While he sat in the Mausoleum, studying alone with the remains of his ancestors, Julius decided he needed to get a pet of some kind, especially since he wasn't the most sociable person, meaning he would also probably be alone at Hogwarts.
While Eeylops Owl Emporium was still the most popular place in Diagon Alley to get an owl, there were already many more shops, selling many different kinds of magical and non magical pets, so Julius had a great amount of options and due to the many complaints from foreign students it was decided to let a few more kinds of animals or even magical creatures into Hogwarts as pets.
The rules were for example allowing all kinds of birds or bird like creatures up to a certain wingspan and weight instead of only owls, on the other hand even many more kinds of creatures were allowed, for example snakes or dogs, though it was mostly frowned upon to have any kind of pet which affected other people too much which was also one of the reasons no one would bring a rat under normal circumstances.
The same was the case with dogs, though there were exceptions to every rule, for example a tribe of Inuit living in the far north of Greenland would send at least one of their children to Hogwarts every year and due to a peculiar tradition they would all be accompanied by a wolf.
Apparently there had even been a case of the son of a shaman from an indigenous North American tribe with a bald eagle who had caused trouble by scratching some pureblood brat.
Anyways, the usual pets would be cats or birds, with the birds being mostly owls and snakes for some wealthy families which can buy artefacts capable of enabling humans to speak in parseltongue or seldomly in case of a natural parselmouth.
(Author: Am I doing this right or should parseltongue be spelled with a capital p? I'm asking because I learned languages are written with capital first letters, but this is literally the language of snakes.)
But Julius had also learned something very interesting: An animagus would be able to understand "their kind" even while in human form.
In the case of normal animals this would only mean they understand their body language and what they want to express with it as well as any sounds they make.
Apparently snakes were the only animals magical enough to have their own language.
And it just so happens, that his own umbra took the form of a snake and the form of the patronus, or like in this case the umbra, was usually also what he would transform into after finally becoming an animagus, something else he would now finally able to do now that he had become eleven, he already planned to start tomorrow during the full moon.
A few hours later Julius and George, who had waited for Julius outside of Ollivander's shop, had already gone through almost every pet shop in Diagon Alley without finding what he was searching for.
Well, he had seen a baby horned serpent while strolling by one shop but when he entered it a bit later it had already been sold.
Sadly the reason for that was most likely to kill it and take its crystal after it reached adulthood.
After all the crystal of a horned serpent allegedly gave the abilities of flight and invisibility.
When Julius was already getting ready to leave he saw something that caught his interest; an apparently empty cage in which a slight glitter was seen every now and then.
If he hadn't looked in its direction during one of said glitters, he would most likely just have overlooked the apparently empty cage and left but now he was intrigued. So he walked up to the owner of the street stall, apparently selling a hodgepodge of things.
The owner of the stall was a small man with dirty blonde hair and all in all a rugged appearance, he also seemed quite suspicious, considering the nervous glances he threw over to anyone looking at him or his stall for even a moment longer than actually needed.
"Welcome young man, are you maybe interested in anything you see here?", after seeing someone was finally interested in his stall, the owner immediately addressed Julius.
Pointing at the „empty" cage, Julius asked:
„Coincidentally yes, could you maybe tell me more about whatever is in this cage?"
Considering the size of the cage Julius was actually already quite sure what was inside this cage, but there was still a slight chance of it just being some kind of artefact which was for some strange reason stored inside a cage or it just being an enchantment created to trick people into buying the cage under the exact assumptions Julius was making right now.
He had heard this kind of scam used to be quite common in Australia until about a decade ago when a campaign was started by the magical government of Australia to harshly prosecute those kinds of scammers after they made exorbitant sums of money by just acting like they didn't know what was in the cage, which also made them exempt from any punishment by the former laws as long as the victims were unable to prove the knowledge of the scammers.
"No, unfortunately I have no idea what it is, I just found it in… I mean on the streets and I just took it with me, after all it would be a waste for something as interesting as that to just lie around, I mean it could be anything, who knows? I would give it to you for only 13 galleons, are you interested?"
Even though the worth of the magical currency had fallen tremendously in magical Britain after opening up to the world, this amount was still not negligible in the slightest, at least not for the average child roaming through Diagon Alley to get their school supplies.
Now the only question was if he was actually unaware of the contents of the cage which probably meant he had stolen it from somewhere, or if he was just another scammer who had brought his business to London.
‚If it's the first option it might actually be what I think it is but I would have to get out of him where he got it from or this could pose a problem later on, on the other hand if it's the second option… well, let's just try this out…'