To Tickle A Dragon
By JK Fie'r
Disclaimer: I don't own The Bill or Harry Potter.
Other notes:
This chapter was going to be called 'fabula (Story)'. Then I wrote the thing, and it turned out that it fit much farther down in the timeline of this tale. This is the price you pay for only having a vague idea about the plot when you're writing. At the moment, the fic is writing itself. I am merely the medium. No, I still have no idea where it's taking me. Fun, isn't it?
Oh, and please review this time? Only, I did work hard on the last chapter, and I haven't gotten any feedback on it at all. I even accept emoticons as a form of review!
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Chapter Six: de gozaru
Subtitled (Archaic Japanese into modern Japanese): desu
OR
Chapter Six: es!
Subtitled (Latin): be!
-
"Expelliamus!"
Aw, hell. And the morning had been going so well…
Almost without thinking about it, Gina ducked the flying baton, wincing as muscles protested their sudden ill-treatment.
"I'm getting too old for this," she muttered, clambering back up to her feet.
Sergeant Smith was glaring from floor level, but seemed to be taking being hit by that spell pretty well.
"What the fu-"
Then again, maybe he wasn't.
"Language!" she barked automatically, and restrained a small smirk as the blonde assailant trained his wand on her.
She already had hers out, and aimed. Discretely, of course.
"Shut it, muggle, or you'll be next."
Muggle? She'd ducked the baton, hadn't she?
Now Gina did smile, stepping forward softly.
"Stop moving muggle! I said stop moving!"
It was almost comical. Really, this guy had to be the stupidest Wizard in history.
Well, no. Tell a lie. She had met Lockhart, after all.
Okay. Second stupidest. Moving on…
"It doesn't have to be like this."
"I thought I told you to shut up!"
Gina raised an eyebrow. She was not going to sneer, she was not going to laugh…
"No, you told somebody that you were addressing as 'muggle' to shut up. As my name is not 'muggle'-"
"Stupefy!"
"Protego!"
The shield shimmered into being around her just as the stunner hit it, harmlessly absorbing the spell.
Handy trick, that. Pity it made things a bit blurry for about a split-second; the expression on the guy's face would've been priceless…
"Pertrificus Totalus!" Gina hollered, while her opponent took his time in recovering from the shock.
The spell hit him dead on. No shield to absorb it.
Still, no sense in taking any chances.
Holding out her left hand, Gina added "Accio!" to the list of spells she was calling today. Wooden wand made a soft thunk noise against leather gloves.
Low-level spells. Simple, easy to cast. Except for Protego, of course, but the shield was equally as useful, even if it did drain her.
Downsides to not completing her Hogwarts education were many and varied, and sometimes Gina wondered if she'd made the right choice.
"Ma'am, what the-?"
Right. No time for nostalgia, focus on the task at hand.
As if standing on a swivel chair while somebody pushed it, Gina turned.
"Stupefy!"
And that one was almost too much. Gina barely had enough strength to call out the next spell.
"Obliviate!"
The room swayed around her.
Yes, Leglimancy was a high-level spell, but she'd done it often enough that she didn't need to think too much to control it. The Patronus Charm, yeah, okay, that one was tricky, but since it relied more on a person's self-assurance than actual magical ability, she could manage it without too much difficulty, and-
Gina Read her prisoner his Rights as she cuffed him, careful not to let the process injure the literally spell-bound young Wizard. He'd committed a muggle crime, he'd be tried in a muggle court, and sentenced to a muggle sentence. This one was going to be done by the book as it was taught to the majority of Stanford's students, not as the minority knew the extras.
That done, she leant against the wall for a few slow moments, holding her wand in a death-grip, the other Wizard's tucked away in her pocket, echoing reminder of the last Wand she'd put in there.
MIT had no magic-users in its fold. And maybe that was a good thing. It certainly meant that Gina had almost free-range in a case such as this, should she choose to exercise it.
Oh, yes. Some of the questions with this young man weren't going to be recorded using conventional (or rather, muggle) means.
Gina groaned quietly, carefully pushing herself away from the wall.
The prospect of yet more paperwork was not filling her with any kind of joy.
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Note on the chapter title: It's impossible to translate 'desu' into concise English with any reasonable degree of accuracy, and something that isn't concise makes the title lose its impact (ah, the age-old problem of translating – little note: I HATE Ablative Absolutes. Just to clue you in here). 'de gozaru' is an archaic version of 'desu'. About the only real way to put it is to say that it's every possible form of the verb 'to be' and a few forms of 'this/that is' too. One of the better ways of putting it that I've seen, however, is 'existence'. This exists, that exists, I exist as, and so on and so forth. So, to sum up, this chapter is called 'existence'. It's not in Latin. Bearing in mind that some of the spells that are used in HP are not in Latin either. Avarda Kedavra is Aramaic, and Harry himself uses a spell that uses the English words 'Point me' in Goblet of Fire.
That said, despite the original chapter title, I still decided to give this a Latin name as well. 'es' is the Present Imperative form of the verb 'to be'. As such, it is a command, and not a statement of being; but any other form of the verb, when translated back into English, simply doesn't have the right level of… well, I guess the word would be impact, really.
As for the inspiration for this title, I have been reading A Rurouni's Guide to Idiocy.