"The name's Daxter. Mark Daxter.
I'm a private Auror."
That's how he would start his books. When he had adventures, he would write about them. He knew he would have them, because all private detectives had adventures, even the Muggle ones. He had practiced everything he would need, like Curses and the Incarcerous Charm and coming up with witty banter under pressure. He was ready.
"It all started on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I was playing Minecraft, waiting for my next adventure, when..."
That was as far as he'd written so far. He didn't know exactly what would happen next because, of course, none of this had happened yet. He figured it wasn't really important what the weather would be doing, or how he would be passing his time, so it was okay if those parts turned out to be inaccurate.
As it happened, both facts were entirely mistaken on the morning adventure knocked.
It was a short, businesslike rap. He thought he should be able to tell something about the person from the way they knocked. After thinking for a couple minutes and drawing a blank, he opened the door.
The man was tall, thin, and wearing a business suit. Daxter felt that he should at least have predicted the suit. Oh well. He had to admit he was still new at this.
"Mr. Daxter?" asked the man in the suit.
First impressions were everything, Daxter knew that. Right now he had to sound just like a Private Auror.
He opted for a bit of sarcasm. "What's it say on the door?" Yes. That was good.
"Your name's not on the door." replied Suit Man. Daxter fought to keep from blushing.
"Touché." said Daxter. Admit defeat, but only slightly.
He sat back down in his swivel chair, which tilted too far backwards and momentarily threatened to dump him onto the floor, before he was able to get his balance under control. He was pretty sure that, as a Private Auror, he was not expected to offer the client a chair, which was lucky as he only had the one.
"I trust you've heard about the Portkey disappearances?" Suit Man asked, standing awkwardly in the doorway.
"Let's pretend I haven't."
"They've been in all the papers."
"Humor me."
Daxter felt he was definitely getting the hang of this.
The man in the suit told him that person or persons unknown had been secretly turning people's things into touch-activated Portkeys. The victims would unknowingly come into contact with them and never be heard from again, at least as of the present moment, despite several searches of the Sahara desert. In one case, a whole family had disappeared.
Well, all except one of them.
Daxter rang his doorbell.
Immediately something shot out of the peephole, nearly punching Daxter in the face. He jumped backward.
The thing looked like a brass telescope with a bright blue eye in one end looking straight at him. It quickly swept a grid of green light over his body and then retracted into the door with a small click. Daxter had the uneasy feeling he had just been scanned.
The door opened. The sum of Daxter's first impression of the man inside, was merely that he was rather fat. He had wispy grey hair, two chins, and a visible belly button, and Daxter noticed that he had opened the door with magic instead of manually.
"Are you Herman Waters?" Daxter asked.
"Yes. Who are you?"
"Mark Daxter, Private Auror."
Time passed as Daxter waited for Waters to invite him inside. Finally, it seemed this was not forthcoming.
"Can I come in?"
The man frowned. "...okay."
Daxter stepped inside, strode to one of the armchairs in the living room, and sat down.
"I wouldn't advise sitting. The chair could be a Portkey." Waters gulped.
Daxter rested his head on his palm, his elbow on the chair arm.
"You're really paranoid, aren't you?" he observed shrewdly.
Waters seemed to take this the wrong way. Angrily, he replied "Well can you blame me? Do you know what hap-"
"Yes." Daxter cut him off. "Tell me - please - was there anything the rest of your family all had in common that you don't?"
Waters thought.
"Well, they're all very... er... fit. They work out." Waters looked a bit embarrassed.
"I see. Anything else?"
"They're big fans of the Portal games."
"You're not?"
"Well... Yeah. I mean, it doesn't really have any plot, right? You're just moving though test chambers..." The man trailed off, looking at Daxter, who was suddenly glaring at him fiercely.
"I think we're done here." Daxter said icily, getting up and moving toward the door. "By the way," he added, a malicious smirk playing across his face, "have you thought that maybe parts of the house itself are Portkeys? Like the floor?"
Daxter ignored Waters's alarmed yelp and stepped outside onto the porch. He immediately felt a sharp tug behind his navel, and was zooming away in a swirl of color and sound, his foot glued to a wooden floorboard.
"Immobulus. Accio Wand."
Daxter felt it shoot out of his robe pocket, presumably towards the person behind him.
"Mella?" the person said, for some reason.
There was a shuffling noise and a white stick fell with a click in front of Daxter. He had ended up immobilized in a very awkward position, balancing on one knee and one hand, since he'd fallen over after the unexpected Portkey trip.
Someone cleared their throat loudly behind him, then began to speak as if from a script, in a high, wheezy voice that made Daxter think of house-elves.
"Welcome to the Department of Experimental Charms. You have been selected to participate in some of our experiments. When the Immobulus charm is lifted, you will please pick up the Testing Wand and attempt to complete the testing courses. Please note that the Testing Wand is only capable of one spell, around which the tests are based. Today you will be testing the -" Daxter heard papers shuffling. "- Eraser Charm. The incantation is 'Exculpus'."
Daxter heard footsteps, and then, "Finite Incantatum." He crumpled to the floor as the door slammed behind him, then sprang back up and spun around. The room was incredibly empty, its walls aggressively white and blank, all except for a door at either end. He ran to the one through which his captors had left and hammered on it. "Oy! Let me out! I didn't agree to any testing!"
Soon his hands began to ache, and he gave it up, not that he'd had high hopes.
A thought came to him: Being captured, it happened all the time to Private Aurors, didn't it? It should be par for the course. So everything was going to plan. His mood was considerably brightened by this notion; He supposed he'd just have to wait for an opportunity to escape.
Daxter looked around the room and spotted the Testing Wand lying on the floor where he'd left it. He walked over and picked it up. It was plastic.
He pointed it experimentally at the wall and said, "Exculpus."
Immediately something like a spout of hot air issued from the wand,and the wall's metal melted away as if he had sprayed corrosive paint. It left a large, smooth, gaping hole.
Daxter giggled.
He immediately began slicing up the room with great vim, spinning in place and carving pictures and words into the walls, escape temporarily forgotten. He was an up-and-coming graffiti artist, an elite construction worker, a boy or a somewhat immature man in possession of a flamethrower.
"Hey!" he called, "the spell works great! We don't really need the tests, right?"
He pointed the wand at the door. "Exculpus!" With a bang, the door melted from the middle out and was gone in a second. Daxter raced out into the hall, cackling maniacally.
He raced through hallways, erasing doors and walls wherever they blocked his arbitrarily decided path. It was great fun, but after a while the novelty faded, and Daxter realized that he wasn't getting anywhere. All of the hallways looked the same, and all of the doors seemed to branch out into more hallways. He decided to keep going straight ahead from now on - that way he was sure to get somewhere eventually, probably out. But no sooner had he decided this than he erased a door and found himself face-to-face with a house-elf.
The elf's eyes went wide, and Daxter realized that his escape had just been discovered. He immediately pointed the Testing Wand at her.
Rationalization flew through his mind - It was just an elf, he had to escape so he could save any other prisoners, this elf was the enemy, really he had no choice-
The elf shrieked and fell to her knees.
"No! Please! Mella meant no harm! Mella would never... must do what Master says! Please! Have mercy!"
Daxter stared into her big, brown eyes and lowered the wand. Conscience had won over caution.
The elf grinned. "Sucker."
And with a snap of her fingers she sent Daxter flying backwards, to crash into the wall behind him. He fell to the floor directly onto his newly bruised areas, or so it felt. He groaned. Mella cackled. Then she walked over to where the Testing Wand lay on the floor, picked it up, and pointed it at Daxter.
"Come."
He slowly got to his feet and followed the house-elf as she led him through several more hallways. He was silently cursing himself for his mercy, while wondering what to do next time this happened.
He heard a clank and looked up; It seemed they had arrived. They had finally come to a room, instead of a hallway. He looked around as Mella led him inside.
The place was spacious, but the only thing in it was a man sitting on a throne, in front of what seemed to be the magical equivalent of a tv screen. It was a flat, floating image, split into many sections. Seen from the back the image was washed-out and reversed, but Daxter could tell that it showed other testers, in various dangerous situations. He tore his eyes away from a woman trying to repel poisonous snakes with a wand that sprayed gravel, to look at the man on the throne.
His hair was slicked upward, looking a bit like a black flame around the large moose antlers jutting out of his scalp.
"Hello." He said, looking at Daxter as they came in, "I am Gilbert Wimple, head of the Department of Experimental Charms."
He looked at the ceiling and sucked air through his teeth, seemingly trying to think of the right wording. He found it.
"I have some bad news."
Daxter stood stock still, acutely aware of the wand still at his back.
"Your tests were...a...failure, yeah. You escaped. So, um...your part is over. And actually...well, as a wise robot once said," he paused, half-chuckled at what he was about to say. "'This is the part where he kills you.'"
At this, despite everything, a guffaw burst from Daxter, who had gotten the reference. He grinned and waved his finger at Wimple. "I see what you did there," he said.
Gilbert looked shocked. "You... you've played Portal 2?"
"Totally!" said Daxter, entirely forgetting the context of the situation. "Have you found the secret part where the turrets rehearse the song?"
Gilbert's face darkened. Ignoring the question, he said, "Then you know what GLaDOS would do here." He took out his wand and pointed it at Daxter, whose smile quickly faded.
"You're... you're still..." He stared at the wand. It was pointing straight at his heart.
"Exculpo." said Mella.
Gilbert's face was frozen with shock as the bubble of air blossomed from where the spell hit and enveloped his body. In an instant he was gone.
Daxter stared at the empty throne in horror. Then he looked down at Mella. His throat was suddenly so dry that it took two attempts to rasp out a shaky, "Thanks..."
He was thankful he was alive. But Gilbert was dead...his mind stalled. He didn't quite know how to process it. Gil was an enemy, but...
"Shut up." snapped Mella, "I didn't do that for you."
She stared at him for a while, then began to pace back and forth across the room. She didn't look at Daxter, but kept talking. On the far end of her route she would disappear from view behind the throne.
"I did it for power. Nothing else. I've been waiting to get a wand ever since that bushy-haired girl freed me, and you, you idiot, delivered one right to me. Thank you, by the way." She grinned at him, looking slightly insane. "Now nothing can stop me! I can go anywhere - no one will notice a house-elf - and all along I will have my own wand with such a useful spell and I will gain power no house-elf has ever dreamt of and OTHER MAGICAL CREATURES WILL FEAR TO SPEAK MY NAME!"
She cackled madly, jumped onto the seat of the throne, and once again aimed the wand at Daxter.
"So goodbye, dude-who's-name-I-don't-care! You've been quite helpful! Exculpo!"
Daxter ducked. The spell shot over his head. He heard it hit the wall behind him. Then there was something else, a sort of rumbling. The elf's eyes widened in terror.
Daxter whipped around.
An enormous tidal wave of wands - normal ones, not plastic - was collapsing out from behind the Erased wall. With one mind, both elf and Auror yelled and sprinted to the left as the shadow of a hundred wooden sticks fell over them. With an almighty crash, the wands hit the floor, scattering in all directions, obscuring vision. Everything was a blur of elder and yew. Daxter snatched out blindly and caught one, as another bounced off his head.
"Protego!" He yelled. A translucent shield popped into being in front of him, just as another Eraser spell zoomed toward him and bounced off it.
"You jerk! Don't you screw this up you jerk!" Mella shrieked through the chaos of falling wands.
Daxter suddenly knew that witty banter would be more important now than ever. But he was drawing a blank.
"I'll screw up anything I like!" he called, for lack of a better idea. Too late, he thought of the line he should have used: 'That's not what your mom said last night.'
He'd given away his position. With a crack, Mella appeared in front of him.
"Excu -"
"PRIOR INCANTATUS!" Daxter desperately yelled the first spell that came to mind.
His spell hit the Testing Wand. It hissed and sparked as it tried to perform an action other than erasing. Daxter threw himself backward, bruising himself on the floor, right before the wand exploded.
Shards of plastic flew everywhere. He saw Mella slam into the ceiling and fall to the ground, dead or unconscious. The last of the wands clattered to the floor and left a ringing silence.
In the end he Summoned his own wand from the pile, Incarcerated Mella, and went erasing through walls until he found himself in the Ministry of Magic. He told the story to the authorities, who promised that there would be a full inquiry into the matter.
He never saw Suit Man again, because Suit Man worried that Daxter would realize he'd never gotten paid for the whole enterprise.
Mella became the first house-elf in Azkaban, but orchestrated a mass breakout the next year and escaped with several Death Eaters.
The existence of the Eraser Charm was hushed up by the ministry, as the combination of immense usefulness and ease of use would make it devastating in enemy hands, although all official Aurors were trained to perform it silently, only for emergencies.
It took the Ministry several years to track the blame for the incident back to one Hermione Granger and her illegal house-elf rights activist group, by which time she was already wanted for questioning about her blood status.
They never found her.
It was raining as Daxter Apparated back to his apartment/office. He glanced at the insignia in his door's window: two shrewd-looking eyes and three magical sparks, arranged symmetrically. His Private Auror symbol. He had always felt proud, looking at it; proof that he was a real PA now, not just some kid hoping to be one someday. It had been his dream job as long as he could remember.
Now, looking at the mark of how far he had come, he thought of Gilbert Wimple's horrified face as he was erased. How he had spotlessly vanished. Gil was dead.
"Exculpo."
The stained glass window vanished. Daxter put away his wand. He had decided; he was done with adventures. He didn't know what he would do with his life, but it wasn't this.
Mark Daxter, ex-PA, unlocked the door, went inside. He sat down on the one chair and for a while he did nothing. It was a big change, to give all that up now. Then he smiled to himself, turned on his laptop, and double-clicked the little block-and-pickaxe icon.
Outside, the rain continued.