The night of their arrival in Cairo, Ananke had been playing with some potions and runes on restoring a few dried out creatures she purchased the other day to their original shape. The small pairings of frogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and small birds were dull and grey, but mostly as plump as they were when living--at least as plump as the red-head assumed they had been.

Her project was then followed by doing curfew with her didactic and light tone adding, "and if anyone wants to try something silly tomorrow they should get up for an early trip to the pyramids." Despite her strange word choice coupled with her unwavering and informative tone, some students had joined her that morning for an early start to the day.

The group was allowed into the pyramids through a muggle entrance, but Ananke directed her small pack of students from the usual limited path to a side-path that deviated into an area, tucked in a corner where a stone slab rose from the wall and allowed them to enter; it was only visible, audible, and available to the wizarding public. The room was just as empty as any of the other ones in the pyramids but more peculiar shapes sneaked around the smooth and plain architecture of the chamber, with a few dim-glowing lamps.

Ananke knelt down in the middle of the room and let her bag slide to the floor, where a plain pedestal rested, as she began an introduction, "Currently we are standing atop two ley lines, also known as dragon lines," she started rummaging through her rucksack bag as she continued, "They're nothing we can see, just natural energy patterns produced by the earth." She finally fished out a grey bubble of a dried grey frog and placed it on the surface of the pedestal like a dainty ornament, "Many ancient structures were built on these lines, and even more mysterious ones were built where these lines meet," her informative tone finally paused as she analyzed the little ornament with a distant look of awe as the frog's skin started to change a sickly green and it's mouth slowly began to open, "Even muggles, with their inhibited senses of observation, have realized that the Giza pyramids aren't exactly Egyptian garden-variety tombs."

The frog then closed it's mouth as a pocket of air rolled into its throat, rippling with orange light. Then it popped! Like a piece of bubblegum coming to life with bright orange and red colors. It opened its mouth again, and instead of a watery croak, it hummed. It emitted a perfect B-flat.

"So, while there have yet to be any tombs discovered in these pyramids, they are particularly great magical conductors." The frog hummed again, with a dull and purposeless stare, as if lost in the witch's own thoughts once her hand dove into her bag again, "And, in here, the same thing has never. Happened. Twice." The Divination professor tossed the same kind of dried grey and dull frog at one of the other students, before returning to her lecture with a more chipper tone.

"Now we're not much better off in here either, so no wands. If you feel a little overexcited and lightheaded I have some gum. Otherwise you can come grab a creepy critter," She opened up the front pocket of her rucksack for students to pick and choose what they wanted to play with.[1]

1.	Dried lizards, snakes, fish, and little birds are inside. How they change or react to the pyramid is up to you guys!

Ambrose gaped in amazement as the frog transfigured. He couldn't quite believe it could be reanimated to quite an extent, surely that was impossible, nobody could come back from the dead!

"And, in here, the same thing has never. Happened. Twice."

His gaping was stopped as Professor Cosmos threw the next dried up frog at him. He fumbled, but caught it just about and stumbled forward towards the pedestal, where he placed the frog facing the other.

"Now we're not much better off in here either, so no wands. If you feel a little overexcited and lightheaded I have some gum. Otherwise you can come grab a creepy critter."

Ambrose lowered himself to peer curiously at eye-height, wondering what would happen, as the frog very much looked like the one the Professor had just placed down.

The frog started to colour, but this time more purple, and before Ambrose's eyes, it shrank to half the size, looking up at its companion with glassy eyes.

Ambrose Pepper's jaw dropped again.

"But why is it never the same?" He asked, curious and a little frustrated - it sounded rather like his spell casting.

Arlaug must have had a prophetic vision about what was going to happen at the pyramids today. When he saw what happened to the toad Philo frantically searched his satchel but found the bag free of damp or cuss-words.

This was the kind of vacation Philo could get behind. Early to rise, yes, but that meant the sun was not as strong plus they delved into a tomb, free from the scorching heat. A bit musty for Philo's tastes but so far the demonstration was fascinating.

Philo started with a snake, finding a space along the area Professor Cosmos indicated. The snake shivered and then flattened into a long piece of green tape and shimmied backwards. Or kelp, like that roommate of Drea's was known to collect. At least the snake hadn't turned blue with intricate designs, or Philo would have been worried about another kind of stowaway crashing on the facilities.

"But why is it never the same?" spoke up Tim's brother Ambrose.

"Wenlock's Uncertainty Principle?[1]" Philo suggested, recalling a tidbit he had read in a book from the school library about the most famous scholars to come out of Hogwarts. He struggled to recall. "In that, um, raw unchanneled magic, like these crossings of ley lines, works in highly improbable fractions of the largest denominator. And the magic will cycle through all the possibilities but since it's near infinite it appears to never have the same results twice?"

He looked back to his revived snake you could call a flatworm that was beginning to crawl up the wall, still moving backwards. "This must be where the belief of pyramids housing tombs for those traveling to the afterlife came from." Squiggle snake was now on the ceiling and Philo was a bit unnerved. "But it only works in the pyramid, right? The effects disappear when you're off the ley lines?"

1.	Totally making this up, but here is Mz. Wenlock for those interested

Ananke looked up at the Ambrose Pepper as he asked a question, but before she could open her mouth one of the younger years let loose a mouth wad of some contraption of an explanation. Ananke just stared as she analyzed his explanation. The boy was bright, Falkin, but he seemed too keen on overanalyzation,  "Not really," the red-headed witch admitted with a a shrug of her lips, "Less mathematical and more chaotic. Wenlock did discover that there's absolutely no clear patterns or reasons as to why this happens though. There are just too many factors to be considered or discovered."

She promptly pointed to the purple frog and then the orange one, "The difference between Pepper and my frog could be as simple as which one of us last touched it, and as complicated as how many times rolled around on its left eyeball," Her frog hummed again as his dully stared at a wall, " You would have a much better time of trying to analyze the behavioral patterns of Peeves than try and discover any concrete answer."

Ananke pulled out the tail of another dried snake and begun to lay it head-first onto the pedestal, "But at dawn and dusk the lines give off the most energy, when the dark of the night and light of the day collide," The snake opened its mouth as the scales on its body spiked up like a horned lizard's and its body loosely began coiling on the ground, "It's not just about reacting, it's about changing. These creature's bodies reacted with the magic stored here and change." The snake's eyes rolled around the room as it faded from a greyish green, to a sandy orange, then to a transparent blue, and completely invisible save for its bright eyes, "Permanently."

"Similarly, you could wake up at the crack of dawn for a week, and after the initial shock of fatigue you'd feel a little more energized." Ananke patted the new snake between its eyes then, and it flicked its tail and changed purple in response, "So you can keep them if you want. They hardly have the mental capacity or animal instincts they carried with them while alive--other than being capable of being particularly annoying they are fairly harmless."

Philo listened to Professor Cosmos' mini-lecture. He wished he had remembered to have his notebook and quill ready before the demonstration. That was the Ravenclaw in him, finding a lessen in an informative tour mostly meant for fun. The change would be permanent, then. Another good reason for Arlaug to be absent. Still, was the flat snake alive or still dead? He wasn't sure about another pet. Did it need to eat?

Philo still put forth a good effort at analyzing the unquantifiable. As the flat snake made a full backwards loop around the entombed chamber he crouched next to it, notes at the ready. He pulled a length of measuring tape out of his bag, one of the animated ones his mother or Mr. Ollivander used, or anyone that required quick measurements. Philo used it to measure the length of his school essays. It was so old it feebly accomplished measuring these days. You had to yell at it repeatedly and precisely what you wanted measure.

He let it drop to the floor. "The length of the flat snake," he said in clear tones. The measuring tape flopped, unresponsive. He figured he would have to give the command again and that's when it happened. The measuring tape moved, maybe to measure the length of the snake. Once it passed the flat snake's head, however, the snake bit the end.

"Um..."

The flat snake swallowed the tape measure like a long spaghetti noodle. Philo couldn't see how this was possible if it was supposed to work backwards.

"Um..."

And another curious transformation was taking place. The grayish-blue snake became even flatter, if that were possible, like a ribbon as it began to twist around. Head and tail became indistinguishably, except for two small dots on the end that were leftover from the eyes.

"Um..."

Then the flat snake lay motionless. The pattern of its scales had changed. There were black lines, tick marks, with every tenth being longer with a little number underneath. Philo warily picked it up. It still felt like snakeskin.

"What...?" Had just happened? There most have been residual magic from the ley line, or introducing the almost spent measuring tape had triggered an additional transformation. Or the snake had been used in the measuring tape's transformation, but the tape hadn't been previously alive to begin with.

"Er, length of my shoe," Philo commanded.

The snakeskin measuring tape did as commanded. This time it just slithered there instead of floating in the air.

Good luck trying to quantify magic.

From Ananke's robust, escaped a resolute and pleasantly whisking laugh at Philo's contemplative surprise, "Interact with it while you can, Mr. Falkin," she informed with perky interest, "You can be sure that sort of interactivity won't occur outside the tomb--just don't give it anything particularly diabolical and all should be fine."

'Fine' of course meaning she wouldn't have to subject herself to punishing any of the students or leaving to soon. She was a Gryffindor, at heart, but she was very stingy about breaking rules sometimes.

She turned her attention to the glowing frog and mumbled, "Interesting..." before humming a tune to her frog, which responded with the mysterious melody of, 'Something Wicked This Way Comes.' She gave a twinge of a smile before continuing again, "They have much more of a fast-track learning experience in here, I'm sure." She looked back to the young Ravenclaw, nodding at him before giving him a gesture to continue, "Try something else, Mr. Falkin, try not to let it eat devour all your belongings."

Professor Cosmos laughed, though it wasn't at Philo. Her explanation confirmed his suspicions that the only time permanent changes would occur to these...curious creatures was going to be in the tomb, before they leveled off upon leaving the crossed leylines.

"I don't think it can eat anything else of mine, professor. It doesn't have a mouth anymore." The snakelike measuring tape was crawling up his leg in little loops that perfectly measure the circumference of his pant leg. He checked his bag. "I do have a spent quill and a spare bottle of ink if anyone wanted to, err, experiment."

At her encouragement he ordered the snake through more kinds of measurements, like his body or lines on the floor. At each command the snake-tape snapped into action with its slithering and levitating movements. He noticed that the accurate measurement was given in glowling yellow numbers, if the measurement didn't line up with a tick mark or if it was a circumference measurement that didn't start from one end.

Finally for fun he added "Length of the room on a side" knowing full well that the measuring tape had only been 6 feet long. To his continued surprise the snake-tape stretched the full length of a an unoccupied wall, the accurate length glowing near the tail with yellow numbers.