The Hogwarts infirmary was lit despite the late hour, indicating that its expert healer was busy helping some unfortunate student.
Madame Pomfrey had been woken from her restful sleep, and when she learned the reason, she was furious!
What witch in her right mind would spontaneously decide to swim in the Black Lake in the middle of the night?
Miss Lovegood was lucky Barnaby saw her when she got a cramp in both legs and almost drowned; otherwise, who knows what might have happened to the young Ravenclaw…
Barnaby wiped imaginary sweat from his brow upon seeing that the performance was a resounding success, while Poppy was busy applying an ointment to Luna.
After finishing helping her, Ginny and the twins realized they had to get back to the castle with an unconscious Luna, which carried a high probability of being caught.
Fortunately, the twins had an idea. While Fred slipped his hands under Luna's armpits and George held her by the ankles, they threw her into the Black Lake and quickly pulled her out once she was soaked from head to toe.
Then they used the joke spell to induce cramps, and voilà.
A completely different scenario!
After that, they just needed to return quietly while Barnaby levitated Luna and took her to the infirmary, saying he found her swimming at the edge of the Black Lake while taking a nocturnal stroll with some of his creatures.
With the reputation Luna had earned these days, even someone like Poppy didn't doubt Barnaby. Partly due to his eccentric behavior, and partly because he was as reliable as Hagrid's son.
By Merlin's beard, he had just saved a first-year student's life!
She would award him no less than two hundred points for this feat if he were still a student!
Yes, a detail not many people knew was that the Hogwarts nurse had the ability to award or deduct points just like the professors, but she rarely used it throughout her career.
Oh, right, Barnaby never showed much interest in the house points system, and given how he graduated, it seemed normal. He's a good lad.
As the head of Ravenclaw House, Professor Flitwick was naturally informed of the incident with Luna by a house-elf and appeared shortly thereafter in the infirmary, dressed like an elf from Santa's workshop (presumably his pajamas), to learn the details of what happened.
"Thank you," he shook Barnaby's hand with emotion. "I suspected Luna was having trouble fitting in, but I didn't expect it to affect her so much in such a short time."
Flitwick was keen on keeping his house as harmonious as possible for optimal academic exchange, but one flaw of his brightest ravens was that some occasionally developed an intellectual superiority complex that led them to commit questionable actions.
But even with the help of the prefects, he couldn't find any evidence to confirm his suspicions about Luna's situation and act on it. As a result, he was greatly shocked to learn she had gone "swimming" in the Black Lake in the middle of the night.
He was going to have some very serious words with some of his students about the consequences of bullying within the sacred walls of this castle!
After breakfast.
The headmaster and deputy headmistress were also informed of the incident, but while the former only sighed in relief that nothing had happened, Minerva took it seriously and decided to secretly talk to her lion cubs. Just in case, it never hurts to remind them of these things.
Pomona frowned upon hearing what had happened, but the harmony in her house was good, and she didn't need to act. In any case, she paid more attention to ensuring the first years could integrate easily into Hufflepuff's warm atmosphere.
Snape, on the other hand, maintained an indifferent expression while contemplating whether to increase the amount of crushed snake fangs in the potion he was going to make that afternoon by two grams.
Moreover, everyone was very sensible and avoided letting Lockhart know about this incident.
After going through something like that, the last thing Miss Lovegood needed was for that attention-seeking parasite to be broadcasting what happened and what didn't.
Harry was unaware of what had happened but was equally depressed because the school had determined his punishment for the way he arrived at Hogwarts this year. For the next few weeks, he had to help Lockhart catalog and respond to his fan mail.
He had only been doing it for a week and was already wishing it would end.
It was one thing to respond to harmless letters, perhaps excessively perfumed and with lipstick marks, but harmless nonetheless. Lockhart had given him a list of generic responses, so all he had to do was match them and copy the corresponding response.
Then there were the dangerous ones, which were enchanted, cursed, or contained some questionable items, like dirty female underwear or sweets oozing with love potions.
And those were the more innocent ones!
Lockhart looked at these letters as if they were just part of his daily routine.
He gave Harry an enchanted magnifying glass that showed which letters had magical problems, and those were directly thrown into the fireplace with a practiced wave of the wand. According to him, he was too popular, and some husbands decided to teach him a lesson out of jealousy.
But what could he do if he had the most perfect smile in the world?
It was normal that when wives compared their husbands to him, they felt heartbroken and sought solace in his books. Completely normal.
Harry saw a side of human madness that scared him a lot, but not as much as when, during one of the punishment sessions, he heard someone saying they wanted blood.
"Professor, didn't you hear that?" he asked, looking around before eyeing the letters with suspicion.
He hadn't touched any of the cursed ones, right?
The strange thing was that, for once, Lockhart didn't boast about it and told him with a puzzled look that he didn't hear anything. Then he dismissed it with another smile, saying Harry needed to improve his jokes to affect someone of his high intellectual level.
Yes, that was definitely strange…