"Hmm. I can't have you lot going around spreading this story," says Lockhart, closing his suitcase and drawing his wand. "Totally incongruous with my image. So just to be sure . . . obliviate!" He flicks the wand at Ron.

"Eh? What's going on?"

That wand is going to be encased in a block of ice now, grown so as to break his grip but probably not any fingers! "What the actual fuck did you just do?"

"That was a memory charm. Ron, what's the last thing you remember?"

"Uh, we just found out there was a basilisk? Why are we in Lockhart's office?"

"Aaaaaaa! Wandless magic?!"

"You're lucky I didn't just snap it! Memory charm? I should snap it - do those wear off, are they reversible -"

"They might be reversible? Oh, Ron, I'm sorry, this is all my fault for trusting him."

Lockhart tries to break the ice off his hand by banging it on a table, winces in pain, and then stands there looking stymied.

Cam courteously melts the ice from his hand for him so the block with the wand in it rests on the table. "Do you have a... better... teacher somewhere we could try?"

"Professor McGonagall has never actually made things worse?"

"That sounds like a step up! I do not want to let this creep out of my sight right at this moment and mirrors or no mirrors the snake is certainly big enough to eat you guys up in one bite so I should be along for better-teacher-fetching too, so I guess he's coming with us. Are memory charms illegal, can he just be turned in or something?"

"I think it's illegal to use on wizards? It's got to be some kind of forbidden to use it on your student. Let's bring him to McGonagall, she'll know for sure."

"All right. Come along, Professor. Lead the way, kids. Ron, I apologize but I do not have a recording of the missing time. It was fairly uneventful though."

"Cam couldn't see Hogwarts because of the anti-muggle spells, so we went looking for a teacher to take them off and ran into Lockhart. Hermione told Lockhart about the basilisk, so he tried to run away and wipe our memories so we wouldn't know he had."

"Alright. Thanks, mate."

Ron and the others set off for, presumably, McGonagall's office.

Wibble. Lockhart follows, clutching his useless icy wand.

"I think maybe you want to put that down because I don't know under what conditions you could cast with it and if it looks like it might be occurring to you to aim it anywhere I'm just gonna wreck it. It's hard to overstate how offensive memory charms are. I will give you a pair of glasses like theirs though." Glasses.

Lockhart maybe did not expect or want glasses spontaneously appearing on his face, but he sure does have them! He jumps. He does also put his wand in his pocket, though.

"Your options are you have that on your person and I'm on a heck of a hair trigger about splintering it into a hundred pieces if you twitch, or I carry it and I am not," Cam tells him. "The glasses are an attempt at an anti-basilisk defense."

He'll hand it over and look extremely annoyed about it.

"Who are you, anyway? I've never heard of you."

"My name is Cam and you wouldn't have. Off we go."

Off they go! More beautiful stone hallways that connect at weird angles, and doors that the kids open by poking them. There are portraits on the walls; some of them wave and one says "Good morning!".

"Good morning," says Cam blandly, and, "are they people?"

"I don't think so? They're more like echoes, or recordings--they don't learn, they can talk about the lives of the people they're based on but not what they did last year, that sort of thing."