Classes were cancelled for the rest of the week. Questions were running through the heads of all the students. Who had killed Merwin? Why was Merwin killed? Who was going to replace him? However, while the rest of the fourth year Gryffindor students were wondering this, Remus and Chara were plotting their next two murders.

Then, after the weekend, it was back to classes for Monday. The fourth years had relatively normal lessons for the first three lessons. However, the fourth lesson was Defence Against the Dark Arts.

'You think they've got a replacement yet?' James asked as they waited outside the classroom.

'Probably, or Minnie would have told us that we have a free period,' Sirius replied. 'I wonder what the new guy's like. You think they know what happened to Merwin?'

'They were probably told. I think it would be kind of illegal for them not to be told,' Remus replied. Funnily enough, he had sort of become slightly numb to what he had done.

The door of the classroom opened.

'Come in, please,' a man's voice spoke from inside the classroom. The students stepped inside. The new teacher was a male. He had his back to the class, writing on the chalkboard. He had brown hair and wore glasses. Unlike the other professors, this one did not wear robes, but a plain black polo shirt, blue striped tie and jeans. Once the students were all sat down, he turned to face them. 'Salutations. I am Professor Sanders, and I am your new Defence the Dark Arts teacher.'

Sirius' hand shot on the air. 'Did you hear what happened to the last one?'

Next to him, James draw a finger across his neck.

'How can you make fun of something like that?' Lily asked.

'The guy was an asshole; do you really expect us to cry over him or something?' Remus shrugged. Lily looked slightly shocked that it was Remus off all people to say that.

'In response to your question, yes, I was informed,' Sanders replied. 'However, simple mathematics shows the probability of being killed is infinitesimal.' He paused, noticing the confused looks of a few of the students. He rephrased. 'The chances of being killed are very small.'

'I'm guessing someone has never heard about the curse,' James mumbled loud enough for everyone to hear.

'Curse?' Sanders questioned, intrigued.

'The DADA job's supposedly cursed,' Marlene replied. 'No one's been able to keep it more than a year.'

'Really?' Sanders asked, taking a seat at his desk. He looked over some papers in front of him before pushing them aside. 'I did have a lesson planned for today, but I'm very interested in learning more about this "curse". It does technically relate to our first topic of the year. So, I will postpone what I had planned for next lesson. Today, we'll have an open discussion. We can talk about the curse, and you can also tell me if there are any particular topics you wish to learn about this year.'

Immediately, the class knew this teacher was way better than Merwin. He had literally dropped the lesson so that the could just talk for an hour.

It got better.

After about ten minutes of discussing different topics in class, there was a knock on the door. It opened and a man stepped in. He had a light blue polo shirt, khakis, brown shoes, glasses like Sanders', and had a cardigan tied over his shoulders. No, wait, on closer inspection, it was not a cardigan, but a cat hoodie.

'Hey, Lo!' he smiled.

'Um, Patton, I'm in the middle of a class,' Sanders replied, gesturing to the students.

'Oh, sorry! I thought you said you have a free period at one thirty?' the man, Patton, asked.

'Two thirty, Patton,' Sanders corrected.

'Oops,' Patton chuckled slightly, scratching the back of his head. 'I just wanted to bring you these.'

'Are those cookies?' Peter asked, looking at the box in Patton's hands.

'Yeah, they're my own recipe! I actually own a bakery in Hogsmeade,' Patton explained.

'Hm. You know, Professor,' Sirius turned to Sanders. 'With what happened to the guy before you, you can't trust anything. Maybe we should test them, make sure they haven't been messed with.'

'I think I can trust Patton,' Sanders replied. 'I've known him since I was five. But, I will share the cookies if you want them.'

'Trying to become the popular teacher, Lo?' Patton smirked, opening the box of cookies and beginning to offer them out. Remus made sure to sneak two and hand one to Chara.

Chocolate chip, the spirit observed. Good. These guys can live. For now.

'You can't blame him. Unpopular DADA teachers don't tend to end well,' Emmeline replied to Patton's comment.

'What do you mean?' Patton asked.

'Dead!' the entire class replied in almost perfect unison.

'Last one was killed. No one knows who did it,' Cathy, a Ravenclaw girl spoke up.

'I overheard a rumour that it was a student,' Jayleigh, another Ravenclaw who was sat beside Cathy, added. 'It could be anyone in this room...'

Patton sent a worried look at Sanders. The teacher sighed. 'Patton, I'll be fine.' The other man didn't seemed convinced. Sanders got to his feet and went up to Patton and did something that surprised many of the students.

Sanders wrapped his arms around Patton a planted a kiss on his lips.

'I'll be okay, you don't need to worry.'

'O-okay,' Patton nodded, though he still sounded unsure. 'I-I should probably go. Roman wanted me to run through some lines with him.' He addressed the rest of the class. 'It was nice to meet you all!'

He turned and left, waving to the class. Sanders made his way back to his desk, but it didn't take him long to notice the looks the class were giving him. 'Yes, I am openly gay. If you have a problem with that, too bad.'

'It's not that, Professor. It's just that we've never met any of our other teachers' spouses before, let alone seen them kiss in front of us,' Lily replied.

'Whoa, okay, "spouse" is too strong a word, he's just my boyfriend,' Sanders replied.

'For how long?' Marlene inquired, obviously intrigued by the relationship gossip.

'Is this really information I should be telling students?' Sanders raised an eyebrow.

'I thought you said we could talk about anything we wanted this lesson,' Mary pointed out. ' "Open discussion", and all that.'

Sanders sighed. 'Two and a half years.'

'Two and a half years?!' Emmeline gasped. 'Okay, I think it's safe to say, you're very close to "popping the question" time.'

'Okay, this is definitely too personal to be discussing with students. Maybe we could stick with the subject of Defence Against the Dark Arts,' the teacher replied.

They didn't stick to the subject.

'Definitely as good as Professor Lester was.'

'As good? More like better! Are you forgetting he gave us cookies?'

'Chocolate chip cookies, you can't forget the chocolate.'

'You'd never forget the chocolate, Moony.'

The four Marauders made their way down the corridors after their Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson was over. They had Monster Studies for their last lesson, and so it was time for Peter to head off to the common room. He said goodbye to his friends before heading off.

The other three gathered outside the Monster Studies classroom, Remus looking around for Chara. He hadn't seen her since he left the DADA classroom. She was probably working on getting rid of anything that would interfere with their plan.

The door of the classroom was surrounded by the blue aura of Sans' magic and pushed open. The students made their way inside, extremely excited. They were going to be learning how to use monster magic, starting today. They couldn't wait!

But apparently, they had to wait.

'sorry, kiddos, but i forgot something important we have to go through before we start doing magic,' Sans apologised after they'd all sat down at their desks. 'we have to go through stats.'

Frisk, who'd been sat on Sans' desk, jumped to her feet summoning her soul. She then double-tapped it with her finger, and a black box with white writing appeared.

'these are frisk's stats,' Sans explained. 'everyone has different statistics, for different reasons. i'm gonna take you through the basic stats today.

'HP. health points. basically, how much damage you can take before you die. for monsters, HP varies drastically between everyone. for example, my bro has 680 HP. on the other hand, i only have 1.'

Whispers filled the room. One health point? He could only take one damage, and he'd be dead? Merlin's beard, he was vulnerable.

'as you can see, frisk's maximum HP is 20. this is the average for most humans your age. humans live through the first years of their lives with 10, then it jumps to 20 when they are ten years old, then 50 when they turn eighteen. they can also train themselves to raise their HP even more,' Sans continued. 'that isn't the only way for a person to raise their maximum HP, however. i'll come back to that later.'

'next. there's ATK and DEF. ATK is how strong your attacks are, how much damage you can inflict. DEF is the strength of your defence. the higher your defence, the less damage you take.

'now, the final statistics I want to go over are EXP and LOVE. both of these are anagrams. EXP stands for execution points.'

A chill spread through the class as Sans said this.

'A way of quantifying the pain you have inflicted on others. When you kill someone, your EXP increases. When you have enough EXP, your LOVE increases. LOVE stands for level of violence, a way of measuring someone's capacity to hurt. The more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself. The more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. The more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others.'

Remus' heart thudded in his chest. He hoped – no, prayed – that Sans didn't ask them to practice checking their stats.

'now, i want you all to practice checking both your own and others' stats.'

Fuck.

As everyone else started standing up and summoning their souls, Remus stayed frozen in his chair. This was it. They'd see how much LOVE and EXP he had, and he'd be screwed.

'Okay, let's get this done,' James spoke, breaking Remus from his trance.

'I'm guessing you have experience with this, Moony,' Sirius turned to his friend, who was still sat in his chair. 'You wanna go first?'

'U-um...'

'I can deal with this.'

Chara had appeared next to Remus. She placed a hand on the lycanthrope's shoulder, concentrating hard.

'It should be okay. Go ahead.'

Remus, hoping whatever Chara had done had worked, summoned his soul and double-tapped it.

Remus Lupin

ATK: 25

DEF: 25

LV: 1

Remus let out a sigh of relief. He didn't know how, but somehow Chara had manipulated the appearance of his stats. The only thing that looked slightly off was that the numbers were in red instead of white. However, it seemed James and Sirius did not notice.

'Seems easy enough,' James nodded, summoning his own soul, double-tapping it.

James Potter

ATK: 27

DEF: 23

LV: 1

Sirius then did the same.

Sirius Black

ATK: 28

DEF: 22

LV: 1

'Hell yeah, I have the highest attack!' Sirius grinned.

'Not true,' Chara smirked.

'Yeah, but I have higher defence than you,' James replied to Sirius.

'I have the highest defence,' Remus countered, smiling at the competitiveness of his two friends. He noticed Sans glancing in his direction and quickly double-tapped his soul, knowing the skeleton definitely would notice the red writing and question it.

The rest of the lesson was just people comparing their stats. No one in the class had any LOVE above 1, and no one had ATK and DEF above 28. Well, no one except Remus.

Once it was over and they left the classroom, Remus let out a sigh of relief. However, he didn't get to relax for long as Chara gestured for him to follow her into an empty classroom. As he did so, she held out to him a pair of gloves and a knife.

'It's time. You know what to do.'