Late in the night, four animals could be seen making their way to a certain girls bathroom.
Well, two of the animals could be seen, the others were as good as invisible in the darkness of the castle, only if someone looked at the exactly right spot during exactly the right moment they could possibly observe a strange reflection of the torch light on a wall, though that wouldn't exactly be obvious with the torches flickering anyways and obviously the cat and the regular snake would be caught long before if someone were to look that intently in their direction.
After the four entered the bathroom one of the turned into a human again, Julius then used the charm he had learned specifically for this on his friends and himself before opening the entrance to the pipes and turning back to follow his friends inside and into the innards of the castle.
A bit later, when they reached a particularly dirty area Lia jumped straight into the air when she suddenly felt Rachel slithering up her leg, she was far too proud of her crystal clear scales to voluntarily go through the disgusting grime of some centuries-old sewer, not that she didn't know that she wouldn't actually get dirty with Julius magic, she just did it out of principle.
~Rachel, would you please refrain from scaring Lia so much?~
Julius was slowly getting more and more certain that Rachel was using her invisibility to pay Lia back for when they first met, or maybe she was just enjoying scaring her for her funny reactions, Lia was quite jumpy regarding that.
Be that as it may, Rachel barely reacted to Julius light-hearted reprimand though he could swear he saw a spark of mischievous joy in her eyes during the short moment she faced his way before going on to make herself comfortable on Lia's back.
As the four continued to make their way towards the library Julius was able to get a glimpse of Rachels eyes again but by now the spark he had seen before was gone as if he hadn't just been there and it seems like she was even quite relaxed and content for their current situation.
'I guess I should just be happy Rachel obviously doesn't really have any serious gripes about my choice of friends.'
...
A short time later they arrived in the restricted section again and began to replace their read books with new ones with only Julius deviating from the topic of his first book by choosing one about the dark arts this time in the hopes of getting at least an inspiration of what to learn next.
Since Lia had transformed to be able to better look for a new book Rachel had climbed on top of the highest shelf in their close vicinity, presumably to look for teachers that might come in for their nightly patrol while the inattentive humans were occupied with what must seem like extremely boring books to her, even though she'd learned to read more or less well she would only sometimes read on Julius shoulder when she really had nothing better to do and the book was some kind of action novel or something similar.
Then she suddenly jumped down from the shelf and quietly hissed into Julius' ear:
~Leave quickly, the companion of that annoyance in the form of a cat is coming.~
Cursing inside, Julius quickly motioned for his friends to transform and quickly go and hide in some corner before placing a sound proofing ward over said corner and hiding there himself, hoping that damned cat was patrolling somewhere else instead of following Filch around and possible smelling them, he had forgotten to put the ward down this time, so that might be the only reason Filch was here.
For what felt like eternity Filch used his lantern to look around all parts of the library accessible by a human until he finally turned towards the exit.
Julius was already feeling relieved, as with a triumphant scream, Filch jerked his head and lantern around and in their direction.
"Ha! You should come out now if you want to have the slightest chance to stay at this school, should've just stayed in your dorm with those shiny things you have there."
As Filch made his way towards them, Habol did his best to hide between two books, but Lia, whose eyes had probably reflected some of the lantern's light, had no chance to get away unseen.
Julius was already panicking when he remembered somthing obvious: There was a huge amount of cats on the castle grounds and there was no way Filch would be able to find out that she wasn't just another pet that had somehow managed to get into the library, he should now that cats just have their ways.
And Lia also seemed to have though of that as she waited just until she was directly in the light of the janitor's lantern, before darting away, sending Filch stumbling against in a futile attempt to catch her and at least get to punish her owner.
'That looked like it hurt.'
Julius was able to see even Habol wincing compassionately as the two witnessed the older man run head first into the edge of a wooden shelf.
After waiting until a loudly cursing Filch was gone and listening to what he wanted to do to the owner of this "damned cat" the two quickly transformed back, picked up the book Lia had in her hurry had to leave on the ground as she was the one furthest away from Julius and made their way back to their common room.
This time though, they had to have taken a wrong turn in their agitation and found themselves in front of a tunnel, that seemed to lead into the Black lake if the fish, barely visible through the dark surface of the water that filled the pipe was any indication.
Even though Julius couriosity was piqued and he assumed it was probably the same for Habol, they had to hurry back to their dorms to get a bit of sleep this night.
Besides; exploring something like that without Lia didn't sit quite well with them after she just pulled Filch away from them and was probably waiting for them in the common room and so the two agreed to delay the exploration until later, before finding the way back and finally reaching the common room much later, finding a sleeping Lia on one of the armchairs and sitting down next to her after stashing away the books and replacing them with some half finished homework.
That way they could just pretend they had fell asleep while doing this together.
And of course this had nothing to do at all with the relaxed expression Lia had on her face while sleeping that made them not want to wake her up.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — —
I tried getting an AI to make me a decent picture of the mc and partially succeded, it should be in this paragraph if I remembered to put it here.
Anyways, it's been over a month again since I've last uploaded a chapter mostly because of motivational problems as well as no idea how I was gonna fill this chapter (and many, many times of discarding plans I'd already made), even though I wanted to finish this year at Hogwarts as quickly as possible (the plan was to end it with 5-6 more chapters but until now it hasn't quite fit like I planned it to).
Thanks for reading though and have a nice day :)