Full Summary: Waking up at the feet of a temple statue in a strange land with the last seventy-two hours drawing a blank, Pandora Potter is left scrabbling to get home and back to normalcy with nothing but a strange box she awoke with, a magical suppressing cuff strapped to her ankle, and a quest to find three keys to open said chest and maybe figure out, for once and for all, who the hell had dumped her in Kyrat.
In no way should she get involved with the local civil war running the country into the ground. No siree. Not at all.
Fate, it seemed, had other ideas.
Tags: Ajay Ghale & Pagan Min, Harry Potter & Ajay Ghale, Harry Potter & Pagan Min, Female Harry Potter, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Lakshmana Survives, Harry IS Lakshmana, though she doesn't know it, She Doesn't Know What the Hell Is Going On Either, Oblivious Harry Potter, Time Travel Sort Of, Ajay Ghale Just Wants A Nap, Pagan Min Just Wants His Family Back, And Also World Domination, Moral Ambiguity All Around, Protective Pagan Min, He's a Trash King But He's OUR Trash King, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Chapter One:
Not In Kansas Anymore
Pandora Potter aroused from her stupor in fragmented bits and pieces that was hard to hold together in any kind of complete consciousness. Instead, she felt the pain first. A small Mariachi band was kicking up a salsa-storm in her head, doing the fox-trot on her temples, an ash tray had been dumped in her mouth and her tongue felt fatty and useless, and her stomach felt as if it had turned into a washing machine drum fuelled by Firewhisky and vomit.
Not exactly the best start to a Monday morning.
Or was it Tuesday? Wednesday?
Pan tried to roll over, to snuggle deeper into the covers that she must have kicked off-
Only for her cheek to graze cold stone, and not her smushed-soft pillow in Grimmauld Place.
The idea of any late-night benders she possibly could have gone on yesterday flew from her head dizzyingly. In its place, awareness came hurtling back with startling clarity, her heart beating fast as the buzzing in her brain whirred together as if someone had reached inside and put jump-leads to her panic. Lurching up to a sit, however, proved to be the wrong move. Blinking awake, the room around her swam sickeningly, bile lapped up her throat to sting sour on her tongue, and white-spots dotted her vision.
Pan heaved over and emptily retched, and by the time the last spasm knotted her sternum up, a sheen of sweat was gathering on her brow. "Bloody hell."
Swiping at her face to brush off the tired dregs of gagging, Pan finally found she was… sitting on a bed roll. Square, long, decorated in little embroidered lotus's, it was barely thicker than toilet paper, and the probable cause of the crick in her neck and back. Similarly, the bed roll was in a… temple?
A small, boxed room, narrow enough that should Pan stand up and stretch her arms wide she'd touch both walls. It had barely enough room for the bed roll and the statue that took up most of the space, a tall stone effigy of-
Buddha?
Pandora thought the muggles called him Buddha, though she was sure Buddha didn't have tits quite as pronounced as this, clearly, ladies. She sat crossed limbed on a plinth, incense, heady in Pan's nose, burning at either knee, a tiny sea of candles alit around her sitting form, and in her lap, a box.
Where the hell was she? The last thing Pandora remembered was… Well, she wasn't too sure. Either she had been at a Weasley Sunday lunch, or she'd been taking Teddy for ice cream, or-
Then why was she in her Auror uniform? Sleek and grey and embellished with the Ministry symbol on her own breast. Had she been on a mission? Pan didn't remember picking up a new case from Shacklebolt, especially one that would have led her here. Yet, sometimes she was called in on emergencies, cases where the ministry needed a heavy hitter in the ring, one with the name to cause waves. People found out that Pandora Potter, the girl who lived, was on their tail, and it was normally enough to get them to pack it in and hand themselves over before a fight could break out.
Pan had never woken up in a temple before, however, no matter how dire the emergency had been.
Fear settled to cold, hard resolve.
Think. Don't panic.
What did Pan know? She was sitting on a bedroll in some sort of temple. How did she get here? Pan wasn't too sure, but the last seventy-two hours were a black hole in the back of her mind, so something had clearly happened to either obstruct those memories, or she was willingly repressing them herself which was unlikely. Had she been hit with an Obliviate? No, Pan thought with a sniff. She smelt no butter popcorn, which was usually the sensory suggestion of an Obliviate for at least five days after the spell had been cast on the victim. Imperio? Pan twitched her bare toes and fingertips, flexing them and releasing. Extremities were normal, no icy flush which meant that, too, was improbable. A-
The sleeve of her jacket rolled up just enough to flash the expanse of her wrist. A forming bruise darted across the tender skin in a streak, pink and raw and still in the early stages of showing its ugly face. Pan scrambled to pull up her other sleeve, spotting the matching mark on her left wrist.
She'd been bound at some point, though now the rope was missing. Rope… a bit muggle, wasn't it? Pan didn't know of a single witch or wizard who went for rope over a binding hex…
Take stock.
Pan had awoken in some sort of small temple. She doesn't remember the last seventy-two hours. At some point, her hands had been bound in rope, hard enough to chaff against the thin skin of her wrists.
Her hand jolted for her holster on her forearm, only to find it empty. A quick glance across the floor around her showed no wooden stick had rolled into any corner in a tussle.
Pan had awoken in some sort of small temple. She doesn't remember the last seventy-two hours. At some point, her hands had been bound in rope, tight enough to chaff against the thin skin of her wrists. Her wand was missing along with, apparently, her fuckin' shoes.
There was writing on the wall, tethered on multicoloured scraps of cloth fastened together like bunting, in a script Pan couldn't place. Curvy, rounded, definitely not based on the Latin alphabet. The only thing Pan could read was the scrap of a note attached to the box in the statues lap-
The box!
Pan reeled for it, despite the pounding in her head, scrabbling on her knees over to the statue, nearly burning her legs on the tea-candles to get close enough to snatch up the box as she knocked them over in her haste. It was modest, easily carried but not so small to go unnoticed, intricately decorated with gilt corners on the red-wood, and on the latch, a piece of parchment sticky-charmed on. Pandora snatched it off and scanned it.
Pandora's Box. It merely stated. "Real fuckin' funny." She scoffed in reply.
Scrunching up the note and dashing it away over her shoulder, Pan turned her focus on the box in hand. There was, underneath the parchment, no latch. Only three key-holes, encased in the same gold gilt of the corners. Each one was slightly different to the last, one adorned like the head of a tiger, the other an elephant, the last, a presenting peacock.
"Alohomora." Magic thrummed in Pan's hands, rising up in wandless throes-
And jarred inside like a seatbelt catching in a car accident. The box stayed locked.
Pan froze, blinked, and panic reared it's misbegotten head. "Alohomora!"
A rise and a sudden drop, and a still locked box. "No, no, no, no, no-"
Pan dropped the box, uncaring if it cracked or broke on the stone below, instead clambering for her bare throat, her empty wrists, her baren right ankle-
Her fingers met freezing metal on her left ankle. Pan promptly shirked up her trouser leg and… there it was.
A bronze-coloured cuff, as wide as her palm, sitting innocently around her ankle inscribed in old Goblin runics. There was no key to it, no hook and eye, not even a bloody zip. The metal bled seamlessly together like water, encasing the whole of her ankle.
A magic suppressor.
They were an old bit of magic, old and intricate and outlawed, made during the first Goblin wars where goblins had wanted to capture wizards and witches to ransom back to families. Only their hostages kept Apparating out, casting spells on their captures, and that just wouldn't do.
So along came the cuffs.
They constrained magic inside, leashed a witch or wizard, bound them so no magic could be preformed from the smallest Accio to the largest Bombarda. In short, it rendered them no more magical than a muggle.
They had been banned for nearly five-hundred years, since the peace accords had been struck between the two races, and how one, an intact one as most had been destroyed after the signing of the treaty, had managed to find its way to Pandora's ankle was anyone's guess, but there it was. Mockingly staring back at a suddenly wandless, and now magicless, eighteen-year-old Pandora.
In an act of pure desperation and not much thought, Pandora took to trying to yank the fuckin' thing off, clawing, tearing, even tying herself up into a pretzel to try and chew through the metal. None of it worked of course, and she very nearly chipped her front tooth clean off on a rather vicious bite.
The cuff glimmered and shone, and didn't budge an inch.
Don't panic. Don't bloody panic. Don't fuckin' panic!
Okay… okay. What did she have so far? Pan had awoken in some sort of small temple. She doesn't remember the last seventy-two hours. At some point, her hands had been bound in rope, hard enough to chaff against the thin skin of her wrists. Her wand was missing along with her shoes. And, the cherry on top, she had a magical suppressor strapped to her ankle barring her from doing any magics. The only way to get it off was for the person who had slipped it on to willingly take it from her, or for the time said person had magicked into the metal to tick down to zero.
That could be an hour, or it could be seven months, maybe even up to a year.
In an odd way, you had to give the Goblins their due for being ingenious little shits.
But, and that was a big BUT, that didn't, currently, help Pan's odds. Again, she turned her attention to the box, but that proved, without magic, as unmovable as the anklet, the wood not even creaking as she tried to pry the lid off with her blunt nails and even blunter brute strength.
Fantastic.
Fuckin' fantastic.
It's fine, Pan told herself. She can't apparate, and she can't Floo or send a Patronus, and if she gets jumped she's fucked without magic, but she can call Hermione with a muggle phone. Hermione would then go and tell someone else, likely Shacklebolt, about her current predicament, and then he would send some men to come and grab her, and then she'd be taken to Saint Mungo's to get the anklet off and-
Done. Dusted. In a week, this would all be some funny story to tell George and Angelina over a butterbeer at the Hog's head. Another misadventure in a long line of Pandora Potter's life. It wouldn't even be the weirdest thing she'd been through.
Pan just needed to find a muggle phone first.
Heaving herself up and taking the box with her slung underneath her arm, Pandora turned for the door of the small temple. There was no deadbolts on the decrepit wood that sat wonkily in the stone frame, not even one of those weird muggle chain thingies, just a brass handle.
A brass handle that turned without obstruction as Pan twisted it.
Whoever had done this to her and dumped her here, they hadn't thought to lock the door. Which either meant Pan had been jumped and one-upped by a complete moron, and wouldn't that be a blow to her ego, or they had wanted her to leave the cramped temple.
Pan couldn't really decide which one is worse. Getting taken out by an idiot, or playing right into their hands in any shape, form or style.
Still, there was only one way to go, and so, with a steadying breath and a squaring of her shoulders, Pan went.
The door creaked as it edged open, and the light sinking through the crack was almost dazzling compared to the candles in the dimly lit room. Pan held her hand up to shield her eyes, squinting as she finally stepped out and onto grass that tickled the soles of her feet. Seen as she wasn't immediately tackled to the floor, she guessed wherever she had been dumped, she hadn't been ditched with guards.
Small mercies.
Her hand fell from her eyes as the word outside came into focus.
And it was beautiful.
Pan was standing on a hillside, soaring high with foothills surrounded by snow tipped mountains wrapping the horizon in stony embraces with steep-sided jagged peaks that washed to green valleys below. Down the hill was an alpine ravine, dotted with pink trees throwing petals in the breeze across a dirt path, and even further below was a deep river gorge. By the side of the tipped temple she stood before, in a patch of weeds, a mountain goat chewed his lunch and winked at her with his twisted horns crowning his head, the only other living thing as far as Pandora could see.
It was beautiful, and a hundred percent, without a doubt, not bloody England. "This is bad, even for me."
Woo or Boo?
A.N: Pandora: Well, well, well... if it isn't my old friend: the dawning realization that I am royally fucked.
As always, thank you all so much for taking the time out to read this nonsense. I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter, and are looking forward to the more that is to come. If you have a spare moment or two, don't forget to drop a review, they keep the fingers typing, and I will hopefully see you all!