Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

The heroines crept past solemn oaken panels carved with gilded frescos, and came to a dead end leading into a boys' bathroom, and turned around, and wandered back through the solemn oaken panels carved with gilded frescos, and then turned through dusty old brick corridors grouted with worn cement, which sort of led them in a circle actually, so they consulted a portrait and then went down a different dusty old brick corridor instead, that took them to a brief rise of marble stairs that should've put them on the third-and-a-halfth floor if it'd been anywhere but Hogwarts, and then it was back to tiled stone pavement again, and skylights that let shafts of sunlight pour down even though they were nowhere near the roof, and after they'd followed that passageway around a few corners it took them to another boys' bathroom, clearly marked with a plaque showing the silhouette of a robed figure whizzing into a toilet.

The eight of them stood before the closed door and stared with a certain amount of weariness.

"I'm bored," said Lavender.

Padma made a show of taking a pocketwatch out of her robes and looking at it. "Sixteen minutes and thirty seconds," she said. "A new record for the longest attention span in Gryffindor."

"I don't think this is going to work either," said Susan. "And I'm a Hufflepuff."

"Y'know," Lavender said thoughtfully, "I wonder if maybe what really makes someone a hero, is that when they try something like this, something interesting actually happens."

"I bet you're right," said Tracey. "I bet if we had Harry Potter with us, we'd run into three bullies and a hidden room full of treasure in the first five minutes. I bet that all General Chaos has to do is go to the bathroom and he, like, finds Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets or something -"

Daphne couldn't quite let that one go past. "You think Lord Slytherin would've put the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets in a bathroom -"

"What I'm saying," said Susan, as Tracey was opening her mouth to reply, "is that we've got no way of actually finding any bullies. I mean, all they've got to do is find a Hufflepuff somewhere, but we've got to run across them at exactly the right time, d'you see? Which is a very good problem because if we did find them we'd all get squished like bugs. Can't we just do the forbidden third-floor corridor like we're supposed to?"

Lavender snorted scornfully. "You don't become a real heroine just by doing the forbidden things the Headmaster tells you not to do!"

(Daphne's mind tried to wrap around this statement as she silently thanked the Sorting Hat for not putting her anywhere near Gryffindor.)

"Come to think..." Parvati said slowly, "I mean, what're the odds that Harry Potter would run across those five bullies on his first morning of school? He must've had some way of finding them."

Daphne happened to be standing where looking at Parvati let her see Hermione, so she noticed the Ravenclaw girl's expression change - and then she realized that the Sunshine General had also found some bullies just recently -

"Oh!" said Padma in a tone of sudden realization. "Of course! He got told by the ghost of Salazar Slytherin!"

"What?" said Daphne at the same time as several other people.

"That's who the ghost was that scared me, I'm pretty sure," Padma explained. "I mean I only figured it out afterward, but... yeah. Salazar Slytherin's ghost doesn't like it when Slytherins bully people, he thinks it shames his name, and the ghost is still keyed into the Hogwarts wards so he knows everything that happens, I bet."

Daphne's mouth was hanging open; and she saw that Hannah had put a hand to her forehead and was leaning against the stone walls, while Tracey's eyes were blazing like little brown stars.

Salazar Slytherin's ghost?

Had leagued himself with Harry Potter?

And had sent Hermione Granger to stop Derrick's crew?

She would have paid a hundred Galleons to be there when Draco Malfoy got told about this.

Although considering how fast rumors spread through Hogwarts, now that Padma had spilled the beans, Millicent had probably told him thirty minutes ago...

In fact... now that Daphne thought about it...

"So," said Parvati. "We've got to ask the Boy-Who-Lived where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost? Wow, I guess if I'm saying stuff like that out loud, I might actually be turning into a heroine -"

"Yes!" said Lavender. "We've got to ask the Boy-Who-Lived where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost!"

"We've got to ask... the Boy-Who-Lived... where to find Salazar Slytherin's ghost..." repeated Hannah in a nervous voice, like she was forcing herself to say it.

"And if that doesn't work," shouted Tracey, "we'll stun Harry Potter, tie him up and bring him with us!"

It said something, Hermione Granger thought, and it was something rather sad - as the eight of them strolled back through the maze of twisty little passages that was Hogwarts, their time before the next class having run out without finding any bullies - that she genuinely didn't know whether Harry Potter had been led around by the ghost of Salazar Slytherin or a phoenix or what. And whatever Harry had done, she hoped it didn't work for them. And most of all she hoped that the others didn't vote for Tracey's idea of stunning Harry Potter and carting his unconscious body around with them to attract Adventures. That couldn't possibly work in real life, or, if it did, she was giving up.

Hermione looked from witch to witch, Tracey chatting with Lavender, and the others making occasional remarks; and her gaze caught on a girl who was subdued and quiet, the one person whose thoughts right now she couldn't guess at all.