"This place is a dump," Harry gasped. "Umm. No offense."
"None taken," Sirius replied, himself kind of at a loss. "I didn't expect it to have gotten this bad."
The day after a very lovely and fulfilling Christmas, Sirius had brought Harry, Remus, and all three Grangers over to see his ancestral home in the Grimmauld Place neighborhood of townhomes up in Islington. While the whole area was kind of ripe for gentrification—aging homes facing onto an overgrown park—number 12 really set the bar low. In fact, given how the peeling paint and sense of disaster intensified on its side of the tract, it was very likely that the old manor was, to forgive the pun, a Black hole on property values.
They'd only gotten into the foyer before the dismay set in. Jean and Helen had only been able to enter with the others basically dragging them in, the muggle-repelling charms were that strong. And they were even now rationalizing the effect as their keen intuition about not wanting to wander into a haven of filth. "Is that… is the paint actually supposed to be forest green?" Hermione's mother nearly wailed, as she realized that the midnight color of everything was a patina of grime, dust, and mold on all visible surfaces.
"Was when I was a kid, yeah," Sirius admitted. "My mother only died seven years ago. Maybe she decapitated Kreacher before she went…"
"What creature?" Hermione asked just as Harry asked, "Who's Kreacher?" Harry had seen the correct spelling in the chat log and realized it was a name.
"Family house elf," the Black scion added. "Kreacher!"
A stooped and wizened house elf in a filthy old towel-tabard poked his head out from one of the doors down the hall from the entryway. "Thought it was you," he croaked. "Kreacher would only be so lucky to die without having to see you again."
KREACHER
House Elf, Level 15
"How did the house get in this state!?" Sirius asked, ignoring the disrespect.
"Did you leave a house elf here for years, alone, expecting him to just take care of the house!?" Hermione demanded with some heat.
"It's his home too!" Sirius argued, not really being aware of Hermione's concerns about house elves. "Most elves would sooner die than let the state of their home get this bad."
"Or punish themselves," she said darkly, remembering Harry's stories of Dobby.
"Would that Kreacher had died," the old elf moaned, but realized that he couldn't avoid answering Sirius' direct question. "Mistress says she likes the place like this. Keeps out interlopers. Or it should."
"Early-onset dementia, maybe?" Jean mused out loud, having done some study of hoarding behavior in pre-med.
"How old was she when she died?" Helen figured.
"I think about sixty," Sirius answered. "Really young for a witch." He sighed and said, "Maybe the library is in a better state. It's just upstairs." The Boxing Day trip was in the hopes that the Black library might have some of the references to Ekrizdis that Hermione couldn't find in the Hogwarts collection.
"I don't think it's safe," Remus cautioned. "This much filth in a magical house, there could be doxies at the very least." Seeing everyone look in confusion, he explained, "They're magical pests with highly-venomous bites and no fear of attacking people."
GETTING DOXXED
Clear a safe path to the Black family library.
"Quest log agrees, but thinks we can make it to the library if we clear a path," Harry announced as the quest popped up. The liberal use of space-expanding charms in the house was making his map somewhat Escher-esque as it attempted to fit the floorplan into the limited real-world space around, but he at least didn't see any immediate red dots for hostile targets. "I can make an instance so we can help?"
"That's the thing that lets you ignore the Trace?" Sirius grinned. "I don't think you'd actually need it here, since the Ministry probably can't see through the house's wards. But safety doesn't hurt."
"Can't we only instance the party, anyway?" Hermione wondered.
Harry nodded, "Oh, right. We'd better drop and then see who has the highest Charisma." He left their normal party (they'd made Lee the leader, since his maxed-out Charisma let him keep the entire set of Marauders at the school in the party together), and said, "Sirius. Remus. Would you both be in my party?"
"Uh, sure," they agreed, sold on the reality of his weird abilities but having no context for a lot of them.
As soon as they showed up, Harry made Sirius the leader and suggested, "Invite the Grangers, please, Sirius."
"Do… you… uh… want to party?" his godfather asked, with a smirk.
The agreements rang around with Helen not showing up in the list. "Guess you're limited to five," Harry figured. "So was Ron, before we made Lee the leader."
"If it's linear, it has to be one member per three points of Charisma," Hermione agreed. "So that puts Sirius at somewhere between 13 and 15, assuming you start with just yourself at Charisma 1, and get to seven members at Charisma 19." She realized everyone was nodding at her without challenge, when she was used to Ron fighting her about her assumptions, so she belatedly admitted, "I don't actually have enough data points to support that until Harry gets to Charisma 10 and we see if he can have an additional party member." Everyone was still nodding politely, so she huffed, "Math is important!"
"I know, dear," Helen told her. "So I'm not in the party? I can stay here and not fight magical bedbugs?"
"They're more like little pixies," Remus corrected her. "And, yes, we should be able to protect this room if you want to hang back."
"Delightful. I'm sure there's so much to see just here, like this… er… lovely portrait." Helen had sidestepped an umbrella stand made from a taxidermied troll's leg to look at the painting set back far enough to be visible to some extent or other up and down the hallway. The expansive frame contained a full-scale rendering of a sleeping woman who appeared to have a host of health problems. "I think this poor woman had jaundice," she noted to clarify her earlier sarcasm, the yellow skin being just one clue she could spot with her medical education.
"That's not lovely… that's my mother!" Sirius realized, as he also moved to take in the painting.
"What?" the woman murmured sleepily, the magics on the painting finally catching hold and reanimating her. Bloodshot and yellowing eyes opened to peer out and recognize Sirius, and then she hissed, "You! How dare you return to my house!? Muggle-lover! Blood traitor! Shame of my flesh! What scum have you brought with you to defile this ancient home!?"
"Good to see you too, mother," Sirius sighed, apparently not at all surprised by the ear-splitting tirade. "Yeah, this is the first thing coming down," he casually reached up to try to detach the painting from the wall, but then couldn't seem to get a purchase on the frame. He swished his wand to try, "Mobilipictura," but the spell just glanced off the painting harmlessly. "Little help, Mooney?" he shouted over the increasingly unhinged tirade coming from the portrait, and the grumblings of the other waking paintings along the hallway.
Remus flicked his wand a few times casting detection spells and yelled, "Some kind of permanent-sticking charm. Probably spell-wards hidden underneath it. Impressive bit of setup. You'd have to get it down to be able to take it down."
GETTING DOXXED
Clear a safe path to the Black family library.
O (Optional) Take down Walburga Black's portrait
"Game system thinks there's a way!" Harry announced. He cocked his head at it and compared its placement to the map. His incidentally-acquired Carpentry 6 kicked in as he suggested, "Looks like she put it on a load-bearing wall, too. But I think you could probably conjure some supports, cut the wall out, and then put more permanent bracing in."
"Hear that mother! All you've managed is to give us incentive to make the dining room open plan," Sirius screamed over her shouting. "Show us what to do, pup!"
After checking to make sure the dining room wasn't full of hidden threats, Harry directed Sirius and Remus to conjure the requisite scaffolding on either side of the portrait, then watched as Sirius cackled with glee as he used cutting charms to chop through the brickwork of the wall. As it was balanced precariously, ready to break free, he ran into the dining room so he could kick it from the other side.
Still yelling aspersions, Walburga Black's portrait fell face-first onto the rug in the wide hallway, half a ton of brickwork pressing her down and finally muffling the shrieking. Covered in plaster dust, Sirius was grinning like a loon from the other side. Kreacher appeared behind him, started wringing his ears in his hands, muttering the same tirade as his mistress, but quieter, clearly discomfited by the easy fall of the painting.
"Well that was fun," Sirius said, dusting himself off.
"We should get some kind of long-term solution in there before the conjurations fade," Remus suggested, his mouth twitching at seeing Sirius happy for the first time since entering the house.
"Why don't Helen and I see if there's anywhere open that we can purchase a load of bricks while you clean house?" Jean suggested, already reaching his tolerance for magical shenanigans. "Just… don't get magical tetanus or anything, please?"
Everyone thought that was a fine plan, so the doctors let themselves out as the wizards and witch oriented themselves to explore. "Library is two floors up," Sirius pointed, and a waypoint and pathing trail appeared on Harry's map.
"If we do encounter doxies, I'm hoping you both know the knockback jinx?" Remus asked. Both Harry and Hermione nodded. "If we encounter anything else, well… follow our lead."
They did encounter doxies. Lots of them. A bizarre cross between pixies and gremlins, they splattered nicely against the walls in droves under the fusillade of knockback jinxes. Most came out of the curtains of the sitting room next to the stairway. Harry finally got what Sirius had said about decapitating Kreacher when he noticed the stuffed house elf heads mounted above the staircase.
Hermione gave a shocked gasp and Sirius apologized, "My family convinced the elves it was an honor." Kreacher, following them, merely quietly clucked in annoyance at the splattered doxies around the sitting room. It was unclear whether he planned to do anything about it without specific and direct orders.
It was on the first landing that things almost went very wrong. Harry was toward the back of the group climbing the stairs when he heard a thump from one of the doors near the stairs. With only a moment's warning of the appearing red dot, a figure tumbled out into the hallway little more than a couple of yards from Harry. If the swirling bits of user interface were the first clue, the weird modem screeching and flickering of his game system were the second. "Dementor!" he yelled, nearly falling down the stairs in his haste to get away.
"That's not a dementor!" Remus said, whirling and spotting the threat from higher up the stairway. "I've never seen anything like that!" He was casting futile spells at it, each one seeming to glance off.
"It's how Harry sees dementors!" Hermione explained, herself unaffected by the fear that was supposed to come with them, and trying to puzzle out what was going on. She was also trying to not get bowled over by Harry, retreating into her down the stairs.
"Oh! Of course!" Remus stepped boldly in between Harry and the apparition, and it immediately transformed into the full moon, to scale for the hallway. "Riddikulus," he incanted, swishing his wand and turning it into a wheezing white balloon that sailed back into the room and slammed the door shut. "Colloportus," he said, magically locking the door. "That was a boggart. We'll deal with it later. Should have figured one might have shown up."
"They take the form of your worst fear," Hermione realized, steadying Harry as he recovered a third of the way down the stairway.
"And don't respect the Mental Fortress," he grumbled.
"So that's what the actual dementor looked like to you?" she checked. When he nodded, she said, "It was honestly a little pretty… in a terrifying sort of way."
"You're seeing stuff like that all the time, pup?" Sirius asked.
"Not as broken up, but… yeah," Harry agreed.
"Wild," his godfather nodded. "You okay to keep going?"
They made it to the Black family library without any other major encounters, and the quest completed with a reasonable bounty of XP. The room didn't actually look as run-down as the rest of the house. Perhaps Kreacher respected the books too much to allow them to become covered in rot, or maybe the preservation charms on the shelves were proof even against a negligent housekeeper. "I thought it would be bigger," Hermione said, taking in the room. Though densely-packed with shelves, it really was only as big as you might expect in a single upstairs room of a townhome.
"Not a good idea to put serious space expansion on a room with this many spellbooks," Sirius shrugged. "And basically everything in here is a rare volume. It was never particularly useful for doing my summer homework."
"I guess we should get to looking," Hermione said, rolling up her sleeves and pulling out her parchment with the names of the books that the Hogwarts library collection didn't have.
Sirius shook his head and warned her, "I may be the only one that can safely touch most of these. Give me the list." She handed it over and nodded in appreciation when, rather than trying to visually find them, he just started casting summoning charms. "Accio Blood Mages of Europe. Accio Hacklebrand's Dark Lords. Accio The Founding of Azkaban…" He wasn't having much luck until he got to, "Accio Autobiography of Sagittarius Black. Oh, that's gotten something." A thick volume bound in black leather (most of the books were in black leather) lazily unshelved itself and floated over to him. "Probably should have started with that one, honestly."
"Is it safe to take it with us?" Hermione asked, eyes gleaming at the chance to crack open a book not even Hogwarts had.
Sirius flicked through it and nodded, "This one just seems like collected journals, not a spellbook. Those are the ones you don't want to try to remove. But I'll carry it outside, just in case."
She nodded and asked, "So… what are the rest of you going to do for the next few days while I read that?"