed them by one after another, their tense hands never straying far from their wands, as stone and wood and Everburning Torches came into vision and then moved past. At one point they heard footsteps and drew in their breath, hands almost dropping to their wands, but it was just a lone older Ravenclaw who looked at them curiously before sniffing and dropping his head back to his book as he walked on.
The heroines crept past solemn oaken panels carved with gilded frescos, and came to a dead end leading into a boys' bathroom, and turned around, and wandered back through the solemn oaken panels carved with gilded frescos, and then turned through dusty old brick corridors grouted with worn cement, which sort of led them in a circle actually, so they consulted a portrait and then went down a different dusty old brick corridor instead, that took them to a brief rise of marble stairs that should've put them on the third-and-a-halfth floor if it'd been anywhere but Hogwarts, and then it was back to tiled stone pavement again, and skylights that let shafts of sunlight pour down even though they were nowhere near the roof, and after they'd followed that passageway around a few corners it took them to another boys' bathroom, clearly marked with a plaque showing the silhouette of a robed figure whizzing into a toilet.
The eight of them stood before the closed door and stared with a certain amount of weariness.
"I'm bored," said Lavender.
Padma made a show of taking a pocketwatch out of her robes and looking at it. "Sixteen minutes and thirty seconds," she said. "A new record for the longest attention span in Gryffindor."
"I don't think this is going to work either," said Susan. "And I'm a Hufflepuff."
"Y'know," Lavender said thoughtfully, "I wonder if maybe what really makes someone a hero, is that when they try something like this, something interesting actually happens."
"I bet you're right," said Tracey. "I bet if we had Harry Potter with us, we'd run into three bullies and a hidden room full of treasure in the first five minutes. I bet that all General Chaos has to do is go to the bathroom and he, like, finds Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets or something -"
Daphne couldn't quite let that one go past. "You think Lord Slytherin would've put the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets in a bathroom -"
"What I'm saying," said Susan, as Tracey was opening her mouth to reply, "is that we've got no way of actually finding any bullies. I mean, all they've got to do is find a Hufflepuff somewhere, but we've got to run across them at exactly the right time, d'you see? Which is a very good problem because if we did find them we'd all get squished like bugs. Can't we just do the forbidden third-floor corridor like we're supposed to?"
Lavender snorted scornfully. "You don't become a real heroine just by doing the forbidden things the Headmaster tells you not to do!"
(Daphne's mind tried to wrap around this statement as she silently thanked the Sorting Hat for not putting her anywhere near Gryffindor.)
"Come to think..." Parvati said slowly, "I mean, what're the odds that Harry Potter would run across those five bullies on his first morning of school? He must've had some way of finding them."
Daphne happened to be standing where looking at Parvati let her see Hermione, so she noticed the Ravenclaw girl's expression change - and then she realized that the Sunshine General had also found some bullies just recently -
"Oh!" said Padma in a tone of sudden realization. "Of course! He got told by the ghost of Salazar Slytherin!"
"What?" said Daphne at the same time as several other people.
"That's who the ghost was that scared me, I'm pretty sure," Padma explained. "I mean I only figured it out afterward, but... yeah. Salazar Slytherin's ghost doesn't like it when Slytherins bully people, he thinks it shames his name, and the ghost is still keyed into the Hogwarts wards so he knows everything that happens, I bet."
Daphne's mouth was hanging open; and she saw that Hannah had put a hand to her forehead and was leaning against the stone walls, while Tracey's eyes were blazing like little brown stars.
Salazar Slytherin's ghost?
Had leagued himself with Harry Potter?
And had sent Hermione Granger to stop Derrick's crew?
She would have paid a hundred Galleons to be there when Draco Malfoy got told about this.
Although considering how fast rumors spread through Hogwarts, now that Padma had spilled the beans, Millicent had probably told him thirty minutes ago...
In fact... now that Daphne thought about it...
"So," said Parvati. "We've got to ask the Boy-Who-Lived where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost? Wow, I guess if I'm saying stuff like that out loud, I might actually be turning into a heroine -"
"Yes!" said Lavender. "We've got to ask the Boy-Who-Lived where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost!"
"We've got to ask... the Boy-Who-Lived... where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost..." repeated Hannah in a nervous voice, like she was forcing herself to say it.
"And if that doesn't work," shouted Tracey, "we'll stun Harry Potter, tie him up and bring him with us!"
It said something, Hermione Granger thought, and it was something rather sad - as the eight of them strolled back through the maze of twisty little passages that was Hogwarts, their time before the next class having run out without finding any bullies - that she genuinely didn't know whether Harry Potter had been led around by the ghost of Salazar Slytherin or a phoenix or what. And whatever Harry had done, she hoped it didn't work for them. And most of all she hoped that the others didn't vote for Tracey's idea of stunning Harry Potter and carting his unconscious body around with them to attract Adventures. That couldn't possibly work in real life, or, if it did, she was giving up.
Hermione looked from witch to witch, Tracey chatting with Lavender, and the others making occasional remarks; and her gaze caught on a girl who was subdued and quiet, the one person whose thoughts right now she couldn't guess at all.
"Hannah?" she said to the girl walking alongside her. Hermione tried to make her voice as gentle as she could. "You don't have to answer, but is it okay if I ask why you voted
yes on fighting bullies?"
Hermione had thought she'd made her voice soft, but everyone stopped walking, and Lavender and Tracey halted their conversation and looked at them.
Hannah's cheeks were already reddening, and just as Hannah opened her mouth -
"It's 'cause she's got more courage than you think, obviously," said Lavender.
Hannah paused with her mouth open.
She closed her mouth.
She swallowed, hard and visibly, while her cheeks reddened even further.
Then Hannah took a deep breath, and said, in a small voice, "There's a boy I like."
The Hufflepuff girl flinched as she said it, and her head darted around nervously to look at everyone looking at her, while the pause and silence stretched.
"Um, okay?" Susan said eventually.
"I've got five boys I like," said Lavender.
"Padma and I knew we'd both like the same boys," said Parvati, "so we made a list and flipped a Knut to see who got to pick first."
"I know who I'm destined to marry," said Tracey. "I don't care what the world says, he's meant to be mine!"
This made all the other girls look expectantly at Hermione, whose brain had gone ahead and flushed Tracey's last statement entirely so it could focus on just on the first thing Hannah had said.
"Um," said Hermione. She carefully continued keeping her voice gentle. "Hannah, the reason why you joined the Society for Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches was that there's a boy who might like you more if you become a hero?"
The Hufflepuff girl nodded again, her cheeks reddening even further while she stared down at her own reflection in her black-polished shoes.
"She likes Neville Longbottom, actually," Daphne said. The Slytherin gave a woeful sigh. "And unfortunately for her, he's going to marry someone else. It's very tragic."
This produced a high-pitched eeping sound from Hannah as she went on staring at her feet.
"Wait what?" said Lavender. "Neville's going to marry someone else? How do you know about this? Who?"
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Page 113
