As the month turned over to May, the Hufflepuff common room seemed to be more crowded in the evenings and weekends. With a month left until exam season, many were squabbling over the limited resources available for revision. There were only so many chairs and tables to spread the plethora of books, papers, and bags per person.

But Heliotrope, albeit unconsciously, had a method for ensuring her piece of the common room pie. She was lying flat on her back in plump sofa by the hearth fire, tangled hair falling to the floor, her legs crossed against the back of the chair. He toes were busy scratching the corduroy.

Her method of studying thus far was rereading her textbooks, as it was advised to her that rereading the text was an important part of the revising process. Her head was resting on a stack of such books partially hidden by her yellow hair. In her hands was an open copy of A Beginner’s Guide To Transfiguration. Her eyes stared at its contents, not moving, and occasionally turning a page.

Amidst the scratching of quills, the zip, zip of her toes rubbing against the couch fabric could be heard.

Figaro Sellaphix was never accused of being studious and it showed in his marks.  But this was his fifth year.  This was the big leagues.  O.W.L.s loomed over him - the first big test of his skills as a functioning, capable, contributing-to-society Mr. Wizard.  He exhaled in a giant puff of air and slipped down in his chair.  He had books open, he had quill and ink, his schizophrenic notes from class (covered more in drawings than notes), but his brain was spent.

It was Friday.  He knew he should be spending his time studying, at least a couple hours.  The professsors were saying so, the Prefects were encouraging it, their Head of House had been on their asses telling them how important finals were.  "You've been here all year - if you don't do well on your finals, you might has well have been on a long Scotland holiday, yes?" and somesuch drivel.

Through all the quiet mumbling of the studying Hufflepuffati, a rhythm made its way through.  Zip, zip, zip, zip....

He looked around for the source, his pencil following along in time.  Zip (t'tap), zip (t'tap), zip (t'tap), zip (t'tap)... Craning his neck around, he saw it.  A pair of tiny, grimy feet hanging over the back of the yellow couch.  Still keeping his cadence, he crumpled a page of his Herbology notes and chucked them like a mortar over to the unseen source of the feet.

As her eyes bored through the density of her book, a small paper projectile hit Heliotrope in the face. Not even flinching, she placed down her book and uncrumpled the paper, a loud crinkle punctuating the action.

It made no sense to her. From one margin, the words "Deadly Nightshade" were written and a half hearted attempt at a description. Identifiable drawings of nightshade gave way to various doodles of which Heliotrope tried to identify. All she could make out was a dragon, a unicorn, and a witch with "great heaving knockers" if she was remembering the phrase correctly. She had seen a few Sirens before, a Mediterranean merfolk species, and they were often attributed with "great heaving knockers."

Gleaning no further insight from the discarded notes, Heliotrope placed it under her feet at the top of the sofa. She returned to staring at the words in her book. Absentmindedly, her dexterous toes curled the paper back into a ball with the associated loud crackles of crunching paper. She rolled it around her feet. With a flick of her ankle, it launched off into the distance.

Dax had actually been studying, for once. He wasn't exactly great at Potions aside from mixing paint, so even he would admit he needed help with that. And he needed it for his Auror application, which actually gave him a reason to study for it as opposed to, say, just passing the exam.

He sat at the far end of the common room, textbook open in his lap and trying hard not to let his brain shut down from the sheer bore of it all. He didn't know how Dion did it other than sheer willpower. Dax had willpower, he just didn't chose to use it. It wasn't like he didn't understand it, but there were only so many times you could do the factions for Bat's Breath without wanting the strangle the next bat you saw.

The piece of paper that struck him in the head was therefore a grateful distraction, as much as he made a show of looking about the room for the culprit. Then he unfolded it - why was it so dirty? - and saw the drawings. So it was the good kind of a dirty. He grinned.

Dax chuckled, picking up his quill and make some quick artistic corrections to the anatomy of knocker-lady, who seemed to be lacking a lot of the important details, like nipples and sexier lips. And a cat sitting next to her. Then he blew on the ink to dry it, re-crumpling the paper.

"Oi, Sellaphix. Yours," he said, the chucked the paper at the back of Figaro's head. He wasn't sure if it was Sellaphix's, honestly, but he seemed the most likely to like knocker-lady.

Oh.  It was that creepy, quiet little first year.  Heliotrope.  Figaro's pencil-tapping stalled as he watched her do so much with her feet as he'd done with one hand and send his wad of paper over to Seventh Year man-clone Dax Fayette.  It was best not to tangle with Dax Fayette.  Figaro wasn't deaf to the rumors that said his short, explosive, snog-smothered relationship with Sophie Flickwick, and subsequent shouting-match break-up, had made him some muscle-y, 17-year-old enemies.  So when the wad of paper hit Dax, Figaro immediately turned back round in his chair and pretended not to be involved.

Thwap.

Karma certainly was speedy today.  The ball of paper hit Figaro in the back of the head, its arrival heralded with Dax's voice.

He left the paper on the ground where it had bounced off, under the table some how.  The Hufflepuff sharing Figaro's table gave him a warning look, perhaps to indicate that should Figaro continue to start paper-wars there'd be hell to pay. 

"Not mine," he denied casually, keeping his voice low for the others' studying.  But then, a thought came into his mind and so he spoke it: "What do first years have to study for, anyway?"  Figaro did not recall ever studying when he was 11-years-old. 

The page Heliotrope was gazing at had several suggestions for common transfiguration practices. One needed to know what the object was to change into. He eyes moved down the list until...

Mice into snuffboxes.

Mice? Those small, rodent creatures. Snuffbox? What was this? Something to store sneezes in? Or coughs?

Heliotrope flipped over from the couch, standing. She noticed a boy a table glancing over his shoulder her direction. She paced over, scrunching the crumpled note from earlier.

Her book was held open. "What is a snuffbox?"

Eveline was beginning to wonder why she hadn't stayed in the dorm to study. First there was Sellaphix and his endless pencil-tapping. (She couldn't see the bare grubby feet from where she was sitting; so she assumed it was Sellaphix making all the racket. After all every time she got into any sort of disturbance, wasn't Figaro Sellaphix at the heart of it?)
 
Sure enough he crinkled up a paper and tossed it at some poor unsuspecting little First Year, who moved to retrieve it  so that now Evie could see her. Heliotrope Le Jean,  wasn't it? An odd little creature to be sure, but that didn't mean she deserved to have Sellaphix throwing stuff at her. Frowning, Evie was about to tell Sellaphix to pick on somebody his own size, but Heliotrope handled it on her own. Giving the paper precisely the attention it deserved, she tossed it on the floor, crinkled it back up with her toes and then flicked it away. Evie frankly admired the move, wishing she could do something like that with the same nonchalance...

The paper sailed aross the room and hit Dax Fayette in the head. He opened it and chuckled, his expression giving Evie  the distinct impression that he was looking at a portrait of a female with too much bust and not enough clothing. Dax made a couple of additions,blew on the ink to dry it,  wadded up the paper again and tossed it. "Oi, Sellaphix. Yours?"

It hit Figaro in the back of the head with a good resounding thwap.

"Nice throw," murmured Eveline.

"Not mine," said Sellaphix, a little too casually. Then, most likely to change the subject, he said. "What do first years have to study for, anyway?" 

Eveline smiled at Heliotrope. "I don't know about either of you," she said to the boys, "but I wish I'd started hitting the books in First Year. If I had, I'd be in a lot better shape now. Seems like we just barely got done with OWLs, and now NEWTs are coming up..."

Then, Heliotrope flipped over the couch and advanced toward them, book held open. "What is a snuffbox?"

"Dear Lord Merlin," grumbled Eveline. "You'd think they could find something that people still use, to ask us to practice our spells on. A snuffbox...erm...it's a fancy silver box that wealthy gents back in the 1700's used. It held powdered tobacco. They would take a pinch of it like this..." She mimicked the bloke she'd seen in that old movie The Scarlet Pimperel, holding an imaginary pinch of tobacco up to her nose, with the most exaggeratedly affected gestures.

"It would make them sneeze," she explained, and shrugged. "It was supposed to be elegant..."

"Pffh, whose is it, then?" Dax asked, sitting up so he could see the rest of the room. "Dunno anyone else here who'd draw naked ladies and get bits wrong, Phixie." He didn't seem annoyed - rather, he was clearly amused, and Eveline's attempt to explain the snuffbox to the little fish-girl just made his grin widen.

"Always found the goblets easiest, myself," he said, laying forward with his arms dangling over the end of the couch. "Honestly, just think of it as a box that slides open, like a little drawer. S'basically what it is anyway." He snorted. "But if you manage to transfigure tobacco innit, lemme know, I could use some."

He considered this.

"Actually, that'd be powdered rodent or something. Nevermind."

Heliotrope stood listening to explanations of snuffboxes from Eveline and Dax. From their actions it did support Heliotrope's thought that a snuffbox must contain sneezes, or rather the powder to make sneezes.

She placed her book on the table. "I will need a mice." This was thought made into action spoken aloud, not directed at anybody. With that she disappeared under the table. Heliotrope crawled across the floor, slinking around the legs of furniture and humans, looking for a small rodent to transfigure. He neck craned to look under gaps from sofas or cabinets, places where a mice might hide.

Figaro was doing his best to not engage Dax Fayette - he still had no idea what reprecussions his dating and subsequent break-up with Sophie Flickwick had on the social landscape.  Also, Dax was kind of giant and kind of a hardass.  Figaro didn't need that kind of heat.  So his restrained reaction to Dax's grinning jibe about his knowledge of ladybits was an immature fake smile and a sneering 'Hur hurrr...'. 

But Heliotrope had surfaced from her couch hideaway and was asking about mice and snuffboxes.  He remembered that Transfiguration; mice with lids, boxes with tails... ah to be an inept first year again...  Sure beat being an inept fifth year!

But finally something interesting had come along to distract him from his studies.  And it came in the flimsy guise of helping a firstie with her studies.  Weren't their professors always encouraging that Hufflepuff team spirit?

As soon as talk went up that a mouse would be required, Figaro stood up in his seat.  Hadn't he just seen Fauna Blake in here?  The seventh year Hufflepuff student leader and hair-flipper had a pet rat.  Well, whereever she was, she'd gone, but her things were still over on the rub where she'd been.  And so was a plate full of crumbs.  And Bernie the rat.

"C'mere boyo..."  Figaro had nimbly slipped from his chair, strode across the commonroom to scoop up Fauna's rat, who was munching on snack left-overs.  He was nice as far as rats go, and didn't mind being held.  Squirmed a bit, but Fig held him firmly.

He scritched the rat's head with his thumb.  "One 'mice' for Miss Soggy Bottom," he declared.

Heliotrope stood upon hearing the word "mice," knocking over another student's stack of books. She crossed to Figaro and took the rat from him by the tail. She stared at it for a moment, a film crossing her eyes with a blink. She sat the rat down on the table.

Heliotrope concentrated on this new information of "snuffboxes." Free-form transfiguration required in depth knowledge of the thing you wanted to turn something into which explained while so many early practitioners of transfiguration failed to completely transfigure the target. Her wand pointed at the rat, Heliotrope began the wand motions, thinking about this "snuffbox" and turned the rat...

From rodent to invertebrate bivalve

...into a large, silver plated mussel. Strands of anchoring byssus spiraled from the base, sticking to Figaro's notes. The mucus like foot appendage of the mussel oozed out onto the table.

"Fauna's not going to like that."

Ayla's soft voice spoke up from next to the hearth. With the months turning to spring the fires in the old castle weren't blazing as they were in the dead of winter but Ayla found it soothing to be next to the flames. While the other gathered Hufflepuffs were hitting crunch time studying for up coming exams the petite Huffle was indulging in her most recent favourite pass time - creating new recipes for her enchanted pastries and goodies. With Charms and Potions being the only classes she was successfully getting good grades she wasn't holding much hope out for her future.

She put her enchanted diary (her book of recipes that was charmed not to let anyone else take a look at the contents except her) and got to her feet to join Heliotrope and Figaro. She cocked her head to the side and regarded the rat turned muscle with a mixed of fascination and disgust, "Okay so what was it supposed to turn into?"

"What am I not going to like?" Fauna asked as the portrait swung closed behind her and she entered the common room. Ayla, Figaro, and the odd first-year were huddled in a group, while Dax was lounging on the couch. As far as she could tell, they weren't burning SAWS posters in the fireplace, or playing frisbee with her hats, and the common room as a whole looked rather calm.

Casting a suspicious glance around her, Fauna went over to the things she'd left on the rug and dropped the new library book onto the messy pile (that she could have sworn had been neater when she'd left). Not yet remembering her rat, Fauna straightened, and tried peering over the students' heads. A silver, shell-like thing oozed goo onto the parchment.

"Er... that looks interesting?"

Heliotrope poked the foot oozing out from between the shells. "Mice into snuffboxes," she said, as if this explained anything. Forgiving the slightly different genus of rodent, the only thing a mussel and a snuffbox had in common was the hinge.

However, Heliotrope's mind caught up on something Figaro had said before he handed her the rat. She turned to him. "Soggy bottom?" She patted her bum. "I do not have a soggy bottom. I know when to use the...the toilet." A hint of mermish infused words escaped her lips, making the word "toilet" sound screechy.

Eveline eyed the mollusk with some distaste, though not as much as she once would have done. "Ummm...okay...you did change the...erm...the Mice...into something that opens and closes, so that isn't a bad start really. And...well...Figaro didn't really mean that you have a soggy bottom, did you Figaro?" she added, stressing the question so Figaro would...hopefully...know better than to go on teasing the girl like that. If she got upset Merlin knew what she might change  poor Bernie into next.

And speaking of upset, she eyed Fauna, gnawing her lip nervously. Fauna wasn't the sort to get upset that easily...but all the same, she might not like having her pet rat  turned into a...a clam, was it?  Evie wondered if Fauna realized that the strange object everybody was so focussed upon was Bernie.

And then she wondered whether it would make Fauna more upset that they were experimenting with Bernie without her permission...or that no one was mentioning that it was Bernie, now that she was here.

Evie glanced hopefully toward Dax. Dax was a guy. And...he was the biggest...