Author's Note: Thank you, dear readers and reviewers both, for your interest. This one is short and sweet. Think of it as a springboard to where the fun really begins. Onward!
Chapter Two: "The Great Disappearing Act"
As it turned out, wandering into the Leaky Cauldron had been a terrible idea. But at least the events that unfolded there elicited a news headline that many a reader of The Quibbler would appreciate.
Female Muggle Breaches Magical Establishment. Orders Lager. Is Threatened by Wandpoint.
"It's a'right, love. You just caught me by surprise. No one's gonna hurt you. We'll get an Obliviator here and you'll be as fit as a fiddle in no time."
Olivia Charles was not convinced.
She was currently taking refuge behind an overturned table, knees pulled up to her chest, small fingers snaking into her hair to grab purchase of something real whilst trying desperately hard to grapple with what had just occurred. Adrenaline surged through her veins, which did nothing for her harried nerves. With each passing moment, however, she was delighted to feel the initial shock tapering off. In its wake the cognitive part of her brain that housed the majority of her bullheadedness resumed control, heart slowing its frenzied tempo against her ribcage.
Liv released a long, illustrative string of expletives under her breath. Now, she was downright mad.
Mad that bad luck seemed to follow her in spades like some dithering extension of Murphy's Law. Mad, because how unreasonable was it to have one normal, sane morning where tea kettles didn't levitate, and innkeepers didn't accost her with wands?
Wands!
Liv pinched the bridge of her nose. "None of this would have happened if I'd learned kung fu."
Long ago, she had come to terms with her abnormality, that her genetic coding had probably cackled in the face of normalcy upon conception, declaring, 'Methinks not, for thy fetus shall be chimera reborn!'—because the jury was still out on the radioactive spider theory. Unfortunately, coming to terms with her abilities only punctuated how utterly and certifiably insane she felt disguising them, which in itself was no small feat.
Fortunately, they were not a daily happenstance. But the knowledge that her mutant powers could rear its ugly head at any given moment, equal parts uncontrollable, frightening, and awkward when unleashed—not unlike her great uncle Emerson's bowels—did nothing for her mental health. Possessing no instruction, no conclusive inkling on how to control them was just the cherry on top of her metaphorical sundae of shitty bad luck.
This, however—this!?
This was a cruel twist of fate.
No, this was just a figment her twisted and insomnious brain had dredged up because if she had just managed to go nearly eighteen years without once happening upon another magically gifted freak until now, someone was going to get dragon-kicked into a pub toilet. Maybe it was because she hadn't slept in nearly 41 hours and her brainpower was severely reduced, but Liv was having difficulty registering this concept.
Or the fact that some wanker had just tried to bombast her with a strange, cerulean jolt of magic—a goddamn spell, the better part of her brain corrected—from a wand! Sadly, no amount of drunken impersonations in the mirror during her bi-annual Bruce Lee marathons could have prepared herself for that. Especially when she had launched herself off a pub stool, startled and terrified, and had fumbled for her bearings before tripping over her boots and somersaulting over a nearby table.
She wished, one day, to hopefully look back at that moment and laugh.
"Lass, come on out now. You've got nothin' to worry about."
Liv snorted. "Bugger off, Schmendrick."
She slapped her hands across her mouth, eyes expanding. Shit, she thought. Shit, aw shit! And sure enough, there was a moment of weighty silence, one wherein the barman's tread upon the crumbling cobblestone flooring halted.
Listening.
When his footfall gingerly crossed the pub in her direction, Liv swore, diving for her leather satchel, digging inside and searching like a madwoman for something to defend herself with. Cowering against the gum-speckled underside of a pub table, ass smarting like hell, was not her style. Neither was violence—she was a cynic, not a jackass—but she wasn't going down without a fight, no matter how unsavory the chances of being turned into a newt was.
"Aha!" Liv crowed to herself, then groaned. "Never mind. I'm fucked."
In her tremulous hands was the rolling pin she had purchased at the market the day before from a strange, bandy-legged peddler named Mundungus, which had been duly forgotten about in her bag until now. It was marbled with thick wooden handles, which promised to pack one glorious punch if she didn't get turned into a rodent beforehand.
A shadow fell across her line of sight. Her heart clenched. Slowly peering upwards, Liv met the wide, apprehensive eyes of Tom, the Leaky Cauldron's barman and innkeeper.
He was squat, balding, and middle-aged with a head that resembled a peach pit. He was friendly and obliging when she'd first walked through the doors, and politely didn't question why a five-foot-nothing witch with eyes that could light up hell itself, bedecked in several layers of flour, ordered a lager half past five in the morning.
Had the Amazing Levitating Tea Kettle Incident not left her nerves frayed, she may have been more observant of her surroundings than the desire to drown her misery in a pint of fermented hops when first entering the premises. So, she'd not been privy to the fact that the Leaky Cauldron was distinctly more than meets the eye in a very magical way.
Sitting on a stool, back to the empty pub with only a few distant snores coming from the inn's occupants a floor above, Liv had not noted that the frames splaying the walls from floor to ceiling behind her beheld portraits that moved. That had peered owlishly at her and one another in wonder and bewilderment, and at various occasions animatedly flapped their hands to silence a gilded frame rendering the image of a troll with a bulbous nose from yawping with curiosity. Several of the enchanted paintings, mostly of famous Quidditch players, swooped from frame to frame in huddles, taking bets on how long it would take Tom to realize this girl was more than a new patron of the Leaky Cauldron, but a Muggle.
It's like dinner and show, a mahogany-framed painting of a wizard wearing a burnt toque had thought, as Tom instantaneously became leery after asking five Sickles for the Dragon Scale lager, the girl resolutely replying with a heartfelt "Gesundheit". His waiting silence and slow dawning realization thus made her leery, so she'd pawed into her bag and produced an errant theater stub, a fuzzy lozenge, and an American buffalo nickel she kept for luck as payment.
"I can start a tab if ye'd like, poppet," Tom had said, inspecting the nickel with one hand, the other furtively snaking for his wand. "Maybe head to Gringotts. Keep a few Knuts on you for a rainy day."
Liv had made a face. Knuts?
"Gringotts? That, uh, sounds personal. Maybe a doctor should check that out."
The rest, they say, is history.
Or the present, because presently Liv was scrambling to her feet at the sudden, pronounced sight of the barman.
"Back off," Liv seethed. "Take another step and your doughknuts get flattened!"
Tom's face furrowed, layers of skin folding together until he looked like a living legume. Instinctively, his legs pressed together in an act to protect his private bits. He thrust a finger in her face, threats of violence to his jollies making him churlish.
"Now see here, missy, that's downright rude. You'd just startled me before, is all. I apologize. That was just a friendly curse–"
"A curse?"
Outraged, Liv brandished the rolling pin, holding it out before her like it was a two-handed broad sword. In this display of umbrage, she managed to whack the wand out of the barkeep's outstretched hand. There was probably some fanciful French fencing name for such a maneuver, but to her chagrin, the handle of the rolling pin still had the price-tag attached, which fluttered to-and-fro like some booger clinging for life at the end of a nose.
Tom held up his hands in surrender.
"It only binds you," he reasoned, eyes saucer-wide. "Didn't want you running amok 'n telling other Muggles what you've seen.
Magical tomfoolery was one thing, but gibberish just fanned the flames of Liv's infuriation. She clenched her teeth. Unconsciously she shifted her posture to reflect what his had been, holding her rolling pin aloft and readied, stance poised.
"What the bloody hell is a Muggle?"
"You're a Muggle, dear," he nodded to her, which caused his jowls to wobble. "Non-magical folk."
Liv snorted. "That's completely backasswards. Murphy's Law has been bitch-slapping me in the face for the past eighteen consecutive years with how non-magical I'm not."
"Oh." Tom blinked, then heaved a sigh. "Then you're not... Well, that changes things. Don't have to contact the Ministry after all. Grand! But it's clear you didn't go to Hogwarts, lass. Whomever taught you should be ruttin' ashamed of themselves, if you pardon my language."
Liv frowned—Hogwarts? But the barman continued on, complete relief having washed over his face, shoulders relaxing, and he chatted on like he had not just accosted her with a quasi-sentient magical stick.
"–nearly three decades later 'n I'm still a proud Hufflepuff. Best school on Merlin's green earth, if you ask me, especially with Dumbledore in charge."
"Never heard of him."
He choked. "P-pardon?"
"Dumbledore," Liv found herself snickering, not registering the expressions of sheer disbelief and indignity warring on his face. "Brilliant. Sounds like something a role-playing, stringy-haired, pimple-assed twelve-year-old made up for himself after watching a Houdini documentary."
Tom gasped, affronted, before taking Liv by surprise and making a mad dash for his wand. He dove for it, the wooden apparatus skittering beneath his fingertips before grabbing hold and whipping it around.
"Petrificus Totalus!" he shrieked, voice three octaves higher than normal.
And that's when things went awry.
—again.
Fortunately for Liv, her survival instincts kicked into gear, and dodged the spell's bolt by several inches. Besides a string of barbaric sounding expletives in umpteen languages she had learned for special occasions, a swift sequence of thoughts burst forth into the forefront of her mind.
First: I really should have taken Latin in school; second: Shit, not again; third: Run! Vámonos! Schnell, fräulein, schnell!
Her last thought, however, resounded in her head like a forever-echo, which was the deep, perennial yearning to go home. Which was typically only reflected upon after slamming down several shots of Will's terrible, home-distilled moonshine.
Home.
Home, which was not the cramped flat she shared with Essie. Not her cozy realm that was her kitchen in Cloverdilly Coffee. But home, back when she was a child and her father had not vanished the day before she turned eleven, long before her mother had changed the locks to their manor when she was sixteen. Home, where there were roses of every color, hillsides dotted with houses and windmills, and a kitchen where she had once baked the best mince pie their cook had ever tasted.
Home, where she'd been safe in hiding her magic.
Catching how Tom the barman was working himself into another spell, however, Liv leapt in action, sweeping the rolling pin into the air. She had hoped to gain momentum in an effort to thoroughly thwack the wand out of his hand once again, but want clutched her heart at the last moment. The sheer, desperate need to go home compressed her fingers around the rolling pin's handle, the other pointing to the ground before her feet as she lost all propulsion to retaliate.
She closed her eyes, ten years old, and far away.
Suddenly, she couldn't breathe. Her lungs were being compressed, like there was no atmosphere in the room and she was being sucked into a great vacuum. Her ears popped painfully, eyeballs feeling like they were being pushed into her skull by two invisible thumbs, which opened to see the pub condensing rapidly into a sphere of shadows.
And with a ear-splitting pop!, Olivia Charles folded into herself, disappearing within the blink of an eye.
There was a moment of breathless silence.
"Bloody hell," Tom said, bug-eyed in disbelief. "That Muggle girl just Apparated."
(Three seconds later)
Liv stumbled, feeling her vision warp into a tipsy-turvy, helter-skelter of colors. Which righted themselves the moment both of her boot-clad feet became rooted to the ground, an effect that resulted in a long procession of throbbing in her temples, eyes squinting like she'd just stared up at the sun for several moments.
Then she froze.
The distinct growl of an engine sent a shock into her bones, could feel it reverberate through the ground and up her legs, and she was startled to feel an encasing wave of heat from a churning motor nearby.
Too nearby.
She blinked, stunned, scared shitless to see that she stood within the center of a roadway. Freshly fallen snow glistened in the morning light, and the unmistakable profile of a large motorcycle careening straight for her filled her vision. At her sudden appearance, the rider had instantaneously braked, causing the bike to fishtail, tires screeching as they attempted to grip the asphalt beneath the blanket of snow.
"Oh shit," Liv said, and thought, Historic last words, Charles—real eloquent, before the motorcycle was abruptly airborne. Tires fluttered her hair about, but did not once touch the unprotected head below.
Her heart stammered, staring wide-eyed at the now-empty roadway before her. A gust of exhaust pushed through her hair, in staccato with the rumbling engine effortlessly riding the air above. Adrenaline seized her nerves. Sheer disbelief making her breathless. And she tried her damn hardest not to focus on anything in particular.
"Levitating tea kettles," she breathed, hysterical laughter lodging in her throat and threatening to erupt. "And now levitating motorcycles? These are justifiable reasons to faint, right?"
And all went black.
