Adrian entered the first-year Charms classroom with the damp paper bird securely hidden between the pages of his Standard Book of Spells.
Professor Flitwick welcomed the combined Gryffindor and Hufflepuff class with a brief lecture on wand safety.
Flitwick detailed the correct grip, the importance of keeping the wand directed away from neighbouring students, and how poor wrist control could ruin even a perfectly pronounced incantation.
For their first practical exercise, Flitwick had them maintain a steady Lumos while tracing several marked shapes in the air, ensuring the light did not flicker or cross outside the designated lines.
Adrian’s wrist remained steadier than it had during the summer.
He traced the straight lines and circles cleanly, but the first sharp turn sent the light skidding outside the marked path.
However, when he attempted a sharp directional turn, his wrist overcompensated.
The wand slipped, and the bright beam of light flashed directly across Ron Weasley’s face.
“Watch it,” Ron complained, blinking away spots.
“You nearly blinded me.” Flitwick stepped up to the desk, adjusted Adrian’s grip by two fingers and demonstrated the turn again.
Adrian adjusted his grip and improved significantly on the second attempt.
At the next desk, Hermione recited every instruction perfectly before beginning.
Unfortunately, she gripped her wand so tightly that the light jerked through each shape instead of flowing around it.
After watching Adrian finish a cleaner circle, she erased her own line with an irritated flick.
Adrian did not boast.
He leaned over slightly.
“You’re gripping the wand like it owes you money,” he told her quietly.
Hermione blinked, looked down at her white-knuckled grip, and deliberately loosened her fingers.
Her next trace was substantially better.
Hermione gave him a short nod before returning to the exercise.
Beside him, Susan sat working on her own tracing.
She behaved perfectly normally throughout most of the class, but while Flitwick was busy helping Neville Longbottom, she leaned close enough for only Adrian to hear.
“Your hand appears much more disciplined when it is holding a wand,” she whispered.
Adrian easily caught the reference to the previous night in his bedroom.
“The wand,” Adrian replied smoothly, keeping his eyes on his spellwork, “has not yet accused me of using excuses.” When the class ended and students began packing their bags, the damp paper bird crawled out of Adrian’s textbook and unfolded itself on the desk.
Susan saw enough of the parchment to recognise the messy handwriting.
“Fred and George almost certainly intend to feed you something,” Susan warned him.
“I know,” Adrian said, sliding his textbook into his bag.
“That is why I plan to inspect it before opening my mouth.” They separated outside the classroom.
Susan went with Hannah and Justin toward lunch, Hermione headed to the library to correct her notes, and Harry and Ron left together.
Adrian followed the twins’ directions alone.
He found the unused classroom beside the western staircase.
Fred and George had already taken over the space, pushing the desks aside.
Three boxes of small, brightly coloured sweets sat on the teacher’s table.
Two of the boxes were carefully labelled.
The third had no label at all.
Fred welcomed him inside, clapping him on the shoulder and calling him their “promising junior.” George immediately picked up a purple sweet from the unlabelled box and offered it to him.
Adrian did not take it.
The twins immediately launched into a coordinated set of tactics.
They claimed they had already tested it.
They claimed the colour proved it was perfectly safe.
They claimed Ron would have eaten it without hesitation, and finally, they warned that refusing would severely damage Gryffindor-Hufflepuff relations.
“Ron isn’t here,” Adrian pointed out calmly, “because you specifically selected someone less familiar with your tricks.” Adrian studied the cracked purple coating and activated Basic Appraisal.
[Experimental Voice-Changing Sweet] [Intended effect: Temporary voice imitation] [Current fault: Uncontrolled hiccups and tongue numbness] The information appeared and vanished in less than a second.
Adrian kept the system result to himself.
The cracked sugar coating and sticky filling gave him an ordinary reason to question the batch.
He noticed that the purple sugar coating had split unevenly, and the centre was leaking a faint, sticky residue.
The finished sweets in the other boxes did not have the same flaw.
“What changed in this batch?” Adrian asked.
Fred exchanged a look with George.
“The mixture refused to set, so we heated it longer.” “I don’t know enough confectionery magic to repair it,” Adrian said, stepping back from the table.
“But I know enough not to put the leaking version in my mouth.” As George began relabelling the failed batch, a system window appeared beside the boxes.
[MISCHIEF MISSION: Improve the twins’ prank without eating the failed batch.] [Bonus: Make a professor hear her own voice.] [Reward: Enchanted Object Theory Fragment ×3 and 25 PP.] Adrian accepted the mission internally.
He looked at the unlabelled box and suggested that a failed batch did not necessarily need to be thrown away.
The hiccups did not make the batch useless.
They simply made it a different prank, provided the twins labelled it properly and stopped pretending it was safe.
Fred grinned, clearly enjoying the idea of someone hiccupping violently in Snape’s voice.
George immediately stopped calling the batch a failure.
He pulled out a quill and wrote a new label for the box: Hiccupping Impersonators — Do Not Eat Near Authority.
“Testing the safe batch in a private room proves very little,” Adrian added, pointing to the finished boxes.
“You need to know whether the voice holds up in normal conversation.” With most students still at lunch, the three of them each took one sweet from the safe batch and moved into the corridor.
Fred received Professor Snape’s voice.
George received Percy’s.
Adrian ate his and immediately felt his throat tighten.
When he tested it, the strict, clipped tones of Minerva McGonagall came out of his mouth.
Fred and George grinned.
Adrian already regretted agreeing to a public test.
They moved down the busy corridor.
Fred tested his Snape voice by making highly insulting, drawling comments about George’s shoes.
George used Percy’s authoritative tone to order a talking portrait to correct its posture.
Older students recognised the twins and quickly moved out of the way, eager to avoid becoming involved.
Adrian initially used Minerva’s voice only for small, quiet remarks, having absolutely no desire to attract the real Head of Gryffindor House.
Fred and George immediately accused him of cowardice, insisting that the effect would wear off long before anyone important arrived.
They reached a decorative suit of armour standing crookedly beside a classroom door.
Yielding to the pressure, Adrian squared his shoulders, pointed at the armour, and delivered his best Minerva impression.
“Abysmal posture,” Adrian announced, Minerva’s clipped voice rang down the corridor.
“The breastplate is a disgrace, the helmet angle is completely unacceptable, and whichever student last polished this ought to be scrubbed with the same rag.” The enchanted armour rattled and frantically attempted to stand straighter.
Fred and George went completely, unusually quiet before Adrian even finished his sentence.
Adrian noticed their frozen expressions and slowly turned around.
The real Minerva McGonagall was standing several steps behind him.
Adrian was still holding a purple sweet wrapper.
Minerva had just heard her own voice lecturing a suit of armour.
Fred and George were already arranging their faces into expressions of profound innocence.
Adrian swallowed and cleared his throat, but Minerva’s voice remained stubbornly in place.
Minerva looked at the three of them.
“Whose idea was this?” Fred and George both immediately attempted to accept the blame, knowing Adrian was new and trying to cover for him.
Adrian refused to hide behind them.
He stepped forward and admitted that the armour criticism was his own contribution.
Fred and George both tried to claim responsibility, but Adrian admitted that the lecture to the armour had been his contribution.
Minerva confiscated the boxes and inspected the labels one by one.
She informed the twins that they could collect anything proven harmless after serving two detentions.
Adrian, as a first offender, received one evening in the armour gallery.
The difference did not feel especially generous when she added that all three would begin that night.
Adrian received a shorter detention for his first offence, but he was still punished.
[Bonus condition fulfilled.] “Mr Clarke,” Minerva said, her real voice matching the one currently fading from his throat.
“Reaching Hogwarts on Sunday and joining the Weasley twins by Tuesday is an impressive decline in judgement.” Adrian nodded.
Minerva appeared almost disappointed that he had enough judgement left not to answer.
That evening, Adrian reported to the armour gallery.
Fred and George were already present, scrubbing tarnished breastplates under Argus Filch’s watchful eye.
Filch handed Adrian a foul-smelling rag and deliberately placed him at the far end of the gallery, clearly assuming that physical distance would stop them from talking.
It did not.
Fred and George continued calling him “junior” from the other end of the gallery, but the word had already lost some of its dismissive edge.
George eventually asked how Adrian had known something was wrong with the purple batch.
Adrian reminded them that the coating had split, the filling was leaking and they had already admitted to reheating that batch.
He had not known the exact result, but those were three excellent reasons not to put it in his mouth.
Fred acknowledged that most first-years they recruited simply ate whatever they were handed.
George added that the remainder usually panicked the moment a professor appeared.
“I am willing to participate,” Adrian told them quietly, scrubbing a gauntlet.
“But I am not going to serve as your disposable test subject.” George nodded.
“That’s reasonable.” “It’s inconvenient,” Fred corrected, though he was grinning.
While Filch was approaching down the hall, Adrian accidentally dropped his cleaning rag behind a heavy, wrought-iron display stand.
Reaching it normally would require moving the armour and attracting Filch’s attention.
Adrian aimed his wand beneath the stand and focused on the rag.
The familiar invisible tug answered.
The spell remained clumsy.
The rag jerked across the stone floor far too quickly, smacked against Adrian’s shoe, and stopped.
Fred and George both saw it happen.
They didn’t recognise the charm and immediately asked what it was.
Adrian casually brushed it off as a utility spell he had practised during the summer and left the explanation there.
The twins’ minds immediately began spinning with possibilities.
They suggested using it to steal notes directly from Percy’s hand, retrieve confiscated sweets off desks, pull shoelaces while someone was walking past a professor, and trigger pranks from a distance.
“It only moves small objects,” Adrian reminded them.
“And I have used it successfully exactly twice.” “Twice,” George said solemnly, “is more than enough for preliminary misuse.” Filch returned a moment later, scowling at the three of them.
“You two were already a nightmare without collecting another one,” the caretaker muttered, inspecting a shield before stalking away down the corridor.
George watched him go, quietly repeating the word.
“Nightmare.” Fred grinned.
“Nightmare Trio.” “I have known you for exactly two days,” Adrian pointed out.
“Reputation should be planned early,” George countered smoothly.
Adrian returned to polishing the shield, but Fred and George repeated “Nightmare Trio” several more times before detention ended.
Only when Filch dismissed them and the confiscated sweets remained intact in Minerva’s possession did the system consider the prank safely concluded.
[MISSION COMPLETE] [Enchanted Object Theory Fragment ×3] [25 PP] [PP Balance: 265] Near the turn leading toward the Hufflepuff entrance, a tabby cat sat perfectly still in the centre of the corridor.
The cat watched Adrian approach with an unusually severe, judgemental expression.
Adrian slowed his pace.
A pink screen materialised in the air directly above the cat’s head.
[PERVERTED MISSION: Pet the tabby cat and call her a good kitty.] [Reward: Transfiguration Insight Fragment ×3 and 30 PP.] [Decline: No penalty.] Adrian looked at the glowing text, and then looked down at the cat.
The cat looked back at him, unblinking.
After everything that day, Adrian’s first thought was that this was probably another trap.