The final whistle of the Quidditch match should have been the prelude to Gryffindor's carnival, the punctuation mark that ended all turbulence.
However, reality was far from that.
In the dark, damp Slytherin common room, the firelight cast a sickly green glow, twisting and flickering across the stone walls. The air was heavy, more suffocating than the silt at the bottom of the lake.
The name Alan Scott was being chewed over here by every unwilling soul, like a slow-acting poison.
"I swear on my broomstick, that Scott didn't use any flying technique at all!" snarled a fifth-year Seeker, squeezing the silver trophy in his hands until it creaked, veins bulging on his knuckles. His voice was thick with the humiliation of seeing his skill trampled. "He used some filthy Muggle trick, called… a mathematical formula!"
"Formula?" A pale-faced Slytherin beside him frowned, as if the word itself brought nausea.
"A kind of dark sorcery," the Seeker lowered his voice, though it grew more certain. "My father has long warned me: Muggles are best at using crooked methods to clumsily imitate our wizarding power. They've desecrated Quidditch!"
Desecrated.
The word dropped like a stone into stagnant water, instantly stirring countless ripples.
"He's right! It's blasphemy!" another pure-blood supporter jumped up, waving his arms furiously. "The sacred sport of Quidditch has been polluted by Muggle sorcery! What we lost was not a game—it was wizarding dignity!"
Hatred had found its outlet.
The shame of defeat was deftly transformed into rage against heresy.
The rumor began to reproduce itself. Each retelling added more venom, more malice. Within a few days, the version that had once carried a faint air of technical discussion—the "mathematical formula" theory—had rotted and mutated into a more incendiary, discriminatory final form:
"That Muggle-born genius of Gryffindor used Muggle sorcery to pollute the sacred sport of Quidditch."
This version of the rumor was flawless. It neatly stripped away the truth—that Slytherin had simply been outplayed—and cloaked their failure in the tragic garb of a "crime beyond their control." Every ounce of discontent, envy, and hatred now had a sharp, clear target: Alan Scott.
The castle's atmosphere had changed.
Walking the corridor toward the Great Hall, Alan could feel the gazes of the Slytherins. They were no longer just hostile; they were poisoned, scrutinizing him as if searching his skin for a Muggle's brand. Whispers cut off abruptly as he passed, only to swell louder once he was gone.
"Alan, you have to do something!"
At the breakfast table, Lee Jordan crushed a piece of buttered bread into dough, his face full of worry. "You can't just let them slander you like this!"
Even Fred and George were unusually serious, their usual mischief gone.
"He's right," George muttered, eyes flashing dangerously. "Need us to help? We could sneak in and paint all their brooms permanent pink. What do you think?"
"Good idea—but it only treats the symptoms."
Alan calmly cut his steak with his knife, the edges of the slice neat and exact. His face showed no trace of anger, only the focus of a researcher confronted with an intriguing subject.
He raised his head, looking at his friends evenly.
"Denying or retaliating will only give them satisfaction. It will make them think we've been struck in the heart, desperate to explain—that, in turn, indirectly confirms the truth of their rumor."
Alan paused, placed a piece of beef in his mouth, and chewed slowly.
"When facing this kind of information war, the best defense… is offense."
"How do we attack?" the three asked in unison.
Alan smiled mysteriously, but gave no answer.
In the days that followed, Alan's actions left everyone watching him utterly dumbfounded.
He did not avoid the rumors. On the contrary, he deliberately reinforced the very label of "Muggle prodigy" that had been forced on him.
He became a frequent visitor to the library—and each time, he would deliberately sit in the areas most crowded with Slytherin students.
Then, under countless suspicious, wary, and disdainful gazes, he would slowly, deliberately, pull out of his bag one strange object after another—tools utterly unheard of in the wizarding world.
Alan pulled out a silver compass, its legs stretching wide—one end tipped with a sharp needle, the other with an ink pen.
Then, a translucent plastic protractor, etched with fine scales, curved like a crescent moon.
He spread out a massive sheet of parchment on the desk, pressing down the four corners with brass paperweights.
The entire process was brimming with ritual.
Under the breathless gaze of the Slytherin students, Alan began his "performance."
With those so-called Muggle alchemical tools, he drew on the parchment intricate, symmetrical diagrams—magic circles that carried no magical resonance at all.
The patterns were made of countless razor-precise lines and arcs. They lacked the mystery and vitality of traditional arrays, instead exuding a cold, inhuman beauty of pure logic.
A foreign beauty. An unsettling, almost "evil" aesthetic.
Alan drew with utter focus, immersed in his own world. From time to time, he would pause, picking up a quill to jot strings of numbers and symbols beside the figures—notations his onlookers could not begin to decipher.
Each time he finished one of these "masterpieces," he would deliberately hold the parchment up to the light streaming through the windows, examining it with the satisfied smile of a creator.
At last, he carefully folded the parchments, storing them as though they were priceless works of art.
His behavior succeeded in plunging the rumor-mongers into unprecedented confusion.
They wanted to laugh, to mock him, yet found themselves speechless—for they could not understand a single thing he was doing. The fear and unease born of ignorance began to gnaw at them.
Was this Muggle genius… truly researching some dreadful sorcery they could never comprehend?
But Alan wasn't finished.
One Friday afternoon, in a corner of the Gryffindor common room, he found the Weasley twins.
"I need your help," Alan said bluntly.
"Of course!" Fred puffed his chest proudly. "If we can do it, it's yours!"
"Your 'Memory Ink'—it can imitate someone else's handwriting, right?"
"Imitate handwriting?" George's eyes gleamed. "Child's play! As long as we've seen it once, we can copy it well enough to fool Filch's old eyes!"
"Good."
Alan handed them a parchment covered in text.
"Rewrite this onto a new sheet of parchment, in handwriting that looks very official—very stiff, like a traditional scholar. And use Memory Ink."
The twins exchanged a curious glance, then bent over the parchment to read.
"Dear Mr. Alan Scott,
We have been honored to receive your preliminary ideas on The Intrinsic Correlation Between Spell Trajectories and Parabolic Equations. The Association for Muggle Magic Research wishes to extend its highest admiration for your pioneering contribution in applying mathematics—this great tool—to the field of modern magic.
…We sincerely invite you to our headquarters during the Christmas holidays for deeper academic exchange."
"Pfft—!"
George almost sprayed laughter across the parchment.
"What the hell is this? Association for Muggle Magic Research? Alan, you've got to be joking!"
"That's exactly the point." Alan's expression remained cold, unnervingly calm. "Remember—use Memory Ink. Once the ink dries, the writing will be fixed by magic. No detection spell will ever prove it's a forgery."
The next morning, at breakfast, the letter from this so-called "mysterious organization" was "accidentally" found by a younger Ravenclaw in the library.
The news spread faster than the flu.
By the time the letter made its way, passed hand to hand, to the Slytherin table, the whole of Hogwarts was buzzing with excitement.
The Slytherins fell silent.
They stared at one another, faces caught in a storm of shock, confusion, and absurdity.
They suddenly realized: the rumor they had painstakingly forged, the poisoned sword meant to stab their enemy, had been taken up by Alan in a way they couldn't fathom—twisted, reforged, and turned into what sounded like a prestigious medal.
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