Harry Potter: A Certain Ancient Rune Professor of Hogwarts (TL)

Chapter 680: Statement (2 in 1)

What he said about the Chamber of Secrets amusement park is certainly not a casual thing; Felix is very serious about it.

The members of the frontline lookout club had already experienced the first ride, which the Creevey brothers called ‘tunnelling through’, and the others found it quite apt – through a long, damp underground pipe, as if they were travelling through some deep, deep crevice in the sea, their whole being lightly floating and whirling downwards under the effect of the levitation rune circuit. After the initial discomfort, they soon fell in love with the ride and shouted with glee.

The glow of illumination led them to a circular open space.

Harry recognised that there were remains of rats and small animals piled up here before – all eaten by the basilisk – but now they were all gone. Although it is still wet and dirty, at least it is no longer so ominous, and when they push open the last door, the students were stunned by what they saw before them.

In front of them, there is a town far vaster in scale than the Hogsmeade village, with snowy mountains, forests, sandy plains, and lakes … Each place is not very grand, but the various terrains are like pieces of a brightly coloured jigsaw puzzle, and they are harmoniously put all together. Overhead is a blue sky with white clouds. At the entrance, they found a huge wall with instructions and directions.

“It wasn’t there last time I was here,” Harry gulped, as he pointed at his feet, “the last time I was here there was only a single path, I followed it all the way and came across-” he closed his mouth, but Ron and Hermione understood what he meant – an encounter with Voldemort.

“Hey! Have a look, there are quite a few projects up there.” Seamus said in surprise, staring up at the lines and text descriptions on the instruction wall, “The flying rollercoaster-” “I think it’s that thing.” Dean interjected, pointing his finger at the long, snake-like carriage that glided over the top of the snowy mountain, “Looks like some kind of sightseeing vehicle.”

“Hey, don’t interrupt.” Seamus continued, “There’s also – well, Wild Quidditch, the Library of the Future, the Interactive Murals, the High Swings, the Rapid Shooting, the Dream Architects … wow even more! I can’t wait, but it looks like a long way to go.”

“It says here – you can ring a bell to summon a ride, or you can fire red sparks with your wand.” Neville said, turning his head and staring at a metal object in front of him; it looked like a curved-neck table lamp, only it had been enlarged several times and the location of the light bulb had been replaced with a metal bell.

“So what are we waiting for?” Dean said excitedly, “I’m going to try Wild Quidditch!”

Harry also had a soft spot for things with the ‘Quidditch’ name on them and at the urging of the crowd, Neville shook the bell, and they waited for almost a minute when there was a clatter of hooves from the distance and a group of glowing creatures came running towards them and stopped right in front of them.

“Rune creatures?” Hermione said in surprise, looking around her and knowing what this meant: rune creatures couldn’t last long, so everything here is like something taken out of a thinking room and brought under Professor Hap’s magic control.

Next, everyone picked out their favourite creature.

Harry picked a creature that looked very much like a hippogriff, and he made his way to the heel and wondered hesitantly if he should bow in front of the shining pupils, but Justin on the other side of the ground had already climbed impatiently on top of a huge flamingo, and he asked uncertainly, close to its ear, “Can you understand what I’m saying? I want to go on a roller coaster that is-”

Immediately the flamingo took off running on its two long legs, Justin screamed and grabbed its pink wings, and it quickly disappeared from the sight of the crowd.

Those left behind looked at each other for a moment, then became even more excited.

“Well – I’m going to go to the Library of the Future first, then I’ll see the Interactive Murals, I don’t know what the Dream Architect means, but the high swings sound nice and calm too -” Hermione chattered.

They parted at the entrance and a giant creature carried them as they raced towards their goal. The journey wasn’t boring and the ‘Hippogriff ‘ beneath Harry’s feet wasn’t slow, so after only two minutes, he made it to his destination.

There was a huge golden birdcage-like hollowed-out building in front of him and Harry stepped in the sand, a dry heat spread through the air, and he suddenly realised that it had been over a month since the Quidditch finals, and he couldn’t wait to play a game of Quidditch, Dean was waving at him!

“Hey Harry, look at this.” Dean sat excitedly on a flying broom and Harry had no idea how he had done it, but a huge clear bellflower-like blue bubble wrapped him up completely.

Harry touched it, and the sensation on his fingertips felt like a leathery toughness, and then he was struck by a flash of motivation to figure out what the Wild Quidditch is all about. Soon he too got on his flying broomstick and the two swooped and collided like barbarians – with the protection of the bubble, which bounced them off, there was no need to worry about getting hurt at all.

Harry felt the joy of the now abandoned and historical style of Quidditch, the ‘aerial collision’, but of course, he felt that the Professor’s approach was far safer and more civilised.

They had a good time, and at some point, Neville and Ginny joined in. Harry got even more excited and was totally into it: as the opposite party’s faces came closer and closer and when they were about to hit each other, the flexible bubbles came into play – the bubbles were squeezed out of shape, and then they were bounced off in a whirl, having to scramble to control their direction, which tested their skills on the flying broom, and Dean couldn’t avoid hitting the birdcage despite all his efforts then bouncing off again.

Harry took this opportunity to roar and vent his emotions, knocking down anyone who got in his way, and as he waved his fist in celebration at his third victory, he turned his head and noticed that Ginny had disappeared.

Neville held out a finger and pointed to the entrance with an innocent expression.

“I don’t think she was too happy when she left.”

“Er…”

Harry hurriedly left the Wild Quidditch birdcage, the ‘Hippogriff’ still waiting for him where he left it, but he couldn’t find Ginny’s ‘horned camel’ anymore. When he looked up, a huge rollercoaster flew overhead and Harry’s eyes caught sight of the Patil sisters’ ponytails dangling backward from the open carriage, and his ears heard their excited shouts as the rollercoaster that looked like a caterpillar flashed past him.

He got on his ‘Hippogriff’ and started to look around, and soon he spotted the figure of Ginny in front of a huge rock wall – her fiery red hair was recognisable, and he went over to her, but Ginny ignored him. Harry got an idea and talked about ‘Wild Quidditch’ tricks, and Ginny soon perked her ears up and listened.

Harry was relieved to see Ginny’s expression change from gloomy to sunny, and he asked, pointing to the brown rock wall, “What’s this?”. He looked around to find Katie Bell, Lavender Brown, and Terry Boot looking at it with great interest.

“The interactive thingy,” Ginny said, “Ron’s in there…”

Harry’s eyes widened as he looked at the rock wall. The rock wall is painted with sketch-like lines that seem to be the random scribbles of someone who isn’t very good at drawing, and there is a long, meandering black line that represents the rolling hillside, on which a small, sketchy-looking figure is currently climbing.

“That’s Ron?”

“Yeah.” Ginny said with a grin, “Watch, I’m getting the hang of this a bit.” She said taking out her wand and tracing a circle on the rock wall, in which the circle seemed to turn into a huge tumbling rock that rolled down the hillside under Harry’s dumbfounded expression.

“Who’s messing with me!”

Ron’s clear roar came out of the rock wall as the little man representing him smashed a rolling rock ten times his size with a single punch.

“I should have painted it more real.” Ginny said regretfully, and when she saw the look on Harry’s face she reassured him, “Oh, don’t worry – the person inside the rock wall won’t be in danger of losing his life, all we can do is put up some sort of obstacle, or convenience for him. A bit of a prank, I think Fred and George would like it here …”

Soon there was no way in front of Ron in the rock wall, and he was dealing with a huge gully, Lavender Brown had drawn two bat wings on the rock wall with her wand, which was picked up by Ron, and he flapped them to reach the top of the hill (which was drawn with a straight line) where a huge chair was drawn and there was actually someone sitting on it –

“Valen?” Harry rubbed his eyes.

“This is a mural of warriors fighting a demon.” Lavender muttered, without looking away.

The Valen in the mural looked a dozen times bigger than Ron, and even Ron himself was startled when Valen gave two excited grunts and snapped a curved pair of branches from the tree, and made them fall like lightning. “Oops, Ron’s going to fail. Let’s give a hand.” Katie Bell shouted excitedly, pulling out her wand and drawing a circle around the rock wall, circling Ron’s entire body.

“Who turned off the lights?” Ron asked in a bewildered tone.

At that moment Valen sneaked over and kicked out as hard as she could at a ball, and the rock wall suddenly flickered and Ron emerged from it.

Half a dozen people surrounded him.

“How does it feel?” Susan Bones asked.

“Erm, a bit dizzy,” Ron shook his head, “it was like entering the world of a comic book – the world is all just a row of lines in your eyes, but for the people inside, it seemed like a real black and white world, although I don’t know why Valen got so big …”

The next second the rock wall shimmered again and Valen jumped out of it, with a smug smile, standing only a foot tall.

Hermione had just come out of the ‘Library of the Future’, she had re-read the ‘The Monster Book of Monsters’ but it felt completely different, the words and pictures in the book became a single coherent scene. She had just assisted a large man (who looked a lot like Hagrid) in catching a group of Coco Rumsey Catcher, using exactly what she had learned from the book – a large handful of fresh, dew-soaked leaves – and it’s even better if you can also perform an exaggerated dramatic movement during the capture: they immediately can’t resist running out of the corner to watch you perform. That’s when you can put them in their cage.

For her next destination, she wanted to go to the high swings, and she stopped for a moment on the way past the rapid shooting field, where Justine and Ernie Macmillan stood on one side of a long canal, with a steady stream of Billywig insects coming out of the nest on the other side, which quickly rushed towards the pair. They sweated profusely as they shot a stream of red light from their wands, and when it hit the Billywig insects, the nimble little creatures fell to the ground like a soft rubber ball. As time passed, the Billywig insects grew in number and speed.

Hermione left shortly afterward when she heard a frustrated intake of breath from behind her.

She arrived at the place marked on the map as ‘High Swing’, there was only a sign nearby, she stared blankly and tapped the wooden sign with her wand. Then a rustling sound came from above, and she looked up as a green vine dangled from the sky.

The vine weaved itself into the shape of a letter ‘J’ and the bottom of it inflated into a seat, she managed to sit on it, and it carried her up high and soon everything on the ground came into view. Over a plain, she saw the blurred figure of Luna, who flicked her wrist and a monstrous and uncanny house (Hermione guessed it would be a house) rose from the ground like a huge black smoking pipe with a silver crescent hanging from the chimney.

“Okay, I can probably guess what the Dream Architect is.”

Hermione muttered in a small voice. She couldn’t help but imagine what her ideal house would look like in her mind, nothing too formal, but nothing too weird either, and she tilted her head as she gawked at Luna’s creation, which appeared to be Luna’s home, and from her perspective, it surprisingly looked a bit like an upright boot. She giggled.

After looking at it for a while, she tapped her wand on the vine, which continued to rise upwards, and she wanted to look at the highest point. Hermione remembered the fairy tale about Jack and the Beanstalk that she had heard when she was a child; there couldn’t be a giant that could eat children above the clouds, could there?

She laughed at the thought. A steady stream of wavy clouds with neatly cut edges glided before her, they seemed to be carved out of the same mould, the professor didn’t seem to have put much thought into them … Hermione couldn’t help but muse about it when finally the vines stopped moving.

Hermione looked around and spotted a silver sphere the size of a crystal ball behind her. Is this – the moon? But it looked too small to notice at all if she didn’t pay attention. She reached out curiously and picked the crystal ball up in her arms, and unexpectedly found a small note stuck on the back of the sphere as she turned its back towards her.

“I should be a thousand times of this size, but for now all I can do is pretend I’m the moon.”

Hermione slowly read the note and giggled at the familiar handwriting, laughing so hard that tears welled up in her eyes, “Oh Professor, I didn’t think-” As she laughed, she noticed that the other side of the note also had something writing on it, and she turned it over to see the following written on it ‘Lunar city plan is on hold’.

…

The Chamber of Secrets amusement park was rapidly taking Hogwarts by storm.

For some reason, Felix had noticed Granger looking at him strangely for the past two days, but he was busy at the moment, both with his responsibilities as Deputy Headmaster – learning how to run the day-to-day affairs of the school under Professor McGonagall – which he disliked so much that he had offered to hand over the job to the Head boy and Head girl of the school, under the fancy name ‘work experience’.

“But you should at least know exactly which jobs you are responsible for.” Professor McGonagall said with a grunt from her nose.

On the other end of the world, Grindelwald still hadn’t stopped his activities. Word had come back from the British representative of the International Confederation of Wizards that Babajide Akingbade had hosted a strange man and woman in his mansion, during which the tight protection measures put in place around him had completely failed and over twenty elite Aurors had lost half an hour of their memories.

One could use a knee to guess that Grindelwald had approached his door.

But strangely enough, no problems were found with Akingbade after he underwent various tests. No Imperius Curse, no replacement, his memory left intact, in fact, all evidence pointed to the fact that: he hadn’t been harmed in any way. In his own words, Grindelwald talked to him for a while as if he was an old friend catching up. He even went on to receive representatives from New Zealand and Norway after the examination.

“Grindelwald definitely did or said something. He is best at verbal bewitchment.” Ms. Bones said with certainty.

She had guessed it right.

Three days before the holidays, Babajide Akingbade made a solemn statement addressed to all wizards.

“It is with great regret that I have to announce that Gellert Grindelwald is back to the public eye, previously he had been imprisoned in Nurmengard Prison, but now he has escaped and regained his freedom …” The newspaper, which recorded his entire speech, spread instantly throughout the whole wizarding world.

“In view of the series of crimes he has committed, I, the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, Babajide Akingbade, should have immediately mobilised all my forces to arrest him, which I did, but he voluntarily approached me, and we had a private conversation – I personally was not subjected to any coercion, Yes, Mr. Grindelwald was very polite throughout the whole conversation, we even discussed one of the wizard fairy tales, I’m sure many of you have heard of the story of ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ … Ahem, what I’m trying to say is that the wizarding world is in a dire situation, and we can’t afford another wizarding war.”

“And Grindelwald, who, unfortunately, is a wizard with generally long life, and he still retains enough influence in our world. Under these circumstances, Grindelwald has offered to show his goodwill, so what reason do I have, on the basis of personal preference, to break the olive branch he has offered me? I admit that my actions will be controversial, but I must put aside my personal feelings because every decision I make has far-reaching implications … Negotiations for peace are essential.”

“What’s more -”

The newspaper deliberately highlighted this and as he said it he looked very embarrassed and hesitant, and a full five minutes passed before he finally made up his mind to tell.

“What’s more, the man who defeated Grindelwald last time is no longer with us, the great, wise, and benevolent Albus Dumbledore – he’s dead!”

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