TIME; SIRIUS BLACK

000.

The table was littered with gears, little screws and various leather bound books. In the middle of it all laid a time-turner.

The little rings usually surrounding the container of the Hour-Reversal charm were taken off and laid carefully to the side, in a small wooden box, where already the chain and an array of handwritten notes were carefully placed inside.

Charlene Longbottom stood above it all, her blonde hair messily pushed away from her face, the bun only held up by a pencil. Her face was scrunched up as she read through yet another useless paragraph in a book about time travel.

It all was useless, really.

She lived in the 21st century and there was so little information about it, it was almost laughable. Even wizards weren't able to travel in time after (almost) all the time-turners had been destroyed a few decades ago.

But really, as she looked at the little thing infront of her, she decided that she should be thankful for having stumbled upon one of the last few, still intact time-turners in the forbidden forest.

She shouldn't curse it out and should be thankful for it.

Still, it was very frustrating that she couldn't travel further back than the measly five-hours the Hour-Reversal Charm allowed her to travel.

Frustrated with everything and that she wasn't getting further ahead with her experiment, Charlie slammed the book down onto the table with a sigh. She had to accept that she would never be able to travel back in time and see a real live Greek tragedy be performed or anything of the sort.

What she didn't notice in her frustration was the way the room was slowly filling with smoke, the source being the crushed time-turner underneath the book she had just slammed down.

Charlie closed her eyes, her mind reeling with what she could do next.

She had tried everything: read every book there was on time-turners and time travel (even the ones in the restricted section), had subtly asked her father, Neville, about time-tuners and what he knew of them (the man knew almost everything, it seemed, but on time-turners he knew even less than Charlie), she had tried using charms that were meant to lift or ward off other charms, had tried composing a charm of her own to counteract the Hour-Reversal charm but nothing worked.

She opened her eyes and looked down at the time-turner once again, only to finally realise she had crushed it with her book, single screws rolling out underneath it.

Cursing, she picked up the book and was engulfed by a cloud of thick, white smoke from one second to the other. She lifted her arm to cover her mouth and nose, while she took a few steps back in the empty old classroom, but it was as if the smoke was following her, completely surrounding her and not letting go of her, no matter where she moved.

Then, she ran into a desk and almost fell over, as she moved back quickly.

However, there shouldn't be any desks in the old classroom she used, only the table she had forced her sister, Alice, to carry up there with her and a few chairs.

As she realised this, the smoke dispersed again and Charlie found herself standing in a classroom full of students in school uniforms, most of them writing on parchment with quills, their heads only turning to her when she gasped loudly, her eyes scanning the unfamiliar faces of students that looked around her age.

Charlie turned around, to the desk she had just run into and found herself face to face with Professor McGonagall, Hogwarts' headmistress, but something was off about her . . . she looked younger, which in no way meant that she didn't have her demanding aura around her.