The Clever and the Cunning

Septima and Bathsheda arrived at the entrance to the forbidden corridor to find Severus and Minerva outside the door waiting for them. Accompanying them was Atrien, the Head Elf.

"What exactly is going on here?" Minerva asked the two other staff members as they arrived.

"Five of the Gryffindors, led by everyone's favorite orphan, have gone into the forbidden corridor," Septima informed them.

"Atrien has already informed us of this," Minerva said. "Has anyone got any idea why they did it?"

"Quirrell is attempting to steal the Package," Severus replied. "Atrien told us that as well."

"Are we sure about that?" Minerva asked everyone. "I would think you, Severus, of all people would be sceptical about trusting Peta-Lorrum."

"According to the house-elf," Bathsheda said, indicating Dripty. "There are five Gryffindors in there. I have received notification of six people passing our challenge." This time, she indicated her and Septima.

"I checked Quirinius's flat and office on my way past," Severus said. "He was in neither."

"Atrien can be having the house-elves search for Professor Quirrell," Atrien said.

"Please do," Minerva said.

Atrien nodded and turned to Dripty.

"Dripty, we must be beginning the search."

"Yes, Ma'am!"

Both house-elves apparated, leaving the four professors on their own.

"We need to get those children out of there before they get themselves killed," Septima said.

"Not to mention stopping Quirinius from getting the Package," Bathsheda added.

Even when alone, the staff had been told to refer to the Philosopher's Stone as "The Package" in the event that someone might be listening in on them.

"Has Albus been notified?" asked Septima.

"Already done," Severus said.

"We had best get started then," Minerva said

She flung open the door, and the four of them began to progress through their own challenges.

The five Gryffindors passed through their own door and found themselves in a large cavern. Large stalactites covered the ceiling, but the more important feature of the room was in front of them.

Covering the floor of the room was a giant chessboard. Both sides were lined with pieces, with the black pieces on their half of the room. The pieces were a few inches below the stalactites, leaving no room to move over the board.

Across the room were a group of more detailed white pieces. Rose's attention was drawn to the king and queen, however; they were in the form of Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall, respectively.

"Chess!" Ron exclaimed. "Now this I can do!"

Ron was a little disappointed by the last challenge. Everyone else had done something, but he struggled to keep up with any of it. Now, they were faced with a chess match. Now was his time to shine.

"Do we play our way across?" asked Sally-Anne.

"Let's find out!" Rose exclaimed, and began to skip across the board. As she reached the white line, the pawns moved to block her path.

"Excuse me," she said. "Would you please let me through?" Her picnic basket appeared on her arm. "My grandmother's old and sick, and I'm bringing her a basket of muffins!"

In spite of all the life-threatening danger, Sally-Anne burst out laughing. Not only had Rose read the book that Sally-Anne had gotten her, but she was now pretending to be Little Red Riding Hood.

"There is no grandmother past this line," the White Queen said sternly in McGonagall's voice. "We will not stand aside unless you can defeat us in a fair game."

"Okay!" Rose said cheerfully. She considered using dimension jumper to bypass the line entirely, but she couldn't take her friends with her. Sure, it would keep them safe, but they couldn't easily pass through the dimensional prison to go back. There was nowhere to go but forward.

She cheerfully skipped back to the other side and looked up and down along the black line.

"So we just sit back and command the pieces?" she asked as she reached her friends. "That seems a little boring."

"We cannot begin the match until all five of you are on the board," the Black King said. Unlike the white pieces, the black pieces were a little more generic. None of them had custom faces, but instead all wore helmets over their heads. Looking back over her shoulder, Rose noticed that the white king and queen were holding their helmets.

"We need to be the pieces?!" Hermione shrieked. "That's dangerous! We'll get ourselves killed!"

"Remember everyone," Rose said, "the fate of the world depends on it."

"So we're going to play chess to save the world?" Ron asked eagerly.

"Yup!"

He grinned. "I have been preparing for this moment my entire life."

"We cannot be seriously considering this!" Hermione shouted. "I'm sure the teachers are on their way!"

"Hermione," Rose said, turning to her friend. "Ronald is a master at chess. Even if Professor McGonagall is good, Ronald can do this. Not to mention he'll have you backing him up. We can't fail."

"I still–" Hermione said, but Ron cut her off before she could kill any more of his joy.

"Rose, you take the king's place," Ron said. "You're the one we need in one piece when we make it to the next room."

"I'll be in one piece regardless," Rose said. "I can survive anything. Put someone less durable than me as the King, like… anyone else."

"Harry, then," Ron said, turning to his best friend. "You're my best mate, so you take king."

"Alright," Harry said, turning to the king. The large statue kindly stepped down so Harry could take his place.

"Sally-Anne, Hermione, take the castles," Ron said. "They're least likely to get captured. Rose, take the king's bishop."

"Okay!" Rose skipped happily over to one of the bishops, who stepped down for the crimson-haired girl.

"What about you?" Sally-Anne asked as she took the place of the right castle. "Which piece are you going to be?"

Ron smirked. "I'm gonna be a knight." The piece between Hermione and Rose hopped down, allowing Ron to take its place.

No sooner had Ron taken the place of the knight than a white pawn moved forward to take the center of the board.

Ron moved piece after piece, expertly commanding the board. But even with his incredible aptitude for chess, it was still a difficult game. Ron wracked his brain for what McGonagall had told them back at the start of Transfiguration. Something about limited by the caster's intelligence. That meant that Professor McGonagall was actually that good at chess.

The first of the problems that they experienced was when one of them had to take a piece. Ron ran into it first, when he attempted to take a pawn.

"How am I supposed to move it?" Ron asked.

Whenever one of the white pieces took one of their pieces, or one of their pieces took a white piece, the taker picked up the other piece and flung it across the room. This was a trivial task for a large, stone statue, but not so easily managed by five first-year students.

"What about a levitation charm?" Sally-Anne suggested. "If we all work together, then we can–"

"Telekinetic Sphere!"

A shimmering sphere appeared around the pawn in front of Ron. The piece was lifted into the air, then flung across the board, landing on the edge of the cavern behind the white line.

Ron turned to see Rose with her wand in her hand.

"Job done!" she exclaimed. "Great idea, Sally-Anne!"

"What was that?" Hermione asked.

"Telekinetic Sphere," replied Rose. "Eighth-level spell that can move an object weighing up to 5,000 pounds 30 feet per round. The sphere's also indestructible!"

"Nice!" Ron shouted, moving to take the place of the pawn.

Behind him, Sally-Anne and Harry began laughing.

"Oi!" Ron shouted. "Pay attention, you two!"

"Sorry!" Sally-Anne shouted. "Muggle joke!"

Ron wasn't in any mood for joking. Every move he made could spell the end for his friends, and he was still exhausted from the prison in the previous chamber.

Still, the game progressed, with Rose picking off the pieces whenever any of the five of them needed to capture a piece. In the end, it came down to the five of them on black, and king, queen, one of their castles, and some pawns remaining for white.

Rose was impressed with how well Ronald was handling the pressure he must've been under. Rose vaguely remembered her friend Veshraolea saying something about a chess game her cousin had played as part of a dungeon crawl. He had had to command the entire field, potentially killing his friends with every move. But he had been in an antimagic field, which was why the mage hadn't just teleported everyone across. Veshraolea had said that her cousin had been paralyzed with fear, but Ronald was moving his pieces around without fear that he would kill his friends. Despite the handicap of not being able to lose one of his friends, he had still been playing magnificently.

"Ron, is everything alright?" Sally-Anne asked. "You've been thinking for a while."

"You see it too, don't you?" asked Hermione sadly. "We win in three moves, but…"

"Knight checks king," Ron began. He paused, not even wanting to so much as think about his next move. "Queen takes knight, bishop checks king, queen blocks bishop, bishop takes queen, checkmate."

"Ron, you can't!" shouted Sally-Anne. "You'll get yourself killed!"

"But this is what I'm good at!" he shouted back. "I've been fairly useless up until now, and now that Hermione and Rose are here, I'm going to continue to be useless after this. The only other thing I can do is pull random facts out of my head, but Hermione and Rose can do that far better than I can! This is the only reason I need to be here! Besides, I'm not the one that needs to continue. That's Harry and Rose!"

"What can I do?" asked Harry.

The boy realized that he hadn't actually done much at all this entire night either. Other than dragging all of his friends into this mess, all he had accomplished was snatching a flying key out of midair in a challenge that was apparently designed to be an awful lot like Quidditch. Otherwise, he had counted entirely on Ron or the girls to help him through.

"You've beaten He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named before!" shouted Ronald. "You can do it again!"

"Yeah, but I don't know how I did it the first time!" argued Harry.

"Well, today's a good day to find out!" shouted Rose.

"Rose said the fate of the world may be riding on this game!" shouted Ron. "We can win this right now, and we're probably not going to get another shot! This is our only chance! We've got to take it!"

"But you'll die!" Hermione argued, turning to Rose. "Can't you do something?"

Rose didn't reply because Rose was thinking. When she found herself in a situation such as this, with people's lives on the line, she often thought of Sk'lar. He kept his cool in battle… usually. Except that one time with his parents, or that other time with… usually. She decided to stick with usually. Nevertheless, Sk'lar was usually a good role model. What would he do in this situation?

He wouldn't have put his friends in this mess for one thing. Sk'lar would've just used dimension step to teleport everyone safely past the white line, which Rose should've done in the first place. She kept forgetting that wish allowed her to move any travelers from any location on any plane to any other location on any other plane. Could she do that now?

No, that wasn't fair to Ron. He deserved to win this. Ronald had worked hard in this match; Rose began to wonder how his strategic mind could be used later in combat. In her world, he would just become a teleportation specialist like Sk'lar, but that wasn't really an option in this world.

Rose decided that that was a question for another day, but teleportation spells did remind her of something. In fact, it answered her question.

I know what Sk'lar would do!

"Rose!" Hermione shouted again.

"I've got an idea!" Rose shouted back at her friend.

Rose power surged Serendipity for the fourth time in the past 10 minutes and waved her at Ron. "Benign Transposition!"

In the blink of an eye, Rose and Ron swapped places. Before he knew what was happening, Ron found himself being a bishop, and Rose found herself being a knight.

"Rose, no!" shouted Hermione.

"I can survive anything!" Rose shouted, "but you lot can't! You're my friends, and I'm not gonna lose any of you!"

She counted out six seconds, then whispered another spell.

"Iron Body."

Rose had cast this spell before, so she knew to ready herself for the sudden shift in physiology, but then realized that the change wouldn't be as drastic this time. Being partially undead, she already had no functioning respiratory system, so there was no panic as her heart continued to not beat and her lungs continued to not move.

The Artificer moved two spaces forward, and one space to the side. Her now heavy footfalls echoed through the chamber as she took her new place on the board. "Oi!" she shouted at the White Queen. "Check, bitch!"

Rose didn't like swearing in Common, but sometimes Draconic or Dwarven didn't do the trick.

The White Queen angrily turned to face Rose. "You would do well to watch your tongue, young lady!" she scolded Rose in McGonagall's voice. "I'll just have to teach you some manners!"

The large statue approached Rose, looming over the pale girl's head. The queen grabbed Rose and tried to throw her.

"Tried" being the operative word. The living chess piece had difficulty picking up the small girl.

Rose smirked. "Having a little trouble there, Queeny?" she asked as the piece slowly picked up the Artificer.

Hermione watched as the White Queen struggled to pick up her best friend. How did Rose do that?

"Rose, what'd you do?" called Ron.

"Used iron body to increase my weight tenfold," Rose replied as the queen finally succeeded in lifting the small girl.

Rose was lobbed to the side of the board, landing with a loud thud as the now heavy girl hit the stone floor. She climbed to her feet, barely scathed by the throw. Rose dismissed the spell, then looked up at her friends.

"Well don't just stand there! Finish the game!"

Ron nodded, and moved himself a few squares. "Check!"

Sure enough, the large queen moved in front of him to block. He advanced on the queen, then realized that he had a problem.

"How can we move her?" Ron shouted at Rose as the queen smirked. "Can you do that sphere thing?"

"Better," Rose said, grinning maliciously.

Her friends took note that that was Rose's evil smile. They had each seen it before, and some of them (Ronald) had learned to avoid it at all costs. If the young Gryffindor flashed that smile, it was best to run away as fast as possible, or apologize incessantly for whatever it was that caused the smile to appear on her face, because if neither of the above happened, the other Gryffindors were fairly certain that the target had little time left to live. It was true that none of them had ever seen Rose kill someone, but she gave the distinct impression that she had no issues with doing so.

"Clenched Fist!"

A large, shimmering fist flew across the board, slamming headlong into the queen. The sound of the collision echoed around the chamber as the pair continued moving across the board, driven by the momentum of the fist, all the way to the side of the board, completely removing the queen from play.

"Nobody enters my personal space!" Rose shouted after the queen. "I enter other peoples' personal space!"

Ron glanced over at Rose with a look of slight terror, then continued his move. He stood up straight, and faced the White King, which stared back at the young chess master with Professor Dumbledore's face.

"Checkmate!"

The king bowed to Ron, and stepped aside to allow the children to pass through.

"Well played," the king congratulated Ron on his way past. "Well played, indeed."

"Good game," Ron said as he passed the king.

"Rose, are you alright?" Sally-Anne asked.

"Yeah, I'm okay," she said. "The queen barely got me. Also, I think I understand the purpose of that hallway!"

"Really?" asked Harry.

"If one of us got flung back towards that wall, it might land us right back into the dimensional prison, forcing us to escape from it once again. I think the hallway serves as a buffer between the two rooms."

"Why not just put a door in the way?" asked Sally-Anne.

"You could break through the door," Hermione replied. "The door might not stop the player from falling back inside the prison."

"I guess that makes sense," Sally-Anne said.

"Let's get moving!" Harry shouted impatiently.

The five of them left the chess room, moving onto the next challenge.

As the children finished up their chess match, the four professors looked around the room at the swarm of flying keys.

"Does anyone want to give the broom a shot?" Septima asked.

Minerva was the best flier of the four of them, but it had been years since she'd flown. She wasn't sure that she'd be able to catch the silver key, even in its current state.

Severus didn't understand the purpose of this challenge. Sure, Filius had charmed the keys to resist the summoning charm, and reinforced the doors and walls against damage, as the four of them had discovered, but why even put the key in the room at all? Why not just put a bunch of fake keys to distract the perpetrator indefinitely?

Severus dismissed the blatant flaw for the moment, and decided on the simple solution.

Without saying a word, the Potions Master pointed his wand at the silver key with the bent blue wings. A green bolt shot out of his wand and struck part of the wall next to it, causing a small chunk of rock to fall. With a wave of his wand, the piece flew towards him, taking the silver key with it. The Potions Master grabbed the key and jammed it in the door.

All three of his colleagues looked on in stunned silence.

"I knew there was a reason we tolerated you," Minerva muttered as they passed through the threshold into the next room.

A familiar pink glow illuminated the room, but Septima and Bathsheda had both memorized the counter-runes and the incantations. The two women had worked together on formulating the polar equations for each rune in the chamber, then Septima had written down the counter-runes for each one. They had both spent days memorizing the counter-runes before burning the papers.

After less than a minute, a hole opened up in the prison, allowing the four professors to exit through the door. The four professors walked through it and into the room with the chessboard.

"Figures," grumbled Severus. "What is it with you and chess?"

"There are few people who can best me at it, Severus," Minerva replied matter-of-factly. "Sadly, it looks like I need to add a certain first-year chess prodigy to that list."

She strutted across the field. Upon reaching the white line, she yelled "Sides!"

The entire white line parted to allow her and the other three to pass.

"Thank you," she said to the king and queen on her way past.

"What's that smell?" asked Ron, covering his mouth and nose.

"Hermione, isn't that–" Sally-Anne began.

"A mountain troll," Hermione breathed, as she began to tremble. "It's a mountain troll!"

The room was dimly lit, so there was no way for them to see it. It could come out of nowhere and attack them at any second!

Both girls began to have flashes of that day. Hermione, laying there helpless, unable to stop the troll from killing them; Sally-Anne, struggling to save her friend before they were both smashed to bits. It had been a horrible day for both of them, and the smell of a troll brought back the awful memories.

"It's not just any troll," Rose replied, surveying the room through her goggles. "It's a dead troll."

She looked over at the troll, which was lying in a bloody heap on the floor. There was a huge gash in the top of its head, presumably the cause of the creature's death.

"Come on," Rose said, taking both Hermione and Sally-Anne by the hand.

As the children entered the next chamber, a line of fire sprang up between them and either exit to the room.

In this chamber stood seven bottles, all of different shapes and sizes, lined up side by side on a table to their right. They weren't lined up in any particular order, but instead seemingly at random. The smallest bottle was in the middle, the largest next to the one furthest to the students' right, and the widest one was on that one's right.

In front of the bottles was a piece of parchment that read:

Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,

Two of us will help you, whichever you would find,

One among us seven will let you move ahead,

Another will transport the drinker back instead,

Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore,

To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:

First, however slyly the poison tries to hide

You will always find some on nettle wine's left side;

Second, different are those who stand at either end,

But if you would move onward, neither is your friend;

Third, as you see clearly, all are different size,

Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;

Fourth, the second left and the second on the right

Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.

"Is that a logic puzzle?" Hermione asked. "I love those!"

"Of course you do," muttered Ron.

"I can do this one," Hermione said, and began to think over the puzzle.

"While you do that," Rose said, pulling out her picnic basket. From within the wicker basket, Intelligencer flew out, circling around Rose a few times and coming to rest on her shoulder. Rose replaced the Picnic Basket on her charm bracelet, and pulled her efficient quiver off next. From within the quiver, she produced her wand of invisibility and tapped Intelligencer with it. The homunculus immediately vanished from sight.

"Int, I need you to scout ahead. Make sure Quirrell hasn't gotten the Philosopher's Stone, or alert me if he does get it. If he manages to spot you, tell me at once so I can pull you out of there. This is most likely the last challenge, since we're down to the last of the significant professors."

Intelligencer nodded, and flew over the black flames that covered most of the exit to the room.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"Fluffy was Mr. Hagrid," Rose said, holding up a finger after she replaced her quiver. "Devil's Snare was Professor Sprout, then the keys were Professor Flitwick's doing, and maybe Madame Hooch. The ward was probably Professors Vector and Babbling, since it used both runes and Arithmancy, and the chess was obviously Professor McGonagall. This is potions and logic, which means it's got to be Professor Snape. The only one left is Professor Dumbledore, since the other professors don't teach magic-heavy subjects."

"What do you think Professor Dumbledore would do?" Ron asked.

"I'm not sure," Rose said. She grinned. "But I can't wait to find out!"

"I've got it!" Hermione exclaimed, pointing at the first one on their left. "That one brings us back." She pointed at the middle one, from which it looked like something had already been drank. "That one brings us forward."

"How do you know?" asked Harry.

Hermione counted along the line, from her left to her right. "First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh. Second and Sixth must be the same from clue four, so that leaves only wine or poison in those two. But since Sixth is the biggest one, from clue three we know that it can't be lethal, so Second and Sixth are nettle wine. From clue one, Third and Seventh must be poison, since they're on nettle wine's left side. From clue two we know that First must be different from Seventh, but not the potion to move forward, so it must be the potion to move backward. That leaves Fourth and Fifth remaining as the last poison and the potion to move forward. Since Fourth is the smallest, it can't be poison, and therefore must be the potion to allow us to move forward."

"That makes sense," Rose said, nodding. Something about this didn't sit right with her. It was too… easy. Professor Snape was like Shadow. What would Shadow do? Shadow would never make something this easy, despite how difficult a logic puzzle might be in a world where most people didn't think logically.

"Alright, why don't we try it?" Ron said. "We've got to be almost there."

He reached for the small bottle.

"Wait!" Rose shouted.

"What?" Hermione asked. "You said yourself that this makes sense for the riddle."

"But the riddle's a trap!" Rose replied. "There's no trick to this one! It's Professor Snape's challenge!"

"Rose, look," Hermione said. "I know that you like Professor Snape, for whatever bizarre, Rose reason, but that doesn't mean that this is going to be the best one!"

"It's not because I like Professor Snape," Rose replied. "Also, for the record, I liked the ward best so far. But it's because he acts, dresses and talks a lot like my girlfriend, Shadow, so I suspect that the two of them think similarly, too."

"Which one's Shadow again?" whispered Harry to Sally-Anne.

"Her best friend, I think," Sally-Anne replied.

"Saying that Shadow is paranoid is an understatement. She is extremely paranoid. No, not even that describes it. A word doesn't exist to describe how paranoid she is. She had me remove the need to eat, sleep and breathe just so she wouldn't have to worry about being poisoned by her food, or killed in her sleep, or suffocated. If she were asked to create a challenge that involved potions, and there had to be a correct solution, then she'd poison all of them except two, make one of them look like it had been consumed already, and make another one the actual potion. Then, she'd write a false riddle as a clue that pointed to the one that looked like it had been consumed."

"Hold on, how do you mean 'girlfriend'?" Sally-Anne asked.

"If there's one thing I've learned from Shadow, it's to never trust the obvious solution," Rose concluded, "which means that that isn't the solution to this puzzle. The solution is cleverly mixed in with the rest of them, and I can almost promise you that the immunity potion would register as poisonous under almost any test that we could perform. The only way to distinguish it is to actually know what the correct solution is, or to test it somehow. Knowing Professor Snape, he just tossed in the riddle as a red herring and memorized the correct solution."

The Gryffindors gaped at her. Hermione was keeping up with her strange friend just fine, but it was still a little strange that Rose was thinking so… rationally. Especially after everything Rose had said in the past few hours. There must be something that wouldn't make sense.

"Of course, if Shadow were asked to defend the Philosopher's Stone," Rose added, smiling as she fondly remembered her girlfriend, "she would have just built an indestructible box around it, removing any means of accessing said box. Then she'd wrap it in chains for good measure, weigh it down and throw it into the deepest part of the ocean. Then, for additional security, she'd erase her memory of it, thus ensuring that no one even remembered its location."

There it was.

The Gryffindors continued to gape at her.

Rose beamed back at them. It was nice getting to call Shadow her girlfriend and not run the risk of the Halfling cutting out her tongue, as she'd promised to do if Rose used the words "girlfriend", "love", or a bunch of other words Rose had written down and immediately forgotten.

"I was so sure that I was right," Hermione said finally.

"You solved the riddle, Hermione," Rose said. "You were right. You didn't fail, you were tricked. It happens to everyone. It's happened to me, it's happened to my brother." She shrugged. "It happens."

"You've got some weird friends," Ron said.

"We're her friends, Ron," Sally-Anne reminded him.

"And we must be weird too because we're her friends," Ron shot back. "Who else other than weird people would be friends with her?"

"Of course!" Rose exclaimed. "Normal people are so boring!"

"Case and point."

"Alright, then how do we know what to do?" Harry asked. "How do we get past this?"

"I'm immune to poison," Rose said. "And fire, for that matter. I can do the same for all of you as well!" Rose produced Serendipity, power surged her, then stopped for a moment. "Wait, Ronald!"

"What?" the ginger asked, looking panicked.

"We're friends?"

Ron hesitated before responding with "Yeah?"

"Kethé!" Rose exclaimed, throwing up her hands. "I've got four first-year friends!"

"'First-year'?" Harry asked.

"I've got other friends!" Serendipity vanished from Rose's hand as she began to count on her fingers. "Dripty's my friend, and Fred is my friend, and George is my friend, and Professor Snape's my friend, and–"

"I am not your friend, Peta-Lorrum!"

The first-years turned to see four professors walking through the fire. Professors McGonagall, Vector, Snape, and Babbling emerged unscathed from the black flames.

Interesting, Rose thought. It's only harmful from one direction. How'd they manage that? More importantly, what took them so long?

"You five," Professor McGonagall said, "have no idea just how much trouble you're in."