Chapter 2
In Which Lord Bogwater Inspects His Vast Estate and Finds It Wet

Harry Potter, being a thirteen year old wizard currently living on his own, sat in his room and polished his wand. This was not something most thirteen year old wizards bother to polish; certainly Harry had never polished his before. He hadn't known he was supposed to. Ollivander hadn't offered much in the way of wand upkeep, and Hagrid had offered even less. Nonetheless, he sat on his bed with his broom polishing equipment and gave it a quick shine. It sparked at him. He hoped that broom polish was good for wands. At the very least, it was now shinier.

In truth, he was making a valiant attempt at boredom. A bored person might decide to polish their broom, and then decide to move on to their wand. A bored person would not be thinking about a newly acquired ring that may or may not transport them to a mysterious estate. A bored person does not have such dangerous excitement to consider. A bored person definitely wouldn't be discovering what a 'portkey' was through dangerous experimentation.

A non-bored person, in this particular instance, could very well be a very stupid person. A smart young lad like Harry, on the other hand, would realize that he had been told to stay put by the minister of magic himself. A sensible young person would acknowledge the very real danger to their person and definitely not go off on their own to inspect a supposed estate. At the very least, said intelligent youth would contact a responsible adult to consult with on the matter first.

Unfortunately, Harry did not know such an adult as could be described in that manner. Every adult he had ever had contact with was at best well-meaning but irresponsible, and at worst actively malicious, if not murderous. So, having no one to contact on the matter, Harry was determined to ignore the new fortune that heavily encased his left thumb.

On the other hand, Harry was only thirteen years old, and had actively been taught to avoid self-preservation methods by all adults in his life, caring or malicious. That he held out for half an hour was testament to his own inner strength.

So maybe, while polishing his wand, the tip may have slipped a bit until it pointed at his new ring. And it was certainly not Harry's fault that he was musing aloud about his new estate, and happened to say 'Bogwater Estate' at that instance. This was an accident that surely could happen to anyone. The fact that nothing happened the first time, and that he then repeated the whole experiment while shoving a bit of magic from his wand to his ring, was inconsequential.

The activated portkey was not inconsequential at all. Apparently 'Portkey spell' meant 'Vomit Inducing Teleportation spell'. If that were the case, it did its job admirably. The world spun and jerked Harry away from his warm, dry room at the Leaky Cauldron before dumping him outdoors.

Harry's great luck held, however, as instead of falling onto potentially painful stones or brambles, he was dropped into squelching mud. He sunk into the muck a good foot. The mud was oozy and soft and smelled so exactly like a pile of Dudley's underpants on washday that Harry actually found himself hunching over in case his aunt suddenly appeared to scold him into hurrying up with the laundry.

"Ugh," said Harry, and he tried to look around. This was made difficult by the fact that his glasses had flown from his face upon his arrival. With great seeker reflexes, not to mention long years of practice from living with Dudley, he had managed to catch them before they disappeared forever. Unfortunately, they still somehow were covered in mud, making it rather hard to see. Not that there was much to see.

He was surrounded on all sides by mud. Some mud was thick and black. Some was goopy. Some was green and bubbling gently. Some was so wet that it might well not be called mud at all so much as murky water. There were plants as well, reedy plants hiding treacherous pools and making swishing noises in the wind. The world was alive with sound, in fact, buzzing and croaking and the occasional bird's scream. The air was cool, on the verge of being cold, and the wet ground was not helping matters. There were also splashes and blooping noises and then, quite close by, some creature screamed and thrashed and growled with unexpected violence, as though some unknown being was being savaged by another unknown being. Which, in fact, was exactly what was happening. And then all was silent again. Through the film of mud coating his glasses, Harry could just make out a nearby structure of some kind.

Harry tried to stand up and make for the structure. Then he had to sit back down again, both because the mud was unexpectedly sticky and because he suddenly realized he was no longer holding his wand.

"My wand!" he did not scream in a girlish high pitched voice, because thirteen year old boys do not scream in girlish high pitched voices. Therefore, his scream must have been quite manly and deep.

Desperation overcame any natural aversion to his surroundings and he plunged his hand into the mud. The mud grabbed back, or so it felt, because when he pulled his left hand out it was sans ring.

"My ring!" came a second cry that was so deep and manly that it threatened to break his glasses, as deep, manly screams are wont to do. Soon he had both hands dripping and squelching through the earth. Occasionally he'd yank up something hard only to find it was a twig or a large pointy tooth or a bit of bone. Just when he was ready to despair completely, he finally found his ring. He then leaped up in triumph, fell over when his feet failed to escape the murk, and alighted upon his wand, which hadn't sunk into the mud at all and had been resting near his elbow the whole time.

Wand and ring in hand, he struggled toward the mysterious structure. Perhaps it was an ancient castle. Perhaps it was a mansion. Perhaps it would be warm and dry and, at the very least, not housing whatever violent creatures the surrounding mud seemed to hide.

Every step was a trial. The mud sucked at his feet. The water gurgled. Reeds entangled his knees, and then his chest when he stepped into an unexpectedly deep hole. Luckily, none of the pools of water were so deep that he needed to swim, considering he had never learned how. The entire time he trudged, waded, and occasionally sank forward, he heard noises. Things thrashed in the pools. Strange, ethereal voices sang luring tunes off in the distance. Flies attacked any bit of his flesh they could find. Thankfully, he was so coated with mud that there wasn't much bare flesh available for them to bite. Larger insects zinged about his head.

Finally, instead of stepping into sinking mud, his foot hit something hard, followed by his knee which promptly started bleeding. Harry paused to wash his glasses in a nearby pool, and then attempted to wipe off the slime using the inside of his shirt. He got his first proper look at his new estate.

It wasn't a castle. It definitely wasn't a mansion. It wasn't even a house.

Before him was a very tiny island, or perhaps oasis. More accurately, there was quite a large rock that jutted out from the swampland and provided solid, though damp ground. Upon this rock, there was a stone tower. The tower leaned quite a bit. In fact, it looked like it might topple over at any moment. The stones were probably white to begin with, but time and their environment had left them a slimy green. All in all, the entire structure looked old, decrepit, and diseased. Normally, Harry would never have gone inside such a building at all. Even knowing he was now the owner was not enough to entice him. In fact, he might have sat outside all evening and all night, if it weren't for the crocodiles.

The island, if one might call it that when it was, somewhat, surrounded by land, was inhabited. It took a moment for Harry to notice, considering the inhabitants were much the same color and shape as the stone they rested on. They were, however, somewhat cleaner and less slimy than the ground, and even Harry's poor eyesight was able to notice when a rock opened its mouth and showed him rows of sharp teeth.

"Eek," came Harry's manly scream.

Under normal circumstances, it is not possible for a human to outrun a crocodile. Their legs may look short and stumpy, but there are four of them to our two. Four legs will always run down two legs. However, Harry had two things to his advantage.

Number one: he was a wizard and his magic was already in the practice of helping him to quickly relocate from potential bodily harm. Years of accidental magic incidents in relation to Dudley's gang had left a sort of magical muscle memory that aided him in his flight. Number two: the crocodiles had no interest in Harry and didn't bother to run after him.

Not realizing this second point, and probably not caring if he had noticed, Harry made for the closest crocodile-free zone he could find, namely the tower. Within seconds of first realizing the large stone he was about to step on had teeth, Harry was bursting through the remains of an old rotted door and half up the stone steps jutting out from the tower walls before he quite realized what he was doing.

Harry had, in his short career as a wizard, seen many amazing magical feats when it came to enchanting buildings. The Weasley's home, for instance, looked quite small and crooked from the outside. Much like the tower, their house did not look like it should stand. He had also seen the effects of enlargement charms, which could make any space bigger on the inside than the outside. Magic, he knew, could be used to make a comfortable, clean, and roomy living space even out of the most run down of structures.

No such charms seemed to be in effect inside the tower. The stones were just as slimy and old within as without. He could feel the whole structure swaying slightly beneath his feet. Even worse, there was no railing to the staircase. There were simply stone slabs that jutted from the walls, just far enough apart that Harry could manage to hop up. If Harry had been the sort of person to fear heights, as soon as he got over his crocodile scare he'd probably have been frozen in fear halfway up the stairs.

Harry was not scared of heights. Now that he was actually in the tower and on the staircase, he thought he might as well climb all the way up to see what his new abode might be like.

The staircase was treacherous. Aside from the lack of proper railing, the stones had grown some sort of moldy slime that was slippery to walk on, and quite possibly deadly to touch. The light was poor, despite the occasional hole in the tower's side; whether those were windows or the natural result of time, Harry wasn't entirely certain. He preferred to think them intentional. The tower was also inhabited, just as the rocks outside. Instead of crocodiles, however, he came upon webs. His friend Ron would almost certainly have been petrified. Harry, on the other hand, thought they gave a friendly feel to an otherwise unlivable location. For roughly ten years of his life, spiders had been his only friends. There was one other good aspect of the stairs. They seemed to have been built with the tower's tilt taken into consideration. The walls might lean, but the slabs were all parallel to the floor.

Finally, Harry managed to climb the stairs right up to the top. They led to a trap door, or the remains of one. Like the doorway to the tower, the wood had long since rotted. In this case, only the hinges and a sliver of blackened wood remained. Harry had to pull himself up, as the stairs didn't quite go high enough to just step out.

The trap door led into one large room. The room was stone with a wooden, half missing roof. Like the stairs, the floor managed to be mostly level despite a pronounced tilt to the walls. The whole room swayed gently beneath his feet, rather like the rocking of a boat. Harry looked around the room. Thanks to the half missing roof, there was plenty of light to see by.

The room was quite large, really, though very small if one were secretly hoping to find, say, a mansion disguised as a decrepit tower. There was a large fireplace on the side where the wall sloped inwards with a pile of old, very rotted logs sitting waiting to be burned at its side. In that corner there was also a bed. At least, there was an old metal frame with yellowed rags which may have once been sheets covering a pile of wet, somewhat blackened straw. On the other side of the room there was a strange, rusty metal contraption that Harry thought might have been a stove, considering it had a sort of metal chimney leading out through the roof, several shelves that had, surprisingly, not rotted away, and an equally surprising wooden table accompanied by a single wooden chair. The legs to both were not quite even. On the shelves were one rusted cauldron, two pans, and three clay plates. Finally, there was one massive wooden chest.

The entire room was covered in cobwebs, mildew, and dust. There were also bird's nests, or possibly rat's nests, built just about anywhere an animal could find to build in. Harry studied his new abode. He walked carefully over the swaying floor and looked out through what was either a window or a hole his new wall. There was swamp as far as he could see.

"Well," Harry said at last, "It still beats living with the Dursleys." Then he smiled at his new home.