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Breakfast finishes uneventfully and the Hufflepuffs leave not long after, promising to meet the other girls in the library that afternoon. Alli looks skeptical at this idea, as it appears to involve studying, but Jenny talks her into it, and leaves the Hall looking rather smug about her success.
"I want to bake a cake for Miranda," Jenny announces to Emma once they've left the other girls' earshot. "There's kitchens here, right? Would they let me bake, do you think?"
Emma supposes that they might, but has no idea where the kitchens are, so Jenny flounces off to find an older Hufflepuff to ask. The girl she asks for directions takes this very seriously, writing them out carefully step by step for her before handing it over. When asked about permission for baking, the older girl shrugs and says "the house elves probably won't care, just ask," which then dovetails into a conversation explaining house elves, but eventually Jenny thinks she has some idea what she's doing and heads for the kitchens.
Thanks to the extremely comprehensive directions, Jenny finds the kitchen immediately with no trouble. Convincing the house elves in the kitchen that yes, she's been cooking for years, no, she is not going to try anything fancy, and yes, she will stay out of their way, takes a little longer. She eventually charms them into it with protestations of "but it's for my friend's birthday!" A couple of them are even lured into helping her, which means the cake ends up decorated rather more nicely than Jenny could have managed by herself. Since the cake is chocolate- she had to guess on flavors, but she's seen Miranda eat a Chocolate Frog and really, who doesn't like chocolate?- she proclaims that 'close enough' to bronze and frosts the rest of the cake in blue, with her new elf cooking companions providing fancy little flowers along the border and chocolate sprinkles as extra frills.
She is extremely pleased with the result! She heads back to the Hufflepuff common room to fetch Emma, looking like she would be skipping if only she wasn't carrying a cake, and they head to the library to meet their friends.
metamorphmaga
witch_please
"I bet older Ravenclaws do that in their free time. Look, old books, we should translate them!"
chanuphis
"Okay, I'll try to avoid - translating things where other Ravenclaws can see me. I'll put textbook dust jackets on the things I read."
chanuphis
"You're welcome. Maybe I'll figure out how to kill Dementors. Though somehow I don't think the ability to read Latin was what was standing between wixen in general and that."
parental_guidance
"Um, I think she actually is here, somewhere. But I think she's doing something with house elves. Dementors is Miranda's project."
chanuphis
"I have, but it doesn't seem very well put-together? It didn't involve any house-elves themselves, if I heard right."
witch_please
"I know some stuff! Mostly 'cause the Slytherins are pleased about it," Alli says helpfully. "See, she was upset at how house elves were being treated, so she started SPEW, but the house elves like to work, so they think she's rallying against them or something? And a lot of Slytherin families are super old and rich and have their own elf, so they don't want her to succeed."
chanuphis
"I'm sort of uncomfortable with elves existing, but doing things that they don't like because the way they exist is sort of uncomfortable seems definitely worse than nothing."
witch_please
"Weird, right?" Enjoying work is not, one might say, Alli's specialty. "You should know, anyway, you cooked that cake with them, didn't you?"