The Rose of King's Cross - continuation story

[Bara]

From behind the heavy wooden door, came a sudden scuffling and squealing and the stern tones of the guardian gargoyle remonstrating.

Startled, Minerva slid the crystal back into her pocket. Harry and Ginny leapt to their feet. Through the solid door, glided the stately wraith of Nearly Headless Nick.

“Really, the youth of today, they’d have been off to The Tower in my day!” His expression softened. “GOOD to see you, Harry,” he said. “And Miss Weasley, lovely as ever!” He bowed.

“It’s Mrs. Potter, now, Sir Nicholas,” said Ginny.

“Ah, yes, yes. How time flies. It seems like only yesterday that Good Queen Bess ..”

“Nicholas?” Said McGonagall.

“Ah, yes,” said the ghost. “Well, I gave them the password, because …”

The door burst open and two small flying bundles hurtled across the floor.

“Mummy! Daddy!”

Laughing, Harry and Ginny scooped up their children.

“I think,” said the headmistress, “We shall continue our conversation later. The breakfast bell is about to ring, and I have some important announcements to make.”

[Bara]

As the long refectory tables cleared themselves and the hubbub of children’s voices rose into a happy, excited babble of high spirits, the professors and guests at the staff table had to shout to each other to be heard .

The last of the Strawberry Towers and Chocolate Chatterboxes ascended into the ceiling.

Professor McGonagall allowed the din to escalate for a few moments, but as the multicoloured mischief spells began to splatter from table to table and the Weasley’s Patent Mini-Howlers began to land in laps, she stood up.

The students subsided into silence, all eyes turned to the top table.

“Ladies and Gentleman. Welcome to the new school year here at Hogwarts. Welcome especially to our new first years – many of you from long-established Wizarding families – Miss Goyle, Miss Malfoy, Mademoiselle Weasley and her cousins – and of course, the young Potters…”

A cheer rose up from the Gryffindor table. Harry and Ginny waved from their places as guests of honour.

“HOGWARTS,” continued the Head, “is an Academy of traditions. But this year, we are introducing some new initiatives.

“For the first time, we are welcoming mature students to our hallowed halls…”

A murmur rippled across the hall – all eyes turned to the newcomers. The exracers blushed.

“And, I am proud to say that for the first time in the history of Wizarding, we have invited our Muggle friends to share our mysteries..”

She was interrupted by a storm of cheering from the Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Gryffindor tables. Only Slytherin seemed unsure how to react.

“BUT!” Said the Professor, “we have some sad news, too. Our own teacher of ‘Care of Magical Creatures’ is planning semi-retirement this year….”

Loud calls of ‘Boo! No! Shame!’ rose from the hall.

At the top table, Hagrid blushed. As large and hale as ever, yet it could be seen that that his thatch of tangled hair was silvering, his slow speech was slower . He lumbered to his feet to a storm of applause, tears welling in his eyes.

McGonagall judged her moment .

“HOWEVER – he is not leaving us altogether ..” Another storm of cheering, the bigger boys stamping their feet and whistling.

“AND,” the headmistress persevered, “I am delighted to introduce his successor. Hagrid will be working with our new ‘Magical Creatures’ master throughout this term and the next.”

For the first time, the assembly noticed the stocky, bearded man, standing by Hagrid’s side, dwarfed by the half-giant.

The hall fell silent. The new teacher scanned the faces. There was an audible exclamation from one of the new Muggle students. Her eyes opened wide and she opened her mouth to speak.

The new professor looked out over the student body, his gaze pausing on the American at the Gryffindor table, he smiled and gave the suspicion of a wink.

“Professor Law?” asked Minerva. “Would you please tell us a little about yourself?”

Brian swept off his cowboy hat, scratched his head, and took a deep breath ……

[brooks]

Professor Law ;D Love it!

[brian]

I thought " the Rose of Kings Cross" was a pub.

[Bara]

.....said Professor Law, replacing his hat and gazing down at his feet.

There was a second of stunned silence. Professor McGonagall's lips twitched. The Hogwarts students burst into gales of laughter.

Rose blushed.

With one gruff sentence, the new Professor had won over the whole school.

He winced and staggered forward, as Hagrid patted him on the back.

"Yer'll do alright, son," said Hagrid.

[johnnysauntie]

((it's a long one! two long airplane rides today, and I just wasn't motivated to do much else. )

Professor Law smiled and waved at the crowd of students, who were clapping politely and looking at him with interest. Approaching the podium, however, he suddenly started to leap about, patting himself frantically, and then he appeared to engage in a hearty struggle with his left pants leg. The students gasped and Brooks put her hand over her eyes and groaned.

“There, I’ve got you!” Law exclaimed, holding a furry writhing creature that he had extracted from his pants leg. The beast was small, about the size of a loaf of bread, and had brilliant, cobalt-blue fur. As Law held it, the creature waved its long spindly legs and turned its head to stare at the students. Ears like bat wings unfolded from its head, and beneath what appeared to be a small tusk a floppy snout unrolled.

“Everyone, meet Spud,” said Law. “ He’s one of the last Crumpled Horned Snorkacks in existence. They were hunted almost to extinction for their fur, and their horns, which are an important ingredient in ancient potions.”

Spud had been motionless in Law’s embrace but with a squeal, he suddenly wriggled free and scampered down the center aisle, his long thing legs a blur, and leaped into Brooks lap. He purred contentedly and then crawled down her leg, wrapped his long limbs around her shin, folded his ears and went contentedly back to sleep. The females students murmured adoringly at the sight.

“Hogwarts has been selected to be one of the word’s two Crumple Horned Snorkack Preserves,” Law continued. “Spud is our first offspring, and hopefully, there will be many more. The wizards of Durmstrang have another small herd, and joint efforts between the two schools are underway to breed these wonderful animals.”

The students applauded again. Spud opened one eye, was unimpressed, and resumed his nap on Brooks’ leg.

“He came straight to you,” said Persephone Prewitt, a Gryffindor second year who was sitting next to Brooks.” How did you do that?”

“Well dear, it happens that Professor Law and I are married.” Brooks replied. The students tittered. “Spud knows me pretty well.” She reached down and stroked his furry back, and was rewarded as the musical purring resumed.

Across the room, Lynne and Bara were whispering furiously over at the Slytherin table. “Neither of them EVER mentioned Snorkacks before!” hissed Bara to her friend.”Goats, dogs, cats and of course Rad and Hairy but NEVER a mention of a mythical blue-furred creature in all the years we’ve known them.”

”Internet friends,” Lynne sniffed. “You think you know them…Well, nonetheless, it is pretty exiting, isn’t it? “

Suddently the two were elbowed apart. Terrie and Thea squeezed between them.

“Hey you, this is the Slytherin table,” cried a stout third year with bushy blond hair. “Go back to your own House tables!”

“Dursely,” said a sharp voice as Lucinda Malfoy glided over. “That’s no way to behave. Unless we’re on the Quidditch pitch, we co-operate, remember? I think you can help the elves clear up, to make up for that little outburst.” With an apologetic nod to Thea and Terrie, she led Dursely away by the ear.

“Dursely!” Lynne exclaimed, looking wide-eyed at the others. “Do you think…?”

“Well, it makes perfect sense,” said Thea. “His great aunt was Lily Evans Potter!”

“Okay, yes, fine, good. We have something else we need to discuss!” interjected Terrie. “Does anything strike you as particularly funny about this situation?”

The three others goggled at her.

“Oh, well, let’s see, ” said Bara. “Hmm. Yesterday I was on deadline with a marketing project and today I’m a student at a magical school in a land of make-believe, only, the whole make-believe bit just happens to be real.

“No, no, aside from our being here.” Terrie insisted. “Brooks and Brian! He’s a professor? She’s got a baby Snorkack curled around her leg? Anyone else get the feeling that they’ve been hiding something from us?”

“We definitely need to have a word with them, that’s for sure,” said Thea. “We have some time after lunch, let’s track them down.”

About thirty minutes later, the friends, now joined by Brian and the audibly snoring Snorkack, were alone in a quiet corridor, perched on assorted window seats and benches.

“Well, you two, we’re getting the feeling that this whole junket isn’t the surprise to you two that it is to us,” Terrie started.

Smiling at Brian, Brooks said, “Well, no, it really isn’t. We do have a lot to explain. Let’s start by showing you a couple things.”

Taking a wand out of his overalls, Brian bellowed “Expecto Patronum” and suddenly, a silvery Arabian horse had joined them and was cantering around the corridor. The group immediately recognized Rad, a horse so gentle and intuitive that Brian often rode her without any tack whatsoever.

As the group gazed at the beautiful Patronus, Bara suddenly felt warm breath on her neck, and Thea was bumped by a large nose. They started and turned, and in that moment realized that they were in fact looking at Rad, live and in the flesh, and that Brooks’ chair was standing empty. The Snorkack had been unceremoniously dumped into the floor, where, now awake, it stared around balefully. Brian scooped Spud up and stroked the fluffy blue fur.

Speechless, the ladies gaped at Brian and were unsure of how to behave around Rad, wondering if it would be rude, or simply altogether weird - to pat their friend on the nose or neck.

“Shortly after she lost use of her legs,” Brian explained, “Brooks started to Transfigure. It began when she would watch Hairy, running around his paddock, squealing, bucking and kicking up dust. Watching him enjoy his total freedom of movement, she keenly felt how much she missed hers. She must have been harboring magic inside all along, because it didn’t take long for her to start transforming into the horse you’ve always known as Rad. I’ll never forget the day I went outside and found two horses racing around the field, but no Brooks. She hid it from me for a while but I saw her Transform one day, when she thought I wasn’t around. That name by the way, is our shorthand for “Radical Change.”

Rad pranced in place, squealed and shook her mane.

“We had no idea what was going on, as you can imagine, and this really isn’t the sort of thing you talk about publicly, you know?” Brian continued. “We could hardly put a post on ExRacers and say ‘Hey! Guess what! Brooks changed into a horse today! So instead, we just said we got a new horse, Rad. But if you think back, you’ve never seen a picture of Brooks with Rad.”

The Tarts were strangely silent, utterly cowed by this revelation. Rad clopped over to the wheelchair, and backed up to it. In the next instant, Brooks was sitting there, grinning madly at her friends.

“You can’t even imagine how I’ve longed to share this with you, but for obvious reasons, I really couldn’t,” she laughed.

“What’s it like, Transfiguring into Rad?” Thea asked.

“Oh, Thea, it’s wonderful. I’m faster and stronger than I ever dreamt. I love to hear my hooves drum the ground, and a horse’s heightened senses are something else. I hear so much more acutely, and sense things so much more clearly and rapidly,” she described. “And grass is, surprisingly, delicious.”

The group was spellbound, but Terrie needed more answers. “How did you wind up here? And for that matter, how did we?” she asked.

“We were Found,” Brian said. “Enough wizards and witches are born to Muggles that the Ministy scours the earth for incidents of Magic, in order to identify them. Brooks’ Transforming was discovered pretty quickly, and we were under observation for several years, though we didn’t know it then.”

“During this time we were reading the Harry Potter books, and it wasn’t until we read the third (The Prisoner of Azkaban) that we started seeing some similarities between what we could do and the magic described in the books,” he recalled.

“I conjured my first Patronus the day I first rode Rad. She cantered up to me and I hopped aboard, and we galloped hither and yon like a couple of pony clubbers. I recall it so vividly – we were cantering along the crest of a hill just past twilight. The sun had sunk from view but the horizon still glowed orange and the sky was a deep blue. I threw back my head and raised my arms and laughed – I was so happy. And from one of my fingers sprouted this silver whisp, and I just laughed more and boom, next thing you know, this silvery horse was cantering next to us. It was something else.”

“We started getting the idea that maybe there was a parallel universe when we read Azkaban. The similarities were just too eerily close,” Brooks picked up the story. “We started to see eccentric people, and animals that just didn’t belong in our neck of the woods. And one day, we got a letter. A Witch named Seraphine Butters came calling, and brought with her a Portkey. We made our first visit to the Ministry that day.”

[brooks]

[brian]

Her?

[Bara]

INSPIRED!!

(So - of all the things that are happening, Professor, your only element of disbelief is Rad becoming a mare? )

Hmmm, Sarah, I think he's trying ''obfuscatus"

Quick! All Exracers, download your auroptical filters before Brian makes you think this is just a story .......

[Bara]

The Tarts were looking confunzled.

“But that doesn’t explain why WE -“ began Thea, she broke off with a gasp. Light footsteps were padding across the corridor intersecting theirs. Everyone turned to look.

Seeming unaware of their presence, a house-elf was striding purposefully in the other direction. He was wearing a single sock tied jauntily around his neck to show that he was a Free Elf and he was leading someone by the hand.

The blonde lady was wearing a checked shirt, jeans and riding boots. She wore glasses and she was smiling down at her guide.

“Where are we going?” she was heard to ask, in a lilting, soft southern drawl.

Thea, Lynne and Bara were staring in disbelief.

“What? What is it?” asked Terrie.

The three dumbstruck Exracers exchanged wide-eyed looks.

“It was her, wasn’t it?” said Lynne.

“I think so, “ said Bara.

Thea was the first to confirm the fact.

“That was Deb!” She told Terrie, Brooks and Brian. “Lynne, Bara and I met her at Rolex.”

Brooks and Brian exchanged a secret smile.

“We’ll explain later,” said the Prof. “Now I have to go and explain to Hagrid why his breeding programme for ‘Mulicorns’ just ain’t gonna work.”

[Bara]

Professor Law and Hagrid were hanging over the paddock fence.

It sagged alarmingly under Hagrid's weight. Brian was careful to keep his balance on his back foot.

"You mean," Hagrid was asking, anxiously, "that Bucephalus can't ... won't...??"

Brian shook his head, regretfully.

The small, scruffy, orphaned mulicorn was sucking on Hagrid's fingers. It was about 11 hh, with a nondescript brown coat. A stunted, twirled horn rose from its forehead between two floppy ears. It had, however, an abundant mane, which the professor was braiding elaborately but absentmindedly.

The two Magical Creatures teachers nodded wisely, in sync.

"Uncle Hagrid? Uncle Hagrid!" The two adults turned. A small figure was trotting towards the gamekeeper’s cottage .

Brian smiled to the child and waved a goodbye, walking swiftly in the direction of the Castle.

Hagrid felt a tugging on his robe. He looked down. There was little Lily Potter. For just a moment, she looked like the young Harry, soft dark hair flopping across her forehead, big blue eyes behind the glasses. Hagrid’s gaze softened: “Ahh. You look just like your ….”

“… HAGRID!” Hissed Lily fiercely. She tugged on his robe, until he hunkered down, arthritically, as low as he could.

“Hagrid, listen. We don’t have much time. I have found.. “ She glanced around … “I’ve found a secret archive. What do you know about Hippofants?” Her eyes pierced into him.

“.. just like your Aunt Hermione,” finished Hagrid, lamely.

Lily snorted. “But Hippofants??? ” she insisted.

“Ah, well,” Hagrid wracked his brains, creaking upright. Lily stood, hands on hips, tapping her foot, staring up at him.

“Well…?...I know, well, “ repeated Hagrid – ‘they’re, uh mythical?’ he suggested.

Lily sighed. “So are Mulicorns,” she said. “But Bucephalus is one.”

Hagrid wracked his brains. “Errr – Hippofants live on dragon’s fears?” he suggested.

“Yes. And?” Lily looked at him.

“They hold the keys?”

“Yes, yes,” said young Lily impatiently. “All that is in your own textbook ‘Magical Mythical Mysteries – A Brief History of Creaturatology’ “

“You’ve read that?” asked the giant, flattered and impressed.

“Yes, yes,” said Lily. “Auntie ‘Mione read me to sleep with it when I was a baby.”

Hagrid blinked. Unsure whether it was a compliment.

“Then I shall just have to search the library – and ask Professor Law,” said Lily. She turned.

Remembering her manners : “Thank you, anyway, Hagrid.”

Hagrid watched the small figure march way. He crumpled.
Professor Law. Again.

Too late, he roused himself. “Lily!?” he cried. “Why do you need to know?”

[Goalie]

Boy I am a nosy little witch aren't I

[Bara]

"...ask Rose ...." the little voice floated back.

[Bara]

(Enquiring minds need to know, Samantha-dear!) And you are the only one (other than B&B) who hasn't met Deb - go with the flow ...

[brian]

Hippofarts?