Chapter 566
Felix looked blankly.
“Ok, ok, I will stop joking, I want to ask one question: I can act like as usual right?” The Memory body frowned, seemingly genuinely troubled by this.
“Just don’t overdo with your stupid play.” Felix said.
The memory body flipped the bird and Felix asked with a dark look on his face, “Where did you learn to do that?”
“A student.” The memory body said absently, “I can tell you his name, I remember him well.”
Felix took a step out of classroom seven and went to the Room of Requirement, then reappeared in the Shrieking Shack. A few Apparitions later, he was standing near an abandoned warehouse. In the warehouse, a man lay tied up, hulking, with knotted grey hair and a beard, deeply sunken eyes, and long yellow nails on dirty fingers, he looked more like a beast than a man.
Felix noticed that the ground was covered with thick scratch marks.
“Fenrir Greyback?”
Greyback whimpered, a rag stuffed in his mouth.
“Oh, I forgot.” Felix said insincerely, waving his hand as the rag was removed and the man spat on the floor. This revealed the sharp teeth in his mouth and the visible scab in the corner of his mouth. At this moment he slanted his eyes from the ground and asked in an incredulous tone, “Felix Hap? Were you the one who send the men to capture me?”
“It was me. What did Voldemort tell you to do?” Felix’s sharp gaze pierced straight into Fenrir’s eyes like a rapier, and after a long while, Greyback’s gaze went slack, and he fell to the ground, motionless.
“Didn’t Voldemort give you his mark? Oh, sorry, he probably doesn’t think much of you.” Felix said.
Greyback, who looked like a corpse, moved and his eyes grew fierce as he whimpered, “… that was cooperation …”
“Cooperation? Do you really think you are qualified?”
Felix shot out a stunning spell and the werewolf fell straight back down.
After a long while, Lupin and Tonks suddenly appeared out of the air, both of them raised their wands and looked around warily. “Is it the right address?” Tonks asked in a low voice. ” Yes, that’s what the note that suddenly fell on my desk read.” Lupin said, with a vague guess who did that, but with Tonks right next to him, he couldn’t go into details, in case it turned out to be something illegal.
“Over there.” Tonks said warily, and the two moved step by step to the edge of the warehouse, in perfect sync with each other, and Lupin, who realized this, became even more frustrated.
The lock on the warehouse proved no challenge to them, and he pulled open the heavy iron door, but his body froze when he saw what it held inside.
Meanwhile, Felix had returned to classroom seven, regardless of what Lupin intended to do, he, for one, decided to take this matter into his own hands. He reckons Lupin won’t kill Greyback as long as he doesn’t lose his mind a bit, even if the werewolf was the one that bit him when he was a child.
So Felix left a curse on Greyback, to let his sin wither with his body.
The students in Classroom Seven were ignorant of all this, not even knowing that the professor had changed in the middle of the process. All they knew was that Professor Hap had led them to Classroom Seven, where they came into a forest clearing and sat one by one on huge, bald tree stumps, where a line of vine hung from the sky, and Professor Hap sat impishly in a hammock made of vines, as he gave them a lecture.
“Does anyone know what we’ve been learning lately … yeah, that’s right, what a great memory … Huh, didn’t I tell you guys? Combining the core runes of the twelve amulets together to create ancient magic … didn’t tell you? How sly … Never mind, I’ll demonstrate it to you …”
“The Professor is very lively today.” Fred said, looking at the memory body that had been swinging.
“Probably wanted to try a different style,” George said, “it’s quite tiring to always maintain a straight face.”
“Makes sense, we could try that.”
At that moment, a hand suddenly reached out of the air and grabbed their professor. The students looked at each other in confusion. Before they could react, the professor reappeared. Felix cleared his throat and said to the dumbfounded students on the stump, “Ahem, does anyone know what I just said? There’s an extra point …”
After class was over, the students walked out of the classroom in a row.
“The professor must have slacked off, probably ran off to have tea with Professor McGonagall.”
“Why Professor McGonagall?”
“Gee, don’t you think she was very elegant when she was young, if only I could be that elegant in the future.”
In the afternoon Felix saw a lot of new faces in the school, a dozen adult wizards, only a few of whom he recognized. They mostly consist of people from the Wizarding Examinations Authority and people from the Apparition Test Centre along with high-ranking Ministry officials, and among them, two people had attracted his attention – they’re Dolores Umbridge and Chesterton Avery.
“Gee, it’s not that difficult to guess.” Felix muttered. “Nope, can’t take it lightly.” His gaze swept over the dozen or so adult wizards present; perhaps a real mole is hiding among these people.
Dumbledore welcomed them warmly, and then he chatted in a low voice with his old friend Professor Tofty.
“Is Professor Marchbanks absent this time?” Dumbledore asked in a gentle tone.
“She’s busy preparing the test papers, and it is the people from the Apparition Test Centre who are in charge of today’s test, but because they are understaffed they have brought in a temporary group from the Ministry.” Professor Tofty said.
The slightly young wizards in the crowd looked around with excitement, they had rarely had the chance to return since they had graduated and now they felt so much younger all of a sudden to be back at the school again, and currently, they were chatting passionately about the interesting things they had done at school.
“Can we take a stroll around?” A round-faced witch asked.
“Sure, Corrine,” Dumbledore pointed his white-gloved hand towards Professor McGonagall, “Minerva will arrange everything.” The round-faced witch shrank at the name and said in a slightly weakened tone, “Good morning, Professor Mc, McGonagall.”
“It’s afternoon, Miss Corrine.” Professor McGonagall sternly said.
“Oh … good afternoon.”
“Amos! Come and see, I’ve found something new,” Wilkie Twycross, a wizard wearing an old-fashioned bowler hat, shouted from the entrance hall, “My, what a change, it wasn’t here when I came last year!”
He is the instructor of the Apparition class from the Ministry of Magic who basically would pop by the school once a year, and with a look of wonder, he plastered his surprisingly pale face on the bulletin board.
“Is it a club?” Amos Diggory asked from far away at the great hall door, “I heard Ced mention it over the holidays …”
Without speaking, Wilkie Twycross carefully pulled a colourful piece of parchment from under the bulletin board and said with a look of admiration, “This looks like a newspaper? Let me see.”
“Occamy breaking out of its shell documentary sales is quite a boom, and it was filmed by a Niffler- Huh? I didn’t know this – Weasley twins were screaming at a suit of armour late at night and were caught by the Caretaker, Filch, who arrived on the sound – tch, was it exam stress, thinking back when, er – – Filch casted a spell in a high-profile manner and dispelling the rumours about him being Squib – Professor Sinistra’s schedule remains chaotic, often waking up in the middle of the day -Professor Burbage’s intention to change the Muggle Studies course to teach farming and students complaining — Ha, that’s so interesting, this newspaper is called ‘The Wall of Mystery’?”
“Do you like the name? I picked it myself, it’s the name of a song.” A voice asked. “Oh, uh,” Wilkie Twycross looked down at the little girl who had suddenly popped up, and then at the newspaper, “Is this your paper?”
“Yeah.”
Wilkie Twycross stared at the parchment and asked tentatively, “Little girl, your name is Mafalda?”
Mafalda nodded proudly as she fluidly changed the subject, “So can you tell me what you do?”
“Do you want to interview me, little girl? You’re only supposed to be in the first year?”
“That has nothing to do with our interview, I have interviewed a lot of big shots.” Mafalda straightened her chest and tried her best to look taller.
Wilkie Twycross felt a little amused, “Yeah well, who are they?”
“Let’s see, three winners of the Order of Merlin, three full members of the Dark Force Defence League, the captain of the Quidditch team, the Head girl and Head boy of the school, last year’s Tournament of Champions contestants, and some future celebrities … Later on, I’ll also target the Professors. And Headmaster Dumbledore.” Mafalda said with a straight face.
The more the two adult wizards listened, the more surprised they became. “Is Cedric Diggory among them?” Amos asked eagerly, “I’m his father.”
” Yes! He’s one of those future celebrities, the kind that would be on the Chocolate Frog card.”
“And you could even predict that?” Feeling rather absurd, Wilkie Twycross wanted to hear the young girl’s reasoning.
“Yeah, he’s had quite a few articles published in the New Solutions to Rune Magazine, but the real reason is his Magic Puppet Club, which has just recently been renamed.” Mafalda cocked her head at the yellowing bulletin on the wall and stated with conviction, “It’s not just him, I have a feeling a lot of the clubs in here are going to turn into massive entities in the future, I’m witnessing history …”
Amos Diggory and Wilkie Twycross looked at each other and Amos admitted he was somewhat persuaded, he had been bothered about a family issue recently and this little girl seemed to have given him an answer. But Wilkie Twycross would not forget what he had just read on the bulletin board and wondered how on earth the ‘S.P.E.W.’ and the ‘Crumple-Horned Snorkacks Certainly Exist Club’ could become a huge corporation.
He happened to know where the Crumple-Horned Snorkacks had originated from, a third-rate tabloid in the magical world, and its editor-in-chief didn’t seem to be in his right mind …
“So, young lady with a keen sense of smell, what about you? What’s your stance about yourself?” Wilkie Twycross asked.
“Me? I’m just the chronicler of this episode of history.” Mafalda said briskly, “Of course, it doesn’t stop me from making money, so do you plan to be interviewed, I can pay the honorarium of two Sickles each …”
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