"Stars and stones, what is this place?" McGonagall marveled, a little louder than was probably safe since our hearing still hadn't gotten back to full capacity after having magical nitroglycerine thrown at us. We were wending our way deeper into the stacks of discarded items that were what the castle gave us when I asked for a place to hide.
"Room of Requirement," I told her, hopefully quietly enough that our pursuers wouldn't be able to find us by talking. "Gives you whatever room you need, apparently. Colin found it looking for a darkroom to develop his photos."
"That's a shawl I lost when I was a sixth year!" she gasped, plucking said article of clothing off of a rack full of fashions from the 1940s. She looked more closely at everything around and explained, "This must be where the elves put unclaimed items. Albus never did get a straight answer from them about whether there was a 'lost and found' procedure. Some of this looks centuries old! The valuables may have reverted to Hogwarts ownership. If we could sell some for funding…"
"We can fundraise after we keep Voldemort from taking over the school, Professor," I told her. I was, of course, glancing around myself, mostly looking for anything that looked like a proper battle focus. I'd been really kicking myself for not stopping by for my staff and blasting rod, but I guessed I'd narrowly saved McGonagall as it was, so maybe it worked out. I half wondered if the school's fortune wards could have reached all the way down to London to affect my choices to defend her.
I decided to schedule time to have an internal philosophy debate later about fate and fortune magic versus free will. Right now, we needed to have a plan.
Unfortunately, the time to plan was severely limited by monologuing. Voldemort-as-portrayed-by-Gilderoy-Lockhart shouted across the room, "So you've somehow found the Room of Hidden Things? And thought that it would be unknown to me?" He sounded petulant, maybe like he thought he was the only one that knew about the place.
"I found out about it from a first year, man," I shouted, covering my mouth and trying to get my voice to reflect off of a different towering heap of objects. "How long did it take you to find it?"
"Bombarda!" he shouted, knocking over a mound of lost objects in the direction I'd pitched my voice. "I begin to see why you have earned a place as Voldemort's enemy, Dresden. Your mouth would put you against anyone." That was interesting. He was almost talking like he didn't have the memories of the shade I'd tangled with the previous year.
"Hoss, we don't taunt You-Know-Who into a mad rage. It never works out well," McGonagall scolded me as we tried to quietly reposition through the room. Even though he'd missed, toppling the trash had probably cost us some pathways through.
"But is that him?" I asked her quietly, stepping over a fallen broom that was so old it was unclear whether it was meant to fly or sweep. "He's talking like he's not actually the real one. And you would have been notified by the wards if the actual shade somehow possessed him. Plus, if I'm right about that tiara, he's been possessed since Pince got attacked."
"It's a diadem, I think," she corrected absently, then had a thought. "I'd have to consult with Filius, but perhaps Ravenclaw's lost diadem. It was said to expand the mind. If You-Know-Who somehow found and corrupted it…"
"Then he could have it basically running a copy of his mind to control people remotely. He's gone full Doctor Doom with his Doombots running around," I complained.
"I'm not familiar with that individual," she told me, clearly quashing the urge to have me clarify whether it was a real muggle doctor she didn't know about or one of my media obsessions. Instead, she started transfiguring junk into vicious-looking wildcats and sending them to stalk through the stacks.
"Good idea," I told her. "If you transform, you can slip in with them and get behind him. I'll draw his fire and you hex him in the back?"
"I can't let you risk yourself like that, Hoss," she tried to tell me, but it was too late. I was already around a stack from her, looking for a weapon. I still hadn't found anything obviously magical that looked like something I could use. I compromised on an old mop handle that the head had rotted off of. If I was lucky, they'd think I had a staff, and I could at least hit someone with it if I could get close enough. Moody had been insistent over the last few months of defense tutoring that if I was going to carry a staff and rod that I should be at least minimally competent at hitting people with them.
"So you're just a copy of the real Voldemort, huh?" I shouted, once I thought I was clear of the professor's area, carefully picking my way around a corridor of stacked desks that didn't look especially safe. "How does that work? You're just a more complicated imperius programmed into Ravenclaw's diadem?"
"Far more than a copy, Dresden!" the copy in question yelled back, sounding closer than I'd expected. "And the diadem is merely a trophy of my greatness. Useful, but hardly essential!" I was beginning to really appreciate Voldemort's tendency to monologue, even in Doombot form. If years of reading comics taught me anything, it was that you learn so much from bad guys that want to prove how much smarter they are than you. Maybe I could convince him to put me in an easily-escapable death trap if he got the upper hand. "Cats!?" I heard him yell, then fire off a couple of spells.
I repositioned a little further away from where he was coming from, stepping over a pile of lost homework so old the writing was starting to fade off the parchment. "If so, you should have gone with something a little more modern. Diadems don't exactly blend, even back in the forties when you're from."
"And you have no sense of tradition, boy!" he snarled, both annoyed at me and, from the yowls, still engaged in fighting off McGonagall's transfigured cats. "I'm surprised you even use an actual staff and rod. Wouldn't it blend better to use, I don't know, some muggle sporting equipment for the staff? Perhaps a drumstick for the rod? You could tell the muggles you're so keen on that you were in the Beatles."
"A little out of date, but it's interesting that you kept up with muggle entertainment into the 60s. Personally, I would have figured you for a Stones guy, though." I wondered about that, and suggested, "How do you feel about metal? Queensryche or Metallica seem like they'd be your speed. There are probably some good British ones, too, if you don't want to go American." I made a guess, "But they'd be after your time, right?"
"It is never after my time!" the madman insisted, getting too close. I decided to shut up for a minute while I slipped gingerly through a collection of scuffed-up bedpans. A couple more cats slunk over the piles in his general direction. The theory that had popped into my head was that Dumbledore would have been looking for objects like the diadem being slipped into the school. The thing had to reek of dark magic. But what if it had already been here?
Feeling like I'd opened some space, I finally asked, "Was the diadem just sitting in this room since you bombed your job interview in the 70s? Did poor Madam Pince just find it on her own, or did you get to her at her library convention?"
"You're too sharp, Dresden. I'd have had to do away with you eventually, even were you not devoted to being an aggravation. To do you the favor of satisfying your curiosity, she was imperiused over the summer and given specific instructions to acquire a more permanent means of control." The voice sounded smug and then suddenly Voldelockhart appeared at the end of the row I'd been walking down, which was mostly cabinets with miscellaneous junk like old busts stacked on top of them. "You also talk too much," he gave me a mean smile, oddly terrifying in the dandy wizard's face that was always so debonair. With the snap in the closeness of the sound, I realized he'd been using magic to project his voice and lull me into a false sense of security.
When the monologuing villain was accusing me of talking too much, I might have a problem. Nonetheless, I couldn't resist blowing him a raspberry as I dove behind a cabinet with an old wig lying atop it and an acid-scarred set of doors, barely dodging his barrage of spells. The piece of furniture practically exploded, a cage with a small, strange skeleton flying loose. Any time now, professor, I thought to myself, wondering if I could get to an old marble bust to throw it at him. "Where's Belby?" I asked, over the din.
"Hunting down the Weasley twins," he said. "Like I need him to deal with you." I caught a flicker of one of the cats he'd begun ignoring transforming behind him into a black-clad Scottish witch and lining up her shot, only for him to casually flick a, "Confrigo!" behind him, McGonagall having to fling herself backwards to avoid the curse that smashed the floor ahead of her. "Either of you. You didn't think I'd figure out your trick with the cats, Minerva?" he sneered.
He turned to focus on the assistant headmistress, sparing me just enough mind to easily blast my thrown objects out of the air, turning the poor ancient wizard's marble head into so much powder. It at least kept him from going all out on McGonagall, who was quickly losing the duel regardless, but hadn't had to handle any Unforgivables.
Finally, with a dismissive, "Flipendo," he caught her and sent her flying into a large cabinet at the end of the row, the doors clattering shut as she hit the back wall of the piece of furniture. "Bombarda!" he called, blowing up the base of the stack and causing it to topple tons of lost objects onto what might well be the professor's coffin. The fortune wards might not be able to do much if she slowly starved to death, pinned beneath so much furniture.
I hadn't realized I'd stepped free of my limited cover to get a better look until a negligently-cast stunner caught me full in the face and I blacked out.
