Chapter Four
Don't Mess With the Best
"Mister Disintagrat, I do believe that we have everything under control."
"Didn't I just tell you? I'm not here for Olaf! These two Muggles have been frightfully aware of the Wizarding World for over a year and a half! I must take them to the Ministry for questioning."
Matt woke up this time very slowly. When the words finally came from his ears to his brain he tried to faint one last time. This was unbelievable! Besides the utter horror of the possibility of forgetting everything he had found out about the Magic World, the mere thought of Harry Potter and a Ministry Official arguing about his fate in Patrick's house was the coolest thing he could imagine...wow.
"Oh and then you're probably going to wipe his brain of everything aren't you?" Matt saw Harry's eyes narrow at the nodding Wizard who seemed to be named Disintagrat. "Without even knowing the whole story?"
"Well, I do believe, or the Accidental Reversal Squad believes that we--."
"YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ALMOST DID!" Harry roared. His reputation for losing his temper and bellowing out his thoughts seemed to have stayed with him outside the books. "THOSE TWO ARE RESPONSIBLE, OR WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR SAVING THE WIZARD WORLD FROM—uh—EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"What do you mean, Potter?" Disintagrat, Patrick, and Matt were really confused now too. Harry had to wipe a bit of spit from his chin as he gestured down to the end of the hall.
"Matt, Patrick, please lead Zack to the Lab, I'd like him to see what you have been up to..."
Patrick retightened his bathrobe and waved his hand to the door, he was completely flattered to be showing the very people that he spied on the equipment he used. Matt stood up, still a little lightheaded, and followed the rest downstairs.
Once in the lab they could see the real damage that had been done during the "war" that had gone on down there. And to their great surprise there was—none. Amazingly, they looked at all the scorch marks on the walls and ceiling, but no equipment had been touched. Everything was just as electrically happy as it had been before. Zack Disintagrat was looking around in amazement.
"My Lord!" he said, eyes popping. "This is worse than I ever imagined!"
In the light, Patrick could look at Zack more closely, because he was never mentioned in the books, he didn't know what he looked like. He had a small thin face, parted white flecked brown hair, thin eyebrows, and he stood slightly taller than Harry who spun around to face him in anger.
"Worse than you've ever imagined!?!?!?"
"Yes indeed, we'll need to blow the place up at once!"
"NO WAY!! Matt, tell us what that thing does." He pointed at the spinning radar dishes. Matt looked very anxious, his eyes darted to Patrick who shrugged. Harry brandished his wand at him, his green eyes flashing. "Go ahead, its fine!" he said dangerously.
"Umm, these d—dishes." Matt started, "They have a rotating Neutrino scanning amplifier so that when the Divine Proportion Frequency Code is programmed into this computer," He pushed a few buttons." it will detect massive Proton and Electron bursts that have the specific wavelength to magic within a twelve hundred mile radius." He finished with a sign of pleasant satisfaction on his face; Patrick gave him a thumbs-up.
"Yes, indeed, the magic proportion amplifie—WHAT?"
"In English then."Matt grinned at Mr. Disintegrates confusion. "These dishes detect any magic going on within a twelve-hundred-mile distance from this point." He pointed at the ground. "In the records here it has the exact times of everyone entering the radius to within a second of it happening—or whatever. You know what I mean."
"So, basically magic radar?" Harry asked.
"Yeah you could call it that." Patrick said he clearly wanted to show them something now too by the way his legs were dancing on the floor. One of the shorter Wizards must have noticed for they pointed at the map. "What's that?"
"THIS!" yelled Patrick as he spun around to touch the wall behind him. "Is our most prized piece of work!" Matt rolled his eyes. "This took months of work, thinking and... work!"
"No it didn't!" Matt shook his head. "We got the idea right out of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! Remember?"
Patrick looked like the candy had been stolen right out of his baby carriage. "Yeah I know..."
"Wait!" one of the Wizards in Black piped up, they had taken off their mask and had walked over to examine the trashcan full of candy bags. By the look of his red hair it could only be Ron Weasly. Patrick gasped in recognition. "You figured out a way to Spy on us using one of the original books?" Ron looked back at him puzzlingly.
"Yeah." Matt grabbed the Goblet of Fire and opened it, "page 548, second paragraph down, Hermione says it... 'All those substitutes for magic they use – electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things – they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there's too much magic in the air. No Rita's been...' —bla blab la bla and on like that." He shut the orange book with a snap! "Our Idea was, if we find out where the Electrical equipment goes crazy for no scientific reason, then we'll know that that's where the magic is! We took satellite Photos of England, and Europe, and we found—"
"Hogwarts?" Zack asked
"No. Nothing, at first, then we took a live video feed from the GVS, newly installed last year, and we saw this." He put a blurry photograph of the top view of some mountains and a couple lakes on the screen of the computer.
"What's that prove?"
"Hold on a sec! I'm getting to the good part, ok we tried all sorts of different filters, first the reverse color, then darkening, lighting, after that we got into the more impressive—uh—filters, Radiation, Ultraviolet, and Gamma rays. But we still got nothing. So we gave up for a couple of days."
"On the third day," Patrick continued, "I decided to cool off down here in the lab, it was mid August, and I wanted to play a very old game by the name of Half Life 2. While I was blowing up some Aliens, I saw the picture out of the corner of my eye, every once in a while I saw a black shape appear on it, it was very creepy alone down there that day. But eventually near the end of beating the Final boss for the third time, I had concluded that the Picture was hiding something within the Frame rate."
"What? What is Frame rate?" Tonks asked she had turned her face back to the ordinary skin color; because of her ability to change appearance, she didn't need a mask. Brilliant, thought Matt, totally cool! We've got Tonks here too!
"The computer screen, on a computer most of the time shows sixty frames per second," Matt helped. "Basically seeing sixty pictures flipping by your face all at once, making the impression of something moving."
"Anyways," Patrick continued, determined to keep this his story, "I then slowed the frame rate of this computer to a mere two frames per second. Giving me this!" he pushed enter and the picture remained the same except for a black sort of hole that looked to have been ripped from the picture. It was oddly square and shaped like—
"Hogwarts," Patrick grinned "'they all go haywire around Hogwarts, too much magic in the air.'-- Every 42 frames there was a black outline of Hogwarts burned into the digital film due to all the magic. It was in plain sight, and even mentioned in the books. And we had found it! All those Anti-Muggle spells shone like a beacon and we had found it!" Patrick finished with a dramatic sort of bow, Matt rolled his eyes.
"Impressive," said, who could only be, Neville Longbottom, "and you found all this by yourselves?"
"Yup!" Matt and Patrick shouted in unison.
"You see Zack," Harry had calmed down a bit. "We can't erase everything they know because we're gonna need the information only they know."
"For what, may I ask?"
Harry paused, thinking very hard about something, and then he swelled in courage as he prepared to tell the Ministry Official the truth, it wasn't supposed to start like this, he thought, or was it? "The War is coming, Mr. Disintagrat."
Zack's reaction was far from what he had imagined. "What war? We just recently got rid of You—Know—Who! Oops sorry, correct me, YOU did" he said pointing at Harry.
"No, not that one." Harry's face went so serious that Matt thought he would start frothing at the mouth again. "This is a bigger war, the war, this mother of all fights, the BIG BANG, the one war predicted for centuries to eventually come—"
Suddenly Zack understood, his face went white in cold horror, "not, not The Awakening, Potter!?!?!?" he stumbled back into the glass tube which shattered; shards fell to the floor, bouncing around. Nobody noticed or cared, except for Patrick who winced as his machine fell to pieces.
Harry advanced on the shivering Ministry Official. "Yes Zack, The Awakening, the war over Muggles and Magic."
"No, no not this soon!!" he was looking around at the faces of everyone else there. "We're too outnumbered!"
Harry's face was now an inch from his. "Not yet we aren't, that's why we need them!" he pointed his finger at Matt and Patrick like a sword, or a large cleaver. "Those two are not the only two to have discovered us, imagine what the CIA of the U.S. has discovered, Count Olaf, you remember Artemis Fowl? Just one little ten—year—old was a fiasco!!"
Harry looked a bit dangerous with his wand digging into Mr. Disintegrat's forehead. "We have to face the facts Zack! We can't hide anymore! It's getting easier to be seen with all this new Muggle technology popping up all over the place! Someone's going to release this on the Internet! Then the News!" His hands clasped around Zack's throat "Then the World powers are going to go Medieval on us. IN FULL FORCE!!!" he gave a little squeeze.
The Official's eyes bulged, and he made some strangled sort of burpy sounds, Harry noticed that he had gotten his point across and let go, Zack stumbled away clutching neck and gasping for breath. Patrick wasn't sure about liking Harry Potter so much anymore; this was getting kind of violent.
"Our only hope is to gather our knowledge now," Harry was calming down a bit now. "And try to make as little amount of casualty for either side as possible, see Olaf here?" he jerked his head at the dirtily—clad man on the floor behind him. "Almost started the war a week early, if we hadn't caught him—"
"WHAT!! ONE WEEK!!"
"Yes, one week Disintagrat, one stupid, stinking, slimy—"
"WEEK!?!? SEVEN DAYS?"
"Well six actually—"
"SIX!!!!!!!!! MY LORD!!!!! I'M GONNA KILL MYSELF ON THE SPOT!!"
He made a wild grab for his wand and pointed it at his forehead, but—
"Accio wand!" Kingsley Shacklebolt got to it first. "You can't kill yourself...yet Zack."
He looked even shakier at this. "One week, that's how long we have until the Awaken—waaaiiiiiiiit..." his eyes looked around suspiciously, "how do you know it's gonna happen in one week, how do you know that it's gonna happen at all?
Harry's face lost a little bit of color, how did he know? Matt wondered, surely Harry Potter couldn't have mastered Divination?
"Professor Trelawney predicted it." He said simply. "Down to the minute that the first bullet would be fired, exactly five-forty-two PM, next Tuesday."
Then Zack did something that made Patrick's head whirl, he laughed. He completely dumped everything that Harry had just told him! He erupted into a fit of oddly high-pitched giggles that really didn't suit him, as if this was all a sick joke played on him.
"There's no need to make any more of this up, Potter!" he said when he finally stopped laughing. "I knew from the moment you said 'Trelawney' that you were kidding, not that old fraud! There's no way that anything she said could be true!! I remember taking her classes when I was at Hogwarts; I was the one in my time that she kept on saying The Grimm!! The Grimmmmmmmmm!! But I never died. HAH! Not one thing came out of that witch's mouth that actually happened. The Awakening indeed... good joke Harry, convinced me well!"
They all gazed horrorstruck at Zack as he told one of the Accidental Reversal Squad members to grab Olaf and bring him into the cars outside. They couldn't bring themselves to say anything when he started to lead/drag Matt and Patrick upstairs too. And they couldn't even stop gawking at him when he waved goodbye, still going on about the 'joke'. He chuckled all the way upstairs.
Neville started to drool as they heard the three black cars start up their engines and drive off into the night. Finally Kingsley regained his senses. He broke through what felt like an invisible wall of spider webs strong as leather.
"Oh crap! The Bafflement charm! Wake up everyone!"
No one moved, or they actually swayed on the spot as if they were all slightly drunk with frozen expressions of confused surprise, Shacklebolt seemed to be the only one strong enough to resist it. Spit dripped from Longbottom's mouth onto the floor making gross plopping noises.
"OH that's enough!" Kingsley waved his wand in a spiral above his head. "Gitsomcommunsence!" and a shockwave of red energy burst from the tip of his wand creating a sphere that expanded to the edges of the room, hitting everyone and waking them up. Neville wiped his mouth on his mask.
"AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGG!!!! THEY GOT AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Harry ran up the stairs four at a time. "I'm gonna kill ZACK!!!!!"
"Harry," Tonks tripped him with a well placed Leg-Locker, "we can't get them back now, let's just Apparate straight to the Ministry from here!"
"No we can't just Apparate—"
"Yes we can," Luna Lovegood pulled off her mask dreamily. "You got to remember that we're not at Hogwarts anymore!"
"Oh yeaaaah..."
Ron shook his head, "let's just meet them there, when they get to the Ministry, we can grab the two M.D.M.A.'s, Tonks can make a portkey, and we'll dash out! Easy enough?"
...
Patrick woke up in the dark. In the dark with Zack's very pointy wand pointing straight at his face.
"Don't you try anything."
Patrick let his eyes adjust to the unlit interior of where he was. Judging by the gentle rocking of his seat and the quiet hum of an engine, he figured that he was in one of the Ministry cars. This was odd, he thought, because it was just like being in a limo, only with a limo the outside is not as big as a station wagon, and the inside doesn't have six rows of seats. He was in the last seat, and Mr. Disintagrat was in the one opposite him, facing the back. Pat risked a look around and got a nasty shock when he saw Olaf's crooked teeth grinning at him like a broken piano in the darkness to his left, Olaf was awake. Matt was still Baffled to Pat's right, blinking dazedly and swaying on the spot, but he too was slowly waking up.
"Now none of you even think of escaping!" Came Zack's voice from directly in front of Patrick. "Or I'll freeze your brain on the spot!" his wand was still pointed directly at Pat's forehead.
"Aaaaaw, graff!" Matt stretched as his tired muscles woke up from the Bafflement charm. "Why are we driving? Or where?"
"I'm taking you all to St. Mungo's for a quick Veritaserum test and then full blown Mind Wipe! No more Awakening crap!"
Then, taking them all by surprise, Count Olaf spoke, his cabbage—breath oozed all over them. "I don't think that that will work...again Mr. Disintagrat." He said his voice full of malicious laughter.
"Oh and why not?"
"We've already tried over twenty times on me..." his grin extended to his eyebrows. "I keep on breaking the charm! It just doesn't work on me." The Count started to fiddle with something in his pants pocket, where Zack couldn't see.
"We'll see about that Olaf! I know a certain new spell that Digs into the brain and finds specific things to disintegrate—permanently. Like actual brain cells."
Matt gulped. Ouch, they were going to go into his head and BURN everything out? He didn't like that. Patrick got the sudden urge to escape through the car window. All Matt wanted to do was wake up in the morning to the light coming through the windows of his house.
He sort of got his wish when the car at the front of the line exploded into a gigantic fireball, blinding their eyes that had so recently been adjusted to the dark with white light.