Chapter 51 - Stop

The whole room was as stunned as the readership. "DUMBLEDOOR!" they all shouted at the white haired wizard who wasn't gandalf and they all became slack jawed. "Yes, I have been here this whole time." he said with a voice of sternity and seriousness. "Well you're too late to stop it now old man" said Snape who raised his mighty shaft in the air and pointed it at Luna. "Avocado Kebab-" he started shouting before being interrupted by an "umph" sound that he made instead of saying "bra!". Dumbledoor had betrayed Father Time and had lept at Snape from across the room in a direct arrow like jump befitting a man of a younger age and considerably more athletic background. Nevertheless Dumblydoor made the jump and when he hit Snape he winded him on the bed which was formerly his own then he closed his eyes, held out his wand and drew a magical circle around the lot of them in the room, sighed, and grunted out a "disapperate", and then the room was left oily and empty.

The dawn was starting to rise, the clucking sound came from the chickens who were now fully grown and capable for standing up for themselves against adversity, but not foxes. A sleepy man with shaggery hair sat at a desk with his face planted down on the table, on the verge of sleep. He was having sweet and innocent dreams of playing weird nerdy board games over multiple dimensions. He was living a happy and uneventful life so far, hence he was previously unmentioned, but this dream he was having was about to be interrupted very abrupty. A massive brang was heard and the man went "aaah" and jolted himself upright and found himself in reality. Before him had just appeared a room full of people all clearly mad at each other as if some shit had just gone down. "What the fuck is going on?" he said in a daz, "Gandalf, Snap, and Dumbledoor? You're alive? Nobody tells me nuthin!" and then he calmly got out his notepad and started to write. "What are you doing?" cried Rincewind, "They're about to kill each other?". "With what?" laughed the man. "It's okay Kenny," said Sirius to the man, "Ol' Ricefield here doesn't know about Azkaban. "Azkaban?" said Rincewind as he looked around the room, "is that where we are?". "Well duh" said Ginny, "why else would he have said that?". "Whilst we are in Azkaban no magic can be used." explained Dumbledoor as he dismounted a peeved Snape. "Well apart from this!" said Kenny as he got excited and held up his hands. He grabbed at the thumb of his left hand with the fingers of his right hand and moved the thumb up and down in relation to the index finger of that hand. Amazingly the thumb moved freely and did not appear to be rooted in the natural location. People stopped to consider what they were watching beofore Gandalf butted in, "it's just muggle magic, Kenny is using a simple trick." "Hey," said the man behind the desk as he tapped his badge, "that's Officer Turner officially, and you lot still haven't told me why you're here interrupting my beauty sleep." At this stage Dumbledoor stepped towards the desk, "I want these men (pointing at the bad dudes) and women (being inclusive) arrested for murder, attempted murder, terrorism, and landmark destruction". And so Kenny took it very seriously and led the men off to holding cells to wait until the paperwork was processed.

The rest of the gang all went off into their allocated rooms for the night, but before they did they went for a couple of brewskis. As Dumbledoor was leading the prosecution he was kept separately to the rest of the group. They all couldn't believe it. "How can he be alive?" said Harry to the group as he sipped his G+T, "Everyone was sure he was dead, they even replaced him." "Not everyone" said Sirius from the other end of the table which got the attention of the group. "A few of us knew of his plan from the get go." It was a few of hours before he 'died' when we gathered together in his room. It was cold and chilly as he had left the window open, autumn was around the corner, like biscuits to yoghurt. Myself, Hagrid and Dumbly himself were gathered around in his recliners. It felt awesome for me to be in the private room of his, the incense and the fantastical ornaments were legend at my time at school, and here I was in the midst of it all. He took a puff on his pipe and broke the news. One of the students at Hogwarts had died. A young girl called Esk, her body was intact but it was but a shell that once contained her personality, hopes, and life. She had been sitting in her room playing games on her phone when she had been attacked by someone capable of magic of a kind that he did not know, and she was killed on the spot. Her wand was snapped from the brief moment that she tried to defend herself, the howling was heard, and that was it. Dumbledoor explained that he immediately warged into an owl and confirmed this kill for himself, and that he had immediately called us to be there. We asked the usual questions. Who was it? He didn't know. How did she die? No idea. Was anything missing? Her necklace. What shall we do? And he didn't reply for a few seconds. The howling events have been localised around the school recently, there have been no other events reported anywhere else, at least not for a long time. If word gets out that a student has died then the school will be shut down for health and safety reasons and whatever is causing these events will spread out into the rest of the world. He explained that he needed to cover the death and to also do a bit of factfinding of his own about the howling. It was his mad idea but it was the best that we had at that time. He would assume the role of Esk, disguising her body as his own in the process. He thought that this would allow him enough time to figure things out whilst also allowing him to go undetected from the likes of Luscious, Snape, Hans and anyone else like that. It was up to Hagrid to keep on top of things at the school, but when Snape turned against reason and against goodness and the Gryfindoors were kicked out he sent me off to gather some information about Snape's friends. Once I found out the size of the army that was being led against us all I was roped in to help out and provide more protection. I also arranged to have my old buddies meet up and help us with Gandalf here. We had to keep this a secret though, if word got out anywhere that Dumbledoor was alive then we would have been targetted and killed even quicker than we would have been otherwise.

After a few hours at the pub gang all went to go off to sleep.

In bed they all slept or tried to, but this was troublesome partly due to the inherent discomfort in sleeping in a prison tower, and also partly due to the fact that so much shit had been going down over the past few days. There was at least still the reassurance that Snape, Luscious, Hans and the rest of the goobers would all be tried before the judges of the laws of both man and god. This was hopefully the end to it all they all thought, but Luna and Rincewind lay awake and unsettled further. They both knew first hand of Luna's tropical fruit dreams, they knew that there were connections between them and the evil dudes on trial tomorrow, but they also knew that it seemed to go a lot deeper than that. There were so many unanswered questions. Who was actually controlling the howling? What did it have to do with Luna's parents? Who was the weird guy in Belethor's shop? And would any of this stop or make sense any time soon. Rincewind had been trying to rack his brain over this for some time but couldn't make heads nor tails of it, like he was trying to use a poker chip as a flipping coin. Luna tried hard to slip back into a tropical fruit dream, but she knew that there was a distinct lack of vitamin C in her system in this moment and that she wouldn't manage it. The accusations from the evil people about her stung like the stingray that killed Steve Irwin, piercing her right through the heart. "Crikey!" she thought as she thought about the potential relationship between her father and Hans Landa. But surely it would all come clear in the passing light of day tomorrow, so after a few pained minutes she slipped into sleep and dreamt of nothing particularly interesting.

Hans lay on his bed with a subtle smile on his face, smirking away about something.