"Watch out!" Salazar warned Lovage, Lettice, and Helga. Carefully, he guided them past the various cooking stations. Trudging through the opaque billowing white smoke, the burning stench started to overtake the odor of frying fish, the aroma of stewing game, and the fragrance of various herbs. The clang of the metal saute pan rang through his right ear and the thudding of falling russet potatoes ringing through his left ear let him know he was inching closer to the garnish station near the kitchen doors.
From the increasingly distant saucier station, a quickening sizzle from the screaming swamp creature that was once his magister's muddleberry sauce informed Salazar that it was ready to combust at any moment. Quickening his pace, Salazar clumsily grabbed hold of the three women and jumped through the kitchen entrance as his concoction exploded with a crack like dynamite. Rolling on the floor, the foursome escaped being pelted and covered by mucus muddleberry gravy.
Beguiled by the serpentine slithering smoke escaping through the swinging kitchen door, the sting on Salazar's right hand from Helga's slap woke him up.
"You fool!" Helga bellowed.
The surprising sensation of her smack left Salazar momentarily out-of-sorts. Searching for his words, Salazar stammered hoping to string together something close to coherent.
Helga shook her head and wiped the debris and ashes from her apron.
Just when he thought he was clear of a reprimand, Helga stomped her foot. "What did you do?!" she demanded as she helped Lettice and Lovage up, both women still in a stupor.
Salazar exhaled, knowing that a simple explanation would ease her ire. From the past few days working in the kitchen with her, she proved herself to be an overall amiable and forgiving woman — so long as you meant no malcontent, which Salazar knew he did not.
"Me bloomers almost caught on fire!" Lovage slapped her ass. "Me rear ain't been so hot since Sir "Slap-happy" Sandringham paid me a fistful of coin to…."
Helga interrupted with an admonishing cough.
"That was fun!" Lettice, the little annoying changeling hopped up and down, full of adrenaline.
The remaining streams of smoke finally became too much for him as his chest tightened. Coughing uncontrollably, he finally spat out what felt like a pile of phlegm. Once his fit was over, the sober look of Helga Hufflepuff came into view through his smoke-induced tear-filled eyes.
"Just," Salazar coughed, this throat still irritated, "an experiment gone wrong."
"Experiment, you say?" Helga shrieked, stomping her foot.
"Yes, that's exactly what I said!" Impatience uncoiling inside of him like a stirring serpent.
"In the middle of dinner service?"
Lord, did this woman have questions! Salazar picked himself up and slapped the ashes from his robe. "I told you I need to practice for the trials! This is truly important stuff I'm working on!"
Helga stomped her foot and pointed to the patrons in the dining area. "These hooligans want their feed and I've been nice to ye so far, but you've been very slow with the sauces and not much help these past two days and…"
Oh who cares about these fools? Salazar shook his head and held back a hiss. "Need I remind you I'm only assisting you, here?" Salazar raised an eyebrow at the sheer ingratitude on display. "It's been days now. I should've been out of that kitchen long ago."
"Oh right, except a room full of fires, a whole buffet of ingredients, and a never-ending array of cauldrons, pots, and pans for you to work with didn't inspire ye from leaving, did it?!" Helga scoffed and threw her hands up, probably out of misplaced frustration.
It wasn't his fault that she was slow with the tea. Wanting to charm away Helga's irritation and obvious exasperation, Salazar inhaled slowly. "Well, I admit it was fortuitous that you found me a position where I could be in proximity to such things." Salazar offered a smile and noticed the tiniest hint of an upward motion on the corner of Helga's plump lip. Good! He could finally make his point. "But I'm a potions master, not a kitchen wench!"
Helga barreled towards him and poked one fat finger on his nose. "Oh, is that all I am to you, am I?"
Confused as to what her issue was, Salazar continued. "You say that like it's a bad thing, like you're ashamed." What was wrong? He only stated facts. He quickly surmised that it was her fault for taking that fact badly.
"I am not ashamed," Helga choked and backed away. Looking around at all the eyes on them, she said, "It's just I know what your lot thinks of women like me! Of people in my station. Below your boots, you think we are!"
Salazar sighed. The snake of impatience was almost fully stretched out now. "Please, I have the mightiest respect for the working peasant." Why did he have to work so hard to appease her? "It is just that…well…."
"Well what?!" Helga demanded.
"Well!" Salazar stomped his foot, feeling no need to hide his agitation any longer, "unlike you, my ambitions lay beyond…"
"Let me put a stop to you right there, mister!" Lovage interrupted. Salazar rolled his eyes, readying himself for whatever this floozy was going to say. "You ain't nothing more than a bloke who puts blue liquid into red liquid and jumps for joy when it turns into green liquid!"
"Hey now!" Carannog the Calm interrupted the verbal brawl from behind the bar. All eyes turned to the geriatric elixir mixer. "That is amazing considering…." Carranog poured blue fairy elixir into reddish dwarf boysenberry wine and watched it turn purple. "Had that turned green, that would be something!"
"Wait, red and blue make green?" Roddy the bar back responded from behind the old man as he eyed the purple liquid Carannog just mixed.
"That's nothing!" Waldo the courier, at the bar, joined with a slight slur to his words. "Eh, did you know that when you mix white wine with that eh...red wine, it creates a pink kind of wine that goes down well with the ladies?" Waldo waggling his eyebrows.
Helga slammed her foot against the floor for what felt like the hundredth time to Salazar. The sudden quake stopped everyone in their tracks.
"The point is, you lied to me!" Helga pointed at Salazar.
Helga sure liked to have everyone's attention. "How did I lie to you?" Salazar asked.
"I asked you days ago if you planned to be potion-making, and you said 'no'!"
"Oh, well, then yes, I lied, clearly." Salazar stood tall. What was the problem? Not like it was a big deal or anything.
"You know how dangerous it is mixing those chemicals near the food?" Helga's eyes bulged.
"I kept my liquids in my own pots, what am I?" Salazar laughed, almost doubling over. "Sloppy?"
Helga did not seem to be any closer to calming down. Salazar eyed the old geezer still eyeing his purple concoction with that dimwitted bar back. He had hoped the old man had conjured up some anti-hysterics tonic.
"What about cross-contamination? What about…"
Salazar had never seen Helga so worked up before. In response, he simply shrugged his shoulders, which only incensed her more. It was indeed a puzzlement. He knew she cared about food, but in the name of all wizard-kind lady, calm down.
Before he could retort with another clever quip, some heathen at table 12 rudely interrupted Salazar. However, Salazar's face lit up as the glow of the fanning flames blasted out from that customer's throat. Then a peasant at table 35 freaked out over the fact that smoke was blowing out from his ears. Then a third ruffian gained everyone's attention by flopping all over the place as his legs and fingers glued together and shifted into a misshapen form of a fish tail and fin.
As everybody at the Hobgoblin Tavern and Inn for Magical Folk began to maneuver chaotically, either to move closer to or escape from the deformed men. At this vision, Salazar stood strong and proud as he did everything in his power to prevent his eyes from welling up in pride.
As a cherry on top, at table 5, a sod's body began to change form.
Yes! Yes! Salazar thought.
The man at table 5 flopped in panic. Salazar's eyes gleamed as the man's screams muffled as his bipedal primate-form slowly shifted to something wet, coarse, and blob-like. The man's feet turned into two leg stumps that slid against the wooden floor. His entire upper torso, neck, and skull morphed into a wagging pink organ. His facial features disappeared into nothingness. Indeed, the man was now a giant tongue. Salazar tsked as he saw that, somehow, this tongue still had a mouth with its own teeth and a tongue. A tongue within a tongue, now Salazar felt like he'd seen everything.
"My God! This is horrifying!" the tongue screeched, as he aimlessly wobbled past the horrified patrons with their own piercing screams, adding to the soundtrack of his melodramatic monologue. "I can taste the gunk on the floor! I can taste this awful gritty, burnt smokey air!" The tongue spun in terror until it knocked over a nearby bench. "Oh My God! I can taste everything!" As the tongue moved around, knocking over more tables and chairs, others started to slip and fall on the thick saliva that trailed from him.
More and more "select" patrons had a wonderful myriad of phenomena happen to their bodies, all falling over themselves in hysterics. Mrs. Mouffat tried to corral them into a controlled group, but they kept sliding away from her. Godric and Rowena, emerging from the back area, attempted to herd them into a corner, but their contrasting spells led to continued bickering that prevented any sort of meaningful teamwork.
"Hurry!" Helga commanded Lettice and Lovage. "Go and find out from their tablemates what they ate, alri?" Helga grimaced, which Salazar took to be her attempt to suppress any panic that was rising inside of her as she huddled with the two kitchen wenches. "With that, I'll figure out what common ingredient could have caused such a thing they swallowed."
When the two girls failed to move, still frozen in fear at the sights they set their eyes upon, Helga snapped her fingers so authoritatively that the girls finally snapped out of their petrified states and followed her orders.
Salazar smiled broadly at his "subjects". His experimental potions were working! Ruminating over the various liquid mixtures he had brewed an hour ago at the saucier station, he painstakingly went over the careful droplets he'd put in those select dishes. His mind raced with how to tweak his formulas to perfection.
"What did you do?!" Helga shouted at Salazar, while writing down every dish Lettice and Lovage were reporting back to her. She narrowed her eyes at him before sighing followed by an intentionally slow shaking of the head - the same sort of head shake his monastery fathers would give him when he had failed to measure up to some sort of moral code he had never agreed to sign up for. She must have noticed his smiling.
"All in the pursuit of furthering the art and majesty of magic, my dear Hufflepuff!"
"Why, you!" Mrs. Mouffat appeared from around the opposite corner.
"Don't you think there's something wrong with what you did?" Harold, the fat barfly asked with a sneer before his interest returned to the large goblet of lager at his fat finger tips.
"Well…" Waldo, that know-nothing know-it-all courier, downed his own stout of lager next to the fat barfly. "They say that the line between a genius and a madman is…"
"Shut up, Waldo!" Mrs. Mouffat interrupted as she zeroed in on Salazar with a few individuals following.
"I don't know what you think, Mr. Slytherin, but there are a lot of weird things going on with people's bodies," Roddy the dimwitted barback finally observed.
"What makes you say that?" Salazar snarled at the idiot.
"You think?" Lettice asked, trying to listen closely while dodging the flames from the fire-breather from table 12.
"Say, can you make a man out of a can?" Lovage then leapt onto the tongue's "lap", calming him by patting some cheese on his tongued belly. Well, at least he was calm now.
Just like that, more and more people crowded around him with their own high-pitched complaints, overlapping with one another. Between that and all the flames being shot, the screams of horror from his subjects, and the sparks flying from various magical instruments trying to subdue the chaos in the background, Salazar's senses were becoming overloaded.
Backing away from the increasingly madding crowd, Salazar started to sweat when a flash of light shot out of Godric Gryffindor's wand, quieting the room.
With a whipping and then swirling movement, Godric conjured a winding wind spell to push the affected patrons to one corner of the room and successfully isolate them.
A small gust of wind pushed Lettice, Lovage, and the other unaffected persons nearby towards the rest of the bar patrons.
Salazar's eyes burned with envy when he saw the looks of awe aimed at Godric's precision and ability to single out all the afflicted persons and group them together. Why weren't they impressed with the afflictions themselves?
"All of you stay there calmly while we figure out how to fix ye," Godric bellowed as he flipped over onto the bar and whipped up more spells to organize the chaos.
The crowd erupted in cheers and chanted Godric's name.
Oh, good God! Such a fuss made over foolish wand-waving or silly incantations. It wasn't as if Salazar expected many of these idiots to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is potion-making, but, even so, seeing the wonders that happened to these men's bodies should have had some of these apes gawking.
"Honestly, Salazar, don't you think you could have picked a more opportune time to conduct your experiments?" Rowena plopped down on a stool, doing her hardest to seem uninterested.
How disappointing as Salazar always took her to be a Briton of somewhat above-intelligence, and yet here she was uninterested in the effects of his potions. He thought she of all people would appreciate what this could mean for the future of wizardkind.
"What do you think about the potions themselves?" Salazar thought to give her another chance to show she had some sort of a brain.
Rowena failed to answer as her eyes seemed concentrated on another.
Following her gaze, she had that starry look. Pain and deep disappointment shot through his heart. Her gaze fixated on Godric the Great. As much as she was trying to look unimpressed, he could tell she was simply enchanted with the scarlet-haired hunk.
Harrumph! Salazar crossed his arms and offered Rowena a scowl in return. A scowl that she didn't even notice.
Well, no matter! This pseudo-genius was not worth his time. In fact, she certainly was haughty for someone who couldn't do the most basic of womanly duties and take a decent dish order. How many times were the kitchens behind because of her?
"Do I need to tell you how wrong it is for you to give people experimental, body-morphing potions without their consent?" Rowena sighed as she turned her sapphire eyes at him.
Resisting the urge to gulp, Salazar coughed. "I'll just have you know that I already received their consent." How dare he be be scolded by her. Who was she, anyway?
Her eyes did not break contact with his. Not being able to take it any longer, Salazar broke away, turning his attention towards the corralled creatures.
"You! The fire-breather staggered towards him. Fire blew from his now sore throat between every word. "Bloody….fool! I...never...agreed...to...this!" A giant fire boost shot to the ceiling, almost setting it on fire before Rowena silently cast a freezing spell.
Well, so much for staying calm, as Godric the Great had commanded. "Au contraire, monsieur, you did!" The crowd hushed. Suddenly, Salazar had a captive audience. This was now his time to shine. You see, before dinner service, you and the rest of this motley crew — " Salazar pointed to the "sideshow" corner "— agreed to be subjects of my potion experiments. I paid you decent coin too." There, that should be case closed!"
"Not like this! I thought we were going to do it after dinner service and we would know what potions we'd be given and what it's made out of, and what it'll do to us!" Fish fingers he flopped about trying to stand on his fishtail.
"Ahhhh! Everything tastes disgusting! This place is unsavory!" The tongue shouted as the cheese on his belly no longer did it for him.
"This is incredibly unethical," some bearded know-it-all self-proclaimed doctor named Frederick replied. Salazar had had the displeasure of making his acquaintance earlier in the night.
Before Salazar could continue, more and more of the crowd gathered around him to reprimand him for his behavior. He was used to facing dissent for his unpopular stances, but all of this yelling, screaming, and cursing at him was becoming a bit much.
Suddenly, the crowd pushed against him. Then the shoves became more violent. What started out as dark mutterings and threats under their breaths became vulgar profanity, rising to the level of uproarious squawking. More and more of that muffled the sounds of anything else, and he could no longer think.
Salazar looked around and saw nearly everyone at this tavern furled their faces at him and clearly would like nothing more than for him to leave.
Does nobody understand the importance of what I just did?
With all eyes wanting nothing more than his exile and illustrating yet another group of people who did not understand or accept him, his heart sank.
I just replicated entire limbs and muscles. Imagine all the wounded who will be able to be whole again because of his potions.
His breaths became heavy as the sensation of choking built up. He eyed the faces of those who are now condemning him with their moral superiority. How lucky they could afford such morality. Images of war-torn villages in his home Iberian peninsula flashed before him.
Imagine all those poor sods punished by this barbaric muggle kings and lords for whatever idiotic reason.
The images of the frightened faces of the condemned and the rings of their screams replayed in his mind as he could remember those public punishments. What was their crime? They just happened to fall on the losing side of the muggle-waged Reconquista. Salazar eyed the tongue-man hybrid.
Now if they cut your tongue out, you can just grow a new one! Not just that! Salazar knew he would figure out a way to regrow arms, legs and other body parts! The consequences of war can become more inconsequential!
Salazar looked at the unruly and unenlightened faces sneering at him. His heavy breathing became even more labored. They truly did not understand, and the worst part was that they were too dumb to know they did not understand.
As the crowd continued with their threatening approach, he gave a quick glance to the "sideshow" off to the side. It was so obvious that they should celebrate him. First, nobody died, and nobody would be permanently harmed by his potions, he made sure of that. People did worse things to each other every day.
"That's enough!" Salazar yelled, using his wand to push everyone around him away. Unlike the perfect Godric, Salazar didn't care to push any of these folks away with any precision as to where they landed. As they scattered in different directions and positions, Salazar's impatient serpent's fangs drooled venom and it was time for it to bite.
"Look at what I did!"
The crowd murmured as they came to from his whirlwind.
"I allowed someone to become a fish! Imagine the depths of the waters he could explore! What wondrous discoveries of Atlantis await humankind! Hell, I allowed people to breathe fire! Fire! That would change warfare forever…and allow people to ease their burdens of having to make fires themselves in their kitchens with straw and wood!"
The crowd still seemed dizzied from Salazar's uncontrolled attack.
Agitation grew within him. "You know what?" Salazar yelled over the recovering, groaning mob. "If none of you care that I just furthered the survival of humankind and tripled life expectancy, and not to mention advanced magic craft by a few centuries, then I don't either!"
Salazar began to heave as the sensation of ants crawling over his skin began to envelop his entire body. His robe tightened, and he began to suffocate under the glowering stares of the crowd. "That's right! If you don't care, then I don't care!" Salazar shouted trying to loosen the hood of his robe while shaking off the creepy crawlies all over his body.
"Pal!" Godric jumped down from the bar to comfort him. It was no use. Salazar slapped Godric's hand away from his shoulder. This lion was the last person this serpent wanted to be comforted by.
"Salazar!" Both Rowena and Helga ran towards him to offer some sort of comfort. Just what he needed, a condescending touch from otherwise uninterested women. As if his manhood couldn't sink any lower.
"I don't care!" Salazar rushed past the two witches. "I don't care! I don't care! I don't care!" He continued to wail as he stomped the floor trying to kill the invisible arthropods. "None of you deserve me!"
As Salazar rushed towards his exit, he knocked into a haggard-looking man entering. The body-to-body collision knocked Salazar back. Interestingly enough, the creepy crawly feelings dissipated, as if the crash knocked them away, even momentarily.
Shakily rising to his feet, he heavy breathing and new ache made him realize that he must have been more weakened by that damn Goblin's poison than he realized. Embarrassed by the tumble, Salazar wanted nothing more than to rush out of there.
Trying to rush past the haggard man, Salazar stole one quick glance. Man, he's in rough shape. I wouldn't want to be him.
"You!" the haggard man shouted, pointing to him.
Salazar turned back to this tramp. Surely this vagabond wasn't daring to speak to him.
"It's you! It's you!" The man seemed to be in turmoil as he shook in realization.
"I don't know you!" Salazar hissed, as he tried to move past the man.
The man slid and blocked the entrance before Salazar could exit. It seemed this man grew in stature somehow.
"But I know you…Salazar Slytherin!"
Salazar focused sharply on this ne'er-do-well face.
Oh, shit!
The realization hit him like a blacksmith's anvil had just dropped on his "shaved, not bald" skull. If Salazar didn't fear for his life before with this mob, he sure feared for it now that this man, shaking with increasing rage, was before him.