A big thank you to the wonderful Ms krazyredhead0317 for providing her services as beta. I couldn't have posted this without her. Literally.
Disclaimer: The characters and canon situations in the following story belong solely to JK Rowling, Scholastic, and WB. I am not making any money from the publishing or writing of this story. J.K. Rowling belongs to herself. Sanctuary belongs to Syfy and its own writers and producers.
Abnormal – Chapter 2
Henry Foss was frustrated.
He was going through the surveillance footage of the SHU level—meticulously, frame by frame in some places—and still he could not figure out how that woman got past not only the E.M. shield and his security system, but the SHU confined Abnormals. Whenever anyone entered the level, the Lizardman would go berserk, attacking the walls of its habitat. The tiger-wolves would start howling whenever someone other than himself would walk past their enclosure.
Neither of these things happened. In fact, the Lizardman merely sniffed the air and snorted, and the tiger-wolves started purring; the purring tiger-wolves would intrigue Magnus—this was a new behavior for them. The other Abnormals on the level also seemed to accept the intruder with minimal distress.
Actually, these odd reactions were the only way that he could tell from the video that she was even in the SHU until the E.M. detector went off in that sector. In another video frame, he watched himself start, yell to whomever else was nearby that something on the SHU level tripped the sensors, grab a stunner, and run toward the elevator, Tesla and the Big Guy right behind him.
When they had gotten off the elevator they had expected to be attacked immediately by an escaped patient. Instead, the elevator doors had opened to the sound of… nothing.
No unusual animal sounds greeted them. This in itself had put Henry further on his guard. Tesla motioned for him to go in one direction while Bigfoot went in the other.
This was one area where the footage glitched. Tesla had sent out an electro-magnetic pulse, using it like sonar, in an attempt to locate whatever had caused the E.M. disturbance. The video resumed in time to catch Tesla grin and run down the same catwalk that he had taken.
Henry shifted his attention to the footage from the camera at the end of the hall. Both he and Tesla entered the frame, the other man clearly staring at something that both he and the camera couldn't see. Then he walked forward, toward the unoccupied enclosure that the camera was meant to watch, and appeared to wave something aside and walk in. Immediately after Tesla walked through the door, Henry was able to see the woman standing in the middle of the habitat.
"And what, pray tell, are you?"
Hearing Tesla speak, the woman started to turn around, but Henry, fearing a violent reaction, had pulled the trigger on his stunner before she finished. She dropped like a stone, unconscious.
Fast-forwarding through the next few minutes of footage—during which he got yelled at by Tesla, and told to leave—Henry then slowed it again when it showed the Big Guy coming in. Very carefully, so as not to cause injury, he picked her up to place her on the stretcher he had in the hallway. However that is not what drew Henry's attention now. It was what fell out of her hand that did.
"What is that?" he murmured to himself, and he tried to zoom the image in a little closer. It looked like some sort of stick.
He had to go check it out.
However, before he could do more than stand up, Henry's computer alerted him to a video call from the UK Sanctuary. Sighing, he answered, "Magnus' Mad House. How may I direct your call?"
"I need to speak to Helen," Declan said from the computer screen.
"Well hello to you too. What's going on?" Henry asked. Declan looked rather tense, almost like he was running on four pots of coffee and no sleep.
"We have a problem. There is something strange happening with our resident Abnormals. The fire elemental especially seems to be extremely agitated."
Henry nodded, eyes wide, remembering the last time that Abnormal got out of control. "She's in the middle of something right now, but she will want to hear this right away. I'll go get her."
"I appreciate it."
He was about 30 feet away from his destination when he heard an unfamiliar voice coming from the infirmary.
"You should be thankful really, if for no other reason than the life of the werewolf that I sense coming this way."
Peering through the doorway, he saw that the woman from earlier was awake. Henry thought she was actually rather pretty, now that he wasn't seeing her as an active security breach. Tesla looked annoyed.
"Uh, Boss? UK Sanctuary is on the phone for you. Declan says there is some sort of problem with their Abnormals. The fire elemental is acting up."
Magnus' attention was caught immediately. "I'll be right up." She turned to the woman on the bed. "I need to take care of this. Henry," she turned back to him again, "this is Hermione Granger."
His jaw dropped in disbelief. "But—"
"Yes, that Hermione. I'm sure she can answer your questions about how she got past our security system."
The woman nodded an affirmative. "I would be more than happy to do so. I would also like to know how your machines are still working with me in such close proximity."
While Tesla rolled his eyes and said that he could have explained that himself, Henry's face practically lit up. Unless this was some horrible prank or a dream, Hermione Granger was real and wanted to talk tech with him. Him. This was awesome.
"When you get a chance," Magnus said, almost smiling despite her anxiety about the elemental, "please escort our guest to my office. I will take Declan's call from there." She left.
"Well," Hermione said, "when I woke up this morning, I certainly didn't expect for all of this to happen. For that matter, if someone had told me that I would be in a room with a non-moonshifter Werewolf and a half-Vampire at the same time without fearing for my life, I would have said they were off their rocker."
Tesla rolled his eyes again. "Well, someone sure as hell is."
"To what do I owe this urgent call, Declan?" Helen asked her friend when she got to her office. She noticed his haggard expression and immediately became worried.
"The sensitive Abnormals are acting very strangely, Helen. We have had to put gas burners in the fire Elemental's habitat to prevent it from going out, and I was just told that the water Elemental has frozen most of the water on the secondary marine level. Even the pteranodon is acting unusually; she keeps flying into the windows."
"Have you gotten any word from any of the other Sanctuaries?"
"Tokyo, New Delhi, Cairo, and Sydney have all contacted me," Declan replied. "Onryuji has had his hands full trying to keep Suki calm. He asked for a support team from Sydney to help run the rest of the Tokyo house, but they are having problems of their own with mass Tasmanian Tiger sightings. Cairo has reported another surfaced Sand-ray—alive this time, but in distress—and New Delhi has had several Yeti come to them with frostbite. Whatever is going on, it seems to be worldwide."
Pulling up the relevant files on her computer, Helen read through the briefings. "If that is so, I fear we may be hearing from the rest of the surviving houses in short order. Why did they not contact Old City directly?"
Declan looked confused. "Everyone made several attempts, but none could get through. I was on my fourth try when Henry finally answered. It was as if there was no one on the receiving end of the call." They both heard a small 'ding' and Declan turned to his other screen. "I just got a message from Moscow saying that your data stream cut off halfway through a vital system update." He then turned back to Magnus.
"Helen, what is going on?"
Magnus grimaced. "I wish I knew."
After explaining part of how she had gotten into the Sanctuary—something to do with a disillusionment based shield charm (which sounded like it worked by bending light using the principles of electro-mechanics) and apparition (which essentially exploited the basic properties of quantum physics)—Henry and Tesla escorted Hermione to Magnus' office.
"So, what exactly were you doing in the SHU?"
Hermione looked at the werewolf who stood next to her in the elevator. "The shoe…?" she asked.
"The, ah, Special Housing Unit," Henry replied. "That's where we found you. We keep the fragile or especially dangerous Abnormals down there. Sorry, I would have though you had known where you were, since you were, uh, there."
Tesla snorted. "Yes, because that sentence wasn't at all awkward. Really, Heinrich, we need to work on your interrogation methods. You sound like a awestruck fan-boy."
"But I wasn't—"
"Anyway, here we are," Tesla said as the lift doors opened. He strode quickly down the hall to a door that was standing slightly ajar, from which two voices were drifting into their hearing.
"I'll assemble a team to assist Onryuji. If Suki is behaving strangely, she may attempt another escape from her enclosure. We can't risk that occurring again; we only just managed to avert disaster last time."
"Thank you, Helen. I would have done so myself, but I've had my own hands full keeping our elementals from causing too much damage."
Hermione paused slightly. She knew that voice.
"Ah, here you are," said Helen as they entered the office. She turned the computer monitor toward them. "Declan, this is the unannounced guest I mentioned to you. Hermione, this is the head of the UK Sanctuary house, Dec—"
"Declan? Declan MacRae?" Hermione gasped, surprised.
"Hermione Granger." The man on the screen smiled. "I haven't seen you in years."
End Notes:
So, it may have taken more than a year to write and post the newest installment, but here it is. I do have a valid excuse: school attacked me.
Here's hoping it won't take another year to write the next chapter.