The Rod of Asclepius
Chapter VII
Wormtail stood in fear in front of his master.
"It appears that you've messed up again, Wormtail!" the voice from the large chair reprimanded.
"I put the residue of the potion under Potter's pillow!" the quivering warlock replied.
"Obviously you didn't notice that the layout of the room changed since you were living there as Weasley's pet!" came the reply. "Still, all is not lost, with Ron Weasley under my control I can get to Potter eventually. It's too bad that the Draco lad was so careless in following the directions we left him. This spell should have taken hold at once, it now appears to be a creeping infection and I must take my time tightening my grip or I'll loose hold of them. However, there is the matter of this Black Jack. He is becoming more and more dangerous. It may become necessary to deal with him earlier that I had hoped. In order to keep and eye on the doctor we will have to gain the cooperation of someone close to him. I think a hypnotic spell should do the trick. You'll have to transfigure into the image of someone at the school to avoid suspicion to do it. Do you think you can handle the task?"
"Yes, my Lord!" Wormtail babbled. "I won't fail you."
"Good, then take this, you know what to do with it!"
Wormtail took the crystal sphere from the bony hand and carefully wrapped it in a square of cloth. He placed the object into his pocket and left the house.
Ernest Macmillan, Ron Weasley, Kiki Karikiya, and Draco Malfoy faced each other in the dark, misty void. A creepy echo reverberated in their ears, the sound rising and falling slowly, sounding like a heavy door swinging on rusty hinges, or a large rusty chain being dragged across a cobble stone street.
"Where are we?" Ron asked, not really expecting an answer from anyone in the group.
"How did we get here?" Ernest added.
Kiki sobbed, rubbing her eyes. "I'm scared! I don't remember being transported here."
Draco Malfoy tried to be brave and take charge of the situation. "It's that Harry Potter who's done this!" he exclaimed. "I know he's had it in for me every since our first year hear at Hogwarts. I found his research on some special dark spell and tried to master it before he could use it against me. The tricky bastard! He must have set it up to backfire on me, and look what happened!"
"How dare you!" Ron cried out reaching for his wand, but not finding it. "Harry was doing that research for the headmaster, he had no intention of tricking you, though you bloody well deserve it!"
"Yeah, then how do you explain how you are now in the same situation as me and the rest of us?'
"You blind idiot!" Macmillan yelled, reaching out to slap Draco across the face. "Don't you see the obvious. There is one of us from each of the four houses here in this limbo state, where ever that is. Surly we are being manipulated by a much greater evil!"
"Yes! That must be it!" Kiki said. "This can only be the work of Lord Voldermort!"
The mist between the four students began to swirl and slowly lift revealing a hazy holographic image of a tall, slender wizard. The apparition was bald and almost faceless, having but two nostril slits for a nose, lidless slits with lizard like eyes, and a thin almost lip less mouth.
"You dare speak my name!" he laughed mockingly, waving his wand. "You are not at all what I was hoping for, but between the four of you there may be enough energy that I can drain to bring myself back from the beyond. I was hoping for Potter, but with your help I may get him yet."
With that, the darkness began to become more powerful and the four students felt themselves slipping back into the nothingness from which they had briefly emerged.
Pinoko was sitting next to the table upon which sat the two monitoring instruments. Both the EKG and EEG recorders could be connected up to as many as four patients at a time using separate cables with multiple sets of electrodes. The EEG machine's four moving pens recorded one parameter at a time for each of the patients. The EKG readout displayed four traces on its LCD screen, plus four sets of pulse rate readings on separate seven segment LED displays. All four patients showed nearly flat line EEG readings, with enough background activity to indicate a somewhat above coma brain activity. Their EKG and breathing wave forms were normal for a sleeping state. Nothing had changed for several days. Suddenly the EEG recorder started to jump around like crazy. The brainwave patterns of all four of the students was all over the chart. The EKG readings also increased, showing a rapid heart and breathing rate.
"Sensai!" the nine year old sized assistant yelled out. "I think they are having a nightmare or something!"
Dr. Black Jack got up from where he had been examining Macmillan's blood sample and quickly marched over to the the line of four beds set up in the middle of the room. He could see the rapid eye movements under the student's closed eyelids, and muscle spasms though out their bodies.
"Yes, it would appear that they are undergoing a violent dream state." He replied. "This may be the precursor to a change in their condition, or it could mean something else."
The two of them watched and waited. After several minutes the monitors suddenly returned to their previous idle state.
"Just as I suspected." the doctor replied. "This is starting to take on a very dark appearance. It's a good thing the headmaster pulled some strings to get me into a few classes here. I'm certain I'm going to need to know how to use this thing." he added, fingering the wand in his pocket.
After visiting Ron Weasley in the hospital wing, Harry returned to the room he shared with Ron in the Gryffindor house dormitory. It seemed strange to him the way one member of each house had been afflicted by the strange curse. He wondered why Ron Weasley had been the victim and not himself, when it occurred to him that after the massive spring house cleaning earlier in the month, most of the furnishing in their room had been moved about and relocated. Ron's bed now occupied nearly the same space that his had, while his bed had been moved to the opposite side of the room to make for more space in the middle. He looked under and around Weasley's bed and then noticed the rat hole in the wall. Ron's bed hadn't been made up since he had awakened that morning, his bed clothes were still in the same heap he had left them just before they had run off for their breakfast and first class. Harry carefully lifted Ron's pillow and pulled back the blanket and top sheet.. He noticed a residue of gray powder on the bottom sheet. Being very careful not to inhale any of it, he carefully dusted some of the powder onto a scrap of paper using another sheet and then folded the paper up to contain the powder. He then placed the tight wad of paper into an envelope which he sealed and placed into the pocket of his robe.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a large Norway rat scurrying across the room to disappear though the hole in the wall under Ron's bed. The rat bore a strong resemblance to his roommate's pet Scabbers who had disappeared sometime during the recent school year.
Professor Snape looked up from his desk and stared at the student occupying the desk that had previously been empty dead center toward the back of the classroom. It wasn't hard to notice the newcomer, for he was a good two heads taller than most of the students sitting in front of him. In addition his two toned black and white hair, plus the scar that divided his face into two different shades made him quite the stand out.
"I see we have a new student in our class today." he announced. "Perhaps you would be so kind as to stand up and introduce yourself?"
The man stood up and straightened out his robe. "Good morning Professor Snape." he said courteously. My name is Kuro Hazama, although I usually go by the name of Dr. Black Jack."
"That's a strange nick name," the professor replied.
"Not really." Kuro answered. "My given name in Japanese loosely translates to 'black jack' in English.
"Ah, so it does." Snape came back. "Well, in my class we try to be a bit formal, so you won't mind if I address you by your given name?"
"As you wish." the doctor replied, taking his seat.
Harry Potter quickly turned to look when the doctor had stood up. He was a bit surprised to see him in his third year potions class, especially since the year was almost up, and the doctor had only just become aware of his magical abilities. Yet there was something different about him that Harry hadn't yet been able to put a finger on. It was almost as if Dr. Black Jack was a purely natural wizard, a rare breed, the only example in history that Harry had ever heard of was Merlin himself.
Snape's lecture went quickly that morning, and he excused the class early without any laboratory session. Harry waited by the door for the doctor to exit the room and quickly followed him down the hallway. When they were out of earshot of anyone else he reached into his pocket, and withdrew the envelope containing the powder he'd found on Ron's bed.
"Doctor Black Jack?" Harry quavered.
"Yes Harry?" the doctor acknowledged.
"Have you gotten anywhere with the treatment of the four students in the hospital?" He asked.
Black Jack noticed the boy's right hand folded up into a fist with something held tightly inside. "I suspect you've got something to show me?" he asked.
"Yes, I found this powder on Ron Weasley's bed. I suspect it was meant for me, whoever left it there didn't know the room's layout had been changed." he said, handing the envelope to the doctor. "There is a gray powder wrapped up in paper inside that envelope, it might be the cause of the infection. I caught site of Ron's pet rat in our room, he'd been missing since before we did our spring cleaning and moved things about."
"You suspect the rat placed the strange powder in Ron's bed, thinking it was yours?" Black Jack asked.
"Yes, exactly." Harry said. "Scabbers might very well be capable of transfiguration, he might really be a wizard who kept the form of a rat for sometime to spy on us as Ron's pet."
"Yes, I think that makes some sense." Kuro replied. "The tie in with the dark lord is beginning to become clear."
"You know about Voldermort?" Harry asked.
"I've been doing my homework, Harry." the doctor answered. "The headmaster and professor McGonagall have been rather helpful in getting me up to speed on recent history here at Hogwarts."
Black Jack carefully poured the powder that Harry had given him into a petri dish and placed a cover over the vessel after first using a moist wire to pick up a few grains of it. He placed a droplet of water containing the substance in the well of a glass slide, and lowered a cover slip over it. He then placed the slide under his microscope and carefully adjusted the focus. There was nothing much unusual about the powder's appearance, it resembled talcum in it's appearance under 100X magnification. There was however something in between the grains that remained invisible at the low power setting of the instrument. Kuro switched the objective lens to one of 400X power and refocused the microscope. He could now make out the many small somethings swimming between the grains. When he moved the slide to bring the edge of one of the grains into view and carefully focused in he could make out the many indentations on the powder grain, and what appeared to be tunnels or caves on its surface.
He switched to the 1200 X objective and readjusted the light. It was now clear that those swimming objects were strange microbe like objects, but they didn't appear like any bacterium that he'd ever seen before. In fact, they almost looked like nano sized robots, and the grains of powder now looked like miniature factories for the manufacture of the nano bots.
He needed a closer view, but he had the most powerful objective already in play. A thought came into his mind, and he reached into the right front pocket of his robe and extracted the Asclepius wand. He thought of what he desired and waved the wand over the microscope. He felt a twinge flow through his hand and saw a brief glow of light from the tip of the carved snake head at the end of the wand.
The doctor rotated the lens turret one final position to bring the newly conjured objective lens into position under the optic tube of the microscope. The instrument now brought the specimens on the slide into view at 10,000 X power, about 5 times the power that a light microscope is theoretically capable of! There was no doubt about it, the grains of gray powder were activated by moisture. Ron must have inhaled the powder, once inside of his sinus cavity, the activated powder began to perform its function of releasing the self replicating nano sized robots into his blood stream. He could only guess at the function of these machines, but from what he had observed of his patents, they must make their way into the brain and latch onto the main lobs. Clearly this was an attempt at mind control.
Pinoko sat on the corner of her bed fingering the crystal globe she had found sitting there. In the adjoining room Dr. Black Jack was undressing and getting into his pajamas.
"I hope you are getting ready for bed, Pinoko," he spoke loudly. "I suspect we will have a busy day tomorrow."
"You might, busying yourself with learning magic," she pouted. "I'll be stuck in here by myself."
"Nonsense, I want you to watch our patients in the hospital wing." Kuro replied. "I suspect we will be seeing some change in their condition shortly, and I'll need you to send for me the instant that happens if I'm not there. There are a few lectures I need to attend. I must be ready to make use of what magic I can if necessary."
Pinoko rolled the glass ball over in her hands. She wondered who had left it in her room, it was so pretty! It must have been that nice professor McGonagall, she thought. The globe started to glow and it felt warm in her hands. Her mind drifted off for a moment, and then she snapped back to reality feeling sleepy. Pinoko set the globe down on the night stand next to the bed and pulled the covers over herself.
"Good night Sensai!" she cried out, closing her eyes and falling to sleep.
Black Jack walked into her room and smiled. He straightened out the blanket on the bed and gently kissed the sleeping child on the forehead.
"Good night, Pinoko." he whispered.