Merry Christmas everyone.
The first chapter in a double-bill of this story. I hope you enjoy my Christmas presents in the form of new chapters and one-shots.
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The Curse of Jumanji.
"Well done, Miss Hallow," Miss Hardbrooms said as the potions mistress strolled around her classroom, inspecting every single cauldron as she did, "you are almost as good as your mother when it comes to potions, though you still have a way to go."
Bella said nothing as she worked, only just managing to hide her eye-roll in the process, though it did occur to her that if this was HBs' way of being encouraging then she didn't want to know what she was like when she was denigrating towards her students. The small blonde witch was relieved when the potions mistress moved on to criticise or to observe how the others in the class handled the workload.
Her mothers' stories about how HB felt the best and only way to encourage students were to compare them to others in their family line was not an exaggeration. Esmerelda had told her and Prue about what HB did on a regular basis, so she was prepared. To be honest, Bella and Esmerelda genuinely didn't care.
As she worked on her potion, Bella took a few moments to reflect on how things had been at Cackles. It hadn't been that bad. Okay, so she had not really enjoyed the broomstick flying test since Miss Cackle was just as bad when it came to comparing her to her mother. There was no mention of her aunts, but then she'd expected that.
But overall the majority of the classes were great; aside from the flying test and the incessant need she had to make sure every kid in her classes became fit and healthy, lessons with Miss Drill were great. Spells with Mr Rowan-Webb were also great since the only wizard on staff was nice enough to make the lessons interesting and fun. Sometimes the wizard made them play games while helping them develop their spell knowledge and exercise their spell repertoires.
In contrast, the chanting classes were fairly boring. It was an important lesson in the witching world because it helped some witches develop their oratory skills while giving them confidence, but in other areas, it helped developing musicians practice their art. It didn't help with the teacher. While Miss Bat was a very nice woman, very kind and approachable even by witching standards, she did have a tendency of falling asleep during lessons. Her mother and aunt had told her stories about that. It seemed it had happened frequently during their own time at Cackles, but it was clear that for Bella in her time at school, Miss Bat was even worse.
There were some lessons she didn't like, potions was one of them.
Esmerelda had not made the same mistakes with her daughters as her parents had done, which was to palm them off to other people, such as her great granny Josephine and her now deceased dead great grandpa, although Aunt Ethel and Aunt Sybil were given to tutors instead. No, Esmerelda had made sure to teach both of her daughters equally in order to form the important bond between mother and daughter which symbolised the daughters' ascension as a witch in training, and she had made sure both of her daughters were confident in their lessons and in themselves. There was no way she was going to allow a repeat of what had happened with her sisters happening again.
As she worked on the potion in front of her, Bella couldn't help but think of her missing aunt.
That talk with Tasha Nightshade and Morgan Spellbody had been insightful, but what she couldn't grasp was why anyone would give someone the bedroom of a girl who went missing. But the two older girls had made her think about things from another point of view. Bella didn't know either girl, but if they had run away then surely they would have at least left something behind, and if they were sick enough to just run off and decide to fake their deaths or something, why hadn't something been found like a bloody handkerchief, a few strands of hair, stuff like that?
And yet, from what Tasha Nightshade and her friend had said about Mildred and her mothers' relationship, the girl would never just leave without at least telling the woman she was okay. So what was happening?
As she worked near her friend Miranda, Bella had just opened a little bottle of mermaid tears and was about to pour some of the turquoise liquid into the potion before letting it simmer for a bit before she heard something in her head that shocked her in its intensity. It was the sound of drums, and it seemed to chill her to the bones, and she dropped the vial.
The sound of smashing glass instantly brought Miss Hardbroom's attention, and Bella turned to face the angry potions mistress, but she could still hear the drumming and she looked over her shoulder and she could see that Miranda had made a mess with her own potion but it was more manageable than her own, and Bella hypothesised she was just startled by what had happened. "What is the meaning of this, Miss Hallow?" the potions teacher hissed at her.
Bella shivered with fear as the cold reptilian eyes mercilessly glared at her. She knew that it would need to be good. "I accidentally lost my hold on the bottle, Miss Hardbroom," Bella said, mentally kicking herself for not finding a better excuse to use on the woman.
Miss Hardbroom leaned in closely. Bella had to hold back the urge to wince when she caught a whiff of the womans' acrid breath.
"Do you have any idea how expensive mermaid tears are?" she growled.
Bella swallowed, she didn't need the teacher to tell her. She already knew how expensive the tears were, some of her mothers' business involved the collection and trafficking of mermaid tears and scales. Mermaids were extremely hard to find, even for witches and wizards, and they did not like to be bothered. Their blood, tears, scales, hair and saliva were extremely valuable, and they had remarkable properties.
Even farming the mermaids and allowing them to give some of the ingredients was impossible. Mermaids did not like to be caught or locked up, even worse they were extremely unbearable when confined.
"Detention for tonight, you can clean up this laboratory without magic," Miss Hardbroom eventually hissed out before she stalked off, flicking her fingers at the mess, and causing the bottle to reform though there was nothing she could do about the magical tears.
Bella walked tiredly into her bedroom many hours later. The blonde haired witch was tired, and all she wanted to do was drop onto the bed and drop off. She was beyond exhausted. After dinner, HB had made sure she cleaned the laboratory from top to bottom. Without magic. The good news was her mother had made it very clear to her one of HBs' favourite punishments was to have her precious laboratory cleaned without magic since she preferred punishments to be incredibly long and drawn out.
The bad news was Esmerelda had also taken the punishment and used it to teach her daughter what to expect. Bella remembered all of those long days where her mother forced her to clean the potions room at their home in order to build her experience. Bella was thankful she had learnt those skills now, but she was still tired, and she almost passed out on the bed, but first, she slowly got undressed and put on her night things before she washed her teeth and her face before she crawled into bed.
She was just about to get under the covers when there was a knock on the door, which made Bella sigh. She sat up and glared at the door. With a flick of her hand, she opened the door and she blinked in surprise when she saw Miranda there. The bespectacled girl was still wearing her uniform and her hair was down.
"Hi, Miranda. What's wrong?" Bella asked, hoping her friend was not going to be here long.
"Sorry I'm bothering you," the other witch said, and Bella raised an eyebrow, relieved her best friend was empathic enough to see she was tired. "I just wanted to know….what happened in the lab today? What really happened?"
"How do you mean?" Bella asked cautiously; she had no intention of telling her friend the truth unless she wanted to be seen as a lunatic.
Miranda sat on the bed. "I glanced at you when you were making that potion. I just wanted to smile like we did during our entrance tests, but I saw you look startled at something else," she said before she licked her lips and looked back at her hesitantly. "Bella, did you hear something? A drumming?"
Bella reacted very much like a cat that had its tail trodden on. "What?"
"A drumming," Miranda repeated.
"You heard it as well?" Bella asked.
"Yeah, I did, and it scared me," Miranda replied.
Bella looked at her friend, for a moment wondering if this was some kind of a lie but how would Miranda know about the sound to make up a lie like that. It made no sense. "It scared me as well, Miranda," Bella admitted, "but what was it?"
"I don't know, but I can tell you something else that's odd; I looked around the room, and apart from an interest in what you accidentally did with those mermaid tears, no-one seemed to have heard it," Miranda said.
Bella blinked in surprise. She hadn't thought of that, but she had to admit now Miranda had brought it up, it was odd. The drumming sound had been so loud it had felt as though someone invisible had been drumming in her ears with a noise-amplification spell mixed with an exploding curse.
"I don't thunk I've ever heard of a spell that can do that," she said cautiously, "though with magic, nothing is truly impossible."
Miranda nodded in agreement. But before they could say or do anything else, they heard it again, the drumming. It began as a throbbing sound at first that went right through them both. Then it grew louder until it felt as though there was a dragon breathing on them.
Miranda jumped up and headed for the door, desperate to escape, but as she got to the door she paused. "Bella, the sound…. it's coming from the corridor, I don't know how I know but I can hear it."
Bella stood up and walked over to her. As she stood in the doorway, she turned her head from left to right, and she could definitely tell the sound was coming from the right. "Wait here," she said, "I'm going to put some clothes on, and then we're going to find out what that sound is."
She was tired, she knew that she should be in bed, but she knew she didn't want to go to bed with this drumming sound in her head, and she could imagine Miranda wanted to do the same thing. But one look at Mirandas' face told the blonde the bespectacled girl was scared to find out.
"It's coming from down here," Miranda whispered to her friend as they walked down the corridor holding a lantern.
Bella nodded, feeling just as apprehensive as Miranda was; she could tell that her friend was scared, but she didn't think this drumming sound was going to go away.
The drumming sound led them to a door. There was no label on the wood. Miranda and Bella exchanged a look, and the bespectacled girl shrugged her shoulders, and opened the door. The room was filled to the ceiling with clutter; old desks, battered chairs that looked like they'd been demolished with spells over the years, there were old, tattered sheets of cloth that covered old pieces of furniture.
"What could be drumming in here?" Bella whispered.
"Who knows?" Miranda whispered back, swallowing apprehensively as she looked around. The light from the lantern was casting a comforting glow around the room, but as the light shone it also created dozens of shadows which overlapped with one another, creating terrifying shapes.
The drumming sound started up again, shocking them both and made them jump and turn towards a certain part of the storeroom, and as they cast their lantern around they came upon something they didn't expect.
There, tucked out of sight, was a box with the name Jumanji stamped on it in fading white paint, and in the dim light, they could see four pictures on it, of animals from wild Africa and India with a fierce-looking hunter wearing a helmet.
Bella opened up the box. "It's a game," she whispered as she took in the four paths that led in some way to the centre. Miranda nodded to two objects on the board, they were quite close to the centre, but they weren't that close. "Looks like it was being played before it was abandoned," she said, her voice blissfully unconcerned before she found herself reading the instructions. "It looks like a straightforward enough board game to me, but I don't get why it made that drumming."
"Or why and how no-one else heard it," Bella pointed out, lifting the lantern up higher before she studied the board game. Her fingers found a small door which opened up and she pulled out two objects. One was in the shape of a tigers' head, the second a crocodile.
"More pieces?" Miranda asked.
"Yeah," Bella replied before she decided to put them back since it wouldn't help the pair of them to understand the mystery of what had caused the drumming sound. But before she could just drop them back into their box, the pieces suddenly leapt out of her hand and they landed on two corners of the game.
Miranda jumped. "What was that?"
"I don't know. I've never experienced anything like that before with any kind of magical game before," Bella replied.
Miranda didn't respond. She suddenly felt funny, sick to her stomach suddenly. "B-Bella, s-something's wrong," she gasped.
"I know," Bella replied, and Miranda lifted her head and she saw her friend looked as nauseous as she herself thought. But then Miranda lifted her fingers, and she gasped in horror.
Her fingers were turning into smoke, and the rest of her hands and arms were also transforming into smoke, and sucked into the board games' centre.
"Bella!" Miranda screamed in panic.
"Miranda, what's going on?" Bella shouted back, just as frightened, and Miranda turned to look at her friend and she could see that Bella was going through the same thing she was. Her hands and arms were being transformed into smoke and when whatever was happening to them reached their armpits, they were suddenly lifted into the air and then they were spun around over the games' centre, before they were sucked downwards so fast Miranda could barely see what was happening in the room.
The darkness of the storeroom and the weak glow of the lantern candle disappeared, replaced by a clear cloudless sky during the day. Miranda would never truly understand what had happened, she would never work out of they fell through the air or if they were somehow transferred into a hot forest.
Bella was standing next to her, just as stunned and for a moment the two girls wobbled around, surprised they were suddenly upright in this strange alien landscape.
Miranda was about to say something, open her mouth and ask a question, but before she could actually get a word out they suddenly went still when they actually listened to where they were. They could hear the sound of numerous animals, the squawking of birds as they flew through the air.
Miranda and Bella looked at one another, both of them wondering what was going on.
Oooh, they are now both trapped in Jumanji, a game of magic. What will happen to them? Who will they meet? Will they get out?