TOADKEEPER: Trevor on Trial

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 37812

Newly freed from her cabin, Captain Tabouli is growing fond of her new toad.  Since rescuing him from the watery grave to which the cruel Cindy condemned him, she has devoted many happy hours to the development of a new and elaborate theory to house him, in which Neville's nomadic toad Trevor is no ordinary pet, but an evil agent of Voldemort, cleverly masked by the wily, warty disguise which enables him to spy on Harry Potter.  Trevor is a toad of treachery, and Neville is none other than the TOADKEEPER (The Odious Amphibian: Death-eater Knavishly Executing Espionage, Pursuing Evil Revenge).

For the enlightenment of those who have not yet supped at TOADKEEPER's intimidating fount of canon evidence, here are the primary points in favour of this theory:

1. Suspicious Disappearances

The ongoing disappearance of Trevor is introduced very early in the series, apparently as a ploy to illustrate Neville's absent-mindedness.  However, note that he never vanishes entirely, as a true toadbrained walkabout pet might do.  No, he vanishes, for up to hours at a time, and then turns up again.  Is he really just an animal, straying randomly, or is he up to something more sinister, such as passing information on Harry to Voldemort's allies?  If this sounds far-fetched, remember one particular bid for freedom and tremble... Trevor tried to escape in the school on the night the Trio were going to face Voldemort, because Neville was clutching him by the portrait. Indeed, Neville tries to stop them, allegedly because of concern about points for Gryffindor.  Was Trevor trying to stall the Trio in their efforts to keep Voldemort from the Stone?  Was the seemingly innocent Neville really colluding with him in promotion of the forces of Evil??

2.  Pets Choosing Their Wizards

 As I mentioned earlier today, we have a mysterious trend of pets choosing their wizards in HP.  Crookshanks convinced Hermione to change her mind about buying an owl, Pigwidgeon mysteriously turned up just when Sirius needed him and somehow convinced Sirius to offer him to Ron, Scabbers inviegled his way into the Weasley family and very likely convinced the Weasley parents to buy an owl for Percy and pass him down to Ron, the family member *in Harry's year*.  Why not Trevor?  Could he have sulked in his fish tank for weeks until the quaint old Great-Uncle Algie (unaware of how unfashionable toads have become) came beaming in, talking about his son who'd proved good enough to *start school with Harry Potter*, and then hopped about engagingly, fluttering his slimy eyelids and winning the old boy's heart?

3.  Pets Proving Significant

 So far, almost all of the pets of major characters have turned out to be important in some way: Crookshanks, Scabbers, Fawkes, Buckbeak, Norbert, the list goes on and on.  Surely Trevor, who appears so often, deserves his moment in the limelight.  And note that despite the brutal slashing in the Cinematic-Work-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, the toad did have an almost redundant cameo... why, if Trevor isn't important later?

4. The Abrupt End of Trevor's Wandering

 Note that after the incident at the end of PS/SS, Neville appears to carry Trevor around with him, and we never hear of Trevor getting away again.  Has Neville wised up to Trevor's dark ways?  Or, more sinister still, are they hand in warty glove with one another, and Trevor has warned him that the Trio may have them sussed, and the "oh no, Trevor's lost again" trick is no longer to be used??

5.  Snape's Persecution

Snape is undeniably nasty to Neville.  Is it just because Neville is incompetent at Potions, or is it something more malevolent, some dark suspicions Snape harbours about the boy and his toad?  We know Snape was a spy for Dumbledore, and may well have been a spy at the time when Neville's parents were Crucioed.  What does Snape know?  Does he suspect that the Death-Eaters responsible corrupted Neville's toddling mind onto evil avenues?  And does he threaten to poison Trevor in so nasty a manner in PoA because he suspects the toad of treachery and wants to remove the threat?


To this already ominous list of evidence, we have the discreet but discernable signs that Neville may not be all he seems.  Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of how many times Neville has inadvertently... or perhaps advertently... played into the hands of those who want Harry expelled or killed, or been mysteriously locked out of the dormitory late at night with the excuse that he "forgot the password" (very fishy), or had something planted on him by a Death-Eater in disguise (was Barty Jnr really checking out the progress of his corruption spell, or exchanging information with Trevor?).  Is Neville an innocent dupe, a conveniently clumsy and clueless boy on whom to plant the terrible toad, or is he in fact colluding with Trevor and concealing his secret anti-Harry schemes behind a round, gormless face?

Hmmmm.

As Captain Tabouli shuffles through the evidence, her courier arrives, bearing a message from the Cinister Cindy.  Consoling the toad, who fled into the furthest corner of the room at the mention of her toad-torturing name, the Captain opens the envelope.

Cindy:
> As Tabouli acknowledges, something is definitely going on with the Toad.  The 
Toad is showing up way too much to have no purpose at all.  And 
Neville is not a sufficiently important character to warrant a 
useless pet.  No, both Neville and the Toad are going to be 
*critical* at some point in the next three books.  But *how*?<

Captain Tabouli nods grimly.  The revelations of GoF are already revealing that there is far more to Neville than meets the eye.  Surely he has a role, a growing and fundamentally important role to play in future books, and the toad by his side, like the pets of other characters, will surely have a spongy finger in his pie.  Her nods evaporate, however, as she reads Cindy's feeble challenge to point 2: Pets Choosing Their Wizards.


> As Tabouli mentions, toads are the least desirable of the permissible 
Hogwarts pets.  Even Ron, who has a rat with a missing toe, scorns 
toads.  Yet we are to believe that Uncle Algie is so overwhelmed with 
Neville's admission to Hogwarts, so relieved, so overjoyed, that 
Ungle Algie goes out and buys the *worst* pet that exists.  Yes, I 
said Uncle Algie is bent.  But even Uncle Algie ought to know the 
difference between a good pet and a lame pet.<

Shaking her head emphatically, the Captain is already lifting her pen to reiterate her arguments about the well-meaning but hopelessly unhip Great-Uncle Algie (who is clearly eccentric as he views dropping small boys out of windows as an ideal way to stimulate their magical muscles), when she observes that someone has already taken up this gauntlet:

Barbara, a newbie of rare perceptiveness:
> Uncle Algie, who is more precisely referred to as "greatuncle" 
Algie by Neville, is likely to be the same generation as Neville's 
gran. Having it experienced as a very common phenomenom, in the real 
world, that one's elderly relatives lag behind fashion several decades 
without realizing they do so, I can very well envisage good old Algie 
believing he gave Neville a real treat by presenting him with that toad.<

The Captain grins, puts Barbara on her "promising new recruits to watch" list, and draws a satisfying cross through Cindy's objection to her new, renovated TOADKEEPER.  Having dealt with this, she returns to Cindy's original theory, ToadKeeper I.  

According to Cindy, Trevor is the receptacle of the souls of Neville's parents, and Neville's visits to St Mungo's are in fact clinical trials in which doctors attempt to extract the souls from the toad and return them to the Longbottoms.  Neville must therefore guard Trevor at all costs, and his relatives desperately want him to be magical so that he can assist in the extraction process.  As evidence, she casts aspersions on the honesty of Great-Uncle Algie and Neville, and cites the following canon:

>First, JKR has already introduced the idea that something important 
can be concealed in another living thing.  In the Fidelius Charm, the 
location of the Potters is concealed "inside a single living soul."  
>
>Second, JKR has established the idea that souls can be removed from 
wizards. 
>
>Third, JKR has established that people can exist without their souls. 

Captain Tabouli's mouth twists sceptically.  She feels the jump from "something important" to "the Longbottoms' souls" is a large stretch.  Very large.  Moreover, an incurably nomadic and not overly bright toad would seem a risky choice of living soul in which to put something so precious.  And surely, as someone else once said, Neville's formidable grandmother would have shown more distress at the toad's disappearance than the exasperation she exhibited on Platform 9 3/4.  Why not Neville himself, or his grandmother?

As for soul removal, the only method JKR has suggested thus far is via Dementor's Kiss, and she made it clear that the process is irreversible.  As Lupin says in PoA Chapter 12 "There's no chance at all of recovery."  Pretty inequivocal, that.  He also described the soulless as just "existing" with, and I quote, "no sense of self, no memory, no... anything".  If this was the state of the Longbottoms after the Lestranges had finished with them, getting them to testify to the Ministry would have been totally pointless.  The fact that some information, albeit none too reliable, could be extracted from them at the trial suggests to me that they must have had *some* sense of self and memory left.

Just as Captain Tabouli is about to toss ToadKeeper I loftily overboard, a new seed germinates in the corner of her mind, a seed which has the potential to grow into an all-embracing theory, once which encompasses both Trevor as Death-Eating Spy and Trevor as Soul Storage Centre.  A theory which may well appeal to Cindy, as it is mysteriously reminiscent of one of Cindy's own earlier theories about Snape's ancestry...

*** Could Trevor have a dash of Dementor blood? ***

After all, we don't know what Dementors really are.  They appear to be humanoid, at least in height, but they have many characteristics which seem suspiciously amphibian in nature.  As we all know, toad forefeet have fingers, and look rather like human hands.  The differences lie in the toad's amphibious lifestyle.  Although toads are not as water-dependent as frogs, rumour has it they are moist and warty, and, like frogs, begin their lives as tadpoles in water.  Think about it.  How does JKR describe the hands that protrude hideously from the black Dementor cloaks?  "Glistening, greyish, slimy-looking and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water"!!  Are Dementors a sort of hybrid human/toad zombie?  Could they perhaps, interbreed with toads to produce creatures which no longer have the power to drain all happy memories from people, but merely drain lightweight, everyday memories... such as the passwords to the Gryffindor Tower???

AHAA!

Perhaps the secret weapon the Lestranges used again the Longbottoms was not merely Crucio, but Trevor the Soul-Sucking Dementoad!  Of course, just as the true toad blood dilutes Trevor's ability to drain happy memories, it also dilutes his ability to suck out souls and digest them, leaving the victim an empty husk.  Nay, he merely *swallows* souls, like those toads who swallow fertilised eggs, and traps them inside his body, leaving the victims insane but not totally incapacitated, because their souls are intact, just elsewhere.  And, as the doctors at St Mungo's know, it may be possible under some conditions to get the dementoad to regurgitate the souls and reunite them with the victims, but as yet they have not found a way.

Moreover, if Trevor is really a Dementoad in league with Voldemort, the left-hand toad to balance his right-hand snake, that would also account for Voldemort's terribly inconvenient memory lapses at crucial moments... he's spent too long in contact with Trevor and has had his memory damaged!  Every time Trevor "goes missing", and reports to Voldemort, little details escape the Dark Lord, like the fact that phoenix tears cure all wounds, or that mother's love protected Harry from Avada Kedavra.

All that pretence of being Neville's nomadic pet is just a D.A.F.T. S.H.A.M.E.L.E.S.S. S.H.O.W. (Dementor Ancestry Facilitates Trevor's Soul Harbouring, Absent Mindedness Evoking, Lamentably Evil Spying Scheme, Seeking Harry's Overthrow Wickedly)...

Tabouli.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]