Cyan: Hi again!
Magenta: Hi! School is a pain!
Cyan: ¬¬ I told you to stop talking about it here! You have plenty of time when you're doing nothing in class...
Magenta: ¬¬ Look, a possum! (points nowhere)
Cyan: OMYGOD POSSUM! (hides behind a sofa)
Magenta: Well, here's the chapter! :D
Chapter Eleven - Exodus
The following days were grim and colorless. The girls managed to make a secret hideout in the basement of an abandoned muggle house, and for some time they were reluctant to go out for fear of being caught...mostly. Dealing with their sister's situation, however, was almost unbearable. They hadn't known her for long, true, but having her in such a state, after all she'd been through, was what kept them quiet and sad, staring vacantly out the windows whenever they weren't at her bedside.
Each one of them tried to wake her up her own way: Cyan read her Shakespeare every day (mostly his comedies, since it presumably would keep her from dying), doing her best to keep herself from crying while doing so. Magenta would sit next to her and talk about all the nice things they would do when everything was over ("We could pick berries, you know? Or perhaps horseback riding..."). Scarlet took a completely different approach: ever since the first day, she researched for each and every single one of the spells that might be useful, and when her sisters weren't watching she would try them on Bianca. But nothing worked.
"I'M SICK OF THIS!" shouted Scarlet one day, kicking the building her purple eyed sister was making out of silverware. The noise it made attracted Cyan's attention too. "What, are we just going to stay here until they find us?! Someone come up with a plan, for God's sake!"
"There isn't a plan, we can't defeat Dumbledore without Bianca," said Cyan, "It said it in the prophecy, remember?"
"Oh, so just because it's written in a prophecy, it has to be true?" Scarlet snapped. "Most of divination is just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo anyway; we make our own destiny. And I say we should quit just sitting here doing nothing and instead go out and find a way to defeat Dumbledore. Bianca deserves justice, as do all the other people Dumbledore's lied to and manipulated." She was thinking particularly of Harry at that point. Magenta shook her head. "It's not that simple, Scarlet, and you know it isn't. Bianca knows so many things about Dumbledore that could help us, but now, if she doesn't make it..." She trailed off, not wanting to admit defeat but thinking it was futile to pretend otherwise. "We can't just give up!" Scarlet was adamant, and although the other two were inclined to agree that they shouldn't let Dumbledore win, they'd didn't see any feasible way of fighting him. "What's your suggestion then?" asked Cyan. "I don't want to hand victory over to Dumbledore either, but coming up with a plan with Bianca like this will be nigh on impossible." Scarlet bit her lip, thinking. "I don't know, but there has to be a way. If Dumbledore used dreams to get to Bianca when we thought we were safe, couldn't that be something we turned against him?"
Her sister looked at her, intrigued. "That's it!" said Cyan, "I think I've read about that before...
Both of them had a plan now, and started to develop it right away: An Oniric potion. "Hold your Hippogriffs, girls!" exclaimed Magenta, interrupting them. "That takes about two years to brew, and that's not even counting the time we'd need for finding basilisk poison and a giant sloth brain...!"
"What other choice do we have, Mag?" answered Cyan, almost crying. "We're severely screwed, in case you haven't...!"
But then, a sudden, violent noise made her stop. It came from Bianca's bedroom.
The girls drew their wands and rushed into the room, thinking it was one of Dumbledore's allies trying to finish the job. An ink well, which had been left over a table that morning, was shattered to pieces at the other side of the room, with ink splattered all over the wall forming the words. "Do the potion". The girls looked at each other, then at the wall again, and moments later they were all sobbing.
"She's still in there!" Scarlet rushed to Bianca's side, with her face covered in tears. "Bianca, we won't give up!"
With a look of grim determination, Cyan nodded as she joined Scarlet by their sister's bedside. "No, we won't." At last convinced, Magenta also agreed, knowing that they had to do this for their sister. It would be a difficult process but it was the only chance they had.
"Forget our mission," Magenta said, "The prophecy daddy thought he knew about was a lie. If we want to defeat Dumbledore then it'll be down to us, and only us. The Death Eaters can't help us now, only Bianca can if we find a revive her."
And so they set about beginning to brew the Oniric potion that would hopefully revive their comatose sister. It was a difficult process, but one that was necessary if they were to win. Now that they had begun to do something about the sitation with Bianca, it had given Scarlet's mind more time to wander and begin worrying about other things; especially Harry. How was he going to fit into all this, when Dumbledore still thought he was on his side? What would happen to him.
Magenta tried to put her mind at rest. "We'll find a way to rescue him too," she said, but Scarlet was far from reassured. After seeing first hand what kind of damage Dumbledore could do to others, it only worried her more.
"Yeah, but...what if Dumbledore finds out? What if the Order gets here or...does something to Harry?" Her sisters looked at each other, concerned.
"And what if he chops us into tiny pieces?" asked the purple haired girl. "What if the world implodes? What if space wizards come here and conquer us all?... As you said, we can't let fear conquer us."
To that there followed a deathly silence, only interrupted by Cyan, who smelled something next room. "Oh, the fish! I forgot!" and fled to the kitchen, while both the other girls ended up sitting at opposite sides of the bed.
After the meal, they decided it was time for them to move on a find somewhere new to hide; this time on the continent. It was in a small place near Durmstrang called "The Dark Cave", in which the twins had stayed during one of their trips with the Malfoys and, according to the legends, was the birthplace of basilisks. They could go on their brooms, traveling only at night, and eventually get there to brew the potion...
"Wait a second," interrupted Cyan. "Scarlet hasn't got one and Bianca can't hold on to the broomstick! We need another method!"
"Magic carpet?" asked Scarlet. Her sisters looked at her. "Alright, I was just..."
"That's it!" exclaimed Cyan. "Our problems would be solved with one of those!"
"Well, do you see one of those lying around anywhere?" Magenta remarked, but Cyan gave a dismissive shake of her head.
"Magic carpets are just enchanted rugs. We've got rugs, right? And if we found the right spell we could charm one."
Agreeing, Scarlet nodded. "Actually, that would work. We just need to find the right enchantment. I remember reading somewhere about the spell they use on brooms to get them to defy gravity, perhaps that could be done on a carpet as well..."
While Scarlet remembered how to charm an object for flight, the other two girls began to look around the house for a rug they could use as transport. There was a worn old woven rug on the top floor with some horrible floral pattern straight out of the fifties, but it would do. After magically enlarging it to accommodate all four of them, Scarlet was ready to perform the flight spell.
Flourishing her wand extravagantly, Scarlet said, "Wingardium Maxima!" and the carpet glowed orange for a brief second. Then, it did nothing. The three girls exchanged glances.
"Did it work?" Cyan asked tentatively.
"Let's find out," said Magenta as she sat herself down cross-legged on the rug, looking about herself and feeling slightly puzzled. "Um... up?" she commanded it uncertainly, and then tried tugging at the edges of the carpet, but to no avail. Scowling, she gave a huff. "How do you fly this thing?"
The three of them remained silent, thinking about that question. Cyan tried several spells that only seemed to work temporarily, Scarlet started to read some of the library books in search of an answer, and Magenta started search for ingredients to brew potions that she thought might be useful. Then, they tried it on the rug: sometimes it flew all the way to the roof, others, it would wrap around household objects or the girls themselves, and, on one memorable occasion, they inadvertently made it grow fangs and attack them. They argued, planned and practiced until midnight, when they finally made it fly consistently.
"I told you," said Magenta, sitting right on top of the carpet as she learned to fly it across the room. "It was my floating potion."
"It was my animating spell that finally worked, this had nothing to do with your potion," retorted Scarlet, a little bugged, from the ground. She was forced to move as the carpet almost hit her in the face. "Watch out!"
"Tell me, do magic carpets fly like birds or float like lethifolds?"
"Lethifolds glide, you idiot!" Scarlet shouted back, but then Cyan tolf them to stop, saying that time was precious and that the sooner they got to Eastern Europe, the better. So she made them start packing.
The girls didn't have a great deal of belongings to pack; being in hiding meant they had to travel light, but when it came to packing up Bianca's things they all found themselves getting emotional. As Magenta folded one of Bianca's dresses she began to feel teary, wondering if Bianca would ever wake to see how good she looked in it again, but then she told herself that by doing this they would surely help Bianca. Soon after they had all their things packed into a magically expanded duffel bag, they were ready to go.
It was almost nine o'clock when they set off on the carpet, the onset of fall meaning that the days were growing darker earlier, making this season ideal for them to travel unnoticed. Bianca's unconscious form was wrapped in a blanket in the centre of the rug, while the other three girls sat about her steering their textiled transport. As they began to ascend to the clouds they watched the twinkling lights of the city decline into glimmering specks beneath them, a sea of sparkling lights mirroring the array of stars above. Then, as they flew further from the urban areas, the lights faded to leave nothing but the dim shapes of fields and roads illuminated only by moonlight.
The wind was so strong that if any of them talked, it would have been just a faint buzz in the other's ears, so they only communicated through sporadic yells. Cyan smiled, as she remembered the muggle motorbikes she'd encountered in South America: it was an interesting sight to see so many, most of them very cheap, traveling around at top speed, annoying both pedestrians and drivers alike. She had ridden one on two occasions, discovering it was almost like a broom but a lot more difficult to drive, because you had to keep balance while taking care of the speed bumps and irregularities on the road, and also focusing on the many cars that made traffic so darn heavy. As she steered her corner, she thought the rug was even more like one of those bikes...
For an hour or more they drifted high above the rural landscape of southern England, until they began to approach the capital and saw the glowing ring of lights from vehicles on the M25. Flying further still, they soared high above the bustling metropolis of London, a city still vibrant and awake even as the night wore on. The sight of the city at nighttime took the girls' breath away: so busy and alive yet so far beneath them. Lines and dots of white and red and yellow lights glared up at them from below and from all sides; the girls realising that now they weren't even flying above the tallest of the buildings around them. The carpet had to be steered to navigate around the tip of the still unfinished Shard, and again they had to fly higher to traverse the roof of Canary Wharf. Once they even had to direct the rug lower to avoid a plane coming into land at Heathrow, and hoped nobody on board had noticed them.
At length they left the glittering lights of London behind, and flew on towards the continent. Drifting over Kent, they passed Canterbury and Dover until they had reached the Channel, seeing the silhouettes of the White Cliffs disappear behind them as they crossed the gray and foaming sea. By dawn, they would have reached Bruges, where they could rest for a night before continuing their journey on towards the Slavic countries further east.
-*-*-*-tHe NeXt DaY-*-*-*-
"Wake up, sleepy heads!" Cyan seemed very happy that evening, as the smell of Belgian waffles invaded the small motel room, which, as usual, they'd enchanted to be bigger. Outside, the sun was almost set. That meant the girls had slept all day. "We have a special meal in honour of the country we're in!"
"Cyan, leave me alone!" Magenta covered herself with the sheets, turning back in the bed. "We still have to wait until midnight!"
"Don't be a child and get out of that bed!" Scarlet, who was preparing to get dressed, realized how much everything had changed in so little time. "Scarlet, serve yourself before it gets cold!"
That night they travelled across Belgium and into Germany, arriving in Essen the next morning and leaving said city the following night, heading to Fulda. The fifth night they reached their destination after resting in Praha: an enchanted forest only accessible to wizards and witches and, in the depths of the mountains, the Dark Cave seemed to greet them with a somber joy.
Once inside, the girls looked about them to see the cave that would be their home for however long it would take to track down the ingredients they needed. The deeper they went the darker it became and the ground was hard rock beneath their feet, but it was at least spacious and one of the safest and most obscure places they could be. The twins were remembering their camping trip here with the Malfoys in one of their luxury tents. It may not be the homeliest of places, but with all the equipment they'd brought with them it could be made comfortable enough for them to camp out. And hopefully, here would be where they could successfully acquire the basilisk venom they needed for the potion...
Scarlet was just setting up the shrinkable camp beds they'd brought while Cyan made dinner on a portable stove, so that they could eat before the sun came up, and Magenta was preparing protective wards around their campsite and setting up floating candles in the darker corners of the caves to allow them to see, but as she went deeper into the darkness away from the cave entrance, she thought she heard something move.
Stopping still suddenly, she squinted into the darkness before casting lumos to help her see. There appeared to be nothing there except more rock where the ceiling declined and the cave grew narrow, but just as Magenta was about to turn away she again saw a flicker of movement, something like the sudden uncurling of a snake's tail as it slithered into the darkness...
-.-.-.-.-.-.-End of Chapter 11-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
Cyan: You had to play the possum card you idiot!
Magenta: Well, you play the squirrel card every time!
Cyan: No, I don't!...SQUIRRELL!
Magenta: Where?! (runs off)
Cyan: So! How was the chapter? Good, bad, Iowa? Please comment!
Magenta: (gets back) We also want to thank our loyal reviewers, those of you who haven't been for long, and those of you who are yet to comment :D
Cyan: We are dying to hear your comments, people! :D
Magenta: That's right! bUT FOR NOW, SEE YOU NEXT CHAPTER!:D