Chapter 38
No Plan Survives.
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For a change, Mindy is pretty excited when she wakes up and starts reading the bright blue text boxes.
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YOU HAVE GAINED AND LEVELED A NEW MAGICAL ABILITY!
ANIMAGUS FORM: KESTREL: 2
COST: 20.
MAINTENANCE COST: NEGLIGIBLE.
THIS ABILITY ALLOWS YOU TO ADOPT THE FORM OF A SMALL BIRD OF PREY AT-WILL, GAINING ALL THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES THE GO ALONG WITH SUCH A FORM. ADVISORY: WHILE YOUR BASELINE FORM IS SET AND CANNOT BE INCREASED THROUGH TRAINING, OTHER ABILITIES YOU MAY HAVE THROUGH AURA, SEMBLENCE, AND PSIONICS WILL NOT BE ALTERED IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY AND MAY BE USED IN EITHER FORM. ADDITIONAL ADVISORY: WHILE YOU CANNOT INCREASE YOUR BASE ABILITIES THROUGH TRAINING, SKILLS (GENERALLY COMBAT) CAN BE GAINED FOR USE IN AN ALTERED FORM. FINAL ADVISORY: MAGIC CAN BE CAST IN AN ANIMAGUS FORM, HOWEVER, YOU MUST BE PROFICIENT AT WANDLESS AND SILENT CASTING TO DO SO. ADDING TO THE PROBLEM, YOU MUST OVERPOWER YOUR FORM'S NATURAL INSTINCTS. THIS EFFECTIVELY INCREASES YOUR DIFFICULTY ONCE AGAIN, MAKING THE TARGET NUMBER TO ACHIEVE FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT THE ORIGINAL.
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Mindy reads all of this. Then she reads it again. The third time she starts to giggle softly, trying not to awaken any of the others in the dorm.
Her aura, when active, increases her Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution by thirty. And that number is only going to grow. Even if it caps at eighty like a lot of other stuff seems to, at the moment?
Thirty. Thirty strength packed into less than a pound of potentially dive-bombing bird.
An adult human averages a strength of ten.
Obviously, there are limitations imposed by physics, she can infer that from the 'Small Stature' crap on her sheet. She won't be picking anybody up for example. Even if she has the strength technically, she doesn't have the wingspan to use it that way. Even a hummingbird her sparrowhawk's size and with her Aura strength boost couldn't manage to lift a hundred pounds off the ground no matter how hard they beat their wings. But given that a falcon will attack by swooping in and making a single devastating strike just to watch their prey fall to the ground in a wounded and disorganized heap before following up? That is going to be one hell of a strike with a strength of a bit more than thirty backing it up and an Aura to keep her from killing herself on impact.
Plus, that is completely ignoring that she could be spamming low-level magic in a few months to a few years. Whenever she gets her skill high enough, anyway. The idea that she would ever be able to overcome the negatives and cast anything past fourth-year like that is kind of unlikely. But even still. There are possibilities.
Hermione Granger cast a full-body bind curse at the end of her first year, after all. A little low-level magic from a glowing purple bird flying by at whatever speed her Aura's strength can take her? Or even as a first strike after porting in using her Tele-Skulk ability? Sounds like it has potential to her.
It being Saturday, she makes her way down to the common room to once again see that Dave and Luna beat her there. The three manage to make it to the room to practice without waking anybody, but once they are sequestered back into their den, Dave has something to bring to her attention while they are preparing breakfast. Bacon and eggs with hash browns, orange juice, and milk.
Being able to bring their kitchen with them and do the clean-up with magic might just be the coolest thing ever, she decides.
"So, have you checked your status yet?"
She raises an eyebrow. "No, I just read the pop-up. Why? Something funky?"
He flips the eggs and shakes his head. "Not sure, but when I realized that the animagus thing had a level, I checked it just to see what was going on. Found something kinda odd on the status page for it. Check it out, tell me what you think."
Twenty seconds later, she wrinkles her nose a bit.
"What the hell is a 'Soul-blended' form? We mash together into a single creature of something? Gotta say I'm not hugely impressed with that idea."
He shakes his head. "No idea. But I'm guessing it'll unlock when we get the skill high enough. Probably either twenty-five or eighty, that seems to be where the system cut-offs are."
He passes out the plates of food a few minutes later as they all spend a few minutes considering the possibilities and eating. Finally, Luna broaches a subject that they have all been kind of avoiding.
"So, we have about three weeks. How are we going to handle Halloween exactly?"
Mindy shrugs as she stabs down at her hash browns.
"I'll hang out outside the window to the bathroom as a Kestrel with a warming charm. When she goes down we'll set up the trap just on the outside of the secret passage, and when we see on the mini-map a giant blob of snake leaving? We drop it to cut the thing in half and then deal with Ginny. If anything goes wrong, we pop smoke and enter to take the fight to the basilisk. The only bit that changes from the original plan is that as a sparrowhawk I can do it from the windowsill rather than trying to hide near the room and hope she doesn't cast some kind of charms to make sure she's clear before she goes down. Easy peasy. I figure the hardest part is going to be getting the venom and back to the dorms before it gets discovered, honestly. Did your dad have any luck getting something for us that can actually hold the venom? It's supposed to be pretty caustic stuff."
Luna nods and answers after a sip of juice.
"Yes, though it wasn't as easy as he'd have liked to get it done. A glass vial with a liter capacity, but it needed to be strengthened by runes to be able to hold something like that for a long period. Plus, with basilisks being so rare now he needed to secure the venom sack of a manticore to wrap the cork in. I guess that was a fun bit of conversation at the apothecary. There really isn't very much that is nice you can do with manticore bits, after all, and it isn't as though he could tell the man what he needed it for. Expensive too. They are a five 'X' creature, and that drives the price up. But he got the order in, we should be getting it within the week along with a book he picked up on how to render down dangerous creatures."
She shakes her head at the look she is getting.
"I don't expect that we will have time to actually render the basilisk, but getting the venom out safely would be covered in the book. Besides, after Halloween, if you are still set on thinning out the Acromantula in the forest it could easily be useful there to make some coin. I know that you have been spending a lot and we Lovegood's plan ahead." She smiles. "People like to give my Daddy a hard time because we fail so often to find what we are looking for, but it isn't because he doesn't know how to prepare for our adventures. We are just looking for extremely shy and difficult to find specimens of magi-zoology."
After cleaning up the three spend the majority of the day practicing their animagus forms by rampaging around in the room, stopping occasionally for something to eat as a snack. It isn't until they hear a piercing whistle from the doorway adjacent rest area that they realize that they have been at it the entire day and see Filius and Pomona there, a big grin on his face and a look of pure exasperation on hers.
Dave makes his way over as a horse while the other two are lounging around on his back, Luna having made the hop from the top of some crates. He really doesn't care.
He can barely even feel that they are there. Much like Peter Pettigrew doesn't regrow a finger in his animagus form, his deadened nerves, and metal-plated skeleton both being integral parts of him means that they transfer over seamlessly as well. Once he is there he stops, and the two hop off. Then all three become human again. Flitwick can't help himself and laughs.
"It seems you didn't tell us everything you were up to after all, well done!" His tone drops in cheer a bit. "Though you'll want to be careful around McGonagall. She heard the rumors that a bunch of kids saw a glowing horse last night and is on the warpath to discover which of her students is experimenting with their bodies without teacher supervision."
Mindy laughs. "So? What's she going to do? Give us detention? Make us go register?"
Flitwick shakes his head. "You won't actually have to register until you're seventeen and have reached your majority. You'll be expected to, and no doubt encouraged to by her, but you can't be held responsible for wandless magic that isn't actually hurting another person or breaking laws until then. The laws on the books protect you. Too many people would end up in prison during their hormone-driven teen years without that. But even still, she can make your life rather difficult. It probably isn't worth it to cross her if you can avoid it, so either plan on keeping it strictly a secret or coming out to her now would be your best option. I have to ask though, how did you glow? The rumor was that you were seen from the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw dorms during the storm and from all the way down by the lake."
A brief explanation and demonstration causes their head of house to shudder a little.
"Please do be careful, mixing and matching all these abilities. Not only could they be extremely dangerous, but... Well, not to put too fine a point on it but 'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely' could be a real danger for you down the line at the rate you two pick up new abilities."
Dave smiles. "Yeah, we know. We try to put the good of others before ourselves when we can, but we know." Then his smile fades some. "That being said though, with no idea where we will go next or what we might need? Anything we can grab that might keep us alive is pretty much a priority."
Filius can't help but agree with that and stands.
"Well, if you are looking for the best, you'll have to go elsewhere. I specifically left the dueling circuit because I was slowing down and even with my advantages in being a hard target to hit and a larger than standard capacity for intelligently slinging spells, it was time for me to step aside. Let the new blood have their turn."
He cracks his knuckles and draws his wand with a fierce smile.
"That being said as we have three weeks to prepare and have, I think, planned things out about as well as we can? If you like I would be happy to pass along a few pointers. I was intending to offer this to you probably in your third or fourth year, but then, I wasn't expecting you to get through nearly three years of your practical education in a month either. Can you set up the room for your standard training cycle? I do believe I would like a chance to stretch myself and see where you are exactly, and then maybe see what I can teach you if indeed you are interested."
Sprout sighs and settles in to watch. While she is capable of defending herself, she far prefers her greenhouses to what is likely to happen now. The three students all get up and draw their own wands, letting the masterclass begin.
He may have slowed down, but you'd probably have to be a dueling master yourself to tell the difference. He doesn't move about as fast as they can, even Luna is a bit fleeter of foot than the aging duelist. But his wand spits hate of a dizzying variety and at a speed that was rarely seen in the movies. Between Dumbledore being a huge fan of animating things and transfiguration with an eye to defense while Riddle is largely stuck in a rut where power is all and striving to simply overwhelm an opponent? Seeing a true master duelist, even a retired one, is a bit of an eye-opener. He uses a wand, but most of his spells are both silent and without the motions. Simple point casting. They also note that he rarely is forced to use power-intensive spells, preferring to chain a few lesser ones together at lightning speed to a similar effect when he can in an effort to save his magical reserves.
This is a man who spent nigh on thirty years in tournaments where he was sometimes forced to duel up to five or six times in a day, often against people who considered him a lesser creature and would think nothing of 'accidentally' leaving him dead at the end of the match. So he has developed a style that is about casting efficiency, speed, power conservation, and avoidance, rather than overly complicated or overpowered spells.
It's devastating, and all three of them are astounded at how much the old man has to teach them. Moreover, how much he obviously enjoys doing so.
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Why in the hell had she decided to alter the plan like this? Mindy is less than thrilled at this point with hanging out on a windowsill, given that there is currently a torrential downpour going on just now. The warming charm is doing its job, but wet feathers are very much the suck as far as she is concerned.
The last three weeks were wonderful, really. New abilities to play around with, and a teacher who was expert enough in his field that even with their gamer abilities he still has things to show them. Made even better because the man is still in the party and has been getting better right along with them, staying capable of keeping them on their toes as they get better.
Particularly Luna. She hasn't had as many things to concentrate on, lacking Aura or semblance to mess around with. So she has that much more time to concentrate on the stuff she is working on.
In fact, the only real problem she has at the moment is that she's still eleven. So is Dave. And that makes a lot of the things that she might want to do not quite as likely to happen for at least a few years.
She dreams of the day she has enough power to start feeding these god-like beings their own asses for doing this to them, but for now, she'll just have to wait.
She's been out here for almost two hours now. Not knowing exactly when things would be going to happen, she had been here since long before the feast started. Just waiting. Seems like that's all she does these days, is wait.
Finally, when the feast has been in full swing for about ten minutes the door to the bathroom opens. Fortunately, Moaning Myrtle doesn't appear to be here at the moment, which is nice. The last thing she needs is for book-mort to get distracted and spend too much time screwing around.
She can see Ginny Weasley, red hair and all, slowly walking into the room. She steps as though she is being puppeted around, jerky and not very graceful. Her face is blank. Expressionless. Yet tears roll down it as she goes.
It looks like even though he made it a point to do this on Halloween, it may well have been the first chance the damn book had to do it just based on the control he had over Ginny. The little Gryffindor must be putting up a hell of a fight. No wonder he ended up having to blank her memory after he'd done this kind of thing.
She leans toward the sink and hissing fills the room. Mindy can just barely hear it through the glass, and can't understand any of it. Not surprising, Parseltongue is supposed to be incredibly rare. She had guessed that as gamers they might have a better than average chance to have the ability, but really. A one in a million chance versus a one in ten million still isn't exactly the best odds.
Watching the sink dismantle itself and lead to the tunnel is an interesting bit of magic to see, and a minute after the girl closes it again behind her and began walking down the stairs that she had somehow made appear, Mindy pops herself into the room and sprints to where Dave and Luna are waiting.
They had discussed the whole plan so many times that talking is kept to a minimum while they get things set up. The blade set just so against the ceiling, shrunken so as to not be seen. The smoke generators set in the corners so they are both less noticeable, and trying to disable them would require wandering around blind all through the room. Luna then makes her way down the corridor and towards the stairs that lead to the Great Hall. She doesn't it that they have sent her away, but she gave in after they showed her a memory of Mindy coming back from the dead.
It's hard to argue with something like that.
She is their safety net. If she sees on her map that the snake has left the room, she is to assume that things have gone terribly, horribly wrong and go to get Filius and Pomona. It would no doubt wreck any chance to keep things under wraps, but neither of them is willing to risk Riddle responding to the attack by sending the basilisk down to the feast as a distraction while he tries to make his way from the castle with his thrall.
Then, and to their great annoyance, they are forced to hide in toilette stalls. It's the only real place where they can be in the room, able to manipulate the blade using the map as their guide, and yet still be unnoticed.
Unfortunately, things start to go wrong almost immediately when the sink reopens and Ginny, not the basilisk, is the first to exit. She makes her way to the door that Dave had sealed in an attempt to keep the fight here, and when it doesn't immediately open she stops. Turns to the sinks, and once again hisses at the massive hole that is still there.
Dave doesn't know what to do. For all their planning, they had just taken it as a given that riddle would send the snake up first, and going down into that hole after the thing isn't quite what they had in mind. To make matters worse, they are in separate stalls and have no real way to communicate with each other right now.
Then the short, forced steps start moving again and a quick check of the map shows that she is walking to the corner of the room by the door.
From the stall next to him, he hears a muttered: "Fuck it." Then the smoke generators all go off at once, filling the room at a truly impressive rate. Ten seconds to zero visibility when they had tested the things in a similar-sized area they had made in the RoR. Dave and Mindy are breathing through filters as well as seeing through sealed headpieces that they scrounged off of a couple of old combine suits. They are dealing with the smoke fine. Ginny, not so much. It isn't deadly, but it is the magical world's equivalent of tear gas and she is holding the thing to her face trying to make out the runes when it goes off. Her bubblehead charm is fast, but not fast enough to avoid getting a face full of it. Her coughing spree is intermittently broken by frantic hissing, and finally, the basilisk surges into the room. Dave brings the blade up to full size and drops it on the damn creature, causing an incredibly loud screeching hiss as well as loud crunching sound as the blade does its unpowered best to destroy the stone under the basilisk as well. They both give it a slow count to five, as even with the visibility being what it is and the basilisk cut in half, it is still a hell of a risk to pop out in front of one if it isn't completely dead yet. Then they open the doors.
The coughing, desperate voice of the still controlled Ginny Weasley spits out a hateful spell at the sound of the stall door opening.
From six feet away, with no visibility, it was her good luck that she even got close.
And Dave's bad luck that in his panic at the utterance of a killing curse, he dodged the wrong way. He finally sees the green energy a split second later, and he sees it because it is impacting his face.
Then? He knows no more.
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When he wakes up, he knows right where he is. Laying on the floor naked, next to the couch in the area they have been using for training that the RoR supplies.
He croaks out a question to a tear-streaked Luna that is just starting to stir with a look of astonishment. She watches a man that she had seen disappear from her mini-map, and had been told confirmation of his demise? He's moving his hands around a bit and suddenly is clothed in his school uniform.
She regrets that the view is gone. Not that she would ever try to come between the two, but she isn't quite as innocent as her father might wish, and while she knows she is not anywhere near old enough to be doing any screwing, it is fun to think about.
"I take it we won?"
Mindy blinks her eyes open while Luna nods, a half-smile on her face.
"We did. Whether you did or not is dependent on whether or not Mindy follows through on the threats she made when we were on our way here."
The girl in question sits up.
"You could have fucking told me how distracting it is to us when the other one dies. Fucking bitch damn near got me right after you."
He shakes his head, grinning a bit as he closes a couple of windows.
"Sorry. I was kinda hoping that you'd never need to find out. So, we got the venom? Wrecked a Horcrux?"
She nods while he stands and shakes himself a little. Coming back from the dead doesn't feel bad, he decides. Weird as hell though.
"Two, actually. Went ahead and de-Riddled the book and the tiara before I came in here to crash. I figured if we were going to get the boot, we might as well do it before we had to deal with the fallout."
Dave looks confused. "Fallout?"
Mindy groans. "Yeah. None of our plans counted on you fucking dying while you were carrying the control stone, so I wasn't able to do anything with the giant ass razor blade that was stuck in the basilisk. Damn thing sunk itself into the floor a good six inches. No way to hide it because you are carrying the bulk storage, too. Which means since Dumbledore knows it's a goblin device it'll put Filius in the hot seat. No idea where it goes from here, but it's safe to say that we're damn likely to be on Ol' Beardy's radar soon if we aren't already."
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Filius Flitwick and Pomona Sprout find themselves in the headmaster's office and staring down that notable and Minerva McGonagall.
McGonagall is beyond angry, and even more, is frustrated that she has no idea who to be angry at. All she knows is that one of her first years was found unconscious next to the corpse of the biggest basilisk that has ever been recorded in history, sticking out of an unknown construction that has Albus so spooked that he immediately put a notice-me-not on the bathroom entrance so strong that poor Myrtle has been seen wandering the halls in a right state as she tries to figure out where she should go. Then, after dealing with the bathroom, the snake, and getting poor Ginny to the hospital wing, he brought these two into his office with her and slumped in his chair. Nearly seven hours since they were brought there by Potter and company who had found the thing due to a small flood that stretched out into the corridor. The bulk of the time being spent sorting the corpse out, basilisk being magic resistant it was a horrifically annoying bit of irritation to deal with.
It's now been two minutes here in the office. Finally, Albus speaks.
"Are they alive?"
Filius and Pomona glance at each other. Then Filius looks back at the headmaster.
"Can you be more specific?"
The headmaster leans back in his chair and raises an eyebrow.
"McReady and Lizewski, of course. I assume they are the ones who slew the basilisk, and those two along with Lovegood and yourselves have been inseparable after the evening meal of late."
At their uncomfortable silence, the wizened man continues.
"I'll admit that while I had expected that they were up to something, I hadn't imagined anything like this. When they managed to become animagus at such a young age, and begin not only learning but also teaching wandless and silent casting? I was rather expecting that whatever else they might have been, they had been trained for years before they came here."
McGonagall's face, if anything, narrows in fury that tiny bit more. Albus knew who the horse was, and he'd kept it from her! Even the old man winces a bit at the look he is getting.
That isn't a conversation that he'd be enjoying.
"But this? Infiltrating our castle and putting a first-year at risk like this? Doing whatever they did to her mind? Releasing a basilisk for the joy of the kill it would seem?" He shakes his head. "It does much to make some other tidbits I uncovered suddenly understandable, to a point. You see, whatever they may have told you, they are not actually from MaCUSA. That search has been conducted, and even their given family names are not represented. They lied to get into this school. And now they have nearly released an unbelievably powerful danger on the students."
He can see the look on the faces of two of his heads of house, and he sighs. Lowers his head.
"I am telling you this not because I believe it, Filius. Pomona. I am telling you this because in the absence of any other evidence, this is what I will have to act on. It will result in them being taken away by Aurors. Aurors that work for Madam Bones, the guardian of Susan Bones, one of your second-year Hufflepuffs, if I am not mistaken. Then they'll be tried in the Wizengamot. Where the votes will be cast by the likes of Lucius Malfoy and Augustus Longbottom. Two more guardians of students here, and the leaders of their respective blocks among the members there. I can see easily it being the first time the two were ever on the same side of an issue."
He sighs. "They are too young to be forced to take veritaserum and will likely not even be offered the chance if they ask, being Americans as they are. The best case is that they'll have their magic bound, their memories all but destroyed, and they'll be sent by portkey to somewhere out-of-the-way in the States where they can be ground up by the muggle foster care system over there. The worst case is they will be the youngest ever residents of Azkaban prison. And unless I miss my guess, there is a reasonable chance you will be joining them, Filius. I can think of no other that could acquire the tool they used to kill the creature."
Looking between the two of them, he spreads his hands, pleading.
"Please. Tell me what is going on in the school, and I will see what I can do to fix all this. As things stand, my hands are tied. I will, as you know, fight for what is right. But even I need to know that the side I am fighting for is actually the right one."
Filius finally sighs. She'd made him promise, but she'd also given him the out. She trusted him to know when it was time.
If it isn't time now, he can't imagine when it would be.
"Albus, Minerva? Tomorrow is Sunday. Clear your schedule for the day. You are going to be busy taking a trip down a memory that we are desperately trying to see to it never comes to pass."
To say the old man's eyes widened doesn't really do it justice.
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Author's Note:
So, that was a thing. They had a good plan, but... Well, chaos works for both parties, after all.
I know that there will be some people that will be all 'I hate that everybody is finding out, you're ruining the story, I hate you forever, blah, blah, blah.' My answer to that is that you need to consider the characters. These are not super spy's They are superheroes who are trying to work in an area where they have no real home base, few resources that they aren't carrying with them, almost no contacts, and are dealing with all new bad guys with new abilities constantly. Personally, I think it's only by the grace of the writer being a nice guy that their true history hasn't made it into the Daily Prophet yet.
For the record, Albus knowing isn't going to immediately send them packing. Somebody knowing something won't do it. They have to do something. And Albus? Yeah, he isn't quick off the mark or willing to lose a resource like these two before he has to.