 horklump - Tails!, question for profs Gryffindor for life Notorious Niffler
The first year breathed a sigh of relief when Professor Wayland said that the creatures wouldn't suffocate in their jars. She found it suspicious that it was he who had answered Stasya's question, and not the Herbology professor. Her friend had asked the latter, after all. This further cemented her suspicions that Derf was right, and the Herbology professor really was into Dark magic. We see you, Mr. Dark Wizard.
Reassurance meant that it was okay to put the horklump she'd already found in her jar for good. She rushed carefully (so as not to tread on any camo creatures) back to the mushroom patch she'd found earlier and was delighted to see that her horklump hadn't gone far. He was just a few inches over from where she'd left him; the move had clearly been to lay down his roots in a more firm spot. Emmeline bent down and dug a little bit around him so that she wouldn't tear up his roots by accident when she picked him up. She used both hands to gently lift him from his spot in the ground and deposit him in her jar. "It's okay," she assured him in a whisper, "you're safe now." She wasn't letting her jar anywhere near gnomes, nope.
Emmeline collected her jar and crab-walked to another area to look for more horklumps. Now that she thought about it, though, these jars looked suspiciously like the ones from the owl shop in Diagon Alley that were full of insects. Insects to feed to owls. But surely they wouldn't...
"Excuse me, professors," she asked as she raised her hand, "what's going to happen to all these creatures we're finding?" If they said they were food for others, she was taking her jar and running for the forest. She understood about the circle of life and all that, but she also thought it was mean to pluck these creatures up just to be food. Bigger creatures would never learn how to feed themselves that way, and somehow it seemed more like murder to her if she'd been the one to bottle up horklumps only to serve them to gnomes on a platter.
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