(1938-10-14) Whale Song
Details for Whale Song
Summary: Lunch time at Hogwarts is never dull, especially when a Hufflepuff somehow ends up with a singing jinx.
Date: 14 October 1938
Location: Great Hall, Hogwarts
Related: The Sounds of Silence
Characters
DouglasAlphardMedusaFionaBeeryPeeves

Depositing Medusa at the head of the Slytherin table, with a crooked grin and a waggle of his brows at the various girls already there waiting for her, Douglas swaggers over towards the top end of his own house's table, sliding into a seat there. There is a buzz of questions already there for him, mostly concerning the 'duel' challenge and his subsequent refusal, but there are also a few wide eyed younger kids mentioning something about sneaking out to Hogsmeade in hushed, awed tones.

Medusa leans over to listen to something Beatrice tells her, the red-haired girl that likes to make moony eyes with Alphard and is - at least she thinks - going to the dance with him. "No, don't be daft," Medusa tells her cousin. "I just think a ferret would be a great pet. A white one would go well with my black fur coat." No irony there at all. "Just imagine it curled up around my neck like a living furry collar." Medusa pours herself some juice and looks down the table to find

Meanwhile over at the Ravenclaw table, relegated down to the end with the other first years little Fiona Donnelly is trying to be incognito. It doesn't help that whenever she sees Pringle he gives her a nice-ish look. She has tried getting someone to help her magically charm her brown hair red in a ploy to be just another ginger Irish kid, but it has gone wrong. Instead of her hair being brown or a glorious red it is instead splotches of both. She has tried to hide it under a hat but everytime she puts the hat on an older student walks by and knocks it off.

Douglas nudges the boy beside him, grinning as he nods over towards the Ravenclaws, takes up an orange, then draws his arm back and launches it hard for the back of Fiona's head.

Leaving her cousin Beatrice to deal with Alphard, or not as the case may be, Medusa turns her attention to her lunch and begins filling her plate with much more food than usual prompting some raised eyebrows and a few elbow nudges. "Shut up," exclaims Medusa. "I missed breakfast to work on my silencing potion." She hesitates adding another bit of food to her plate. A girl to her left looks at Medusa curiously, "You, were doing potions work? Prove it. Give it to…," she points to a shy chubby Hufflepuff across the room, "Agatha Thornby." Medusa looks over at the muggle-born Hufflepuff and frowns, thinking about how to get it done.

As the orange goes flying another Ravenclaw knocks Fiona's hat off her head causing her to duck. Instead of being hit in the head the flying fruit lands in a tureen of soup that is in front of her, splashing nearly every first year Ravenclaw with carrot and coriander; everyone apart from Fiona who was bent over picking up her hat again. When she sits back up and is greeted by the startled faces of her fellow first years, faces dripping with soup, she asks the immortal question, "Food fight?"

Which is Douglas's cue to look wholly innocent, tearing off a piece of bread to nibble, until the commotion at the lower end of the Ravenclaw table can reasonably be noticed. He swings round on his seat to watch, the halo almost visible. No sir. Nothing to do with him. Naughty little first year Ravenclaws. Tsk.

Alphard was preoccupied with his doodles. The sort of immature and unmentionable drawings that were deserving of nothing but eye-rolls and, perhaps, burning. Which was why he was shielding them with one arm looped around his notebook. Occasionally he took a nibble from his lunch, or threw a passing look around, but he wasn't overly aware of things. After all, who cared what happened down in with the first year Ravenclaws anyway?

Having been focused on her plan to somehow get the portly badger to drink one of the silencing potions Medusa missed the whole fruit throwing incident. "Fine." She pulls one of the vials from her pocket and pours it into her juice, sniffs it and gets to her feet to saunter with a nonchalance over to the Hufflepuff table. She has a few friends there, it isn't that implausible. She wriggles down, siting near poor Agatha and lays on the charm. "Yes, those are lovely cakes. No, I think yellow really is your colour." When someone points out the Ravenclaws with soup on them Medusa swaps glasses with Agatha.

One of the souped up kids starts to cry. It's the same crying, snotty boy Fiona got stuck with on the train. She sighs and looks around, hoping nobody is noticing. But of course people notice, especially when Peeves comes over and starts to point and laugh. "CRY BABY!" The ghost doesn't do quiet. "WE HAVE A CRY BABY HERE!" Fiona tries to shoo Peeves with her hat. "Go away. Shoo."

Douglas tuts quietly, shaking his head. He glances over towards the Slytherin table, searching out the blonde hair of the Gorgon, but appears somewhat put out when she's not where she ought to be. Immediately, he looks down his own table, eyes narrowing as he tries to spot any signs of her. Such a legless cats.

Peeves finally managed to shatter Alphard's self inflicted containment. With a sigh he looked down at his doodles, grimaced, and then hastily blacked them out before anyone got a bit too good a look at them. Satisfied, his derisive gaze went down towards the Ravenclaw table. "First years." Eyeroll. It was hard not to spot Fiona when she made such a point out of waving for attention with her hat! What had she done to her hair? Someone next to him laughed out: "Puke color. Brown and red in a chunky mix."

Taking a sip of the juice she picked up, or at least pretending to, Medusa looks innocently over at Peeves and uses the cover of his shouting to slip away. Just to make a show of it she table hops moving over to Ravenclaw to sit with Thaddeus, the very camp but lovable seventh year. The juice glass gets set down and she takes a fresh one for herself.

"Oh you!" Fiona hisses at Peeves and throws her hat at him. Of course the hat doesn't hit Peeves but goes through him and hits a Gryffindor in the back of the head. "NAUGHTY NAUGHTY!" Peeves wags his ghostly finger at the first year before cackling.

Only then does Douglas spot Medusa. At the wrong table, which confuses him enough. Leaving the chaos at the end of his table and the next, he absently tosses an apple hand to hand and ambles over to the head of the Ravenclaw table. "You should keep your firsties under control," he decides, giving one of his fellow seventh years a nudge up on the other side and a grin. "How's it going, Thad? Don't you have prefects to stop that kind of thing?"

"Should we get the Bloody Baron?" One of the second year Slytherins asked from down the table, since the ghost was the only one capable of controlling Peeves. Alphard shut down the possibility with a very definitive: "Unless he's bothering -us- why should we? The Ravenclaws have been insufferable lately anyway." Leading the point board, while the Slytherins were in negatives. The thought alone was enough to make the Black boy grimace. The injustice!

The trick, as Professor Slughorn would tell you, to a good silencing potion is utter silence when making it. If, at say the right moment a stool were knocked over and clattered to the floor, there is not silence then the potion can have unusual side effects. Unknowingly chubby Agatha has just glugged down such a potion and when she opens her mouth to answer a question she sings out her reply. It turns out that Agatha is a budding Celene Dion and has one heck of a set of pipes on her. Heads swivel in her direction as she belts out, "What is happening to me?"

"Bloody hell, I think we just found ourselves in an opera," Douglas notes as the fat girl starts to sing, turning to glance over at her. "What next? A long, drawn out death scene, with an hour long aria?" He snaps his fingers, shaking his head. "I've got it! It's whalesong! She's an animagus, already half whale, see?"

Thaddeus greets Douglas with that upnod thing guys do and peers at the Ravenclaw firsties just as one of the prefects goes to see to them. The broad shouldered boy shrugs and then like many others turns to look at the songstress. "Didn't know Fat Aggie had it in her," he jokes. Sandwiched between the pair of them, Douglas and Thad, Medusa huffs. "I knew that potion was ruined." She then looks around to see if anyone heard her over and sneaks a sip of her juice.

Over at the Slytherin table the seventh years in the know are practically wetting themselves with laughter, pointing at Agatha from across the hall. Beatrice Nott leans up on her hands and shouts over, "Do you take requests?"

Alphard's sole contribution to the growing derision heaped up onto the poor fat Hufflepuff was a vaguely bemused snort. He'd gotten up to his feet, notebook under one arm, a banana in the other that he was pealing open to take a chunk out of. "I don't know," he said in a voice that was both casually detached and bored - like he was just talking to himself - and pitched loud enough to carry. "Better half whale than half chicken. Hey! You don't know any chicken songs, do you?" The latter addressed to Agatha.

Peeves pootles off when a prefect comes over to cuddle the crying boy. He drifts over the tables to find Agatha and begins to sing with her, or shout at her. Every time he does she shouts back, but of course her's comes out like a song. The taunts from the other houses are not so bad, she can't hear most of them now that the ghost is shouting at her, but the fact that everyone is staring makes her turn bright red. She is now a pudgy, bright red, singer. Did someone mention opera?

Fiona has slunk under the Ravenclaw table and crawled out the other side. She pops up nearest Gryffindor and goes to retrieve her hat. By some random bit of luck it hit the kid next to her brother Gilroy. With a roll of his eyes Gilroy budges up and lets the small girl sit amongst the sixth-years. Triumphant, protected and with her hat covering her hair she looks over at Agatha, "What an eejit. Why doesn't she shut up?"

"Aw.. no?" Alphard threw a shrug out at Agatha's lack of response. Not that he had actually been looking for one. His comments had a different target. "I've heard there's others around who enjoy a good clucking." The last of the banana was finished up, and after a quick little glance around to make sure that nobody with any authority was watching over him, he subtly let the peal fall to the floor at a strategic spot. One poor Mudblood had just been about get up from their seat, and not looking down, was about to put all their weight on that nasty little surprise. Oops.

Nothing to see here. Nope, nothing to see Medusa just sips her juice and tries to not look the least bit guilty. Look at the lovely food at the Ravenclaw table. Oooh chicken. Every so often she sneaks a glance at Agatha though the sniggers.

A couple of students had picked up Alphard's little chicken line, giving Douglas knowing sort of looks and smirks. Though the sixth year pretended that hadn't been his intention at all. Even if he might have shared one of those smirks himself at one point. Innocent was he. Including being innocent of the Hufflepuff muggleborn who stepped on his discarded banana peal and then went whoooosh-THUNK to the ground. Too bad, so sad, with Alphard having moved on far enough that he was out of the immediate sphere of suspicion. It was petty, but he felt a little bit better for it.

Swooping down onto the scene was a sudden flurry of extravagance and dramatics, arms waving, and huffs being puffed. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Beery to the rescue. Agatha would be in good hands, even if the arrival only drew more attention to her. If it was possible.

Douglas nudges Thaddeus again. "Show's over, eh? Has to be, look, the fat lady's singing!" He leans forward to eye Medusa. "Yours? What did you give her?"

Fiona is too small to see what is happening so she gets up on her feet to peer over the tables, earning her and annoyed look from other students which promptly makes the first year drop back down again and shove a sticky bun in her mouth.

Thaddeus laughs, "If we're in luck Beery will do a duet with her. Make a change from all that singing he does with the plants." He turns to look at Medusa, "Yeah, what did you do?"

"It was supposed to be a silencing potion," Medusa hisses quietly to Douglas. "But somebody knocked a stool over." That somebody being her, sure, but you know…she can spread the blame. Glancing at Agatha and the mincing Beery who dances around her Medusa cannot help but laugh. "I still have three vials left."

"Five galleons says you can't get it in Slughorn's tea," Douglas immediately challenges.

"You should think of it as a gift, not a curse." And the Professor drew in a deeep breath, then went on to give an example: "LalalaLALALalaLA-LA-LA!" On the top of his lungs, mouth a wide open O and his uvula dancing like a crazy little hawaiian chick. "See? Having a voice is a -wonderful- thing." But then the show was over, with Beery taking her away to get checked out.

Alphard rolled his eyes at the show, even if he was also unable to help himself from grinning, too. God damned that Beery. A Half-Blood Hufflepuff should deserve nothing but Alphard's derision. But the man kept making him smile.

Agatha looks relieved when Beery comes over to her even if his dancing way of walking adds a whole new level of comical genius to the moment. She sobs, trying to tell him what happened, only it comes out in song still. She lets him lead her out of the Great Hall, sob-singing all the way. Poor little Agatha Thornby, known as Fat Aggie to some, will from this day forward be known as Whale Song. Children can be so cruel.

When Medusa admits it was her Thaddeus starts to snigger earning him a sharp elbow. She turns away from him, pretending she doesn't know him and looks at Douglas instead. "You could just give me your galleons because you adore me and don't want me to risk being banned from Hogsmeade this weekend," she counter-offers, raising a brow to make her point. Just to emphasis her point she adds, "Unless you want to go alone to the places we planned to visit…all…alone without my company. Hmmm, Douglas?"

Douglas rolls his eyes as he digs in his pocket for his coin pouch. "Or I could give you my galleons because otherwise I'll never hear the end of it, too." He gives the various others sat around the table a broad smile as they clearly listen in. "I'm a sucker for a pretty face," he explains to them.

Alphard threw a look over his shoulder in Douglas and Medusa's direction, looking like for a moment he looked like approaching. For whatever reason, he decided against. Instead he drifted unhurriedly off to the exit, finished with lunch.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License