Dumbledore Gets a Fright

If the Campus Supply System only needed a rough version, the Club could put one together easily. Andrew thought the idea had real potential.

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But the next monthly meeting was still a long way off. That schedule would have killed an ordinary club by now, but perhaps shared conviction kept this one remarkably stable. All Andrew could do was wait, steadily practice Transfiguration, and begin studying Arithmancy.

While he waited for his chance, Magical Legends Magazine was in an uproar again.

"Print more copies! This is even bigger than last time!"

"No revisions? What a relief! Check once more for anything another publication could report us for. If there's nothing, send it out!"

"A little this way. Now a little farther..."

Dumbledore was not in his office.

But poor Phoenix Fawkes was being ordered about by the fussy Sorting Hat, which had him drag the lively hat over a book.

"Stories in books have no feelings. I'd rather read young wizards' stories by far. But this time is different..."

The hat began drawing the story out of the book. The Four Founders had cast countless spells on it beyond ordinary imagination, so this was only slightly difficult.

"Ah, I knew it! There's a part for a clever, beautiful hat!"

It waggled its tip happily.

"Oh, this is good too. Excellent, excellent—they're the very essence of magic!"

Pleased, it stopped reading and had Fawkes put it back where it belonged.

"Damn it! How can you do this?"

Lockhart had been among the first to get the new issue, but he was in a foul mood. Adventure stories had competition too, and no rivalry was fiercer than one between writers in the same field.

He had gone to great lengths to make his stories authentic. Every one of them was absolutely true, and he had traveled through most of the remotest corners of the world to find tales that were both gripping and real.

But how could anyone do this?

They had shamelessly made Dumbledore their protagonist, and the adventures were outrageously fake. Why did everyone like this stuff?

The previous issue had explored practically every secret in Hogwarts. He had thought they could not possibly come up with another twist, yet now they had sent Dumbledore back to the days when Hogwarts was founded!

Think about it! Weren't Time-Turners only given to minors? Why was everyone so taken with Dumbledore meeting Gryffindor?

"Albus."

Professor McGonagall stood beside a pile of documents, fixing Dumbledore with a sharp look.

"I'll have the paperwork done soon, Minerva."

Dumbledore pushed the magazine aside. "Would you like some Candied Fruit?"

"Well..."

After a moment's struggle, Professor McGonagall relented. Plenty of professors were reading the magazine too, after all.

"Fine. I admit these stories are imaginative. But Albus, I want you to hold an assembly and tell the students you've already dug up most of the treasure on campus. Mr. Filch can barely keep up these days."

Lured by the stories and with the supposed treasures so close at hand, more and more Hogwarts students had been staying out at night.

It might spoil their fantasies a little, but it was time they started obeying school rules. Adults could tell fiction from fact, at least. The younger students genuinely believed it.

"They might even be motivated to improve their Grades. Applying for a Time-Turner takes time, after all. And didn't Madam Pince say the students are spending more and more time in the Library?"

"Yes, because Dumbledore said, 'Knowledge is the ladder to magical progress.'"

"Dumbledore also said, 'Only by mastering the most basic magic and combining it can you turn magic into miracles.'"

"And Dumbledore said, 'There are no spells that can't be mastered, only lazy wizards.'"

Professor McGonagall rattled off five or six of Dumbledore's Study Quotes. "We thought those lines might inspire them. That's why you let the rest of their nonsense slide."

"Not all of it is nonsense."

The Sorting Hat spoke up from the side.

"Gryffindor really did fight Slytherin, and Slytherin left the school afterward."

"And they really were magic at its pinnacle. How else would I exist?"

As a hat that composed a new song every year, it had eagerly read Andrew's story as soon as Gryffindor appeared in the magazine. Once it found long passages about a marvelous hat, it promptly decided most of the story must be true. The claim that the great Four Founders represented the pinnacle of magic pleased it especially.

"I'll sing about that next year!"

Kindhearted but a little vain, the hat had realized after reading the magazine that if it confirmed some of the story, no one could contradict it.

This time, it was Dumbledore who lost his composure.

"Really?"

He had skimmed the story. To preserve history for a perfect adventure, Gryffindor had not heard about Hogwarts's future from him, and he had permanently drawn the relevant memories out with his Wand.

[Only sometimes, at midnight, those experiences he thought forgotten would surface in his Dreamscape... leaving Dumbledore with a deeper understanding of the nature of magic.]

"Not all of it. I never met you back then."

The hat delivered its verdict without hesitation. It knew nothing about the later events, so how could it make them up?

Somewhere Andrew knew nothing about, a hat had nearly gotten him hung from the Astronomy Tower.

"Perfect. Now I've got enough for an Orrery. And I'm halfway to a Flying Broom for Second Year. If I skip the Nimbus series, I can afford one outright."

Andrew, blissfully unaware of the danger, finally had time to hear what readers thought.

They had enthusiastically embraced the time-travel premise, so coming up with something for the next issue would be no trouble. Meanwhile, Hufflepuff was recreating the dishes Andrew had invented for the story, and Gryffindor, inspired by its righteous two-against-one fight, had argued with Slytherin several times in the Dining Hall.

The school still had not intervened. Ravenclaw, meanwhile, had shown almost no reaction, despite its high readership.

"First-years really are easier to fool. Back then, they were all practicing the Levitation Charm..."

As he thought, he drew his Wand across the strips of wood arranged in his left hand, pulling a rose free.

"Could you at least stop practicing at the dinner table?"

His roommates were used to it by now. "You've been doing this for two days..."

"Sorry. Force of habit..."

He assessed how faithfully he had reproduced the rose, then turned it back into strips of wood.

Yes, it was another day of practicing Transfiguration.