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.
"I don't have an explanation for why I would have scared off the nargles but it sounds like they may not be missed."
"They probably won't be, no." She holds up the letter she's carrying. "I'm writing to my father about you. He runs The Quibbler."
"Are you worried about being in the paper? He might want to interview you, but if you aren't interested I can tell him that."
"I don't think I'd prefer to be in the paper but I do think the freedom of the press is important."
The child beams at him. "That's just what daddy always says. He writes about things the Ministry doesn't want people to know."
"Like Minister Fudge's secret army of heliopaths. Also the existence of crumple-horned snorkacks, though I'm not sure if the Ministry is trying to hide them or just doesn't believe in them."
"I'm afraid I've never heard of either, but I'm learning a lot of new things lately."
"Well, I could loan you my copy of the latest edition so you can see if you want to subscribe."
She fishes a thin magazine (printed on normal paper, for once) out of her bag and holds it out. The cover features a moving picture of an elderly academic-looking witch and the headline "BATHILDA BAGSHOT: SECRETLY SEVERAL BADGERS IN A ROBE?"
All right, fine, what is the evidence for this old woman being secretly several badgers in a robe.
She eats a suspicious amount of frogs' legs, never wears clothes that show anything between her neck, wrists, and ankles, and has on multiple occasions had to leave events on no notice.
"The badger claim seems very specific," says Cam. "Is there a condition of such commonplace incidence that everyone already knows that eating frogs' legs is a symptom and the editor cut the 'as you know, dear reader' about that, or -"
Confused head-tilt. "I don't know of anyone else who's likely to be badgers. My name's Luna Lovegood, by the way."
"Cam. If no one else is likely to be badgers I can't think of another way to salvage the argument here, it seems terribly thin. I suppose I could check on general principle." Is this little plastic figurine of Bathilda Bagshot badgers.
Nope! Human being.
"She appears anatomically normal." Cam offers Luna the figurine along with her Quibbler. "Souvenir."
Luna looks at the figurine. "Hmm. Perhaps the badgers are more clever than we thought." She puts it and her magazine back in her bag and drifts off to give her letter to an owl.
The next couple of days pass uneventfully. The basilisk disassembly person arrives, disassembles the basilisk, and gives Cam an enchanted note for a bank transfer. He'll need to go to Diagon Alley to turn it into usable gold, but he was planning to do that anyway.
And then it's time for Pettigrew's and Black's trials, and thus for Lupin bring Cam to London.
Does he want to watch the trials, or do his Diagon Alley errands in parallel with them?
He is sort of curious how the wizard justice system works! How long do the trials take?
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