Chapter 470 - 21: The Escaped Prisoner

Chapter 470: Chapter 21: The Escaped Prisoner

Early morning, after breakfast.

After filling an entire sheet with words, McGonagall set the quill aside and looked at Yimi. "These are what you need to memorize today. Today’s list may be a little more difficult. If there’s anything you don’t understand, look it up in the dictionary. I’ll teach you arithmetic when I come back tonight."

Before Yimi formally enrolled at eleven, her preschool education still needed to be taken care of. The child displayed unprecedented talent in nearly every area... though perhaps it was not exactly talent.

Voldemort’s knowledge had effectively taught her almost every year’s worth of wizarding theory in advance. That she had not inherited the evil memories along with it was practically a miracle. According to Dumbledore, Voldemort had already displayed his unpleasant nature when he was young.

McGonagall felt guilty that she did not have much time to teach Yimi personally. To her, Yimi was almost like a treasure heaven had bestowed upon a lonely old woman after taking pity on her hard life. As for exactly what this "heaven" was, that did not matter.

McGonagall wanted to place a hand on the little girl’s shoulder and kiss her cheek lightly as usual, only to see Yimi lying on the floor with spare shoes pulled over her hands, apparently pretending to be some kind of creature to entertain herself. After all, there was nobody else in this world for her to play with.

"..."

After saying goodbye to Grandma Cat, Yimi glanced at the vocabulary sheet. It was all common terminology from the wizarding world, and she had already learned about a third of it while reading Lockhart’s and Snape’s books.

She casually put the sheet away, then ran out of McGonagall’s rooms. She was heading for the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom so she could stay there and be ready to teach students at any moment.

Passing a second-floor window, she saw Grandpa Flat-Nose, whom she had not seen for quite a while, returning from outside with a very unpleasant expression.

Yimi did not bother wondering what had happened and went straight to the classroom. When she opened the door, however, she found two people already inside. They turned in unison and stared at Yimi blankly for several seconds.

Yimi stared back at them in equal confusion, because the two looked exactly alike and had the same red hair as Ron.

Then again, in a previous world she had already seen evil orange-cat triplets as well as Rem and Ram, so she was not completely unfamiliar with the concept.

Professor Yimi quickly adjusted her posture, walked behind the lectern, and stood on the chair she had prepared in advance. "Class begins."

She watched the twins exchange a glance, then look back at the seats behind them.

"I know you. Professor McGonagall’s granddaughter. That day you dragged a giant snake around and gave us the chance to hear quite a few girls screaming," one of them said first.

The other immediately continued, "We really ought to thank you. Percy was nagging us at the time. He’s the most boring person in our family. Give him a little authority and he immediately starts using it on his younger brothers. Thanks to you, we got to see him make an absolutely wonderful face that day."

Percy was the third-oldest of the seven Weasley siblings and also a Gryffindor prefect. He was a boy who liked rules from morning to night, while these twins came directly after Percy and were Ron and Ginny’s older brothers.

"You’re pretending to be a professor? That’s a brilliant idea, but you need Polyjuice Potion."

"This classroom is empty anyway. We could try doing the same thing. Maybe we’d even manage to steal a whole class’s worth of students."

The way they kept following one another sentence after sentence made the little kitty unhappy. "You should sit in the seats."

"We would, girl, but our next class is Transfiguration. You wouldn’t want to steal students from Professor McGonagall, would you?" Fred lied cheerfully. Their next lesson was actually History of Magic, a class so boring that every term they thought up excuses to skip it.

Yimi puffed out her cheeks, then pointed at the parchment in George’s hand. "What is that?"

"This? This is our greatest secret." George lifted it slightly.

Fred shrugged. "Nobody else knows about it, so of course it’s a secret. Want to see what it does? Consider it repayment for accidentally saving us, but only if you promise not to tell anyone."

George tapped the parchment with his wand and recited, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Lines of ink spread outward from the point beneath his wand, crisscrossing until they reached every corner of the parchment. At the top appeared large green letters in elegant script:

"Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers, are proud to present the Marauder’s Map."

It was a map of Hogwarts, showing every location and detail. Yimi stood on tiptoe to look and vaguely spotted several passages she had never discovered before. Little black dots represented the people inside the castle, with their names written beside them.

"Your name is ’Quanquan’? That sounds more like a pet name." Fred made the observation in passing before looking elsewhere. In fact, since the first lesson of the day was about to begin, almost everyone was where they were supposed to be.

Since they were holding the map too high, Yimi reached up and tugged at it. She searched for Harry and the others, wanting to see where her three students were right now.

"Why is he, still in the dormitory?" Yimi pointed toward the Gryffindor common room.

Breakfast was already over.

"Who? Oh, Ron." Fred did not care very much. "Who’s he with? Who’s Peter?"

George shrugged. "Maybe it’s a cat? After he found Ginny yesterday, he went around asking who owned a black-and-white cat. He probably wants to wait there and see if he can catch it. I’m more interested in whether we’ll still be allowed to go to Hogsmeade on Saturday."

"Hogsmeade?" Yimi knew about that village. The snacks Grandma Cat gave her all came from there.

Only third-years and above were allowed to visit Hogsmeade, and they needed a parent’s signed permission. Yimi was not a student there, but McGonagall had still never taken her.

Fred explained, "The paper this morning said someone escaped from Azkaban yesterday morning. Then the Minister of Magic came to see Dumbledore. We eavesdropped for a bit just now. Fudge plans to have Dementors guard Hogwarts. He seems convinced the escaped prisoner will definitely come here to hurt students."

George said, "You can get into the village through secret passages too. This one, for example, and there’s another beneath the Whomping Willow. We just want to know whether Dumbledore will really agree to it. No idea whether the Marauder’s Map can display Dementors’ names either."

Fred patted the desk. "This classroom could be our base for skipping class, as long as Dumbledore doesn’t hire anyone yet."

Yimi was unwilling. "I’m not letting you use it as a base."

"Don’t be so selfish, girl. It doesn’t belong to any one person." George said, "Mischief managed," to the Marauder’s Map, and it turned back into an ordinary blank piece of parchment.

"Then you have to attend, my Defence Against the Dark Arts class." Yimi pulled out her wand and pointed at the parchment. "The red-haired one, the scarred one, and the girl, are all my students."

"They want to use this place as a base for skipping class too?" Fred had misunderstood slightly.

He and George exchanged a look and humored her. "All right, if we’ve got time. Want some toffee? We’ve got ordinary flavor, enchanted ones, dog-shit flavor... You can use them to prank people you hate too. Of course, once we put them all in the same pocket, we forgot which is which."

"..."

They left not long afterward. They still needed to spend Professor Binns’s class thinking about how to escape Professor Binns’s class.

Yimi thought about the passage to Hogsmeade she had seen on the map. The only landmark she had remembered was a Whomping Willow.

The Whomping Willow was, as the name suggested, a tree that beat people with its branches. Supposedly it had been planted several decades ago, and Grandma Cat had repeatedly warned Yimi not to go near it.

At first McGonagall had been afraid Yimi would get hurt. Later, after the giant snake was dragged out, McGonagall added another warning: the tree was rather old, and two students—Harry and Ron—had already been scolded for crashing a car into it before term and injuring it.

Taking advantage of the fact that most students had started class, Yimi trotted outside and stared at the willow. It did not look nearly as vicious as people described. Grandma Cat had also specifically told Yimi not to hurt it.

Yimi transformed back into a cat and ran toward the willow in her more agile form.

* * *

Sirius Black arrived at the Shrieking Shack utterly exhausted. He did not look like the vicious man shown in the newspaper. Instead, he was a large black dog.

Nobody knew he was an Animagus too, and that was precisely how he had escaped from Azkaban. Dementors were not nearly as interested in nonhuman creatures.

Besides, the Dementors wandering near him during those days had seemed strangely unwell, as though their teeth had been glued together. Every time they passed his cell, they could spend ages there without managing to draw a single thing out of him, as though their "mouths" were blocked, even though Dementors did not actually need to bite anyone to drain happiness from them.

The Shrieking Shack was called the Shrieking Shack because, decades ago, people often heard horrifying noises coming from inside. Those sounds had actually been the cries of a werewolf named Lupin during the full moon.

Lupin had been one of the four close friends Sirius spent his school days with. Dumbledore had specially prepared this house for Lupin’s monthly transformations, and even the Whomping Willow had been planted to conceal the passage and stop other people from wandering in.

Besides Sirius and the werewolf Lupin, the other two members of the group were James—Harry’s father—and Peter Pettigrew, the man who framed Sirius and sent him to Azkaban.

Black braced the newspaper with his forelegs and glared at the rat printed on it, a rat he could never forget. There were countless rats in the world, but he could recognize this one at a glance, because it was Peter! That bastard was an Animagus too.

Harry’s father James had been one as well. None of them had ever registered with the Ministry of Magic.

"Meow?"

Black, still stewing in hatred, heard a cat’s cry. In his current sensitive state he whipped his head around and saw a strange cat sitting at the entrance leading back toward Hogwarts, staring at him in confusion.

Black watched the cat slowly approach him.

Then she lifted one paw and planted it against his face with the amount of force one might use while roughhousing.

The little kitty hated every dog except golden retrievers.