S. Snape (exsequeverus) wrote in bearandbarnacle, @ 2009-03-02 15:08:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | luciusthread, qthread, rincewindthread, secrets, sevpost, siriusthread, topic |
Severus Snape: Topic: Secrets
Eight Things Severus Snape Has Learned This Week
1. Having one's own voice back is a decided advantage in persuading Margate to let one apparate out for the day; with a voice that sounds like one's spent one's life sucking coffin-nails, a person had best not attempt to leave for more than a few hours, and certainly not two days in a row.
2. The headquarters of the International Association of Master-Brewers is located in Switzerland for a reason. He's not the first charter member to get conscripted by a political lunatic and need the asylum of anonymity in order to continue adding to their store and lore without interruption or imprisonment.
2a. IAMB's clerks will fall over backwards for a member who's not only made significant contributions but has been so considerate as to give them an actual, genuine, non-falsified death certificate and an apparently un-disenchantable reduced biological age to work with.
2b. Not to mention a hermit who never told anyone still living where he went on holidays, who wasn't on good terms with his Wizarding extended family, who's known for making capable brewers out of disinterested children entirely unconnected to him whom he couldn't stand, whose mother's line is bar sinister of a prominent Slytherin known for a certain type of adventurousness. For someone like that, it's barely a stretch at all to create a summer-and-owl-trained home-schooled apprentice of some undefined blood-relationship from out the back end of nowhere, and no trouble whatsoever to put this new-made young man through his NEWTS and mastery assessments.
3. NEVER surprise Poppy Pomfrey unless you are willing to be attacked with terrifying speed and viciousness and nearly broken in half from it and have an absorbent cloth handy. And if you must, do not expect to get any business done without the aid of half an hour and an entire pot of doctored tea.
3a. Apparently he's not getting his missing memories back, because he's damned well not going begging to the Potter brat for them. He probably doesn't want them in his head anyway, to be honest.
3b. Horace Slughorn is a surprisingly sentimental old bastard, especially if you take the trouble to treat your communications to him with oils of pineapple and cut grass and send them through someone he knows, and has lost none of his sense for a good investment.
3c. Black (just a Black, not Sirius Black; that's the only way to think of him), being born to wealth, doesn't blink at prices that'll let a mill-town lad (who knows where all the good second-hand places are and has managed to make the IAMB clerks go watery-eyed with the joy of an easy assignment) furnish a small stillroom well enough to be going on with.
4. House-elves are astoundingly resourceful little twits, and if you don't try to clothe, condescend to, or otherwise humiliate them they'll politely ignore it later if the world assumes you've been released from their care but nothing was ever officially done to remove you.
4a. Kissing a painting is neither as bizarre or uncomfortable as he'd expected, but less heart-easing than he'd hoped and entirely as misery-making as he'd feared.
4b. Allowing anyone who's ever worked for Lucius to sense an iota of softening is a mistake. Now he's going to have to figure out what to do about the butter-beer soaked mess Bartemius the lesser left behind, or Dobbs (he refuses to call anything 'Dobby') will never leave him alone. Ever. Ever. He knows that damned elf.
5. Do not enter a room containing both Aberforth Dumbledore and Frederin Ollivander if you wish to retain your lunch. Even if the goat's been left in the pub.
5a. However, knowing the above is a decided advantage if you wish to persuade Ollivander to submit to a careful obliviate.
5b. His cooperation does not mean that your new, untraceable wand will differ significantly from your old one, and no, he can't walnut-stain it to look less like birch, you asked him that fifty bloody years ago and wand wood still needs to be driftwood-raw if it's to interface properly with its environment and its bearer's palm, does he make himself clear this time?
6. Gringotts does not accept the combination of a key and a post-dated will, and won't even hint at the very obvious fact that a fee is the missing portion of that equation. Sod 'em; a Slytherin knows how to be patient and build resources.
7. If one is willing to hear one's 'cousin' abused at great length, one may find that his apprentice is a welcome business investment by many, and that one's natural impatience and barbed tongue, and even any trifling similarities of forename, may be explained away by the family connection if not overdone.
7a. An owl-run would be an advisable thing to acquire. Or a perching-post, but one with a damned tray under it.
7b. It's going to take longer to look at a package labeled 'Braenden-Clayborn' and remember it's for him than to turn his head automatically when someone says 'Veris.' Not that he hasn't used aliases before, but somehow this one feels like it needs to sink in.
8. The residual venom of neither Dementors nor the Dark Lord can stand against the combination of a course of sufficiently broad antivenins (this may not actually be a factor, but he has no intention of testing it) and a really well prepared Draught of Living Death activated for a condition of sufficient urgency and complexity. At least, that's his current working hypothesis. There are one or two people he toys with the idea of discussing it with, but for the moment he's inclined to keep the possibility to himself.