An eventful breakfast

The breakfast hour was waning; most of the students were preparing to go to their classes when the fleet of mail-owls streamed through the top windows of the Great Hall. The room filled with the usual soft, joyous, mumbles from the students. The owls steered to the seats of their respective recipients and delivered the packages with varying degrees of suaveness and accuracy. A handsome Short-eared owl neatly landed in front of Piova and gave a soft hoot.

Piova wasn’t expecting a mail but she gently untied the package nevertheless. It was a smallish package in neat brown paper wrapping and a card that just had her name in handsome handwriting. Neatly unpacking the wrappings, Piova picked up the small, ordinary-looking, wooden box that was inside. The Great Hall had started to fill up with the soft sounds of scraping chairs, whishing cloaks, and general murmurs, intermittently punctured by the ‘awws’ and ‘urghs’ from the recipients of the owl-mails.

A loud ‘Pop’ made everyone turn around, and freeze. Piova’s face and part of her robe now had a brilliant splash of blue and pink. Nobody dared to move in fear that it might draw her attention and anger. Piova didn’t look murderous at all; true, there was a curious, stunned, look on her face. She exhaled softly, put down the box gently, and drew her wand smoothly. That last action sent the students nearest around her scuttling away. But she merely pointed the wand at herself and whispered, ‘Evanesco’.

With the splashes cleaned; she proceeded to shove the box, paper, etc. into her bag, swung it on her shoulder, and headed for the exit. The sly grin on the lips and the wicked twinkle in her eyes only added to the already deepening doom among the students. It wasn’t until few minutes after she had disappeared that the students broke into worried chatter as they too streamed towards the exit. ‘What she would do to the culprit’ vastly outnumbered the ‘Who could do such a thing’.

By lunchtime rumors were rife. A second-year Hufflepuff somberly explained that an anonymous senior had seen Piova taking someone into the Forbidden Forest and he heard a cry of agony shortly afterward. A fifth-year Ravenclaw was sure that he heard some whimpering while attending the Potions class in the dungeons. At the Slytherin table couple of seventh-years, who might have had annoyed Piova in the past, were unceremoniously given a wide berth.

‘Fred & George must know who did it,’ mumbled Ron. ‘Where are they?’ asked Hermione after a cursory glance up & down the Gryffindor table. ‘They weren’t here during breakfast either’, Harry added. ‘No’ Ron said firmly, ‘they are rascals, but not stupid’, in reply to the questioning look from Hermione and Harry that clearly asked if the Wesley twins were behind the morning incident. But he just couldn’t shake off the uneasiness.

Now Fred & George had a reputation, or rather, they had built a reputation for themselves since their early days at Hogwarts. A wide range of incidents in the past couple of years was credited to them. Whether any link could be proven or not was another matter entirely. Mr. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, was a tireless and vociferous campaigner of locking the twins up to end all such incidents. But the twins continued to roam freely and merrily.