TriNymphs - Chapter Sixteen - Swamp Thing (Disclaimer on my profile)
The cloaked man advanced towards Lyssa again, she could hear his footsteps. She thought he was walking loudly on purpose to freak her out. Her reasoning on this was that making his footsteps heard over her hyperventilating was an impressive feat.
He walked to her left side and stuck a needle in her arm, it withdrew blood. She spent the next twenty minutes bullying herself into calming down. Realising that was a lost cause; she decided she would settle for acting calm. When she finally achieved this state, she addressed her captor. He was currently experimenting on the blood in a similar fashion to the spinal fluid experimentation.
"Who are you." he didn't say anything. She tried again, "why are you doing this?"
"Because I need a test subject," he chuckled.
"For what?" Lyssa accidentally whispered, her voice quivered and she couldn't make it sound any louder.
"Experimentation on non-human magic users," he was trying to freak her out again, and it was working.
"I'm human though!" she said, when the thought occurred to her. She was excited and naively thought that her being human meant he would let her go.
"You're a nymph you idiot."
"But I don't have any powers!"
"Which makes you the perfect subject, you can't fight back!" the captor smiled. "Oh, and to deter any misconceptions you may have, you should know this now. There is no way I will be letting you out of this alive."
She started screaming in the hopes that someone could hear her. She seemed to have forgotten that no one had come last time she had tried screaming. All other sounds were drowned out by her screaming, which intensified when a floating head made out of light appeared in front of her own head. It seemed to be yelling something at her, but that was drowned out by her screaming. The floating head head-butted her, as (in absence of any other limbs) that was the only way it could inflict damage on her. The fact that the head made of light was substantial and could actually hit her, shocked Lyssa into shutting up. Mind you, she didn't process it like that in her mind, no her thoughts were more along the lines of, "WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK MAN!"
Oh yeah, did I mention she had leant to cuss over the past few months?
"FIGHT BACK" the floating head screamed at her.
"I FUCKEN CAN'T!" she screamed back. The hooded man, worried his test subject had gone insane and that it would mess with his results, poked Lyssa on the top of the head. He apparently could not see or hear the floating head, and wondered what she was yelling at, if it wasn't him.
"PISS OFF YOU OLD BASTARD." she roared.
"GO! GO! GO!" the head encouraged her mental break.
Then, Lyssa suddenly recognised the floating head, which belonged to the woman who tortured her in her dreams, and she completely snapped.
She yelled again, this time not in terror but in madness, as something inside her snapped and a wave of pure energy was released from her. Water pushed its way through the crack in the ceiling into the room where Lyssa was still restrained on a rusty hospital and her captor was taking cover from falling ceiling debris. The water quickly broke the ceiling and attempted to drown the old man who unfortunately had his wand on him and could stop that from happening. Lyssa however did not have her wand on her, and if the water had been anywhere near her, that might have been a problem.
However, though the water flooded the entire room, there was a bubble of air around Lyssa, who was still restrained on the table, seeping out energy. She was no longer screaming, but staring curiously in front of her wondering what the fuck was happening. A strip of water broke away from the rest, and crept into the seam of the shackles holding Lyssa to the table. It forced them apart and Lyssa was finally free. She hopped off the table, watching in wonder as her captor floated away, and a boy floated through the doorway, and up towards where the ceiling had been, then towards the surface of the lake. The bubble of air collapsed around Lyssa and she too floated up.
Her chest started to burn after a minute of no air, she glared enviously at her captor, floating fathoms above her using the bubblehead charm. She was even jealous of the boy, also above her, who was unconscious.
A grindelow shot past, skimming her head, and surprising her into opening her mouth. Lyssa was surprised to realise she wasn't drowning; she could breathe in the water.
Alex had decided she would kick Chelsea to get her up, and then run for the hills. After that, it wasn't on her whether or not Chelsea got away. Chelsea was lying on the ground oblivious. Alex took aim and kicked, as the shadow thing started walking towards them. It was something wearing a cloak, and it was dripping with water and mud. Presumably from it's trip in the lake. Alex was booking it back to the castle, and was clear of the lake by the time a second thing rose from the depths.
The second thing looked like a student. He or she was floating face down in the water, and Chelsea (who had sat up) was staring at the student, wishing there was a way to get to him or her without passing the mud thing. She slowly got to her feet as a third thing rose from the depths.
The third thing looked like it was made out of hair. Or it was the head of a person and the rest of him or her was still underwater. It walked forward a bit, the third thing which was in fact a female, walked until the water only went up to her chest. She brought her left arm up and pointed it at the first thing -the mud thing- that had stopped walking when it had noticed the girl reach the surface. She flicked her pointer finger up and the water turreted up and blasted the mud thing clear of the three students.
It ran into the forest and wasn't seen again that night. The girl walked over to the boy floating face down, flipped him over and started propelling him towards the shore. On the way, she pushed her hair out of her face, and Chelsea finally saw it was her sister.
The boy had started to breathe on his own after a minute of CPR from Lyssa while Chelsea had been sent to run up to the castle and fetch Madam Pomfrey, or any teacher she ran into. Lyssa went to the hospital wing the next morning to see if he was okay. She could somewhat relate to him. Or she thought she could, she didn't know though because he hadn't yet woken up, besides he had apparently been in there much longer.
According to Madam Pomfrey and his name was Erik Fae, he was a Ravenclaw second year. A friend had seen him at Kings Cross, but no one had seen him at Hogwarts all year or on the train. A letter had been sent to Dumbledore a week or so after term started saying Erik was going to be home schooled. Dumbledore had recently written his parents, who said they had never written such a letter and had thought their son had been at Hogwarts the whole year.
All the other students were in class, but Lyssa had been given the day off. Tomorrow too. She was going to have to start studying like mad to catch up. She could finally sleep and she had gotten incredibly far behind during her zombie period. But first she wanted to see something. She got up from her chair beside Erik Fae and started making her way outside.
It was three days since she had flooded the chamber under the lake, and lately she had been able to sleep fine. She had started talking to her friends again; they were also all in class. Alex had tried to get at least a day off, but it hadn't worked. She was furious.
But something entirely different was bothering Lyssa. She was a little mad at herself for it, since she had just gotten over her sleeping issues, and gotten back from being kidnapped, albeit it had only been for a day or two, but still. She just had to check something, then she'd let it go, she tried to convince herself as she made her way across the grounds and got to the lake. She had lately avoided the lake. She was talking to her friends now and not distancing herself anymore, the lake only served as a reminder of a perfectly creepy day or two.
That day, she had been controlling the water. She could feel the energy coming from her directed at the water telling it what to do. Some instinct had told her how to control it; how to blow the kidnapper away from them. She had talked to Chelsea and Alex; they said it wasn't normally like that. Chelsea said if she concentrated hard she could feel some energy, but nothing was guiding her.
The day before she had been in the bathroom alone, the taps were on, she had pointed at the water. She tried to feel like she had that night, but nothing happened, the water continued to pour from the sink down into the drain. So the next day she was walking towards the lake. She tried controlling the water; she tried balling it up and lifting it above the water line. She tried making the clouds above her start to rain. She couldn't do anything.
She sighed and walked back into the castle, preparing herself for a day of solid studying. After supper she checked on Erik again. That time he was awake, they talked for a bit. She had assumed he wasn't human, but some magical creature that could do witch and wizards magic, like her. She had guessed he would be a nymph, based only on the fact that that's what she had been kidnapped for.
Turns out, he was water elemental. His parents were enrolling him at Hogwarts until his elemental powers appeared. Unlike with witches and wizards, that could be any time. Some elementals and nymphs didn't get their powers until they were old men and women.
Now that Lyssa could sleep, she found she had tons more energy. She pulled her marks back up and was the top student in many of her classes. She wouldn't admit it to herself but she was jealous of her sisters, and she concentrated at excelling at spells so she wouldn't feel inferior to them.
Exams came and went, fairly uneventful. Alex almost got kicked out of a few of hers for excessive swearing. She was easily frustrated and a lot of questions tended to come up that she had no idea on what the answers could be. She managed to scrape by on all her subjects though. Chelsea got average marks on all her subjects, except for a few she got slightly above average on. Lyssa of course aced everything. Except Defence Against the Dark Arts. Professor Copper was a horrible teacher. He didn't manage to get his students to learn anything. He had been especially bad the last couple weeks, he kept losing focus and staring out the window dreamily, at odd intervals.
Everyone was glad Professor Quirrell was coming back next year.
They spent the last few days together with their best friends. They were always in a group, the sisters, Katie, Holly, another Slytherin girl Eve, and a Ravenclaw girl named Cho that was friends with Lyssa. Erik sometimes joined them as well; he and Lyssa had become friends after their ordeal, as they found they could relate to each other, and knew how to distract each other when they started to think about depressing shit.
The group spent the train ride home together playing exploding snap and wizard's chess. When they got to platform 9 3/4, they promised to write to each other over the summer then went their separate ways. Even Chelsea and Alex went off on their own, to some dark corner of the station where they could make a portal without being seen. After what happened to Lyssa and Erik, neither thought it was a good idea to advertise that they were nymphs.
Chelsea had made plans to stay with Vampira and Dominic over the summer, there was no way she was going back to the Malfoy's. Alex was going back to the earth kingdom for part of the summer, she was going to stay with Daniel, the boy who had trained her when she was there before. He didn't talk much but they were friends. She would be going back to Malfoy manner for half of the summer; she couldn't leave Melissa alone with their parents and annoying little brother all summer, now could she?
A/N - And that's the end of year one, finally. This story is going over two years which is really an enormous cut because when I first started writing it I was going to make it the whole seven years. I had thought of a plot for each of the seven years though, so a few more people review this story I'll post the other two years I have planned out because either way I'm going to write it. There's no way I'm writing the whole seven though because that would be absurd. The second year won't be as long because in this one the main characters go through more personal stuff then they will in the next year.
Anyway, thanks for reading.