In Between Two Worlds (HP/PJO Crossover)

Chapter 141: Rita Skeeter's Scoop.

We all got up late on Boxing Day. The Gryffindor common room was much quieter than it had been lately, many yawns punctuating the lazy conversations. Hermione's hair was bushy again, much to me, Bailey, Annie, and Char's dismay. It had taken us forever to do.

Char, Annie, Percy, and Will left too. They flooed back to their houses.

And Ron and Hermione seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss their argument. They were being quite friendly to each other, though oddly formal. Ron and Harry wasted no time in telling the rest of us about the conversation they had overheard between Madame Maxime and Hagrid, but none of us seemed to find the news that Hagrid was a half-giant nearly as shocking as Ron did.

"Well, I thought he must be," Mione said, shrugging. "I knew he couldn't be pure giant because they're about twenty feet tall. But honestly, all this hysteria about giants. They can't all be horrible...It's the same sort of prejudice that people have toward werewolves...It's just bigotry, isn't it?"

Ron looked as though he would have liked to reply scathingly, but perhaps he didn't want another row, because he contented himself with shaking his head disbelievingly while Hermione wasn't looking. So I smacked him for her. He didn't like that much though.

Now it was the time to think of the homework we had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over - everybody except Harry and me, that is. We were starting (once again) to feel slightly nervous.

February the twenty-fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and we still hadn't done anything about working out the clue inside the golden egg. I therefore started taking the egg out of my trunk every time I went up to the dormitory, opening it, and listening intently, hoping that this time it would make some sense. I strained to think what the sound reminded me of, apart from thirty musical saws, but I had never heard anything else like it. I closed the egg, shook it vigorously, and opened it again to see if the sound had changed, but it hadn't. I tried asking the egg questions, shouting over all the wailing, but nothing happened. I even threw the egg across the room - though I hadn't really expected that to help.

But we had not forgotten the hint that Cedric had given us. It seemed to me that if Cedric had really wanted to give us a hand, he would have been a lot more explicit. I mean Harry and I had told Cedric exactly what was coming in the first task - and Cedric's idea of a fair exchange had been to tell us to take a bath.

And so the first day of the new term arrived, and I set off to lessons, weighed down with the usual books, parchment, and quills, but also with the lurking worry of the egg heavy in my stomach, as though I was carrying that around with me too.

Snow was still thick upon the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that we couldn't see out of them in Herbology. Nobody was looking forward to Care of Magical Creatures much in this weather, though as Ron said, the skrewts would probably warm us up nicely, either by chasing them, or blasting off so forcefully that Hagrid's cabin would catch fire.

When we arrived at Hagrid 's cabin, however, we found an elderly witch with closely cropped gray hair and a very prominent chin standing before his front door.

"Hurry up, now, the bell rang five minutes ago," she barked at us as we struggled toward her through the snow.

"Who're you?" said Ron, staring at her. "Where's Hagrid?"

"My name is Professor Grubbly-Plank," she said briskly. "I am your temporary Care of Magical Creatures teacher."

"Where's Hagrid?" Bailey repeated loudly.