The Distraction Crew did manage to get to their rendezvous point before Astoria, but not that much before. They were still standing around arguing about whether they should go ahead to Durmstrang or wait, or if she might actually be ahead of them when her Locating Charm led her to them. Not that she really needed it, since they weren't being sneaky at all.

Well, Theo kind of was, but not more than usual. He had almost as much of a tendency to lurk as Harry, or Tori herself.

"Hi, guys," she said brightly, dropping the deflection effect and stepping into the little clear-ish spot at the edge of the trees where they'd stopped to talk. There was a hollow log propped up at an angle in the middle of it, and a couple of baskets of rocks, like maybe someone had been using it as a cannon? When she skipped over to the tree-line to admire their fort, she saw the bronze-spear palisade, or at least the side closest to her, had been almost completely covered by thick vines, and the grass and moss and saplings between here and there were wilted and brown. "Wow. Neville's been busy. What did I miss?"

Nick snorted, an amused little not-laugh. "Kind of a lot, honestly. Seran's down, no idea what happened to her; Bell and Rowle are down, I'm sure you can guess what happened to them. Just before we left, we got word Cedric's on foot now. Potter's still up there with Krum, as far as we know."

"Come on, we should head toward Durmstrang," Theo interrupted. "We are on a timeline — if Cæciné's smart, which she is, and if she manages to take Lyra out, which she very well might, and they have any way to share intel at all, which it'd be stupid not to, she'll probably head over there and steal their flag out from under us. You know, since they can't get to ours. And I really don't want to see Granger try to negotiate a draw."

Tori blinked at him. That was positively chatty for Theo. He had a point, though. Not just the fact they should get moving — they hadn't really discussed what they would do if they couldn't win outright, but didn't lose. Negotiating a draw was the obvious solution, but Astoria could see how Theo might be a little...reluctant about the idea of Hermione trying to do that. Not only was she not really familiar with the conventions and so on, but, well...

She was a Gryffindor. And not a Gryffindor like Harry or Neville, who actually had some common sense and would be willing to admit it if they got to a point they wouldn't be able to win. Hermione was very much a fight to the last wand, even for a hopeless cause, because it's about sending a message and it's not over until we're dead sort of commander, and everyone knew it.

Really, it would be best all around if they could just win outright.

Astoria nodded, leading the way further into the trees heading more or less north, parallelling the stream. They'd have to cut east eventually to reach Durmstrang's base, but there was a big patch of fire on the eastern edge of the arena, so they couldn't just head east and follow the wardline north. She was pretty sure, though, that there was a reasonably wide corridor they could get through if they headed east when they ran into the other fire that had been between Beauxbatons and Durmstrang.

Pretty sure.

And if there wasn't, she did have a bunch of upperclassmen now. They could make themselves useful playing firefighters. Though then she would have to make sure at least one or two made it out of the distraction to help her get back to Hogwarts. Hmm...

Oh well, they'd deal with that if it actually became a problem.

"We might have to stage a mutiny and make Longbottom do it," the Hufflepuff suggested, following closely behind her. "Unless you want to, Prince."

Tori could hear the older girl rolling her eyes. "I might have to, if it comes to that. Longbottom's still a little shaken."

"Why? What happened to him?" Neville had always been kind of awkward and formal — not like Daphne, she was always careful to do things right (according to silly noble rules they'd been taught when they were little), but in a stumbling, trying to do things right but being too self-conscious to really hit the mark and making more mistakes because he made one mistake sort of way — and he sort of got down on himself whenever he relaxed a little, like alone with just people he was comfortable with. Self-deprecating, that was the word. Tori wouldn't really say she pitied him, but she did always kind of feel like she should try to cheer him up, because he wasn't nearly as useless and incompetent as he seemed to think he was. She definitely didn't want him to have gotten hurt, when he'd just started to see that he actually was an asset to the Team.

"Ah, well... You saw the vines on the palisade?" Mallory asked.

"Yeah..."

"He was trying to protect it from reversion spells, and one of the veela set the vines on fire while he was completely invested in them."

Tori winced. "Is he okay?"

"I think he's more freaked over—" Nick said, but he was interrupted by Theo swearing as he tripped over a stick or something.

"Have I mentioned lately that I hate the outdoors?"

"It's mutual, Nott," Nick informed him before continuing. "I think he's more freaked about his reaction than the burning itself. Totally flipped his lid, reflexively pulling the life out of every other plant in the clearing to support the ones he was possessing, and then one of the... Was he a Durmstranger?"

"Does it matter?" Mallory answered.

"Suppose not. Longbottom went full earthspeaker-berserker on them, animating at least two dozen trees to drive them out of the forest. Sort of makes you wonder what he could do if he had a little more confidence, right?"

Theo scoffed. "Pretty sure the only person who doesn't realise Longbottom's got potential up to his ears is Longbottom. If today doesn't wake him up to that fact, nothing will."

"Yeah, okay, but what happened?" Tori demanded.

"One bloke tripped and got cocooned by the grass out in the field. I'm pretty sure Longbottom thought he killed him. Violet knocked him out. The first thing he asked when he came around was whether he survived."

"Did he?"

"Of course he did," Mallory said, as though that was a silly question. Tori really didn't think it was, though.

Neither did Theo, apparently. "There's no of course about it, Prince. But yes, Tori, Moreau sedated Longbottom and the elves got his victim out after just a few seconds. Longbottom was working on reflex, I doubt the roots made it deep enough to do any major organ damage. The healers should be able to fix any physical damage he managed to do with relatively few long-term complications."

"Good... That's good..." Tori muttered. She just knew Neville was still going to be feeling all guilty about it, though. She'd have to tell...probably Harry to talk to him. She would usually ask Blaise to do that sort of thing, but she was pretty sure Blaise made Neville nervous in the same way Daphne made Neville nervous — they were very good at pretending to be the proper nobles everyone expected Neville to be, he got all self-conscious thinking he looked bad in comparison. Well, that and Blaise acted really girly sometimes, especially around nobles he wasn't trying to impress, like making fun of the whole high-society act. Which Neville should absolutely interpret as permission not to try to act like a noble himself, but usually just made him even more uncomfortable, because, in his words, it's just...a bit weird, isn't it?

"Bloody hell." Huh? Tori looked around to give Nick a questioning look. "I know they said half the arena was on fire, but..."

Oh, right. The fire. She'd been distracted thinking about Neville, but they were starting to get kind of close to the point where they should turn east. They were probably still fifty metres away from the trees that were actually burning, but the air was getting noticeably warmer and drier already, and they could see flames flickering through the trees that weren't burning (yet).

"Yeah, we should go this way." Except they hadn't gone very far that way when Tori realised that the wind had shifted, driving the big fire-patch from the east side of the arena around to block their path. "Well, crap."

"Crap?" Nick echoed.

"This wasn't on fire, earlier. Hang on, I need to see if I can find another way through." She leaned against a nearby tree and closed her eyes, the better to ignore the three older students looking to her for direction and probably judging her for not having one, and let herself fall into the music.

She got the impression the Weasleys were distracted — there didn't seem to be as much detail now as there had been earlier, even though they were actually focusing on Astoria now, or at least Nick, Mallory, and Theo — but she was pretty sure the fire was about to cut them off completely. If they ran, they might be able to make it to the gap between the fire on the east and the fire on the west, but—

"Not to alarm anyone," Theo said, sounding noticeably alarmed. Tori's eyes shot open to see him staring at the fire which was still advancing on their position. "But is it just me or—"

Mallory caught on in the same moment Tori did — it wasn't just advancing like normal fire, it was surrounding them! "Durmstrang has a weather-witch," she said, her eyes going very wide.

"Crap," Tori repeated. "Do any of you know the Flame Freezing Charm?" she asked, which was probably a silly suggestion, but Wendelin the Weird was the first thing that popped into her head when she thought about being burned alive.

"You know, somehow learning to avoid being burned alive has never really been a priority for me," Nick snarked. "Given that we don't live in the Sixteenth bloody Century!"

"I do," the Ravenclaw volunteered. "But it won't work on a fire this big. We're going to have to actually put it out, or at least enough to get through..."

"Bugger."

"Pithy observation, Nott. How about casting that blizzard spell again for us," Nick suggested.

"It's too dry, and elemental magics are harder to do when you're fucking surrounded by the opposite bloody element."

Mallory nodded. "He's right. Twice over, with heat and fire. Plus the weather witch could probably snuff it out easily. It'd be better to throw controlled fire at this shite and integrate it, then force it back, taking control away from the weather witch."

"Controlled fire?" Tori echoed.

"You know, like fiendfire."

Theo snorted. "Neither Granger nor Lyra are here right now to champion your insanity, Prince. We're not going to start throwing fiendfire around!"

"Well, not actually fiendfire, that would be against the rules, but there are somewhat less destructive controlled fire spells..."

"Or, since they clearly already know where we are, we could just clear a path with blasting curses and use cooling charms to lower the temperature enough to make a run for it."

Nick raised an eyebrow at Theo. "Yes on the blasting curses, no on the cooling charms. Do you even know how much energy you'd have to put into a straight cooling charm to lower the temperature of that much air and earth, by that much?"

"Oh! But we could use that modification of the bubble-head charm Thistle came up with for her NEWT project last year to keep just the area around ourselves fresh and cool!"

"Oh, this is going to be good," Nick snorted.

"It is, actually. It's a bubble with a seven-foot diameter, origin point at your centre of mass. It deforms so you can walk, and sort of flattens out along the ground if you're too short. You know, like if you poke someone's bubblehead it sort of wobbles? Like that. She said she was hoping she could explore the lake without getting wet, but she actually just ended up floating. And it only lasts about ten minutes, max. But that's fine, we're not that far away, are we?"

"I...don't think so?" And in any case, Astoria was fairly certain she could run the whole half-kilometer across the entire arena in less than ten minutes. The Bubblehead Charm sort of looked like a big soap bubble, with that rainbow-like sheen, not exactly unobtrusive, she'd have to find some other way of getting away, but she'd cross that bridge when she came to it. She could probably fake getting hit with a stunner or something and just lie low until no one was watching her to get the flag, so...

"Does the Bubblehead stop magic? Because we're going to need to be able to cast as we go," Nick reminded the Ravenclaw.

She shook her head. "It's a physical environmental modification charm, not a shield."

"I think we're out of time to stand around weighing our options," Theo said, eyeing the flames with a rather leery expression.

With good reason — not only were they closing in, but the wind seemed to be sort of...swirling. A bit. Around them. Like, say, a twister in the making. A fire twister. With the four of them in the middle, only minutes from being burned to a crisp.

Ugh, that was a horrible thought, why had Tori gone and put that image in her own head?

She shuddered, but no one noticed, because Mallory was casting the charm and the boys were throwing blasting spells at the burning trees in their way, and...alright, apparently we're doing this...