Chapter 2:
The Thousand-Eyed Jester
by NonsensicalRants
My Patrons overwhelmingly voted for me to update this. So here we are. It always shocks me to discover what stories of mine you people like.
"Fully outlined, thoroughly planned story about the darkest imagining of Harry ever conceived in Blood-soaked succession? No. Fuck that. Update the random plot bunny you had about Harry killing the horntail that you're making up as you go along and is quickly turning into a crack fic. Also, Harry and Cho's daughter in a post-apocalyptic future? More of that please."
So here you go. At least this one I did outline fully before starting so it's easy to write.
On their way down the path to Hong Kong Island they passed by many curious things. Barbed wire, mines, several corpses and a whole lot of trash. But most inauspicious of all were the signs. They were hard to miss, being the only source of vibrant color and numerous to boot.
Beware the Thousand-Eyed Jester.
Some of them even sported snazzy fool's hats. It was a bizarre juxtaposition to the nuclear wasteland and oceanfront metropolis in any other direction. Twisted metal, rust, dirt and tropical trees was all else that greeted them.
Whoever he was, he sounded like a nice bloke. May they never meet him.
They eventually approached a pristine steel and glass gate that was five lanes wide leading to a highway bridge that entered Hong Kong Island itself. Guarding it were two men in military fatigues, two wizards in Auror-red robes and a machine woman.
No really, it was a machine woman. Lily, for the life of her, couldn't tell if it was a machine that looked like a woman or a woman dressed up as a machine, but her exterior was sleek metal and tinted glass. One arm was less well-made than the other, looking like she stole it from Johny 5 and grafted it to her shoulder.
"I'm guessing cyborg." Victoria whispered as they came within spitting distance of the guards.
"You would guess correct." The woman yelled back from her place ten minutes away. "And the helmet comes with hearing and vision enhancements."
Lily already hated this woman, and they hadn't even gotten to within five meters of each-other yet. She set her jaw in place to do her best at hiding her anger, something her superiors in the Hashashins never could teach her to do well, and walked the final distance.
"Identification." The cyborg woman asked.
They each handed over what passed for passports in the modern state of the system of international identification these days. WW3 tended to make proper documentation difficult to maintain or verify. All the better for people trying to hide their identities, which was most people.
The cyborg woman read the passports in turn and took an exceptionally long time on Victoria's.
"Prewett?" She asked, seemingly skeptical.
Victoria nodded.
"That's peculiar. The last of the Prewetts of magical Britain were murdered by Voldemort over thirty years ago." The cyborg said, surprising them all with her in-depth knowledge of magical Britain. She didn't have a British accent, although that may have been more due to the muffing of her tinted helmet than it not being present. "Let me guess, no relation?"
Victoria shook her head.
"I mean, yes. My grandmother was a Prewett and I took on the family name out of... shame of what my paternal family has become." Victoria said honestly.
The cyborg tilted her head slightly to consider her.
"Weasley." She whisper-hissed just loud enough for them to hear. "Delacour. I know who you are. We've met before. You must be out of your mind if you think I'll be letting someone of your blood through these gates."
And there it is! Lily knew one of them would raise enough red flags to prevent them normal access to the city. But she expected it to be to their heritage as part veela or as a werewolf, not due to their familial connections.
Victoria did a poor job of hiding her confusion. It's not every day you meet a one-armed cyborg. If they had met, you'd think she remembered her.
"But mister Vulpine and miss Abadi may enter." She finished, handing the trio back their passports.
Well, the surprises just kept coming. Her goal was one word away, all she had to do was say "okay" and ditch the annoying redhead veela behind... By herself... In the irradiated wasteland outside of a comically criminal city whose slums are full of rapists and murderers. Rapists and murderers who are regularly punished by exile, leaving them to wander the aforementioned wasteland. Where the gorgeous, teenage veela with no combat experience nor real fighting ability to defend herself would be. Alone.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen.
"Thank you, ma'am, but we are a team. We were hoping for a safe place to sleep for then night, but what's one more day sleeping outside and taking shifts?" Lily joked.
They immediately turned heel and walked away.
The noon sun rose and fell as they waited in the underbrush beneath a rocky outcropping. Teddy and Victoria took the time to have a power nap while Lily stood watch, as they tended to do during the hottest hours. In exchange, Lily was the one who got the full night of sleep while they traded shifts. The sun was finally getting low when the two woke up. They let her wake up naturally, so she always endeavored to let them sleep until they were done sleeping.
"ETA until we try and break in?" Teddy asked, still laying down and seemingly asleep.
"As soon as you two are ready." Lily answered, finally removing her sunglasses now that it was getting dark out.
The twin groans were soon followed by a pair of groggy teens packing up their sleeping bags and pillows. Their expansion-charmed bags filled, they set out back along the path to Hong Kong.
They veered off to circle around the bay, looking for any path forward, but for the remainder of the day all they encountered was ruin, other small parties they kept their distance from, and literal dumps. Mountains of garbage and lakes of sewage from the city, dumped into the crater of the nuke that very nearly missed the city. From what little she knew about the city, it was used as a dump specifically for the sterilizing effects of the radioactive material left within. It was also a long-term plan to repopulate the land with life, as the waste would fertilize the land and compost and over the years create a most fertile forest.
It was already working, based on the lush vegetation that grew along the edges and on the tops of the shit mountains. Strangely enough, it did not smell particularly offensive, so the first art of the plan - using the radiation to sterilize the waste and bacteria - must have been working.
Trekking along its outer edge and keeping to the treeline they eventually spotted their path forward. All along the rim of the crater were what could only be described as comically large pipe exits. From these sewage, trash and runoff water all poured into different sections of the crater, and workers manning different heavy equipment to spread the trash and create canyons for it to flow easier.
"Please tell me you aren't seriously considering what I think you're considering." Victoria predictably complained.
Lily glanced down at Victoria's fashionable, white skirt and flat sandals and the carefully pedicured toes and snorted. She knew the rest of the girl's shoes weren't much better. Pumps and heels, the lot of them.
"Are you a witch, or aren't you?" Lily asked before casting impervious charms on her cloths and a bubble head charm on her head.
They descended the hill, careful of the vitrified rocks and the sharp, glassy edges they contained from the heat of the blast that once ended the lives of hundreds of thousands years ago.
They entered the tube in disgusted silence. The filth and runoff beneath their feet squelched with every step. Though the sensation of human waste and worse was dampened, Lily could still feel in through their soles. Victoria could probably feel it against her skin and it took a lot of willpower not to turn around and laugh at teh sight that would surely meet her. Thankfully the smell of fresh air in their bubbles held, even if it did distort the disgusted rumblings of the redhead behind her.
They walked for only a few minutes before exiting to a familiar crater.
"Um. I'm pretty sure we walked in a straight line; did I nap through the U-turn?" Teddy asked.
"No," said Lily.
She looked around and spotted it, hidden in an alcove between two of the smaller, though still human-sized, sewage pipes. A security camera with a fool's hat atop it.
"We have been noticed by the thousand-eyed Jester." She declared.
"Then I know what magic this is." Victoria declared in turn.
Lily and Teddy focussed their attention on her.
"It is a fun house enchantment." She explained. "Father told me how they used it during the war against Voldemort to devastating effect. Hijacking the wards of a secure location and turning it into an inescapable maze for their enemies. Like a real life Eschar painting where hallways and rooms duplicate endlessly and fold in on themselves and where doors connect to completely different areas of the facility."
Lily motioned for Victoria to stop as Teddy entered his thinking state. His eyes cast down to the ground and a deep frown marking his brow and jaw. They knew to "stop yapping like housewives" when he did this. It could save their lives, as it had before.
"How were they able to navigate such a maze then?" He eventually asked, still glaring at the ground and nothing at all. "Especially if the normal location is unknown to them, the warped version would be even more incomprehensible."
"They didn't." Lily said as if the answer was obvious. "They embraced being as lost as their opponents, who would not be expecting the world around them to turn into an enemy. Though I wager this one is under the control of the same person who controls the wards themselves. So, they have control over how the space alters and folds."
Teddy thought on this, and neither Lily nor Victoria interrupted his train of thought. He eventually nodded.
"This Jester can turn it into an impossible maze, an infinite hallway or an entrance that exits on itself, like he did with us." He deduced. "So that was a warning, then? If we try to enter again this Jester, this protector of Hong Kong, will let us experience the full force of the city's protection. Or just toy with us. With a name like 'Jester with a Thousand Eyes' he ought to be a playful and boastful character. Both are personality flaws that could open avenues of victory for us."
Lily liked the way he was thinking, as she often did.
"Let's tackle it head on." She told her two companions.
The looks of surprise Victoria gave her at the bold strategy could almost be misconstrued as insubordination. But Teddy smirked.
"You're thinking the sme thing I am?" Teddy asked.
She nodded.
"We win as we always do, then." He decided. "ALlow the enemy to underestimate us, and let their pride lead us to victory.
"I really don't like how much we rely on pure dumb luck to get out of situations as is." Victoria complained. "And beating this kind of enchantment really does amount to pure dumb luck, if it is truly random."
"It is." Teddy concluded.
Lily and Victoria tared at him.
"Power comes at a cost, and when enchanting that cost is usually in terms of control. The more powerful the enchantment the more perilous it is to the wielder, often in excess to the danger it poses to those it is wielded against." He concluded. "If it works on a simple algorithm for pseudo-randomness then it can be beaten with cleverness, if it uses a source of entropy for true randomness the nwe have as much a chance of beating it as absolutely anybody else on the planet."
Great. Now he was talking arithmancy. It was time to move on.
"Very well. I will continue to follow you." Victoria acquiesced, clearly not understanding the situation but having faith in her friends to get her through, as they always did.
Lily nodded in approval.
"Onward and outward then." She commanded.
They re-entered the pipe one-by-one, and each gave the camera a gesture of greeting or rudeness as they passed. They needed this Jester to know they were challenging him, or else he might make things too easy.
The pipe immediately began to twist and split; the single tunnel becoming twenty and all occupying a slightly offset space until it turned into something like an inside-out drill bit. It was all still one tunnel but Lily found herself walking along the ground while Teddy walked along the ceiling and Victoria on the wall. Both appeared from her perspective to be within arms reach, but when she reached out to touch them they were so much further away than they appeared.
"Nice of him to start us off easy. Do you reckon he'd let us leave if we turn around?" Teddy joked, his voice echoing and sounding much further away than he appeared from her subjective viewpoint.
"Oh no. We got warned once. It's game time now." Victoria said, fire entering her voice like it did when danger approached.
She had no bite, but her bark was devastating.
Lily couldn't agree more. And so, they marched on past the many branching, smaller pipes that broke off of the main one. They didn't have to go much further before reaching the end of the tunnel with the service door. And many duplicates of said service door, each of which would surely exit into a different part of the subway and sewer systems beneath the Hong Kong Bay.
George stared at the multitude of CRT monitors in consternation.
He scratched at his eyepatch as he turned to consult the terminal and change the camera correlating to monitor two-eighty-five from the low-quality CCTV to the smaller, hd camera built into every such device. They couldn't always be recording in HD, what, with storage space being limited and all that, so they were manually activated.
The higher quality video of the three teenagers appeared on the low quality monitor and he pressed the prt sc key for a quick screenshot. A few hotkeys later and he blew up the image to the one, wide-screen LCD monitor behind him. He retrieved the bag of carrots from his rarely-used desk-chair - aweful for your back, sitting all day. It's best to stand - and went back to snacking on them as he consulted their appearance.
The automatic, sliding door to his monitor station hissed open with that satisfying automatic metal door sound he loved an in walked two of his three favorite black people in the world.
"You called for us, Fred?" Angelina asked.
Blaise walked beside her being his usual stoic self.
"Yeah, come have a look at these teenagers trying to break into the city." He instructed, indicating the LCD.
He stepped away and popped a squat on his office chair to give them space in the cramped, CPU-heated room. They had to come to the center and turn around to properly see it, but when they did their attitudes changed to consternation as well.
"Does this trio look familiar to you guys?" Goerge asked.
"They do, indeed." Blaise said.
"Let's see." Said Angelina. "A redhead, obvious part-veela. A green-eyed girl with a crow's nest of black hair. A metamorph with shockingly expressive hair. Whoever could they be?!"
George leaned back in his seat to escape the "accidental" close contact with Angelina had made with him as she pondered
"My niece is alive?" He asked aloud. "And has escaped Bill and Fleur? This could either be wonderful or terrible."
George pointed to the monitor to waste pipe four and they watched screen two-eighty-five as the new golden trio split up through their separate doors.
"I am suspicious." Blaise warned. "The Dark Lord's progeny and godson along with the daughter of two of his most trusted lieutenants just walk into our house, and you think this is a good thing?"
Angelina took longer to ponder.
"I say we give em a chance. I would rather forget it, but I still remember what HE was like all those years ago. Adorable and kind and brilliant. I remember Bill. I remember Fleur. I remember Tonks. I remember professor Lupin. They all used to be so beautiful." She explained. "I am willing to bet these three are too. If we give them the chance to show it and protect them like our predecessors failed to do for us... and our youngers."
George nodded along to every word. He agreed completely. Thats why he reached out at set the randomization of the fun house enchantment to maximum.
"Merlin, man! I said I was suspicious, not that you should kill them!" Blaise complained.
"Seriously, Fred. Don't you think that's a bit much?" Angelina pleaded for them.
George scoffed, and once against ignored her self-made delusion.
"I thought you said you remembered what they were like, or am I the only one who remembers three eleven year-olds taking down a troll and then, for an encore, tackling a crucible of magical challenges designed by the most brilliant minds of the era to flummox lord Voldemort himself?" George countered. "And that was only their first year together. Basilisks, dementors, dragons and mer, oh my! No. Unless we have misread this situation entirely, we have here the son of the single best Defense teacher we ever had and the most brilliant Auror of a generation. The daughter of a Triwizard Champion and the best curse-breaker Gringotts had ever seen, and a Potter. They will survive this. Maybe even be the first to win against me."
Angelina and Blaise both accepted this line of reasoning and smirked in excitement at the implications.
"Angelina, go in after them and make sure they don't get themselves killed. Blaise... I need you to keep Astoria busy." George ordered.
Blaise raised an eyebrow.
"For how long?" He asked.
"For as long as the daughter of Harry James Potter remains within Hong Kong." Answered George.
Zabini stared at him stone-faced for a moment.
"You overestimate my sexual prowess." Blaise deadpanned with perfect delivery.
"Um, I was thinking more along the lines of romance." George corrected his joke. "Take her on a nice trip to New Zealand or something. I hear it's till relatively untouched by the war. Use up your vacation days if you have to. We cannot allow Astoria to find out about this young woman, or else one of them will surely die."
"Didn't you two put off your honeymoon years ago?" Angelina added. "It might be time for you to correct that."
Blaise glared at them.
"I'll thank you to leave planning our decade-plus overdue honeymoon to Tori and me. And I would also remind you, George, that it is inappropriate for you to try and order me on when to use my vacation or sick days. Employee rights and all that." Blaise quipped with a smirk.
Gotta enjoy that high-society, pureblood humor. It's so dry you could use it to make raisins and jerky.
"They will meet each-other in time, and hopefully neither of them dies from the fight that will ensue." Blaise finished.
George nodded dourly.
"Let us have two body bags prepared for such an eventually." He warned. "And a trash compactor."
Boom! Robot joke. Right to the jugular. He still had it.
"Besides. I'm not activating any of the turrets, so they should be fine."