Harry and Hermione had then made an appearance at the infirmary to check on Neville to make certain he hadn't been hurt by the 'prank' he'd been caught in.
January passed by with little fuss; the only event of note being Neville's release from the Infirmary on the thirtieth fur, ear, and tail free but with a permanent craving for raw vegetables and edible plants (carrots, lettuce, and dandelion greens in particular) and a mild aversion to meat (including fish and poultry). In February, Valentine's Day saw Lockhart recovering his pride enough to torment the entire school with his insanity again as he drowned the Great Hall in the color pink, annoyed the staff with his talk of love potions and enchantments that mess with people's feelings and emotions, and tormented the students with singing telegrams delivered by irritable dwarves dressed as cupids.
Harry made good use of his last remaining Lip Traps to spare himself the humiliation of being forced to listen to some silly rhyme all four times one of the dwarves turned cupids approached him to give him a singing valentine.
While Harry was avoiding love poems from annoying anonymous fans, Neville found a discarded diary stuffed down a suit of armor. His fellow Gryffindor had been caught up in a compulsion charm to write in the diary shortly after picking it up and was drawn into the memory of a boy named Tom Riddle who'd been at Hogwarts the first time the Chamber of Secrets was opened. In that memory, Neville learned that it had been Hagrid who had opened the Chamber and unleashed Slytherin's monster.
He immediately hid the diary in his trunk before he shared what he'd learned about the Chamber with Harry and Hermione later that evening in their common room. Harry refused to believe that Hagrid was the person behind the attacks or that an Acromantula was the creature responsible for the attacks; the twelve year old was intimately familiar with the habits and capabilities of an Acromantula and petrification was not one of them.
The diary would be stolen from Neville's things before he could show it to Harry and Hermione.
Five days after the horrible Valentine Day debacle, a pair of sixth year Ravenclaws had been found petrified in a compromising position in one of the stalls of the same bathroom where Hermione had brewed the Polyjuice Potion. All after class activities were promptly canceled as a result of that fourth attack; including the remainder of the Interhouse Quidditch Tournament. Staff members also began escorting students between classes at that point; the adults concerned since it seemed that the monster only attacked those students that were found alone or in small groups.
Harry had been annoyed by the fact that his weekend trips into the Forbidden Forest were forcefully curtailed at the same time when staff members began performing multiple bed checks each night in order to prevent anyone from sneaking about after curfew. And while he could have slipped out of the tower easily enough, he had no real way of knowing when Professor McGonagall would next check his bed since he didn't know how to cast a Monitoring Spell.
Halfway through March, the monster struck a fifth time and a second year Slytherin was found petrified beneath the message on the wall outside of the same bathroom where the other victims had been found. The next day, Dumbledore was sacked as Headmaster by order of the Board of Governors and the Minister of Magic arrested Hagrid to make it look like the Ministry was dealing with the situation (the large groundskeeper had been accused of opening the Chamber again due to the fact that he'd been framed and expelled for the attacks fifty years earlier).
Hermione and Neville had witnessed the arrest when they'd gone down to ask Hagrid what he knew about the Chamber of Secrets while Harry had managed to sneak into the forest to let the centaurs know why he'd not visited in over a month. Harry had returned to the castle before he could be missed while Hermione and Neville had ventured into the heart of the Acromantula territory in order to speak with Aragog (the father and king of the giant spider colony and Hagrid's old pet) at Hagrid's request and were nearly eaten by Aragog's children.
The two of them had been saved by a hungry Norbert who'd apparently been craving spider that night and the greatly reduced number of spiders thanks to the culling efforts of Harry, Hagrid's dragon, and the centaur herd. Harry had later admonished the two of them for being so reckless and for not talking to him before they took off into the forest; citing the fact that he was on friendly terms with the centaurs and regularly hunted in the forest.
The attacks stopped at that point; or rather they appeared to stop.
Harry didn't stop looking for clues in regards to the location of the fabled Chamber though and eventually found it in the information that Neville and Hermione had garnered from the spiders; the student who'd died the last time the Chamber had opened had been killed in a bathroom. That of course led to the realization that all of the attacks happened in or near the out-of-order bathroom on the second floor.
He didn't need to connect Moaning Myrtle to the murdered student to figure out that the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was behind one of the sinks in that bathroom; he'd used his Tacking Skills and found a single trail of faded footsteps disappearing beneath the sink the moment he searched the bathroom when he snuck away from Lockhart for twelve minutes as the man led their year group through the halls after class on the second of April.
Hermione would spend all of her free time between classes in the library over the next four days putting together a list of potential monsters that could be responsible for the attacks and their weaknesses after she learned that he'd found the entrance. The older girl had made Harry promise not to do anything reckless before she handed him the list on the sixth of April. He would spend the rest of April studying that list and eagerly researching the various spells needed to deal with the dangerous monsters.
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