The Cupboard Series 5: United We Stand ...

Chapter 28

A multitude of heads vied for space as each tried to find the best angle to watch Luna. There was minimal jostling happening, at least now. When they first gathered around her, there'd been a fair amount of shuffling and squirming as each tried to see the desktop without jostling said table or Luna herself.

Eyes followed every line that she drew, every stroke of her pen as the image took shape. The head and bill were the first to emerge onto the paper. The eyes were small and the rounded bill, very much like that of a duck, was large, with two small dots on the bill indicated where the animal's nose was. Next was the body, with numerous strokes giving the impression that it was covered in fur, a sure sign that the animal was a mammal.

The large flat tail that Luna drew in next was very reminiscent of a beaver's, adding credence to the 'mammal' theory, if one discounted the opposite end of the animal and its duck-like bill. And then there were its feet. When Luna added them, it was to show that they small and webbed with sharp-looking claws on each foot.

Finally, after cocking her head this way and that and adding in a few extra lines here and there, Luna nodded and put her pen down.

"My animal," she said proudly, looking up and around at all of those gathered.

"Are you sure that that's what you saw?" a doubtful-sounding Hermione asked, "only I've never even heard of an animal that looks like that."

"This was the animal I encountered in my vision," Luna reiterated. "Isn't it cute?"

"I think so," Astoria piped up in defence of her friend.

"Perhaps if you told us more about it, we'd have some more clues to be able to identify it," Daphne suggested. "Where it was? What it was doing? What it ate, if you noticed that sort of thing."

Luna tilted her head as she remembered back to her vision.

"I arrived near a stream or a creek. It was all forested but with trees that I'd never seen before, not here in Britain or in any of the Scandinavian countries that I've visited with Daddy," she began.

"Okay, most likely not native to Europe," Fiona said.

"I first saw it swimming in the water," Luna continued. "Or floating, really. It was watching me, seemed rather curious, just as curious as I was about it.

"Beavers and otters like the water, maybe it's related to one of them?" Hannah suggested, sounding unsure about the idea.

Luna shrugged before continuing. "And then it swam towards the bank and went into a burrow. I was able to see inside and it was there, at the back, getting comfortable around it's eggs."

"Eggs? Was that what it was eating?" Daphne asked.

"No," Luna replied, shaking her head and making her dirty blonde hair fly around her face. "The animal was protecting them as though it'd laid them itself."

"Well, that proves that it's not a real creature," Hermione stated emphatically. "Mammals don't lay eggs, it's a well-known fact."

"Actually, I believe that you'll find that you're wrong about that," a voice piped up from the other side of the room.

The group twirled around to find Professor Evans walking towards them, a small pile of books in her hand that she'd obviously just gathered from the stacks that she'd just emerged from.

"What do you mean, Susan?" Harry asked. "I've never heard of any mammal that can lay eggs, either."

"That'd be because there are only two in the world and both are native to Australia," Susan replied with a smile.