Which actually looked back, idiotically enough. Tom sighed, then, and threw his spoon behind him without looking back once. There was a yelp as it connected.
"What..." The Headmistress sighed, coming over to him. "What is it now, Tom?"
Tom simply pointed at his porridge, which was now making faces at both at them, with raisins for eyes and mouth.
Nadja Applefield stared for a moment, before turning away with a choking sound. Tom sighed, yet again.
"Headmistress... may I go turn that idiot fur-rug into a stuffed animal for a day? Or a dish-rag? Please? I promise I'll turn him back..."
The honey-blonde woman simply looked at the most annoying (in Tom's opinion) of their resident Werewolves, and sighed.
"...No."
" - He once pretended to bite Helen..."
Tom Marvele Riddle does not whine, damnit. Except when he couldn't help himself, that is.
"I know that, but it wasn't even near the full moon when he did that, you know that, Tommy."
Well, yes, Tom did know that, but...
" - It's not a 100 percent true that Lycanthropy isn't catching if the Werewolf isn't in wolf-form, Headmistress. I mean, there's much less chance of it being passed on, true, but..."
The Headmisstress of the Applefield School looked at him, shaking her head. Tom sighed, yet again. Yes, yes, he probably shouldn't have said that, as it wasn't the sort of thing a ordinary young wizard was supposed to know at all, but...
But Nadja Applefield Fleminger wasn't precisely a normal witch, either, in his humble opinion. Born between two people who either were muggles with some wizarding blood or squibs, depending on which definitions were being used - though he personally thought that her mother probably qualified as a untrained near-squib rather then an outright squib or muggle, probably, and possibly her father too - she'd grown up mostly in the muggle world, for better or for worse, and her training in magic had been...haphazard, to say the least.
Nobody who ever met her could ever deny that she was powerful, though... Tom snickered a little, then, thinking that if she'd been born just a few generations later, several schools of magic would have been quite conceivably been fighting over which one got to get her as a student. In the time she was born, though... Well, there'd been precious little formal Wizarding education available to children who didn't have the right 'connections', then.
Well, that was progress, alright...
It had been several years already since he'd managed to get Helen and himself into the Applefield School. It hadn't quite been part of his initial plans to end up being a student here himself as well, but the Headmistress had a way of making certain decisions easy, somehow.
And it wasn't like he was the only Magical either - the School had many kinds of children, and not all of them were even connected to the Wizarding World proper, though most of them were, in some way or another. Squibs, near-squibs, orphans with nobody to take them in, and yes, werewolves. Three of them.
Tom sighed, then. He didn't dare tell anybody that he actually knew of a version of Wolfbane that actually worked reasonably well - it still was far from perfect, and making the damn stuff took so much expensive indigrents and time and energy, and don't even mention the fumes...
No, no - the wolf-pups could stand being locked up for three days a month for the time being, just as the Headmistress had decreed from the start. As a future project, though...
"Tom." The Headmistress murmured.
"Yes, Headmistress?"
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(Posted Sun, 07 Jan 2007 11:19)
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