"Free this afternoon?"
"Got class this afternoon, but I'm free tonight." Cohen pulled on his dragon-hide gloves and squeezed the swollen pustule of a Bubotuber.
It was a bit gross, but also oddly satisfying – especially watching the pus squirt out.
"I'm... uh..." the Death Eater disguised as a student whispered to Cohen, looking a bit scared of him. "It's about... that..."
"The identity that must not be nad?" Cohen asked.
Cohen rembered his na now, Wayne Hopkins from Hufflepuff.
The other guy nodded imdiately.
"Then why are you talking about it in class?" Cohen said, lowering his voice nacingly. "Would you die if you waited till tonight?"
Where did Voldemort even find these low-level Death Eaters?!
Sneaking into Hogwarts like this, Dumbledore was bound to find out eventually – though, perhaps Dumbledore had already figured it out...
Clearly, without Cohen around, even Voldemort's little 'family' would fall apart, wouldn't it?
"Oh, right, right..." Hopkins nodded quickly and shut his mouth.
"The pus! Mr. Hopkins! Catch the pus in the bottle!" Professor Sprout noticed the student here was a bit distracted and imdiately reminded him.
Following Professor Sprout's instructions, the students squeezed all the Bubotubers in their section clean.
"Bubotuber pus is the best redy for stubborn acne," Professor Sprout said as she stoppered the last bottle. "This should stop students from trying extre thods to get rid of their pimples."
After class, Hopkins ntioned the eting place for that evening: a classroom on the fifth floor. He said there were no portraits there, which he thought would help them avoid Dumbledore's watchful eyes.
But Cohen figured Dumbledore wasn't stupid; even with his backside, he could probably guess what Cohen and a Hufflepuff student would be doing on the fifth floor late at night.
"Who was that Hufflepuff student, anyway?" Harry sidled up to Cohen after class.
"Son of a friend of my dad's," Cohen lied effortlessly.
"Do you think Hagrid will bring that spider back to class again?" Ron asked anxiously as they walked from the Herbology greenhouses towards the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
"Probably not."
Cohen knew that after last term's 'scare' with Aragog, the old spider likely wouldn't be invited back as teaching material. Nobody had bothered to tell the old spider that the person sitting on his back would be Cohen, slling distinctly of snake, no less.
"But didn't Hagrid say last term he wanted to try crossbreeding a Fire Crab with sothing else to teach us about a new species?"
"A Fire Crab sounds pretty normal, though," Ron said, relieved.
"If it were just Fire Crabs..." Hermione had a bad feeling. "Our course objectives include 'thods for Feeding and Cleaning Fire Crab Colonies', but what does Hagrid want to crossbreed it with?"
They would find out soon enough.
Because Hagrid was waiting outside his hut early, one hand holding Fang's collar (as Fang was barking frantically at so open wooden crates), while waving at the students flooding towards him.
"Mornin'!" Hagrid bood cheerfully at the Gryffindor students. "Best wait a bit, the Slytherins ain't here yet – they won't wanna miss this – Blast-Ended Skrewts!"
"What?" Ron frowned.
Hagrid pointed to the crates nearby.
They crowded around to look, and inside the crates were a bunch of wriggling creatures that looked like deford white lobsters without shells, sticky and slimy, with many legs sticking out haphazardly from their main bodies. They couldn't see their heads anywhere.
Since they were currently newborns, they were quite small, and one crate could hold almost a hundred of them.
They were piled on top of each other, crawling around, occasionally bumping clumsily into the sides of the crates, causing sparks from their tails to blacken the inside of the wooden boxes.
"Just hatched!" Hagrid said proudly. "You can raise 'em yourselves, we can make it a big project."
"Why would we raise these things?" the Slytherin students arrived. "They look... disgusting."
Pansy Parkinson of Slytherin said with a look of revulsion.
"What use are they?" Blaise Zabini of Slytherin asked.
"They can be used to feed dragons and Manticores," Cohen chid in, helping Hagrid out. "Effectively replenishing their sulfur sacs, or simply taking their fire-squirting organs for lighting fireplaces."
Hagrid, who had been wracking his brain just monts before, shot a grateful look at Cohen.
"Right, that's it!" Hagrid said. "Alright, you gotta try feedin' 'em sothin'. I ain't never raised 'em before, so I ain't sure what they eat exactly... I've got ant eggs, frog livers, and green snakes, try each one and see if they eat..."
"Do you actually know about these things?" Hermione asked Cohen incredulously when they started trying to feed the Blast-Ended Skrewts as Hagrid instructed.
"No idea, I made it up," Cohen said, scooping up a handful of ant eggs from a crate. "Here, chchchch –"
No creature being raised could resist the 'chchchch' sound. In the wooden crate Cohen and his friends were gathered around, all the Blast-Ended Skrewts scrambled towards the source of the sound.
"Looks and danger aside, they're actually quite cute when they're little," Cohen comnted appreciatively.
His little Basilisk had been complaining recently that catching sheep and rabbits wasn't challenging anymore. Cohen planned to introduce so new creatures for it to play with – Blast-Ended Skrewts seed perfect.
They might even help break the little Basilisk's habit of "biting everything it touches". If you bite this thing, it's definitely going to spray fire, which should be like a running Niffler dipped in Devil's Snare to a Basilisk.
Besides, he was planning to move out of the wooden hut himself soon, and these fire-breathing things wouldn't cause too much damage to the house...
"Ouch!" Dean Thomas yelped, his hand scalded by a Blast-Ended Skrewt's sudden explosion from its tail.
Hagrid hurried over to treat Dean's hand. "Maybe you oughta wear dragon-hide gloves..."
"First pus, now this..." Seamus muttered.
"How disgusting!" Lavender pulled back the hand she'd just used to toss a frog liver into the crate. "Hagrid, what are those spiky things on them?"
"Ah, they've got spikes on 'em," Hagrid said excitedly. "The ones with spikes are the males, and the females have sothin' like suckers on their bellies. I reckon they probably suck blood..."
"Those are reproductive organs, Hagrid," Cohen said helplessly, as two Blast-Ended Skrewts had already perfectly attached their spikes and suckers to each other.
It was hard to imagine a hybrid species that could reproduce stably and also engage in mating behaviour in its infancy.
However, Cohen noticed that these Blast-Ended Skrewts didn't seem to be genuinely trying to reproduce as youngsters; the two attached Skrewts seed to have just done it by chance. Now, they were starting to think the other was challenging them. After separating, they used the explosive force from their tails to ram into each other, trying to eliminate the other.
"How do you know so much!" Harry exclaid in surprise.
"Talent, maybe," Cohen said.
After the class ended, Cohen suggested taking a box of them to raise himself – Cohen's suitcase had more space, which might help them grow more smoothly.
Because before class ended, these Blast-Ended Skrewts had already shown signs of cannibalism (quite a few broken Skrewt legs were found in the crate).
"Course you can," Hagrid said happily, giving Cohen a box. "If you find anything new, be sure to tell – and whatever you do, don't let Norbert eat 'em."
"I don't think Norbert would eat sothing like this," Ron said, looking with awe at the box floating beside Cohen.
As they returned to the castle, Harry tried his best to stop Cohen from telling Hagrid his subsequent findings on "how to feed Blast-Ended Skrewts."
"At least they're still small now," Ron shuffled further away from the wooden crate next to Cohen. "And they didn't eat anything the whole class."
"That's because they don't seem to have mouths," Cohen said.
"But if Hagrid figures out how to feed them," Hermione said anxiously, "I bet they'll suddenly grow to be six feet long. The wisest thing we can do is nip them in the bud before the Blast-Ended Skrewts attack us. Cohen must be thinking that, right?"
"Danger and all that, go tell the little Basilisk in my suitcase,"
Cohen said indifferently,
"Hagrid's breeding plan will fail. I haven't seen many hybrid creatures that can reproduce stably – these Blast-Ended Skrewts are mostly for my little Basilisk to have so fun with."
Before lunch, Cohen took all the Blast-Ended Skrewts back to his suitcase.
The little Basilisk was extrely excited that Cohen had brought a bunch of new friends for it to play with.
[Are you sure this will teach her not to bite things randomly in the future?] Hissokou asked Cohen again, looking at the little Basilisk chasing the Blast-Ended Skrewts all over the grassy area, sounding a bit uncertain.
[They clearly have a bad texture and burn your throat,] Cohen shook his head. [It's like a soother dipped in pepper water. Both snakes and humans have to go through this step...]
The little Basilisk quickly caught up to a Blast-Ended Skrewt and bit its tail.
The Blast-Ended Skrewt 'blasted its tail' as expected, and the little Basilisk spat it out uncomfortably.
This level of fire couldn't hurt a Basilisk at all, but having a firecracker stuffed in its mouth definitely annoyed the snake.
The little Basilisk hissed angrily at the Blast-Ended Skrewt a few tis, then bit it again –
[You watch, I'm going to eat.] Cohen sighed.
In the afternoon, Cohen and Harry went to the Divination classroom with their pre-prepared 'death predictions.'
"This lesson, we shall study the stars," Professor Trelawney said with a tragic expression. "The movents of the planets and the mysterious signs they reveal... only those who understand the rules of the dance of celestial bodies can truly comprehend their secrets..."
After a long, mysterious preamble, Professor Trelawney demonstrated how to use astrology to deduce the past and the future.
"My dears, you were clearly born under the inauspicious influence of Saturn," Professor Trelawney said to Harry's table with a look of pity, like she was looking at people about to die. "Misfortune... such misfortune... dark hair, slender build, and the loss of your parents in infancy... you must have been born in winter?"
"No, my birthday's in July," Harry replied.
Ron squeezed his mouth shut tightly to keep from laughing.
Professor Trelawney seed to want to save face.
"No, no, child, I was talking about him –" Trelawney pointed at Cohen.
Cohen also had dark hair and was very thin.
"Mine's in July too," Cohen said.
Although, if you considered "when I popped out of the lab," he supposed he was technically born in winter.
But what was more fun than frustrating a rambling fraud?
"Ha –" Ron couldn't help but let out a short burst of laughter.
Perhaps because of this, Professor Trelawney gave them a very heavy assignnt: analyze in detail the planetary movents that would affect everyone next month, based on their charts, and it had to be handed in by next Monday.
"Horrible old bat," Ron said angrily after class. "There goes the whole weekend."
"Just make it up if you can't finish it,"
Cohen encouraged,
"If you can't make it up, just don't hand it in. At worst, you get detention. Let her give you detention for a whole term if she dares, and then just don't hand in the howork again. If you don't even dare to get detention, what right do you have to call yourself a Gryffindor?"
"Makes sense," Ron said, as if he had made so kind of montous decision.
"What kind of strange life lessons are you teaching Ron!" Hermione, who had just finished her Arithmancy class, caught up with them on the way to the Great Hall. "Professor Vector didn't give us any howork."
"Professor Vector is too good," Ron sighed. "But I'm not taking Arithmancy – I'd rather take detention."
"Given that, your 'rather' isn't even 'rather do a huge pile of howork'..." Hermione pursed her lips and covered her forehead, saying helplessly.
"Detention just passes if you endure it," Cohen said, understanding Ron's psychology perfectly. "But howork requires thinking, and if you don't ss it up properly, you'll have to spend ti on the howork and still get detention..."
"Right, right," Harry nodded in strong agreent.
"Boys..." Hermione sighed, shaking her head.
After the evening feast, Cohen snuck into the eting spot he had agreed upon with Hopkins.
Hopkins was already there, sitting quietly in an empty seat, his eyes not daring to look directly at Cohen.
"Spit it out," Cohen cast a spell at the door to prevent eavesdropping, then sat on a table.
As for why he didn't sit on a chair –
Simply because sitting on a table looked cool and imposing.
"I'm... sent by the... Dark Lord..."
Hopkins's legs were shaking – because he wasn't sure what the spell Cohen had cast on the door was for. Cohen's deanor didn't look like he was preparing for a secret interview, but rather preparing to secretly eliminate him...
Damn it, if he had known he was going to face a mixed dark magic creature, he wouldn't have accepted Lucius's invitation – even if the Dark Lord was behind Lucius.
At worst, he could just run away... Damn Lucius, only telling him the contact person was "Cohen Norton" after he'd already snuck into the school, and even specifically reminding him not to have any conflict with Cohen.
"Are we starting the kidnapping plan now?" Cohen raised an eyebrow. "I thought we were waiting until after the Triwizard Tournant."
"No, no..." Hopkins looked a bit embarrassed to say it. "It's... can you give a place to stay?"
"?" Cohen's raised eyebrows furrowed together.
"I can't get into the Hufflepuff common room," Hopkins wiped sweat from his brow. "Who knew there were expulsion spells there to guard against illegal intruders... the Slytherin common room doesn't have that..."
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