Tom entered the girl's bathroom with a scowl as he silently vowed to kill the next person to call him "Thomasine". Unfortunately, he had nobody to blame for his current predicament save for himself. He was something of a potions genius, and he rarely made mistakes in that area. When he did make a mistake however, the results tended to be...spectacular.

It had been a week, and both Professor Slughorn and several healers from St. Mungo's had yet to find a solution to his particular problem. Until they did however, he was forced to use the girl's bathroom and sleep in the girl's dormitory as doing otherwise was deemed "improper" despite his true gender.

He - he refused to refer to himself with any sort of feminine pronoun despite the current form of his "equipment" - didn't know what it was that had made him look down at his underwear since he usually tried to get his business done without looking at anything that might remind him of his changed status. Look down he did, and when he did so, he realized exactly why he'd been feeling slightly strange all morning.

There was blood.

There was blood in his underwear.

A quick check revealed that the blood was coming from his...

He'd heard something about this. Whispers amongst the girls here, snatches of conversations at the orphanage when Mrs. Cole took hysterical girls aside and had quiet discussions with them about something, something that the girls needed something for, something that was supposed to happen to girls every month. He had never in his wildest dreams thought that this would happen to him, and frankly he had no idea how to deal with it besides ignoring it and hoping it went away.

Finished with his business, he went over to the sinks to wash his hands.

The sink wouldn't turn on. In fact, the damn thing tried to burn his hand instead. He barely even registered the glowing red etching of a snake that appeared on the tap while he cradled his injured and still dirty hand.

Just one more fucking thing in the shitstorm that was currently his life.

He swore in parseltongue as he washed his hands in the next sink over which fortunately did work...for all of the five seconds before he found himself sliding down a filthy tunnel that hadn't been there a moment before.

When he reached the end of his incredibly foul ride - where he shot out of the slide from hell as if from a cannon, and had rather painfully been introduced to the unforgiving stone floor at the bottom - he found himself in a room he didn't recognize. After searching the room for an exit other than the slime coated slide which looked as if it would be impossible to climb back up, he found himself in front of a massive door which had been decorated with snakes.

It figured. After three years of searching the castle from top to bottom, he had to find the Chamber of Secrets when he wasn't looking for it, and in a girl's bathroom no less. Something up there hated him.