Three twelve-year-olds are gathered in a bathroom, copying a diagram from a book onto the floor in chalk.
"Do you know what all this writing means?" asks the green-eyed boy.
"No," says the bushy-haired girl, "and that worries me too, but we need to find out who the Heir of Slytherin is and this ritual is the best we've got."
Eventually, one or another of them draws the last bit of the outer circle.
"Haven't seen him. A diorama will just fall apart if he's wandered into a spatially inconsistent part of the school but might help if he's gone outside or in your pillowcase or something?"
"If you wouldn't mind? He doesn't usually run off like this, I don't know what's gotten into him."
Scabbers has parked in a wall nook behind a suit of armor.
And Lupin . . . doesn't look like he's seen a ghost actually, ghosts are fine, he looks like he's seen something creepy and weird.
"Oh, I think that's the one on the fifth floor next to that tapestry of Edgar the Eggheaded!"
"Ehm, pardon me, just a moment of curiosity, what would happen if you attempted to use the same technique to get the whereabouts of a dead person?"
"...Uh, I don't know if it works on ghosts. Dead people like, say, me, works fine. I don't know what happens to locals who don't leave ghosts. Or do you mean, like, a corpse?"
He totally misses the part where Cam is dead. "I mean someone who didn't leave a ghost . . . would you mind trying to find a wizard named Peter Pettigrew?"
"Again, are you trying to aim for his body or learn interesting facts about the afterlife?"
"I'm, ah, trying to remind myself that he's really dead. So, his body I suppose. Though by all accounts it was rather messy . . ."
"Oh, thanks for the warning, I will make it real small so I don't wind up with, uh, lots of dioramas cluttering the table -" Real small surroundings of Peter Pettigrew's body.
Same armor. Same rat.
"...how am I supposed to know why an invisible wizard stole a kid's rat?"
"What? No, he is the rat, I recognized him, I thought I was mad--perhaps I am mad-- Why, in all these years, didn't he tell anyone he was alive?"
"Some wizards can turn into animals, McGonagall does it. Are you saying Scabbers was an animagus this whole time? And who are you anyway?"
(Really? They couldn't have a new Defense professor for an entire day without someone who's supposed to be dead turning up?)
"Twelve. Twelve years." But Lupin isn't looking at Ron; he's back to staring at the models in anguished confusion.
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