Mungo opened up his window, and roared out to Duncan,
"How'd ye get here soo fast?"
"Our car. Have you ever been on the Knight Bus?" Duncan shouted back.
"No," Mungo yelled.
"Well, then I can't even begin to describe how it works. Pack your bags, it's chilly out here." Duncan bellowed.
"All righ'. Why doon't ye come in?"
"You haven't de-gnomed your garden in a long time." Duncan shouted, pointing at the area under Mungo's window. Mungo looked down. In front of the front gate surrounding the garden was a small contingent of gnomes, some armed with trowels and hoes, and some were riding wheelbarrows like chariots.
"Ah. Well, come around the back." Mr. Gorsson yelled. Duncan and his parents nodded, and walked out of sight.
Mungo, meanwhile, was hurriedly shoving his school-things into his suitcase. It took a bit of work, as he had scattered his books all over the place, depending on where he had been doing his homework. He found that all of his parchment had somehow wound up between One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi and his old copies of Professor Lockhart's books, creasing the sheets heavily.
Finally, puffing slightly, Mungo managed to get all the stuff into his suitcase except for his broomstick and his Beater's bat. He laboriously hauled the suitcase down the staircase, cursing the little note that said he couldn't use magic during the holidays (the note had had a short lifespan; Mungo had thrown it into the fireplace at the first opportunity.)
Duncan was sitting at the kitchen table with Mr. and Mrs. Gorsson and his parents. He was a short, skinny boy with a very thin, almost horsy face and slightly tidy blonde hair. He smiled at Mungo, and said.
"Hullo. Ready to go? We can get to the car while this lot are sorting things out." Duncan said, nodding towards his parents and Mungo's. They were getting into the boring details about Mungo's stay.
"All righ', good-bye Mum, good-bye Da'." Mungo said, waving good-bye.
"Good-bye, Mungo. We won't detain Mr. and Mrs. Abendroth much longer, you have fun." Mr. Gorsson said.
"Did you pack clean socks?" Mrs. Gorsson asked.
"Aye, Mum." Mungo said. Mrs. Gorsson always made a point to make sure Mungo had clean socks all the time.
"Did you find Gadding with Ghouls? I thought I saw it in the living room…"
"I woon't need it this year, Mum. See ye!" Mungo said, hurriedly exiting with his trunk.
Mungo and Duncan walked around the house, to the gravel pathway in front of the house.
Parked a little away from the road was a vibrant green car. It was an old one, with fins and little angles. The gnomes were edging slowly towards it, trowels lowered. Mungo brandished his club and rushed at them, yelling,
"Raaaah!"
The gnomes gave frightened squeaks and ran back into the sheltering magical herbs of the garden.
"That was rather mean," Duncan remarked Mungo pushed his trunk into the luggage compartment. It had to squeeze quite a bit to get in.
"Well, someone has t' do it. It gets oot o' hand when they start usin' gardenin' tools." Mungo said, snapping the lid closed.
"Eh, I guess so. We don't have gnomes. Too urban." Duncan replied. He got in the back seat of the car as Mr. and Mrs. Abendroth came from the house. Mungo got in as well, and saw that the inside of the car was almost completely covered in purple velvet.
Mr. and Mrs. Abendroth got in the car too, and Mr. Abendroth took out some kind of silvery instrument and set it on the dashboard.
Quite suddenly, they were off. The car zoomed along the road faster than Mungo expected, with trees and rocks passing by in a multi-coloured blur. They passed by hills and rivers and lochs, and then the car gave a loud bang, like a fire-cracker.
They were now driving along a different street, in what looked like Edinburgh. Despite it being rather crowded with parked cars, the Abendroths' car seemed to just go through them like a ghost. With another bang they were rolling along a road beside a nice green meadow, but they were going far too fast for Mungo to appreciate it.
The next bang was rather surprising. It brought them right inside the courtyard of the Tower of London. Fortunately, there was no one there except for one extremely startled Beefeater on a late watch. (He later claimed that he had seen a spectral wagon, on whichAnne Boleynwas riding to her execution.) One last bang, and they were driving along a street in Dover. The car slowed down in front of a white picket fence.
"Well, here we are. The Warren." Mr. Abendroth said. He got out of the car, and grabbed Mungo's trunk out of the back while the rest of the passengers stepped out and went inside the gate.
At first Mungo wondered where the house was, and then he spotted it. Set into a shallow hill was a blue rectangular door, along with some windows lined with some vines or other. Mrs. Gorsson opened the door and quickly ushered Mungo and Duncan in.
There was a long hallway, which curved subtly out of sight. There were doors leading off into other rooms, and windows peeping through the hills and letting the early dawn in.
However, what was really startling about the place was thehuge amount of cats. There were cats everywhere, of every colour and description. Some were pacing the floor meowing for food, and some were perched on special shelves that ran throughout the house. They all looked up when Duncan and Mrs. Gorsson came in, and dozens of eyes gleamed at them, some green, some yellow.
Duncan waded into their midst, stroking some and picking up others.
"Hullo, Emperor Freddie, getting along with Professor Jingles? There's a lad. Oh, look at you, poor little Oofy, you got your claw stuck again."
A horde of tails were fawning themselves on Mungo's legs, fluffy tails, scrawny tails, and midway fuzzy tails. Mungo nervously raised a leg to step over the masses, and took a step before they started fawning on that leg too.
"I asked you if you liked cats, remember?" Duncan said, grinning. He waved his hands at the massed cats and they dispersed, mainly to the kitchen.
"We have about twenty cats living here, and twelve kittens." Duncan said proudly.
"Ah. Tha's a lot o' cats." Mungo commented. He actually really liked the cats, but he was having difficulty in processing so many of them at once.
"Like I said, my parents are Squibs, and Squibs have something special with cats. Mum and Dad haven't told me yet." Duncan explained as he led Mungo down the corridor. There were quite a lot of cat-litter boxes lining the walls.
Duncan stopped at a green door, and led Mungo into a long dining room with lots of chairs.
"How can all this fit into one hill?" Mungo asked, perplexed.
"I think it had some kind of expanding spell from when the last witch owned it. A lot of our stuff is bought from wizards. Take a seat." Duncan said, gesturing to a chair.
Expectedly, there was a cat in it. Mungo carefully pushed it off and took his place. The cat immediately leapt back onto Mungo's lap, kneading it and purring.
"Yeah, Teacup's a sweetheart." Duncan commented, looking. Mr. and Mrs. Abendroth came in with some cereal and milk, as well as some oatmeal.
"Sorry, we haven't been out for a while. Emperor Frederick and Professor Jingles were scrapping like anything. We were afraid to leave them alone in case they hurt each other." Mr. Abendroth said. "Eat up."
Mungo poured himself some cereal clumsily, and the breakfast progressed slowly, with intermittent intervals of cats jumping on the table and being habitually pushed off again. After breakfast, Duncan scooped one of his favourite cats (a reddish orange tom named Tim Troll) and showed Mungo around his home.
Mungo had never been in such an odd house before. It had belonged to a witch, Duncan said, but there weren't very many magical things in the house. There were electric lights, and Mungo was absolutely perplexed by the air conditioning. The living room was a bizarre scene; there was a television right next to a red brick fireplace with a large pot labeled "Floo Powder," which was high out of any of the cats' reach. On the other side was a curious mix of Muggle books and wizarding books on a bookshelf that creaked alarmingly if anything approached.
Duncan's bedroom was normal, by wizarding standards. He had his books hovering in the air in orderly rows, and Mungo thought that the only place he had seen so many books was either Flourish and Blotts or the Hogwarts library. Indeed, Duncan's room was more like a library than a room.
"It's really devilish when our neighbours come over. They all just flop to the floor, making a really big mess. Then they think I'm sloppy." Duncan grinned. "But they pick themselves right back up after they're gone. It's a spell I did once, when I was little and Mum told me to go and clean up my room. It's been here ever since."
Mungo's room (the guest bedroom) was far more Mugglish. It had a plain, brass four-poster bed with pale blue sheets, a desk and a nightstand, and a digital alarm clock. Mungo later enjoyed winding the hands around and making it beep. He unpacked his stuff, organizing it much in the same disarray as it had been in his room. Mungo just felt more comfortable that way.
Mungo quickly got accustomed to the house, however odd it was. Mr. and Mrs. Abendroth both worked as veterinarians, and left the Warren pretty much all to Mungo and Duncan for most of the day. Mungo and Duncan would commonly spend those days in tidying up Mungo's homework (Duncan, being the bookworm he was, had finished his homework ages ago) playing Exploding Snap or Gobstones, or Mungo learning about Muggle technology (their substitute for magic.) Mungo learned the names ofabout half the cats, although he sometimes mixed them up, to Duncan's chagrin.
September 26 came sooner than Mungo expected, and early in the morning Mr. Abendroth and Mrs. Abendroth ushered Mungo and Duncan into the living room.
"Okay, today we're going to go to Diagon Alley to get your school supplies, and meet Mungo's cousin Penoria. We're going to use Floo powder, because we want to get there as early as we can. You've used Floo powder before, haven't you, Mungo?" Mr. Abendroth.
Mungo shuffled his feet.
"Erm, no, actually I haven't. Mum an' Da' could jest Apparate to Edinburgh and Horizon Alley when they wanted t' shop for magical supplies, and' they didn' need to take me along." Mungo explained.
"Ah. Well, you just walk into the fireplace," Mr. Abendroth said, crouching a little bit into the rather lowfireplace. "Sorry… And you take a generous bit of Floo powder, and say where you want to go, and then drop it to the ashes. Like so,"
Mr. Abendroth held out his hand for the Floo pot, which Duncan gave to him, and took a large amount of green powder.
"Diagon Alley!" Mr. Abendroth said clearly. With a roaring sound, green flames erupted and engulfed him, disappearing from view.
"It's really quite easy. Be sure to say it clearly." Mrs. Abendroth said. "In you go."
Mungo was reminded forcefully of the Muggle story of Hansel and Gretel as he climbed clumsily into the rather cramped fireplace. He grabbed a handful of the grainy Floo powder, and said,
"Diagoon Alley!" Or fully meant to. But he sneezed from the soot and the powder, and crashed his head against the lintel of the fireplace at the same time he said it. So, it was more like,
"Diaga-choo, bother-"
But it was too late to correct himself. He was suddenly violently whizzing about, with blurs of different fireplaces. He suddenly realized how Father Christmas did his chimney trick, and didn't envy him one bit.
Finally, and quite suddenly, Mungo shot out of the confusing maelstrom onto a stone tile floor. He picked up his glasses (which thankfully had only wound up in his hat, and had not been damaged) and brushed off his robes. Mungo took off his hat, and knocked the soot and ashes off it on his leg while he surveyed his surroundings. There was a long row of marble counters, with coins and jewels piled in a very strange fashion. There were golden scales, and long rolls of important-looking parchment, written in a language Mungo couldn't read. Mungo could not tell at all where he was.
A wizened old witch came into through the tall brass doors, and stared at Mungo. She stared for quite a while, and Mungo was getting nervous.
"Erm, hullo-" He started, but the old witch interrupted in a flow of apparently angry and unsatisfied talk in a foreign language.
"I say, erm, I think I'll just go now." Mungo interjected during a pause, and turned back to the fireplace. Then he remembered that he didn't have any Floo powder.
The witch was still talking, and getting angrier and angrier. Mungo shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was meant to show that he didn't understand anything and that he couldn't go back where he came from. However, there is only so much information you can convey by shrugging, and then only with careful training. Mungo lacked this, so all it looked was noncommittal.
The witch gave an exasperated sigh and went into a door behind him. There was another voice in there, and the witch emerged again, this time escorting an annoyed-looking goblin in a green uniform.
"What are you doing here?" The goblin asked in a strange accent, wrinkling his nose at Mungo's untidiness. Mungo, just remembering that he had been beating his hat against his shins the whole time, put it on.
"Erm, well, you see, I was usin' Floo powder t' git t' Diagon Alley in London, and I didn' say th' words righ'. And I jus' wound up here. Where is here, anywee?" Mungo asked cautiously.
"You are in the Croatian branch of Gringotts, in Zagreb." The goblin answered.
"Good lord!" Mungo exclaimed. "Do you have any Floo powder? I need t' git back t' Diagon Alley."
"Yes, for three Sickles, and three more Sickles for the unauthorized use of our fireplace." The goblin said, extending a claw-like hand. Mungo nodded and felt deeply into his pockets. He found a handful of coins, but they were mostly Knuts. Mungo found five silver Sickles, and then paid out the right amount of Knuts. The goblin counted them carefully, and said,
"That seems to be in order. The Floo powder is in the vase." The goblin pointed at an ornate vase on the mantelpiece of the fireplace.
"Thank ye." Mungo said, turning and walking to the fireplace. He cleared his throat, measured the top of the fireplace with his head, and nodded, comforted.
He took the Floo powder, and said,
"Diagon Alley!"
((Author's Note: A plague on the person who invented the word 'fireplace.' I mean, it's rather unimaginative. Like, "Hey, look, that's the place where we keep the fire." Might as well call the kitchen the 'foodplace', or something.))