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Dave was a Dementor.
Like all of his family before him, Dave the Demento was expected to become a Deputy in Azkaban, like his brothers Daniel, Danny, Darrel, and David before him. Like all Dementors, they were proponents of the D.
Unfortunately, following Voldemort's death Azkaban was closed down and its occupants moved to a new, more secure facility with things built out of 'plastic'. The new ministry regarded a prison guarded by soul-sucking ghosts with no real allegiance to be a bit of a problem, and did not re-hire Dementors to act as guards, instead opting for something more plebian like mustard gas.
Wizards are not known for being smart muggle shoppers.
Well, not that it mattered to Dave much. Even as a Dementor he was always the unusual one, much preferring to having his daily dose of happiness stir-fried instead of raw, and if given the opportunity would much rather mingle with muggles for their happiness than the less common (though arguably higher quality) happiness derivable from wizards and witches. This had the side effect of ostracizing from the rest of the Dementor Society, but it wasn't as if he cared.
He enjoyed making his haunts happier, because a happier haunt meant more food, and more food was always good. Dave was a growing boy, after all.
It didn't matter to Dave that Azkaban was closed, as he had always intended to find a different way to make his living, now that he was a full grown spawn of sadness.
Now that he was fully grown, it was time for him to go job hunting!
Ironically, the ghosts of sadness do not go to college…at least not as students.
…
So where to first? He wonders.
"Woo?" Dave's father asks.
"Woo." Dave replies.
"Woo." Dave's mother adds.
"Woo." Dave's father sighs.
"Woo." Dave sniffs. He wasn't about to be dissuaded from his dream.
"Woo!" Dave's father says angrily.
Dave responds by storming out of the house, a feat not easily mastered, as he had no feet to stomp with.
The muggles who actually owned the house felt as if they needed to go on a vacation, which was weird, because they were already on vacation.
At least the rent was cheap.
…
Even though Dave said that, he realized, upon reflection, that without work experience he wasn't about to be accepted into his dream job anytime soon. He didn't quite know what his dream job would be, but…
He figured that he would just float from place to place, check out the world, and see if there're any good internship opportunities for an aspiring Dementor like himself. Who knows? Maybe something good will happen because of it.
…
The first place he visited turned out to be a muggle department store somewhere across the Ocean, filled with rows and rows of goods and people driving around with small carts.
Figuring that these carts must be somewhat important, he decides to mess with one of the wheels to see what happens. To his vast surprise, one of the wheels on the cart was already squeaky and wobbling!
Curious, Dave then decided to hop around to different carts and…to his surprise (though a small part of him expected it) all of the carts he visited had a single squeaky wheel.
Deciding that this was obviously the sign of a resident Dementor (and thus his senior) at work, Dave decided to wander around and see if he could see how the current resident worked, and maybe learn a few things from him while he was there.
While Dave was haunting the store, the sales of alcohol and ice cream rose through the roof. Disturbingly to the manager, he caught more than one person weeping in the aisles and briefly wondered if the shop had a gas leak or something.
…
After a week of watching customers fight it out with the workers, Dave came to the depressing conclusion that the previous Dementor of the house must've starved to death. Happiness was obviously in short supply here, and administering a kiss without proper certification from the Department of Dementor Duties would land him in jail, or worse, a Chocolate Factory.
Dave shuddered at the idea of being sent to a chocolate factory, though he had to admit that if he had to go, then the factory run by Willy Wonka would be the best place to be. The first factory, not the second one. The boss of the second one had issues.
Dave's mother didn't have the heart to tell him that they were just movies.
Anyways, with the saddening realization that the Dementor-kind had lost a pioneering spirit to the retail industry, Dave moved on.
…
His next haunt brought him to a hospital.
This place confused him. It was massive, containing multiple levels, multiple rooms…and wildly varying levels of happiness per floor. It wasn't like the hospitals his father described…but then, many things had changed since those times.
To his delight, one of the floors had a room filled with babies. He loved messing with babies and causing them to cry, even though it usually deprived him of a meal for a few hours…it was quite interesting to hear muggles talk about ghosts when their babies started crying, as if they could see him. That alone made up for the lack of a quick and easy meal.
The muggles' words were more along the lines of "I need to find the asshole that woke the baby up" but we can't really fault Dave for his linguistic skills.
Thus, he decided to make his rounds in the rooms full of babies.
He quickly became bored though, as it became painfully clear that these babies were not in the care of their parents, and thus no fun can be derived of filling a room with senseless noise.
Besides, his ears (wherever they were) were beginning to hurt.
He moved one floor up and then immediately decided to be somewhere else. This was a floor filled with nothing but people already sad, and there was nothing he could gain by being here.
…
As Dave floated along, he eventually found a…interesting, room. He stopped next to a small bed occupied by a young man being attended to by what he believes is a worker in the hospital. He watched with fascination as the worker pull what looked like one of those things his muggle family drank from out the young man's posterior.
He thought he heard something about Football (of the English style), beer, hooliganry, and then promptly decided to stop pursuing the matter. It was obviously very dangerous if a cup meant for drinking ended up in a location very obviously not meant for that task.
Dave floated around the beds a little more and realized, sullenly, that there wasn't much happiness around here. He could sense small amounts of relief, and though relief was at most somewhat consumable, its taste was dulled by the fact that the room was just filled with an overwhelming sense of shame.
Dave idly wondered if he could dilute that shame with something more potent, like rancor, to make something that would be edible. Unfortunately rancor was a touch hard to find nowadays, what with the great increase of salt around the world and all…
Dave floated around the hospital a little longer and decided that it was ultimately not a good place to hang out for long. With a great sigh, he moved on.
However, this time he had a lead: while listening to the conversation in the hospital, he picked up on two possible locations he could visit.
…
The first one was a bit of a wash; the 'morgue', as the muggles called it, wasn't a good place to haunt. The amount of death and sadness was simply too high for him to consider using it as a workplace. Maybe he could visit every so often as a vacation, but it was definitely not for him.
…
The second one was a little more promising. This 'church' place would regularly see many people in reasonably high spirits, and was certainly looking like a good place to set up shop for a Dementor like him.
…Except he noticed a small problem. Dementors fed on happiness. A fair number of people that he test-fed from would be sad for a while, sure, but then their sadness would be replaced with hope. Hope was difficult to digest for most Dementors and gave Dave stomach issues. As he had no intentions of haunting a toilet all his life (and his mother had some very disturbing stories of the muggle toilets she came upon) he decided, after two days of trial-haunting, that the Church was not a good place to be.
It did lead him to the knowledge of this 'god' thing, though. Judging by his observations that a Church created hope, Dave came to the conclusion that hope was what god consumed. He then spent several days pondering and marveling at the skills necessary to create these feeding zones without ever showing up for work, and resolved to learn from the mysterious ways of this 'god'.
…
Dave then wandered to a bar.
The bar's fumes made him sick (he was never the brawny type to begin with) and he vomited all over the floor.
Dementor vomit, as it turned out, was invisible and flammable.
Dave escaped from the bar shortly before it burst into flames.
…
Vowing to never approach alcohol again (or at least not while it was being consumed) Dave looked for yet another haunt.
This time, however, he found another Dementor first.
This other Dementor (whose name happens to be Dennis) was busy haunting a muggle prison. Dave didn't take to the idea too well – after all, isn't haunting a muggle prison a step down from Azkaban? – He had to admit that he was interested in the workings of a muggle prison, however, and figured that it wouldn't hurt to take a look.
…
After two days of shadowing Dennis, Dave was unimpressed. Much of Dennis's work involved in sapping the happiness of people already broken down, much like Azkaban. Sure, there was more work involved as muggles seemed to be less connected to the world, but Dennis wasn't doing anything Dave hasn't seen before.
Dave then took a step back and admitted that, yes, subtly diverting basketballs into faces was amusing and helped increase the happiness harvest by a small margin. Ultimately, it was slim pickings, and was no way for a self-assured Dementor such as himself to live!
And thus, the search goes on.
Dave was reassured by the presence of more Dementors in the muggle job market, though.
…
Dave's last stop was the local government office.
It didn't take him a minute before realizing that no happiness could be found here.
…
Dejected, Dave floated down to the muggle place where they sent the big gleaming birds into the sky. This was always his favorite place to linger, even though the structures weren't even a century old. He still remembered back in the day where they first started with the small birds with the funny spinning things. Nowadays, those birds had giant things slung underneath their wings, and they were loud…and a little scary.
In a moment of absurd bravery, Dave decided to hitch a ride on one of the birds.
That particular flight would report a curiously high case of colds upon landing.
…
Dave landed in a foreign land, and the first thing he did was to sample the local happiness and see if it was to his flavor.
It wasn't.
Hoo boy it wasn't.
He wasn't quite sure where he was (Dementors have no concepts of geopolitical borders) but he was pretty sure that the person in front of him should not be thinking of people interacting with appendages like that.
…
Dave looked around for the next week before hitching yet another ride on the muggle birds. Wherever he landed was too weird. The happiness flavor was too strange for his tastes, and he neither knew nor wanted to know what a 'catgirl' or a 'tentacle' or a 'yaoi' was, only that it made him irrationally angry and terrified.
It would be a long time before Dave learned about the proper ways of consuming other muggle emotions, like lust, or creepy.
…
This time, Dave promised himself as he floated out of a city with a green statue in the distance, this time things would be different.
…
It was different. He wasn't quite sure how it was possible for so much anger to exist in a place like this.
Then again, Dave was never really attentive.
The first place he stumbled into was a place with the letters WALMART mounted over a massive structure. Surely, he could find a vast source of happiness in there.
...He really should've known better.
…
A week later, Dave left the structure slightly traumatized. Sure he found a supply of happiness, but it was bland, tasteless. He needed more.
He considered visiting a hospital again, as at the very least the happiness there was varying and filling, if in short supply.
As he floated away from the large but otherwise uninteresting WALMART he passed by a car, and heard the first few bars of a song. Curious, he floated along to listen.
…
The song annoyed him, for some reason he didn't quite understand…it was a song about this 'you', and how the man singing it apparently will never give it up…for a little bit it felt like the man was singing to Dave, about how
He was never going to give him up,
Never going to let him down,
Never going to turn him around and desert him (Dementors had no concept of facing, so Dave was confused by this line).
The man was never going to make Dave cry,
Never going to say goodbye,
He was never going to tell a lie and hurt him.
…
Dave caught himself humming the song to himself several times on his trip.
I'm not even sorry.
…
Anyways, some time later Dave found himself in front of a shiny white house. It was pretty small compared to the buildings around it, but he knew it was somehow very important.
Well, the fence and the guards tipped him off, but he like to think that it was a special Dementor sense of some kind. It made him feel a bit more sane in this strangely subdued city.
Dave crossed the threshold, but he had taken no more than two floats towards the White House before realizing that this building was the site of an immense battle currently taking place.
The battle was occurring everywhere else, but the intent was focused in this building and this building alone.
Quickly, he retreated from the building, as he had no idea when the battle will end…for if the winning party entered the White House, then before he could sap enough happiness from its new tenants he would be destroyed by the triumph and hope his prey brought.
Instead, he made himself comfortable haunting some of the other structures around the building.
To his immense displeasure, quite a few of the people that arrived at those locations had hope.
To his pleasure, said people would lose their hope quite quickly while in the presence of those buildings (especially the one the muggles called 'Senate' or whatever) allowing Dave to swoop in and eat that delicious, delicious happiness. He's gotten quite good at replacing that happiness with sadness.
Congressional deadlock reduced by 20%: lobbyists elect to stay home.
Soon, though, Dave grew bored.
The haunt would change people fast enough, but most of them brought curiosity. Curiosity was not happiness, and there was nothing an amateur like him could do to transform that curiosity reliably into happiness.
Thus, he wandered south.
…
Actually he thought he was going north, but Dementors were never good at compass directions, and he was distracted by a family in a boxy car with an unusually high amount of happiness, so…
…
Eventually, Dave found himself outside of a massive…place.
He's never seen this many people before…and certainly not the muggle dressed like a giant suit-wearing…he thinks it's supposed to be a mouse, but the proportions are all wrong.
But really, Dave doesn't care about the weirdly sized mouse.
He's much more interested in the sheer amount of happiness the place holds, especially the castle-like structure in the distance.
Without further ado, Dave throws himself into the fray of muggles and began harvesting to his heart's content.
Demented Experts would later agree that this marked the first and possibly only time where a Dementor died of clogged arteries.
.
.
.
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