Chapter 12 - Serious Talk - Kind of.
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Well, something has been bothering Alex. She didn't notice it was happening for a while, but it is very clear now. It progressed unbeknownst to her, this serious menace to her world. She doesn't even know how she missed it, but this will be solved right now.
Alex flashes herself into the lair. Instead of showing up right in the middle of the room, she appears in the concealed corner where the door is. She could have come the long way, coming down the stairs and through the SubStation. But then her father would have seen her and forced her to cover a shift.
Alex peeks into the lair. No one is in, so she walks to the shelf with the books of spells, she knows there is one here with the perfect spells to solve it. One by one, she searches the book she needs, and finds it on the middle shelf. With some struggle, she pulls the book out and brings it to the reading stand. She flips a few pages to the summary and runs her finger down the chapters.
"Here!" She states with excitement. "Meals and Dishes. …Page 347." She reads and turns over a block of pages, then a few more … Meals and Dishes… Full Meals - Dinner… "Hah! Got you!" Alex takes her phone from her back pocket and takes a picture of the page, and does that for any other page ahead where she finds her favorite dishes.
What! It really bothered her when she realized she couldn't remember spells to make dinner. This is not happening again.
And after a few minutes going over the various dishes available, "Found you!" Justin's voice breaks Alex's concentration on the book. "Got something important to talk to you." He sternly states, coming into the lair.
Alex closes the book in front of her. "So, Mom finally let go of you?" She asks, stepping away from the stand where the book is.
"She started working a shift just now." He tells, curiously eyeing her suspicious behavior. Let's be honest. Alex, all over a book, it is always a suspicious behavior.
"Doing some 'research'?" He asks her, walking to the stand.
"Yuh!" She shortly answers trying not to give Justin too much.
"Looking for some school material?" He stops in front of the book. "Or maybe… PRANK MATERIAL…" He waves his wand at the book and it opens on the last viewed page.
"Meals and Dishes?" He reads on the page, dejected. Okay, either Justin is wrong or should start worrying about what he eats, he thinks.
"Yeah! Dangerous, right?" Alex mocks him, with a lot of sarcasm.
"Whatever! We have to talk about your behavior in the school. It stepped beyond any boundaries. You've put the entire school in danger." Justin complains.
"What?" She protests. "One small incident where I'm… slightly… connected to something bad, and suddenly I'm all that's wrong in the school?"
"ONE small incident?" He replies. "I think you're forgetting a few things there."
"Oh, yeah?! Like what?"
"Well, let's start with how you got the job."
"Oh, come on. You're just butthurt because you didn't have a say on that." She shoots back.
"You keep pranking me, which shows you have no respect for me." He continues.
"Pfff! Never had, anyway! Why would I start now?" She sits on the chair in front of the center table.
Justin clenches his fists and angrily purses his lips with a grunt. "Because now I'm the headmaster of the school!?"
"Meh!" She shrugs. "Still just my nerdy older brother." He hates this sly smile on her.
Justin tries to control himself, taking a big inhale and letting it out slowly. He looks at Alex again, and continues. "Anyway…" He slowly pushes through his teeth. "You completely disregard the rules of the school."
Alex looks at him, confused. "Does that mean I don't care about the rules?" She sincerely asks him. "Because, then, you're totally right." She completes, smiling.
"Yes! And I mean that, again, one of your little moments of 'let's have fun'…", his shrill imitation of Alex's voice remarking her common careless behavior, "…ended up becoming another threat to WizTech. But I shouldn't be surprised. Your behavior always turns out being dangerous."
"What are you talking about? What 'another threat'?" She asks, honestly lost.
"The zombies!" Justin shortly answers, staring at her.
"What does this have to do with me?"
"Well, you're not gonna be surprised to know they came from the wizard amusement park near the castle… which you had visited just before." Justin finally discloses.
"What? Wait! You're thinking I had something to do with the breakout?" Alex asks, aggrieved.
"Yeah! That's pretty much it!" He confirms.
"No, Justin. There weren't any zombies in the park!" She protests.
"Yeah, there were. The park was setting up an attraction with zombies, so they had a few in there."
"I never saw that!" Alex affirms. "And more, there weren't any incidents with the kids. They were with me the whole time."
"Fiendl told me the zombies were in a secured area. You wouldn't even know something happened." Justin informs her.
"That… guy again!" She complains. "He's always making me look bad!" Then something clicks in Alex's brain. "Wait! Why is he always making me look bad?" She muses.
"You didn't really need much help in that department!" Justin points out.
"No! Justin, hear me out. Think about the hippogriff. Why put them in jars if it was that easy to escape from it?" She asks.
"It's not!" Justin shoots back.
"So why would Fiendl suggest that I had anything to do with it? Like… just 'cause the hippogriff got upset after I opened the cabinet? That doesn't make any sense!"
"You mean you never messed with it?" Justin asks.
"Of course not! That's what I've been trying to tell you. And Fiendl would know all that! So why would he suggest that one thing had anything to do with the other?"
"Uhm! …I don't know!" Justin answers.
"And the zombies. If it had anything to do with me and the kids, why it took so long for the people from the park to notice?"
"Yeah! Actually that was bothering me, too. They are slow, but it wouldn't take a day for them to climb up the hill to the castle." Justin tells.
"What does make sense is that they escaped a long time after we left the park… because someone else let them out." Alex stares at Justin with defying intensity.
"Or…" Justin emphasizes, as if it only hit him now, "…since they are slow, it took them a long time to find the breach." Justin arguments back.
"Urrgh! Would you stop trying to blame it all on me and try to get someone else on the spot for a change?"
"It's hard when it was exactly after you arrived that my wand wouldn't stop sending warning signals!" Justin rants.
"That's right! The warning signals!" Alex gapes at him, as she realizes another important thing. "Doesn't it look weird that your wand kept sending warnings even when we were already dealing with the problem?"
"Well, maybe every time you got near some trouble, the wand freaked out like 'Oh, no! It just got worse!'."
"Funny!" She replies, shooting a deadly glare. "But I'm serious!"
"Well… Yeah!… But it could be just a glitch." He reasons. "And, sometimes, it goes off because of something small. Like about a month ago, when a potion went wrong and a cloud of it spread around a part of the castle. It made us close that part until we were sure it wasn't anything dangerous and could be cleaned up. But it wasn't exactly an attack to the school."
"Really?" Alex asks, pensive.
And Justin completes. "Yeah! We found out that the potion was…"
"Justin, shut up! I'm trying to think here." Alex shouts. "That was about a month ago? You mean about the same time that power transfer machine disappeared?"
"Yeah!" Justin gives her a suspicious stare.
"Let me see!" Alex interjects. "A potion that went wrong when someone stole the power transfer machine." She puts some more mental power into it. "Then there was the hippogriff attack… And the last one was the zombie outbreak."
"Alright! You lost me?"
"Listen. You're right. A potion that went wrong would not be a threat to the school. Then what was the wand warning you about?"
"You mean it was about the machine?"
"Yes!" She affirms with certainty. "And more. I think every one of those attacks were just distractions from something else."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. But I know who's responsible for all of those. I think Fiendl did it."
"Oh, come on, Alex!"
"No, Justin! Just hear me out. You said it was specifically a POTION that went wrong just before you noticed that the machine had disappeared. Who else would know the best way to make a potion go wrong. Then the hippogriff escaped. From where? The potions' classroom. And the zombie outbreak. Who told you the zombies came from the amusement park? I didn't even know they were setting up that attraction. I mean, how can you tell for how long Fiendl knows about that? And he wasn't even there when it happened!"
Justin stares at Alex in complete silence for a couple seconds. And Alex stares back at him, waiting for him to say something. Now it is Justin's time to put some thinking into it. His eyes get lost as he considers the facts that she put together.
"Maybe you really are on to something!" Justin agrees.
"What do you think now, Justin? Which one of us seems more guilty." She practically dares him.
"I gotta say you built a strong case against him." Justin agrees.
"So, let's go get him!" Alex tries to urge him into action.
"Not so fast. I'm still not ready to let you off the hook." Justin stops her
"Come onnnn!"
"And it may very well be all just a coincidence." Justin explains. "I mean, you looked pretty involved too."
Then something behind Justin calls Alex's attention. "Really, huh!?…" Alex interjects, wryly staring at Justin. "It's been a nice day, we all here… away from WizTech… alllll daaaay lonnnng."
Justin's scrunched up face is a good sign he noticed all the malice in her statement. "Yeah! So?!" He asks.
"Well, then why is your butt shinning?"
After a second, Justin pulls his wand from his back pocket. Again the blue and red lights shine on the tool's tip showing that, one more time, there is something threatening the school.
Before they can react in any way, they start feeling something, a familiar sensation they recognize right away. They have used this spell many times. They know how it works.
The room around them starts to wave and distort becoming fuzzy then blurred to the point where their lair is beyond recognition. And right away something else starts to show. A new image just as blurred as before starts taking shape around them, and it becomes clearer by the second. The fuzzy environment is still not clear enough but it feels so familiar.
When the teleportation spell is concluded, they see themselves back in WizTech, in the middle of the front patio. Looking around, the empty place in a weekend evening doesn't look very reassuring. It should be full of children running everywhere, having some fun. Instead, all they have is the eeriness of the dark and empty space.