Snape paused for only a few seconds before his cold, flat voice rang out. "Mirror."
The Stone Gargoyle leaped aside, and the wall behind it split in two, revealing the Moving Staircases that ran from the third floor straight up to the Headmaster's Office on the eighth.
This change to the Headmaster's Office was a new challenge for the professors who wanted to find Allen and report on their work. But such a question posed no difficulty for Professor McGonagall, who had nearly been sorted into Ravenclaw, or for Professor Flitwick of Ravenclaw. Nor was it much of a problem for the Potions Professor standing before the statue, a half-blood with a logical mind; after all, during the Sorcerer's Stone incident in Harry Potter's first year, similar methods had been used to leave behind a challenge.
Only Professor Sprout, the head of Hufflepuff, had been rather embarrassingly barred outside several times. She was not stupid; she had simply never had the slightest interest in this sort of riddle game and had no experience dealing with it at all.
Of course, this alteration also gave ordinary students a chance to visit the Headmaster's Office. As long as a student was clever enough to answer the statue's riddle, he could receive a little treat in the Headmaster's Office similar to the kind handed out by Ravenclaw's head, Flitwick. But what Allen gave the students was not tiny dancing cakes, but Godigan Tea that refilled itself endlessly—it was not popular, and its smell made people unable to stay for long as they tried to escape it. Still, compared with Dumbledore's time, ordinary students now had the opportunity to enter the Headmaster's Office. One had to know that in the past, aside from Dumbledore's regular guest Harry Potter, even the mischievous Weasley Twins seemed