Contest winner: cv675
Spanky's jaw dropped. Beside him, Ilona stiffened. Behind them, Endora gasped. Sadie growled. Sir Lionel said, "Er."
Harvey faced them from the end of a blind alley in the fast-growing yew maze Sadie had planted (seeds courtesy of her friend Miles O'Roughage). Not just one Harvey, nor even both of him. Three Harveys confronted them. But that wasn't what made Spanky gape. It was partly the menacing way each Harvey's wand was pointed at them. And, partly, it was the third Harvey's outstretched hand.
"Give me the ring," he said coolly.
"Was this your racket all along?" Spanky asked.
"Don't let's have a fuss," said Harvey 1. "It's only a wee bauble. You'll come to no harm."
"What do you want with it?" Ilona demanded.
"How will I use it, you mean?" said Harvey 2. "Would you believe me if I said that I would never use it?"
"Indeed," added Harvey 3, "that I would make sure nobody ever used it again?"
Ilona looked at Spanky. Spanky turned toward Harvey again and said, "No."
"He," Sadie shouted, then corrected herself: "They must be working with Il Comte and Lee Shore. How else..."
"...would I be here when you were expecting them?" Harvey 3 shrugged. "I'm afraid I can't answer all your burning questions."
"At least," added Harvey 2, "not at present. Please to hand over the ring."
"You've really gone through time's mangle, haven't you?" Sir Lionel's voice carried an undertone of laughter. "You've messed things up properly. I wonder what you think absolute power over other people can do to sort out your, er..."
"Problem?" said Harvey 1. "I see no problem. I've seen the end of the world. I've seen its beginning. If older and wiser heads had been in charge..."
"...and, well," said Harvey 2 with an immodest air of modesty, "I'm as old and wise as they come..."
"...a lot of things might have turned out differently." Harvey 3 nodded. "Better."
"You're mad," Endora said shakily. "You can't go about history changing things. You of all people would know, if you hand't changed yourself..."
"Don't be ridiculous," scoffed Harvey 2. "I'm the same as ever."
"Haven't you noticed," Sadie said venomously, "you ought to be saying 'we,' not 'I'?"
Harvey looked at each other, then back at the prisoners who had been his friends. "I'm sorry?" Harvey 1 said. "Am I missing something?"
"Only that there are three of you," Sadie yelled.
Harvey looked around themself again. For a moment, he seemed bewildered. At that moment, Spanky struck.
"Petrificus totalis," he muttered with a flick of his right wand. "Incarcerous," he added quickly, waving his left wand. Ilona's voice cut across his, hissing: "Expelliarmus!"
None of these spells had any effect. Harvey looked back at them with a mildly surprised expression on his three faces. Surprised and hurt.
"I say," he said.
The five wizards at bay immediately began pelting him with jinxes. None of them found their target. Sizzling jets of light zoomed toward Harvey's chests, then dissipated as if nothing was there. They didn't seem to be hitting a shield.
"Come, Rumbo," said Harvey 2, tugging on a leash that snaked around his legs.
An elephant walked into view from behind Harvey 2's legs, where it seemed to have been hiding. It was about the size of a well-fed beagle, and it had a wand gripped in its curling trunk.
"Meet my friend Rumbo," said Harvey 1. "Once, when I had a lot of time on my hands - say, eighty years or so - I trained him to remember jinxes and their counterspells."
Harvey 3 added, "He's very good to have with one when one is surrounded by hair-trigger witches and wizards."
"Only look how he's shrunk," said Harvey 2 sadly. "Unfortunate side effect, it always happens. He was the size of a standard schnauzer a few minutes ago."
"Eventually the poor chap will grow so small, I won't be able to care for him," said Harvey 1.
"Alas," said Harvey 3, "it's the price we have to pay..."
"We?" Sadie challenged.
Harvey 3 blinked at her. "Yes, of course," he said. "Rumbo and I."
Sadie stared back. "You've lost your marbles, mate."
Harvey 2 and 3 simply smiled. Harvey 1 cheerfully said, "Right. Now, the ring. Unless any of you is harboring a pocket elephant, I would urge you to give it up promptly."
Spanky opened his mouth to ask a question, but Harvey 2 answered it first: "I've still got a few spells Rumbo hasn't seen."
When no one moved for a long beat, Harvey 3 anxiously added: "They'll hurt. A lot."
Sadie shook with fury as she stepped forward, clutching the ring in her fist.
"That's better," said Harvey 3.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #166 +++
You can help decide what happens next in The Magic Quill! Simply leave a brief comment (up to 150 words) answering the following Survey and Contest. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest answer that Robbie likes best, will turn up in the chapter after next.
SURVEY: Harvey is working (A) on his own. (B) for Bobs the Reality Wizard. (C) for il Comte. (D) for Uncle or Aunt Leslie. (E) for ______ (write-in candidate).
CONTEST: Describe a magical machine and what it does. The more whimsical, the better!
Showing posts with label Miles O'Roughage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miles O'Roughage. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Saturday, December 27, 2008
133. Titus Fistley
Contest winner: Dragonic
Runner-up: greyniffler
Miles O'Roughage sat with the briefcase on his knees on an incredibly hard chair, jammed into a corner between a potted palm-oil palm and a frosted glass door with the words DEPARTMENT OF ABRACULTURE: PATENT OFFICE stenciled on the other side of the glass. Every time someone opened the door, the glass banged Miles' knee painfully, without being damaged itself. The palm-oil palm kept nudging his arm until he dug a sickle and a few knuts out of his pocket and dropped them on its roots; afterward the sound of the palm's roots counting and burying its hoard was enough to drown out the coughing of a sickly, yodeling flytrap in a hanging planter on the other side of the door.
The herbologist sighed, reflecting that magic could sometimes be tiresome. Here he sat in the most uncomfortable chair in a waiting room where he had spent a net two years of his life (though not all at once), steadfastly ignoring a dispute between two other wizards who were both trying to patent the same herb -- either as wurtha-mint (sachets of whose leaves were meant to lend a wizarding home the smell of fresh money) or as catburglarnip (guaranteed to keep thieves docile until help arrived). Not for the first time, he wondered whether he might not have been happier tending an apple orchard or a rose garden, instead of advancing the world's knowledge of magical plants.
Finally the door at the far end of the office opened by itself, and the flytrap yodeled: "NEXT!" before subsiding into another fit of coughing. Dr. O'Roughage plunged through the dark doorway before the arguing wizards could settle on which of them should go first.
As he crossed the threshold, he immediately found himself well inside an enormous, open-plan office. The central area was crammed with cubicles separated by vine-choked trellises; potted trees moved up and down the aisles, pushed by trainer-wearing roots that arched over the rims of their pots, and gathering in rustling groups around watercoolers filled with Miracle-Gro (the wizard recipe, not the Muggle kind whose name is but wishful thinking). Surrounding this area, shelves loaded with seedling trays, glass planters filled with transparent soil, and preserv-o-vac specimen jars marched off into the gray distance in every direction.
The air above the cubicles was filled with one of Miles O'Roughage's proudest inventions: a cross between a paper-waterbomb bush and a hydrolysis hydrangea, which bore dirigiblefruit year round -- hollow sacs filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen so that the plants hovered over everyone's heads. Treated with puncture-proof and fireproof spells, the dirigiblefruit plants also had incandescent tulip bulbs attached to the bottom of their planters by permanent sticking charms, providing ample light for all, and (Miles shivered with pride) all of it through the arts of thaumatobotany.
A throat cleared itself nearby. Miles looked round and found that, as usual, he had been transported instantly to the first available cubicle...and, as too often in the past, that cubicle belonged to a thin-lipped, baggy eyed, pockmarked wizard of middle years, an ample middle, a less than ample comb-over, and a chatwood-veneer name tag that, both in writing and aloud, proclaimed the unwelcome tidings: "Hello! My mame is TITUS FISTLEY, your friendly abracultural patent counselor."
"You again, is it?" Fistley sneered, echoing Dr. O'Roughage's thoughts word-for-word. "Didn't I reject your last application?"
"I still don't understand that," O'Roughage said bitterly as he moved into the cubicle. "I had filled out all the forms correctly, and tied the bundle in the exact shade of red-tape you have always required in the past."
"To be sure," Fistley said with a look of nostalgic satisfaction. "But the knot had twelve corners, whereas I require no more or less than eleven. Also, one end of the tape was one-tenth of a millimeter longer than the other. With the volume of work that goes through this office each day, we have no time to waste on people who aren't sufficiently motivated to observe the forms and conventions. Well? Have you anything new to show me, or is this a social visit?"
While Dr. O'Roughage counted backwards from twenty to settle his temper, someone in a nearby cubicle had a sudden fit of laughter. Fistley looked irritated. His visitor, however, took courage from this sign -- particularly when several other voices joined in the laughter from several directions and distances.
"I was requested," O'Roughage said calmly, "to bring another specimen of my Laughodil, to allow for further study of its interesting properties."
Fistley's face darkened. "I should have known you were behind this," he growled, as another voice nearby gave way to laughter like a pig's snorting. Even a passing tree rustled its branches as if chuckling.
"I take it you haven't examined the plant yourself," O'Roughage said, unlocking the clasps on his briefcase with a wave of his hand. He pulled the lid up, reached down into it until his elbow appeared to be passing through the top of Fistley's desk, and emerged again with a small shrub in a cube-shaped stone pot. The leaves were a glossy, dark green on top, but had a parchmentlike texture beneath. "All you have to do is lift one of the branches," the inventor proudly explained, "and read the words that appear on the underside of the leaf. Every leaf has a different joke."
"Sophomoric humor," Fistley said sourly, "to judge by the sort of punchlines I hear repeated around the coffeepot. Hardly the sort of joke I find funny, usually."
O'Roughage shrugged. "And yet everyone who reads one appreciates the joke, somehow."
"That's a concern," said Fistley, looking suddenly happier in a way that made Miles uneasy. "They go on laughing about the joke all day, too. It's like some sort of intoxication. Suppose there is an oil-soluble toxin in the leaves, something that rubs off on your fingers when you handle the plant, and makes you susceptible to..."
"I have ruled that out," snapped O'Roughage. "It's all in the paperwork. The plant simply knows how to tell a good joke."
"That's preposterous."
"That," O'Roughage said smugly, "is magic."
Disgruntled, Fistley reached toward one of the branches of the Laughodil...but before his fingers touched a leaf, the trellised walls of the cubicle shook with the report of a sudden Apparition. Both men gaped up at the wizard who now stood at the end of the desk, wand drawn. Dr. O'Roughage thought he looked vaguely familiar.
"You must come," said the wizard, beckoning toward Dr. O'Roughage.
"Come where?" said O'Roughage. "What is going on?"
"The Drains. Harvey's flat. You are needed at once." "To do what?" O'Roughage squinted at the intruder, trying to place the slight accent in his speech. "Do I know you?"
"I am Slavik," said Slavik. "Friend of Merlin, friend of Sadie, friend of yours."
"Ah," said Miles O'Roughage. "That makes us friends, three times removed."
Slavik raised one finger, as he often did when motioning Durmstrang students to be quiet and listen. "We are all friends of Harvey. And you are needed to help prevent the end of the world."
"Pish," Fistley said, in a remarkable show of courage for a man so seized by shock that he had lost control of his bladder. Taking a deep breath, he added: "You do not have an appointment. Please remove yourself."
"All right, I'll go," said O'Roughage. Leaving his plant and his briefcase, he stood up and grabbed Slavik's elbow. When the two of them Disapparated, the report caused Fistley to let go of his bowel as well.
Wiping his shiny face with a shaking hand, Titus Fistley took a moment to catch his breath. Since Dr. O'Roughage hadn't walked out of the cubicle, the office door didn't immediately summon another applicant; so Fistley took advantage of his first moment of leisure in a long, stressful day, to reflect on his shortcomings as a coward, a Squib, and a bureaucrat of phenomenal pettiness. He seldom allowed himself the luxury of despising himself, so he wasn't much used to it; therefore, naturally, he didn't like it. So, tentatively, Fistley reached again toward the Laughodil...read the bottom of a leaf...giggled softly...and then burst into tears.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE! +++
SURVEY and CONTEST rolled into one: Who will they find in control of Harvey's flat? (A) A completely new villain: _____ (name and describe). (B) A previously seen villain from The Magic Quill: _____. (C) Someone we thought was a good guy, but who has crossed over to the dark side: ______. [EDIT: This discussion is closed.]
[Originally posted 2/17/08]
Runner-up: greyniffler
Miles O'Roughage sat with the briefcase on his knees on an incredibly hard chair, jammed into a corner between a potted palm-oil palm and a frosted glass door with the words DEPARTMENT OF ABRACULTURE: PATENT OFFICE stenciled on the other side of the glass. Every time someone opened the door, the glass banged Miles' knee painfully, without being damaged itself. The palm-oil palm kept nudging his arm until he dug a sickle and a few knuts out of his pocket and dropped them on its roots; afterward the sound of the palm's roots counting and burying its hoard was enough to drown out the coughing of a sickly, yodeling flytrap in a hanging planter on the other side of the door.
The herbologist sighed, reflecting that magic could sometimes be tiresome. Here he sat in the most uncomfortable chair in a waiting room where he had spent a net two years of his life (though not all at once), steadfastly ignoring a dispute between two other wizards who were both trying to patent the same herb -- either as wurtha-mint (sachets of whose leaves were meant to lend a wizarding home the smell of fresh money) or as catburglarnip (guaranteed to keep thieves docile until help arrived). Not for the first time, he wondered whether he might not have been happier tending an apple orchard or a rose garden, instead of advancing the world's knowledge of magical plants.
Finally the door at the far end of the office opened by itself, and the flytrap yodeled: "NEXT!" before subsiding into another fit of coughing. Dr. O'Roughage plunged through the dark doorway before the arguing wizards could settle on which of them should go first.
As he crossed the threshold, he immediately found himself well inside an enormous, open-plan office. The central area was crammed with cubicles separated by vine-choked trellises; potted trees moved up and down the aisles, pushed by trainer-wearing roots that arched over the rims of their pots, and gathering in rustling groups around watercoolers filled with Miracle-Gro (the wizard recipe, not the Muggle kind whose name is but wishful thinking). Surrounding this area, shelves loaded with seedling trays, glass planters filled with transparent soil, and preserv-o-vac specimen jars marched off into the gray distance in every direction.
The air above the cubicles was filled with one of Miles O'Roughage's proudest inventions: a cross between a paper-waterbomb bush and a hydrolysis hydrangea, which bore dirigiblefruit year round -- hollow sacs filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen so that the plants hovered over everyone's heads. Treated with puncture-proof and fireproof spells, the dirigiblefruit plants also had incandescent tulip bulbs attached to the bottom of their planters by permanent sticking charms, providing ample light for all, and (Miles shivered with pride) all of it through the arts of thaumatobotany.
A throat cleared itself nearby. Miles looked round and found that, as usual, he had been transported instantly to the first available cubicle...and, as too often in the past, that cubicle belonged to a thin-lipped, baggy eyed, pockmarked wizard of middle years, an ample middle, a less than ample comb-over, and a chatwood-veneer name tag that, both in writing and aloud, proclaimed the unwelcome tidings: "Hello! My mame is TITUS FISTLEY, your friendly abracultural patent counselor."
"You again, is it?" Fistley sneered, echoing Dr. O'Roughage's thoughts word-for-word. "Didn't I reject your last application?"
"I still don't understand that," O'Roughage said bitterly as he moved into the cubicle. "I had filled out all the forms correctly, and tied the bundle in the exact shade of red-tape you have always required in the past."
"To be sure," Fistley said with a look of nostalgic satisfaction. "But the knot had twelve corners, whereas I require no more or less than eleven. Also, one end of the tape was one-tenth of a millimeter longer than the other. With the volume of work that goes through this office each day, we have no time to waste on people who aren't sufficiently motivated to observe the forms and conventions. Well? Have you anything new to show me, or is this a social visit?"
While Dr. O'Roughage counted backwards from twenty to settle his temper, someone in a nearby cubicle had a sudden fit of laughter. Fistley looked irritated. His visitor, however, took courage from this sign -- particularly when several other voices joined in the laughter from several directions and distances.
"I was requested," O'Roughage said calmly, "to bring another specimen of my Laughodil, to allow for further study of its interesting properties."
Fistley's face darkened. "I should have known you were behind this," he growled, as another voice nearby gave way to laughter like a pig's snorting. Even a passing tree rustled its branches as if chuckling.
"I take it you haven't examined the plant yourself," O'Roughage said, unlocking the clasps on his briefcase with a wave of his hand. He pulled the lid up, reached down into it until his elbow appeared to be passing through the top of Fistley's desk, and emerged again with a small shrub in a cube-shaped stone pot. The leaves were a glossy, dark green on top, but had a parchmentlike texture beneath. "All you have to do is lift one of the branches," the inventor proudly explained, "and read the words that appear on the underside of the leaf. Every leaf has a different joke."
"Sophomoric humor," Fistley said sourly, "to judge by the sort of punchlines I hear repeated around the coffeepot. Hardly the sort of joke I find funny, usually."
O'Roughage shrugged. "And yet everyone who reads one appreciates the joke, somehow."
"That's a concern," said Fistley, looking suddenly happier in a way that made Miles uneasy. "They go on laughing about the joke all day, too. It's like some sort of intoxication. Suppose there is an oil-soluble toxin in the leaves, something that rubs off on your fingers when you handle the plant, and makes you susceptible to..."
"I have ruled that out," snapped O'Roughage. "It's all in the paperwork. The plant simply knows how to tell a good joke."
"That's preposterous."
"That," O'Roughage said smugly, "is magic."
Disgruntled, Fistley reached toward one of the branches of the Laughodil...but before his fingers touched a leaf, the trellised walls of the cubicle shook with the report of a sudden Apparition. Both men gaped up at the wizard who now stood at the end of the desk, wand drawn. Dr. O'Roughage thought he looked vaguely familiar.
"You must come," said the wizard, beckoning toward Dr. O'Roughage.
"Come where?" said O'Roughage. "What is going on?"
"The Drains. Harvey's flat. You are needed at once." "To do what?" O'Roughage squinted at the intruder, trying to place the slight accent in his speech. "Do I know you?"
"I am Slavik," said Slavik. "Friend of Merlin, friend of Sadie, friend of yours."
"Ah," said Miles O'Roughage. "That makes us friends, three times removed."
Slavik raised one finger, as he often did when motioning Durmstrang students to be quiet and listen. "We are all friends of Harvey. And you are needed to help prevent the end of the world."
"Pish," Fistley said, in a remarkable show of courage for a man so seized by shock that he had lost control of his bladder. Taking a deep breath, he added: "You do not have an appointment. Please remove yourself."
"All right, I'll go," said O'Roughage. Leaving his plant and his briefcase, he stood up and grabbed Slavik's elbow. When the two of them Disapparated, the report caused Fistley to let go of his bowel as well.
Wiping his shiny face with a shaking hand, Titus Fistley took a moment to catch his breath. Since Dr. O'Roughage hadn't walked out of the cubicle, the office door didn't immediately summon another applicant; so Fistley took advantage of his first moment of leisure in a long, stressful day, to reflect on his shortcomings as a coward, a Squib, and a bureaucrat of phenomenal pettiness. He seldom allowed himself the luxury of despising himself, so he wasn't much used to it; therefore, naturally, he didn't like it. So, tentatively, Fistley reached again toward the Laughodil...read the bottom of a leaf...giggled softly...and then burst into tears.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE! +++
SURVEY and CONTEST rolled into one: Who will they find in control of Harvey's flat? (A) A completely new villain: _____ (name and describe). (B) A previously seen villain from The Magic Quill: _____. (C) Someone we thought was a good guy, but who has crossed over to the dark side: ______. [EDIT: This discussion is closed.]
[Originally posted 2/17/08]
118. Laughing Matter
Contest winner: rory86
PARAPHYSICIST ATTENDS WEDDING IN HOGSMEADE
Part 5 in a 7-part Special Report
Bo Dwyer, our top correspondent, continues the report of his week following Professor Algernon Swerve, the Magic theorist whose recent discovery of magically generated states of matter would have won him the Nobel Prize for Paraphysics, except there isn’t one.
During breakfast on Saturday, Dr. Swerve suddenly announced that he was going to a wedding in Hogsmeade. The invitation had come by owl that very morning, and it entitled him to bring one guest: me.
I soon understood that the wedding would be a newsworthy event in its own right. There are not many couples who choose to have their nuptials performed at the Hog’s Head pub. In fact, the last one on record was the marriage of Richard Pellamonter and Elizabeth Polkenhorne in April of 1565 or 1566 (depending on which set of records you go by), a day which saw dozens of Britain’s best wizards lose control of their magic due to a bowl of contaminated punch. This is why all the buildings in Hogsmeade had polka-dotted walls until 1611, and weddings within village boundaries were banned until 1865. When I first heard that Saturday’s wedding was to be the Hog’s Head’s first since 1566, I was moved by the progress and enlightenment of our wizarding community. Then I smelled and, rather later, saw the Hog’s Head and such notions were dashed. It was clearly the only place the couple could afford; which is too bad, because the proprietor should be the one who pays the rest of us to drink his swill.
At least the punch was unpolluted. After about one o’clock Sunday afternoon, at any rate, the buildings and streets of Hogsmeade seemed to be their usual color again.
By coincidence, the bride and groom were both people I had interviewed before. Erastus “Merlin” Sidwell made an unexpectedly strong showing (12th place) in an Iwixarod broom race some years ago, and he was quoted in my report of that race. His exact words were: “I prefer bundimun grease, myself.” And his intended, Miss Doreen Pinch (known as “Endora” to her friends) had guided my tour of the Bertie Botts Flavor Lab, where she was a taste-tester at the time. I remember her as a remarkable woman who was able to tell a great deal about me by smell alone. During the day I learned that Merlin now works as a “special consultant” — I’m not sure what that means — while Endora has moved up the career ladder to Senior Potion Designer. Bride and groom wore matching carnival masks, as a nod to Hog’s Head tradition (all the guests were furnished with masks as well).
I didn’t see very much of my subject that day, but I did encounter a surprising range of people considering the caliber of the establishment. I met a married couple of highly decorated RMB agents who were also once Owlympic medalists (I had interviewed them too), an American agent who specializes in quick-change disguises (I believe he was at least five of the people I shook hands with), and a dodgy looking couple covered in animated tattoos (which posed witty remarks to passersby, in ornate handwriting). I met a wandwright from Finland, an Austrian couple who run a survival school for wizards, a Ukrainian art-wizard (who, by the way his eyes lingered on the tattooed couple, must have been responsible for their body art), several Italian clown-wizards, and a couple of Durmstrang professors. A former member of Nasal Drip gave a solo musical performance that was at least as loud and obnoxious as anything his old band could do. A wizard rich enough to keep his name out of the paper stood near me through the whole song, stoically enduring it in order to keep an eye on his teenage son, who has enough mischief in him to make the name-out-of-paper thing more expensive every year. Sir Lionel Niblet and Dr. Miles O’Roughage were also on hand, holding a soft yet animated conversation in a corner throughout the wedding.
After the ceremony came a meal which I would rather not recall in detail; the punch helped in that respect. At the climax of the banquet, toasts were made and gifts were given to the newly wedded couple.
The RMB agents gave the Sidwells a stoppered flask of some blood-red potion which, they warned, was not to be unstoppered except in the gravest emergency, and only then when Mrs. Sidwell was wearing nose-plugs. It was difficult to follow the explanation of this potion, owing perhaps to some shared background between the agents and the Sidwells, but I gathered that the potion came from a variety of orchid bred by Sir Lionel, and was brewed by Dr. O’Roughage. “It smells like rotting flesh, and it evaporates instantly when struck a violent, physical blow,” they announced. “But until then, a few drops of it shield the wearer against all magic directed against a conscious, living person.”
The next noteworthy gift, following a set of wands, some gag gifts from the clowns, a flask of “eyedropper banquet,” chits for free body art, and similar items, was a large box delivered by two house-elves. I knew the elves at once. Their master, a portable-wall magnate, has been very reclusive lately, and I was curious to know what gift he might have sent to a wedding without appearing himself to give it. It turned out that the box was empty, but it came with a cryptic message which Merlin read aloud: “If this is empty when you receive it, don’t be distressed. My calculations have a wide margin for error. Keep the box, and look inside it now and again, until you find a token of my very personal affection and esteem for both of you. Eventually, the day will come when I will have put something in this box before it was going to be delivered.”
One of the last gifts was presented by Professor Swerve. The couple smiled politely as he handed them an ingot of some dull-brown metal. And this was where I was repaid for all my difficulty in following him at this wedding. As Merlin Sidwell hefted the heavy bar of not-very-precious-looking material, the paraphysicist explained:
“For your special day, and for all your days together, I give you the gift of laughter. As you know, I have spent the last two decades studying the effects of magic on molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. Last year, I finally published my discoveries, including several new states of matter that can only exist under the influence of magic. This bar may seem to contain nothing but a blend of ordinary minerals. But I have charmed it into a state that I like to call ‘laughing matter.’ Whether there is a lot of it or a little; whether it is precious or common; whether solid, liquid, or gas, laughing matter is held together by the energy of pure joy. Touch it when you are angry or frustrated, and you will see the absurdity in your situation and your frown will become a chuckle. Touch it in a time of grief or pain, and you will suddenly remember the good things you still have to be happy about. Touch it when you are terrified and hopeless, and that which you dread may reveal desirable aspects. Touch it at a joyful time, like today, and you add to its stored energy, and to the good memories that will return to you at a time of need.
“Touch it together,” Professor Swerve continued, “and it fosters trust and contentment. Break it in half” – here Merlin effortlessly snapped the ingot in two, causing a stir throughout the pub – “when you cannot be together, and when you both hold it at the same time, you will feel closer to each other. Put the pieces back together” – Merlin did this – “and it sticks in one piece, as if you had never broken it. It also makes an excellent doorstop, for few things are as friendly as an open door; and, when used as a bookend, laughing matter causes nearby books to seem more entertaining the next time you open them. Tonight, I suggest that you tuck it under the...”
“What a lovely gift,” said Merlin, loudly interrupting the professor’s speech, while his bride reddened to the tip of her rather impressive nose.
After taking the Floo network back to Professor Swerve’s study, I told him how impressed I was with what he had said and done at the Sidwell wedding. He shrugged, smiling mysteriously, and said, “You don’t think I would really give such a priceless specimen – moreover, one that neither science nor magic has yet fully explained – to a couple of risk-takers like them? It would be murder. Or, worse, it would be a methodological blunder. I had forgotten to bring a gift, but I found a pile of those bricks out behind the Hog’s Head and checked to make sure there wasn’t anything dodgy about them before choosing one. I put a breaking-and-rejoining charm on it – a little trick on which I often dined out in my salad days. The rest of it was pure codswallop.”
Seeing my shocked expression, Professor Swerve laughed kindly and added, “I also applied a bit of magic in my speech. The magic of psychology. If those youngsters took me even a wee bit seriously, that brick will be a symbol to them, a symbol whose meaning they will pull out of themselves. I mean, really! To give them, actually give them, what I described would be meddling in things where I have no business. It is better this way.”
“So,” I asked, ashamed to notice a tone of childish disappointment in my own voice, “so is there no such thing as ‘laughing matter’ at all?”
“Oh, to be sure, there is! I’ve got some of it right here,” said Professor Swerve, getting up to fetch a waxy looking lump, encased in crystal, out of a locked cupboard. “And if they knew anything about it, they would thank me for not giving it them. Real ‘laughing matter’ is terrible, chaotic stuff; absolutely insane.”
He handed the crystal to me and I turned it over in my hands. “What does it do?” I asked.
“Oh! It is the stuff that moves things around when your back is turned. It hides your keys, causes your toilet to overflow, and stops nearby timepieces just when you are waiting for a certain hour to strike. I once observed a lump of ‘laughing matter’ to re-tune a piano so that, no matter what keys you played, the only thing you could get out of it was the ‘Tristan chord.’ Whenever you feel that someone, somewhere, must be laughing at you, you might have a bit of this stuff stuck to your shoe. With a brick of real laughing matter, the Sidwell’s marriage wouldn’t have lasted a week!
“Promise you won’t print any of this?” Professor Swerve added meekly.
“On my honor as a journalist,” I said, handing the crystal-encased lump back to him.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #120 +++
SURVEY: How does the angel-faced villain from TMQ #117 combine magic with golf? (A) He uses magic to create a self-maintaining, perfect golf course. (B) He uses magical plants, beasts, and other hazards to make his links the most difficult and dangerous course in the world. (C) He plays a wizarding variant of golf involving balls that go up but do not come down (unless played in that direction); players must be able to fly and, on occasion, play underwater. (D) He uses magic to enhance his performance in order to collect huge winnings on ordinary golf tours. (E) Other...
CONTEST: Describe a magical piece of jewelry and its properties.
Special thanks are due to the Cornwall County Council for inspiration provided by their Silly Names List [EDIT: Alas, this webpage no longer exists]. ANOTHER EDIT: What a pity that Blogger has a 200-character limit for labels. The list below should also include Algernon Swerve, Harvey, Dinty, Heidi Svendanna, Tatyana, and Owlympics.
[Originally posted 5/16/07]
PARAPHYSICIST ATTENDS WEDDING IN HOGSMEADE
Part 5 in a 7-part Special Report
Bo Dwyer, our top correspondent, continues the report of his week following Professor Algernon Swerve, the Magic theorist whose recent discovery of magically generated states of matter would have won him the Nobel Prize for Paraphysics, except there isn’t one.
During breakfast on Saturday, Dr. Swerve suddenly announced that he was going to a wedding in Hogsmeade. The invitation had come by owl that very morning, and it entitled him to bring one guest: me.
I soon understood that the wedding would be a newsworthy event in its own right. There are not many couples who choose to have their nuptials performed at the Hog’s Head pub. In fact, the last one on record was the marriage of Richard Pellamonter and Elizabeth Polkenhorne in April of 1565 or 1566 (depending on which set of records you go by), a day which saw dozens of Britain’s best wizards lose control of their magic due to a bowl of contaminated punch. This is why all the buildings in Hogsmeade had polka-dotted walls until 1611, and weddings within village boundaries were banned until 1865. When I first heard that Saturday’s wedding was to be the Hog’s Head’s first since 1566, I was moved by the progress and enlightenment of our wizarding community. Then I smelled and, rather later, saw the Hog’s Head and such notions were dashed. It was clearly the only place the couple could afford; which is too bad, because the proprietor should be the one who pays the rest of us to drink his swill.
At least the punch was unpolluted. After about one o’clock Sunday afternoon, at any rate, the buildings and streets of Hogsmeade seemed to be their usual color again.
By coincidence, the bride and groom were both people I had interviewed before. Erastus “Merlin” Sidwell made an unexpectedly strong showing (12th place) in an Iwixarod broom race some years ago, and he was quoted in my report of that race. His exact words were: “I prefer bundimun grease, myself.” And his intended, Miss Doreen Pinch (known as “Endora” to her friends) had guided my tour of the Bertie Botts Flavor Lab, where she was a taste-tester at the time. I remember her as a remarkable woman who was able to tell a great deal about me by smell alone. During the day I learned that Merlin now works as a “special consultant” — I’m not sure what that means — while Endora has moved up the career ladder to Senior Potion Designer. Bride and groom wore matching carnival masks, as a nod to Hog’s Head tradition (all the guests were furnished with masks as well).
I didn’t see very much of my subject that day, but I did encounter a surprising range of people considering the caliber of the establishment. I met a married couple of highly decorated RMB agents who were also once Owlympic medalists (I had interviewed them too), an American agent who specializes in quick-change disguises (I believe he was at least five of the people I shook hands with), and a dodgy looking couple covered in animated tattoos (which posed witty remarks to passersby, in ornate handwriting). I met a wandwright from Finland, an Austrian couple who run a survival school for wizards, a Ukrainian art-wizard (who, by the way his eyes lingered on the tattooed couple, must have been responsible for their body art), several Italian clown-wizards, and a couple of Durmstrang professors. A former member of Nasal Drip gave a solo musical performance that was at least as loud and obnoxious as anything his old band could do. A wizard rich enough to keep his name out of the paper stood near me through the whole song, stoically enduring it in order to keep an eye on his teenage son, who has enough mischief in him to make the name-out-of-paper thing more expensive every year. Sir Lionel Niblet and Dr. Miles O’Roughage were also on hand, holding a soft yet animated conversation in a corner throughout the wedding.
After the ceremony came a meal which I would rather not recall in detail; the punch helped in that respect. At the climax of the banquet, toasts were made and gifts were given to the newly wedded couple.
The RMB agents gave the Sidwells a stoppered flask of some blood-red potion which, they warned, was not to be unstoppered except in the gravest emergency, and only then when Mrs. Sidwell was wearing nose-plugs. It was difficult to follow the explanation of this potion, owing perhaps to some shared background between the agents and the Sidwells, but I gathered that the potion came from a variety of orchid bred by Sir Lionel, and was brewed by Dr. O’Roughage. “It smells like rotting flesh, and it evaporates instantly when struck a violent, physical blow,” they announced. “But until then, a few drops of it shield the wearer against all magic directed against a conscious, living person.”
The next noteworthy gift, following a set of wands, some gag gifts from the clowns, a flask of “eyedropper banquet,” chits for free body art, and similar items, was a large box delivered by two house-elves. I knew the elves at once. Their master, a portable-wall magnate, has been very reclusive lately, and I was curious to know what gift he might have sent to a wedding without appearing himself to give it. It turned out that the box was empty, but it came with a cryptic message which Merlin read aloud: “If this is empty when you receive it, don’t be distressed. My calculations have a wide margin for error. Keep the box, and look inside it now and again, until you find a token of my very personal affection and esteem for both of you. Eventually, the day will come when I will have put something in this box before it was going to be delivered.”
One of the last gifts was presented by Professor Swerve. The couple smiled politely as he handed them an ingot of some dull-brown metal. And this was where I was repaid for all my difficulty in following him at this wedding. As Merlin Sidwell hefted the heavy bar of not-very-precious-looking material, the paraphysicist explained:
“For your special day, and for all your days together, I give you the gift of laughter. As you know, I have spent the last two decades studying the effects of magic on molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. Last year, I finally published my discoveries, including several new states of matter that can only exist under the influence of magic. This bar may seem to contain nothing but a blend of ordinary minerals. But I have charmed it into a state that I like to call ‘laughing matter.’ Whether there is a lot of it or a little; whether it is precious or common; whether solid, liquid, or gas, laughing matter is held together by the energy of pure joy. Touch it when you are angry or frustrated, and you will see the absurdity in your situation and your frown will become a chuckle. Touch it in a time of grief or pain, and you will suddenly remember the good things you still have to be happy about. Touch it when you are terrified and hopeless, and that which you dread may reveal desirable aspects. Touch it at a joyful time, like today, and you add to its stored energy, and to the good memories that will return to you at a time of need.
“Touch it together,” Professor Swerve continued, “and it fosters trust and contentment. Break it in half” – here Merlin effortlessly snapped the ingot in two, causing a stir throughout the pub – “when you cannot be together, and when you both hold it at the same time, you will feel closer to each other. Put the pieces back together” – Merlin did this – “and it sticks in one piece, as if you had never broken it. It also makes an excellent doorstop, for few things are as friendly as an open door; and, when used as a bookend, laughing matter causes nearby books to seem more entertaining the next time you open them. Tonight, I suggest that you tuck it under the...”
“What a lovely gift,” said Merlin, loudly interrupting the professor’s speech, while his bride reddened to the tip of her rather impressive nose.
After taking the Floo network back to Professor Swerve’s study, I told him how impressed I was with what he had said and done at the Sidwell wedding. He shrugged, smiling mysteriously, and said, “You don’t think I would really give such a priceless specimen – moreover, one that neither science nor magic has yet fully explained – to a couple of risk-takers like them? It would be murder. Or, worse, it would be a methodological blunder. I had forgotten to bring a gift, but I found a pile of those bricks out behind the Hog’s Head and checked to make sure there wasn’t anything dodgy about them before choosing one. I put a breaking-and-rejoining charm on it – a little trick on which I often dined out in my salad days. The rest of it was pure codswallop.”
Seeing my shocked expression, Professor Swerve laughed kindly and added, “I also applied a bit of magic in my speech. The magic of psychology. If those youngsters took me even a wee bit seriously, that brick will be a symbol to them, a symbol whose meaning they will pull out of themselves. I mean, really! To give them, actually give them, what I described would be meddling in things where I have no business. It is better this way.”
“So,” I asked, ashamed to notice a tone of childish disappointment in my own voice, “so is there no such thing as ‘laughing matter’ at all?”
“Oh, to be sure, there is! I’ve got some of it right here,” said Professor Swerve, getting up to fetch a waxy looking lump, encased in crystal, out of a locked cupboard. “And if they knew anything about it, they would thank me for not giving it them. Real ‘laughing matter’ is terrible, chaotic stuff; absolutely insane.”
He handed the crystal to me and I turned it over in my hands. “What does it do?” I asked.
“Oh! It is the stuff that moves things around when your back is turned. It hides your keys, causes your toilet to overflow, and stops nearby timepieces just when you are waiting for a certain hour to strike. I once observed a lump of ‘laughing matter’ to re-tune a piano so that, no matter what keys you played, the only thing you could get out of it was the ‘Tristan chord.’ Whenever you feel that someone, somewhere, must be laughing at you, you might have a bit of this stuff stuck to your shoe. With a brick of real laughing matter, the Sidwell’s marriage wouldn’t have lasted a week!
“Promise you won’t print any of this?” Professor Swerve added meekly.
“On my honor as a journalist,” I said, handing the crystal-encased lump back to him.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #120 +++
SURVEY: How does the angel-faced villain from TMQ #117 combine magic with golf? (A) He uses magic to create a self-maintaining, perfect golf course. (B) He uses magical plants, beasts, and other hazards to make his links the most difficult and dangerous course in the world. (C) He plays a wizarding variant of golf involving balls that go up but do not come down (unless played in that direction); players must be able to fly and, on occasion, play underwater. (D) He uses magic to enhance his performance in order to collect huge winnings on ordinary golf tours. (E) Other...
CONTEST: Describe a magical piece of jewelry and its properties.
Special thanks are due to the Cornwall County Council for inspiration provided by their Silly Names List [EDIT: Alas, this webpage no longer exists]. ANOTHER EDIT: What a pity that Blogger has a 200-character limit for labels. The list below should also include Algernon Swerve, Harvey, Dinty, Heidi Svendanna, Tatyana, and Owlympics.
[Originally posted 5/16/07]
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
105. What's the Rest of Me Doing There?
Contest winners: lupa and Celairiel
Miles O’Roughage scratched his head. He still could not help but wonder what Harvey’s mysterious experiment had been about. Whatever potion he had poured on the roots of that old alder tree dying in the back of his greenhouse, it had made a world of difference.
No longer was the tree dying. Still more perplexing, it was no longer an alder. Each day the tree had grown straighter, taller, thicker, stronger. Its bark now swathed it like folds of a soft, gray robe. Its foliage cast a deep shadow around the trunk and roots, a shadow that nevertheless glittered as if the leaves were covered with tiny, reflective crystals.
Moss had rapidly grown round the tree, until it draped from the limbs like long, gray beards. And when the wind blew through its branches, each day during the scheduled rainy spell – a very special spell O’Roughage had spent the best part of thirty years perfecting – the tree muttered to itself, like an old man muttering in his sleep.
Miles O’Roughage shook his head, wondering why the phrase “Merlin tree” kept crossing his mind...but his musings were interrupted by an unexplained rustle of leaves and a few furtive giggles, coming from the far corner of the greenhouse, near his office. O’Roughage stalked quietly, but quickly, through the paths of his indoor garden, scarcely pausing even to slap away a mischievous bogeyvillain vine that was trying to sneak down the back of his shirt.
It was all for nothing. By the time he reached his office, the last of the green fire was dying out on his hearth. Someone had gotten in and out again, using the Floo network. Alarmed, O’Roughage prowled through the nearby flowerbeds until he found signs that cuttings had been clumsily taken. He sighed and began to dress his wounded plant friends, shaking his head again at the folly of young wizards these days.
Meanwhile, a boy wizard, far too young to attend Hogwarts, sat pouting on a bench outside the head’s office at Dr. Wrigley’s Center for Pre-thaumatic Formation.
Wrigley’s, as you may know, is a cross between a primary school and a latchkey program for the children of witches and wizards whose careers make it impossible to homeschool their offspring. So while Mum and Dad work, their little ones get the discipline and basic education they need to prepare for Hogwarts – and to keep out of trouble. The tuition at Wrigley’s costs a fortune, so it is most used by the wealthy; but the RMB subsidizes the children of its agents, so that (for example) Marmaduke Spankison might find himself pouting on a bench outside Dr. Wrigley’s study.
His brow wrinkled even more, and his lip stuck out still further, as he relived his most recent disappointment. Stung by the memory, he glared balefully at his own right hand.
As he had often done in the past, Marmaduke had tried to play a small prank, relying on his lifelong ability to turn half of his body invisible. While hiding in a cubicle in the girl’s toilet, he had willed the upper half of his body to go invisible, and had started to crawl under the side of the cubicle, where Marjory Sudbom stood in front of one of the sinks, checking her hair in the mirror.
He had only meant to put a spider on her sock, and perhaps tie her shoes together, but Marjory had shrieked. “Aargh! Is that you, Marmaduke Ethelbaldricson? I knew it was you all those other times. For shame!” And then, standing on his inexplicably visible fingers, she had screamed for Matron. And so, give or take a bruised earlobe and a scolding that made him wince even in memory, Marmaduke sat and waited for his sentence.
But the worst memory of all was the moment when Marmaduke had recognized that he was no longer the only person who could see the body parts that he had willed invisible. His thought at the time, as he gazed reproachfully at the hand that had betrayed him, was: “What’s the rest of me doing there?”
Marmaduke’s father came out of the head’s office, wearing a sad but calm expression that made the boy tremble. He trembled because he believed, as boys of his character often believe of their soft-spoken-hero fathers, that under the sad, calm surface was a fury waiting to be unleashed. But all Spanky did was beckon to the boy with a tilt of his head. Marmaduke stood up and put his hand in his father’s firm grip. A pop – a moment of crushing darkness – and the pair of them squirted out into the parlor of their house.
“If you’re as clever as you should be,” said Spanky before letting go Maramaduke’s hand, “you’ll have worked out what your mistake was, and avoid repeating it in future.” That was all he said. Then, he simply went into his study and closed the door, leaving the boy to find out for himself what to do with the balance of the day.
Spanky tossed a handful of Floo powder into the small, woodburning stove in the corner of his study. Then, when the flames turned green, he poked his head into them and said, “Ilona’s office.” A dizzy moment later, he was looking up out of the grate in a stone chamber, part of an old castle that had been taken over by the RMB. Directly opposite the grate was a desk where Spanky’s wife, newly reinstated after years of being nonexistent to everyone except her husband, was debriefing a young female operative.
“Another time,” Ilona said, beginning to wrap up the conversation when she spotted Spanky’s head in the fire, “don’t be so quick to conclude that the stage magician is using real magic in front of Muggles, even if he is a wizard. There are proper tests for that, you know. What with all the Memory Charms that we needed to put on the audience, you would have had a solid week’s worth of paperwork even if you had been right. As it is – well, I trust that these forms will teach you to be more circumspect.”
The younger witch nodded, looking chastised, and accepted a roll of parchment the size of a side drum, tied up with several lengths of twine.
As soon as the younger witch had Disapparated, Ilona went over to the fire and knelt next to her husband’s waiting head. “Well?” she said.
“He’s suspended for the rest of the week,” Spanky sighed. “The children are still learning all the implications of your being freed from that djinn curse.”
“It’s for the best,” said Ilona decisively. “And I have an idea as to how to keep Marmy occupied and out of trouble. Why don’t you take...”
Her suggestion was interrupted by a burst of smoke, ash, and even brighter green flame.
“Uh-oh,” said Ilona. “I have another incoming call.”
That was all the warning Spanky had before someone stepped on his head, crushing his chin against the warm coals. A laughing couple stumbled out of the fireplace, trailing ash onto the hearthrug. Spanky did not recognize them at first, because he was busy spitting out ash and coughing. Then he saw that it was a veiled witch and a burly wizard with tattoos writhing over his bare arms.
“Beg pardon,” said Sadie in a, for her, uncharacteristically cheerful voice. “We don’t mean to intrude – well, yes we do. We’re having a double date with another couple, and we decided to try a scavenger hunt.”
“Isn’t it a bit early to be out on a date?” Ilona asked, glancing toward the mantle clock, whose hour-hand was still several inches removed from the inscription that said “Quitting Time!”
“We had to get an early start,” said Sadie, while her not-very-talkative partner nodded and grinned. “We have to meet up and compare our findings with the other couple, before going to a show together.” In spite of the veil, one could see how Sadie wrinkled her nose at the mention of “going to a show.”
“Then what do you need from me?” Ilona asked brusquely, while Spanky tried to blink soot out of his right eye.
“We didn’t know where else to go,” gushed Sadie. “One of the things on our list is ‘a weapon that was used to vanquish an undead creature.’”
“Then take this,” said Ilona, pulling out one of several items, like wooden chopsticks, that she had twisted into her hair.
“What is it?” the tattooed wizard asked, in halting English.
“Kougai,” said Ilona.
“Yes, isn’t he?” Sadie giggled. “But what do you call this thing?”
Ilona rolled her eyes. “Never mind. I once had no choice but to stake a vampire, and I happened to be wearing it when no other wooden stake was within reach. It saved my life.”
“How do you know it was this one and not one of those others?” Sadie asked, peering nervously at the array of kougai piercing the knot of hair atop Ilona’s head.
“Does it really matter?” said Ilona. “All I know is that I haven’t been without at least one or two of them since that incident. One never knows.”
“She was cleared in the investigation that followed,” Spanky mentioned. Sadie and her companion jumped, only now noticing his head in the fire for the first time. “The Bureau agreed that she was in imminent danger of being bitten, so they determined the staking to be an act of self-defense.”
“That’s the life of an RMB agent,” Ilona agreed, beaming at Sadie. “You know, you might consider a career...”
“We shouldn’t keep you any longer,” Sadie blurted hastily. “Besides, we have to stay ahead of the other couple. Bye!” Then, tugging firmly on her friend’s bicep, which was currently flashing the name of a Polish scriptorium, she stepped carefully over Spanky’s head, shouted "St. Broccoli’s Cemetery Chapel," and disappeared with a loud pop.
“Now that we have a moment of privacy,” Spanky said, “you were saying...?”
“Ah! yes,” said Ilona. “You should take Marmaduke to...”
This time, when Spanky heard the popping noise, he ducked to the side and almost escaped injury as another couple staggered onto the hearthrug in a cloud of dust. Somebody’s boot clipped Spanky’s left ear, and he ended up having a sneezing fit, but other than that he fared better than the last time.
“Sorry,” said Endora and Merlin in unison. They were wearing matched pairs of fake eyeglasses, with attached fake noses, eyebrows, and moustaches. They were also holding hands and giggling like teenagers.
“Honey, it’s the other couple,” said Ilona.
“Oh, they beat us to it, did they?” said Merlin.
“Don’t worry, I have several others,” said Ilona, indicating the bristle of kougai in her hair.
Merlin and Endora gave her a blank look. They clearly did not know what Ilona was talking about.
“Aren’t you here to get...?”
“...your husband’s silver knife, yes,” said Endora. “The one that unzipped a werewolf all those years ago. Your son told us Spanky’s body was at home, but his head would be here, so we popped in to ask if we might borrow it.”
“The knife, that is,” Merlin explained to Spanky. “Borrow the knife, not your head.”
“Feel free to pick my pocket on your way back through my home,” said Spanky, torn between laughing and looking irritated and managing, by a heroic effort, to do neither. “You’ll find it in a sheath belted around my left thigh, just below my left wand holster.”
“The knife, not our home,” Ilona explained. “You’ll find his knife belted to his leg.”
“We understand,” Merlin assured her.
“And please,” Spanky added, “take care not to cut yourself with it.”
“It being the knife, not the leg,” Endora explained, in case anyone was still having trouble tracing pronouns to their antecedent.
“Cheers,” said Endora. “We’d best be going then. We’re to meet up with Sadie and her fellow, so we can all go to the formation flying show at McNutt’s Fairy Farm.” She rubbed her hands eagerly, looking very pleased about their plans for the evening. “We’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“It being the knife, not the fairy farm, I take it,” said Spanky. “Yes, see that you do.”
“And have a good time!” Ilona shouted as the pair Disapparated.
Spanky looked up at his wife and let his eyes ask the question this time: “What were you saying?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Ilona, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Do you know, I think the best thing to keep Marmaduke busy would be a scavenger hunt....”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: True or False: In today’s environment-friendly society, witches and wizards should pay a tax on the use of magical power.
CONTEST: Come up with an original name for a Gringotts goblin. (Examples to follow include: Griphook, Dewclaw, Nailspike, Chokechain, Undergrim, Bilejug, Sawtooth, Spleengraft, Jugshard, Bashmace, and Ripsnarl. Of course, you need not follow any examples at all!)
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #107. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 10/17/06]
Miles O’Roughage scratched his head. He still could not help but wonder what Harvey’s mysterious experiment had been about. Whatever potion he had poured on the roots of that old alder tree dying in the back of his greenhouse, it had made a world of difference.
No longer was the tree dying. Still more perplexing, it was no longer an alder. Each day the tree had grown straighter, taller, thicker, stronger. Its bark now swathed it like folds of a soft, gray robe. Its foliage cast a deep shadow around the trunk and roots, a shadow that nevertheless glittered as if the leaves were covered with tiny, reflective crystals.
Moss had rapidly grown round the tree, until it draped from the limbs like long, gray beards. And when the wind blew through its branches, each day during the scheduled rainy spell – a very special spell O’Roughage had spent the best part of thirty years perfecting – the tree muttered to itself, like an old man muttering in his sleep.
Miles O’Roughage shook his head, wondering why the phrase “Merlin tree” kept crossing his mind...but his musings were interrupted by an unexplained rustle of leaves and a few furtive giggles, coming from the far corner of the greenhouse, near his office. O’Roughage stalked quietly, but quickly, through the paths of his indoor garden, scarcely pausing even to slap away a mischievous bogeyvillain vine that was trying to sneak down the back of his shirt.
It was all for nothing. By the time he reached his office, the last of the green fire was dying out on his hearth. Someone had gotten in and out again, using the Floo network. Alarmed, O’Roughage prowled through the nearby flowerbeds until he found signs that cuttings had been clumsily taken. He sighed and began to dress his wounded plant friends, shaking his head again at the folly of young wizards these days.
Meanwhile, a boy wizard, far too young to attend Hogwarts, sat pouting on a bench outside the head’s office at Dr. Wrigley’s Center for Pre-thaumatic Formation.
Wrigley’s, as you may know, is a cross between a primary school and a latchkey program for the children of witches and wizards whose careers make it impossible to homeschool their offspring. So while Mum and Dad work, their little ones get the discipline and basic education they need to prepare for Hogwarts – and to keep out of trouble. The tuition at Wrigley’s costs a fortune, so it is most used by the wealthy; but the RMB subsidizes the children of its agents, so that (for example) Marmaduke Spankison might find himself pouting on a bench outside Dr. Wrigley’s study.
His brow wrinkled even more, and his lip stuck out still further, as he relived his most recent disappointment. Stung by the memory, he glared balefully at his own right hand.
As he had often done in the past, Marmaduke had tried to play a small prank, relying on his lifelong ability to turn half of his body invisible. While hiding in a cubicle in the girl’s toilet, he had willed the upper half of his body to go invisible, and had started to crawl under the side of the cubicle, where Marjory Sudbom stood in front of one of the sinks, checking her hair in the mirror.
He had only meant to put a spider on her sock, and perhaps tie her shoes together, but Marjory had shrieked. “Aargh! Is that you, Marmaduke Ethelbaldricson? I knew it was you all those other times. For shame!” And then, standing on his inexplicably visible fingers, she had screamed for Matron. And so, give or take a bruised earlobe and a scolding that made him wince even in memory, Marmaduke sat and waited for his sentence.
But the worst memory of all was the moment when Marmaduke had recognized that he was no longer the only person who could see the body parts that he had willed invisible. His thought at the time, as he gazed reproachfully at the hand that had betrayed him, was: “What’s the rest of me doing there?”
Marmaduke’s father came out of the head’s office, wearing a sad but calm expression that made the boy tremble. He trembled because he believed, as boys of his character often believe of their soft-spoken-hero fathers, that under the sad, calm surface was a fury waiting to be unleashed. But all Spanky did was beckon to the boy with a tilt of his head. Marmaduke stood up and put his hand in his father’s firm grip. A pop – a moment of crushing darkness – and the pair of them squirted out into the parlor of their house.
“If you’re as clever as you should be,” said Spanky before letting go Maramaduke’s hand, “you’ll have worked out what your mistake was, and avoid repeating it in future.” That was all he said. Then, he simply went into his study and closed the door, leaving the boy to find out for himself what to do with the balance of the day.
Spanky tossed a handful of Floo powder into the small, woodburning stove in the corner of his study. Then, when the flames turned green, he poked his head into them and said, “Ilona’s office.” A dizzy moment later, he was looking up out of the grate in a stone chamber, part of an old castle that had been taken over by the RMB. Directly opposite the grate was a desk where Spanky’s wife, newly reinstated after years of being nonexistent to everyone except her husband, was debriefing a young female operative.
“Another time,” Ilona said, beginning to wrap up the conversation when she spotted Spanky’s head in the fire, “don’t be so quick to conclude that the stage magician is using real magic in front of Muggles, even if he is a wizard. There are proper tests for that, you know. What with all the Memory Charms that we needed to put on the audience, you would have had a solid week’s worth of paperwork even if you had been right. As it is – well, I trust that these forms will teach you to be more circumspect.”
The younger witch nodded, looking chastised, and accepted a roll of parchment the size of a side drum, tied up with several lengths of twine.
As soon as the younger witch had Disapparated, Ilona went over to the fire and knelt next to her husband’s waiting head. “Well?” she said.
“He’s suspended for the rest of the week,” Spanky sighed. “The children are still learning all the implications of your being freed from that djinn curse.”
“It’s for the best,” said Ilona decisively. “And I have an idea as to how to keep Marmy occupied and out of trouble. Why don’t you take...”
Her suggestion was interrupted by a burst of smoke, ash, and even brighter green flame.
“Uh-oh,” said Ilona. “I have another incoming call.”
That was all the warning Spanky had before someone stepped on his head, crushing his chin against the warm coals. A laughing couple stumbled out of the fireplace, trailing ash onto the hearthrug. Spanky did not recognize them at first, because he was busy spitting out ash and coughing. Then he saw that it was a veiled witch and a burly wizard with tattoos writhing over his bare arms.
“Beg pardon,” said Sadie in a, for her, uncharacteristically cheerful voice. “We don’t mean to intrude – well, yes we do. We’re having a double date with another couple, and we decided to try a scavenger hunt.”
“Isn’t it a bit early to be out on a date?” Ilona asked, glancing toward the mantle clock, whose hour-hand was still several inches removed from the inscription that said “Quitting Time!”
“We had to get an early start,” said Sadie, while her not-very-talkative partner nodded and grinned. “We have to meet up and compare our findings with the other couple, before going to a show together.” In spite of the veil, one could see how Sadie wrinkled her nose at the mention of “going to a show.”
“Then what do you need from me?” Ilona asked brusquely, while Spanky tried to blink soot out of his right eye.
“We didn’t know where else to go,” gushed Sadie. “One of the things on our list is ‘a weapon that was used to vanquish an undead creature.’”
“Then take this,” said Ilona, pulling out one of several items, like wooden chopsticks, that she had twisted into her hair.
“What is it?” the tattooed wizard asked, in halting English.
“Kougai,” said Ilona.
“Yes, isn’t he?” Sadie giggled. “But what do you call this thing?”
Ilona rolled her eyes. “Never mind. I once had no choice but to stake a vampire, and I happened to be wearing it when no other wooden stake was within reach. It saved my life.”
“How do you know it was this one and not one of those others?” Sadie asked, peering nervously at the array of kougai piercing the knot of hair atop Ilona’s head.
“Does it really matter?” said Ilona. “All I know is that I haven’t been without at least one or two of them since that incident. One never knows.”
“She was cleared in the investigation that followed,” Spanky mentioned. Sadie and her companion jumped, only now noticing his head in the fire for the first time. “The Bureau agreed that she was in imminent danger of being bitten, so they determined the staking to be an act of self-defense.”
“That’s the life of an RMB agent,” Ilona agreed, beaming at Sadie. “You know, you might consider a career...”
“We shouldn’t keep you any longer,” Sadie blurted hastily. “Besides, we have to stay ahead of the other couple. Bye!” Then, tugging firmly on her friend’s bicep, which was currently flashing the name of a Polish scriptorium, she stepped carefully over Spanky’s head, shouted "St. Broccoli’s Cemetery Chapel," and disappeared with a loud pop.
“Now that we have a moment of privacy,” Spanky said, “you were saying...?”
“Ah! yes,” said Ilona. “You should take Marmaduke to...”
This time, when Spanky heard the popping noise, he ducked to the side and almost escaped injury as another couple staggered onto the hearthrug in a cloud of dust. Somebody’s boot clipped Spanky’s left ear, and he ended up having a sneezing fit, but other than that he fared better than the last time.
“Sorry,” said Endora and Merlin in unison. They were wearing matched pairs of fake eyeglasses, with attached fake noses, eyebrows, and moustaches. They were also holding hands and giggling like teenagers.
“Honey, it’s the other couple,” said Ilona.
“Oh, they beat us to it, did they?” said Merlin.
“Don’t worry, I have several others,” said Ilona, indicating the bristle of kougai in her hair.
Merlin and Endora gave her a blank look. They clearly did not know what Ilona was talking about.
“Aren’t you here to get...?”
“...your husband’s silver knife, yes,” said Endora. “The one that unzipped a werewolf all those years ago. Your son told us Spanky’s body was at home, but his head would be here, so we popped in to ask if we might borrow it.”
“The knife, that is,” Merlin explained to Spanky. “Borrow the knife, not your head.”
“Feel free to pick my pocket on your way back through my home,” said Spanky, torn between laughing and looking irritated and managing, by a heroic effort, to do neither. “You’ll find it in a sheath belted around my left thigh, just below my left wand holster.”
“The knife, not our home,” Ilona explained. “You’ll find his knife belted to his leg.”
“We understand,” Merlin assured her.
“And please,” Spanky added, “take care not to cut yourself with it.”
“It being the knife, not the leg,” Endora explained, in case anyone was still having trouble tracing pronouns to their antecedent.
“Cheers,” said Endora. “We’d best be going then. We’re to meet up with Sadie and her fellow, so we can all go to the formation flying show at McNutt’s Fairy Farm.” She rubbed her hands eagerly, looking very pleased about their plans for the evening. “We’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“It being the knife, not the fairy farm, I take it,” said Spanky. “Yes, see that you do.”
“And have a good time!” Ilona shouted as the pair Disapparated.
Spanky looked up at his wife and let his eyes ask the question this time: “What were you saying?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Ilona, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Do you know, I think the best thing to keep Marmaduke busy would be a scavenger hunt....”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: True or False: In today’s environment-friendly society, witches and wizards should pay a tax on the use of magical power.
CONTEST: Come up with an original name for a Gringotts goblin. (Examples to follow include: Griphook, Dewclaw, Nailspike, Chokechain, Undergrim, Bilejug, Sawtooth, Spleengraft, Jugshard, Bashmace, and Ripsnarl. Of course, you need not follow any examples at all!)
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #107. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 10/17/06]
104. Vitis Leprosa
Contest winners: PotterPig and _houdini
When Harvey arrived at his greenhouse, Dr. Miles O’Roughage clasped his hand in both of his own, beaming with pleasure. Harvey noted that O’Roughage was wearing filthy, floral-patterned gardening gloves, as he waved round at his vast kingdom of shrub, tree, and vine.
“Welcome to my garden,” he cried.
“I never knew there would be so much of it,” said Harvey, impressed in spite of himself.
“I did all this with one hand tied behind my back. Literally.” He pulled off his gloves and showed Harvey his digits – the right thumb stained green, the left thumb brown. “I don’t dare touch any of my children with my left hand,” he explained, wiggling both thumbs. “I call it ‘demmed if I do,’ and the other one ‘demmed if I don’t.’ What, what?”
Harvey smiled politely. “I can see why Sadie likes this place. Clearly, she does more around here than deliver dodgy dragon dung.”
“Good job she does,” O’Roughage agreed. “Without her pair of ordinary thumbs to help with repotting and pruning, I wouldn’t have accomplished half so much. For instance, take this Obstinut seedling...”
“I’m very grateful to you for agreeing to my little experiment,” Harvey interrupted. “In return, of course, I have something that should interest you endlessly. Where is the tree in question?”
O’Roughage hesitated, looking briefly sad. Then, stifling a sigh, he led Harvey over to an alder tree that sprang up through a hole in the brick-paved floor. It had peeling bark, droopy branches, and sparse, ragged, blighted-looking leaves. “I’m afraid Cecil isn’t long for this world,” he said, patting the tree’s trunk with a brave attempt at cheerfulness. “But if he must go, it might as well be for the furtherance of herbological knowledge. So do whatever you wish. I shall assist you in any way that you need.”
“Excellent,” said Harvey, a bit too excited to empathize with O’Roughage’s troubled feelings. “What time is it?”
O’Roughage glanced at a nearby sundial and said, “About two o’clock.”
“Splendid. Now, keep your right hand on Cecil’s trunk until I say otherwise. All right, here goes.” Harvey unstoppered a tiny beaker of some murky, oily liquid. Pressing his left hand to the trunk of the tree, he emptied the beaker over the tree’s roots.
Both men stood there, each with a hand pressed to the tree’s trunk, saying nothing for a while. O’Roughage grew increasingly fidgety. Finally he said, “Nothing seems to be happening.”
“Just wait a bit,” said Harvey. “The difference may not become apparent for a few minutes.”
O’Roughage squirmed, scraping his feet against the cobbles. Harvey hummed to himself absently.
“I say,” O’Roughage burst out. “Didn’t you come here quite a few years ago, when I had the walls redone? I remember it quite clearly. Those young hooligans kept shooting the windows out, so I had them replaced with magical walls – solid brick on one side, clear glass on the other. You helped install them, didn’t you?”
“You have quite a memory,” said Harvey.
Another seeming age passed, during which O’Roughage repeatedly squinted in the direction of the sundial, then rubbed his eyes with his brown thumb. By and by he burst out again: “I must have mistaken you for a common delivery man, all those years back. I take it you were the heir to the company.”
“I’m merely carrying on a long family tradition,” Harvey said modestly. Then he clammed up again.
After singing all the songs he knew under his breath, O’Roughage overcame his natural shyness and said, “It must have been grand, growing up in one of the old magical families, eh? I sometimes wonder what it would be like. My parents were Muggles, you know. Father was an aerospace engineer. All my brothers dreamed of becoming spacemen, but here I turned out to be a wizard. Isn’t life something?”
Harvey found himself intrigued, against his will, by the wistfulness in O’Roughage’s manner. The man almost seemed to regret being the only magical member of his family.
“I’m not familiar with spacemen,” Harvey said, pitying his host just enough to feign interest. “Are they a kind of estate agent?”
“No, I mean astronauts,” said O’Roughage. Noting Harvey’s blank expression, he added, “Like the men who flew up to the moon, don’t you know.”
“They really did that?” said Harvey. “I always supposed that was just another one of their fanciful wireless plays.”
“Oh, no,” said O’Roughage. “Men actually landed on the moon and walked around, and looked up at the Earth in the sky.”
Harvey shook his head, bemused. “I don’t see any sense in it,” he said. “I mean, it’s amazing what Muggles can do, even without magic. But what was the use of it?”
“Proving that it could be done, I suppose,” said O’Roughage. “Being able to point up at the night sky and say, ‘I wiped my feet on that.’”
“I’ll never understand Muggles,” said Harvey. “So much magic comes from moonlight, or happens in connection with its tides and phases. If I had tracked my muddy boots all over the moon, my mother, of witchy memory, would have taken her broomstick to my backside.”
“That’s the difference in how we were raised,” said O’Roughage. “I suppose I learned my scientific ways from my parents. And they didn’t get punished or scolded for what they did. In fact, my father was given the key to Birmingham.”
“The key to Birmingham what?” said Harvey. “You don’t mean the city? Why would Birmingham give anyone the key to itself?”
“I suppose they meant it as a gesture of respect,” said O’Roughage, looking mildly irritated.
“It isn’t as though one couldn’t get into the city without a key, though,” Harvey argued. “That is, unless the key was meant to open every door in town.”
“It wasn’t,” said O’Roughage, rubbing his eyes again. “It was symbolic only.”
“That’s the trouble with Muggles,” said Harvey. “They’re always waving symbols about, without any regard for their power.”
“Well, as to that,” O’Roughage said rather sharply, “I believe the Muggles left some of their symbols permanently fixed on the moon. How’s that for power? You could try to fetch them down, out of respect for your late mother’s feelings, but I wonder whether your broom would take you so far. Then there’s the small matter of air, heat, and radiation shielding...we wizards would have to work a long time to accomplish what the Muggles managed with a bit of duct tape, some gold foil, and a few canisters of liquid hydrogen.”
Harvey realized that he was on shaky ground, so he kept his peace again.
After a long pause, O’Roughage sighed. “That’s an argument I’ve had with my brothers countless times. I never expected to be on their side of it, until now.”
“What do they do?” asked Harvey. He was really curious, for once, about what happens to the family of a Muggleborn wizard.
“One designs clocks that keep metric time. Another crashes experimental aircraft to test their pilot-ejection systems. And the youngest is a full-time obituary writer for In Memoriam magazine. Really, they all play golf a lot, and live off the earnings from my patents.”
“Really? Do you earn that much, then?”
“Well, I get a subsidy from the Office of Abraculture at the Ministry, as long as I don’t sell or plant certain breeds of magical plants. For example, just last month I patented a recreational fruit called Tomacco – I got the idea from a television program that my brother Rivers showed me – and the Ministry offered me the cash value of the Bailiwick of Jersey to destroy all the plants, and never to allow it to be grown again. I would have turned down their offer, on principle, if they hadn’t added an ‘or else’ clause that mentioned a gryphon, twelve yards of Acromantula silk, a Time Turner, and a round of mooncalf cheese.” Miles O’Roughage shuddered. “Those Abraculture blokes can be demmed persuasive.”
Harvey tried in vain to imagine what kind of penalty the Office of Abraculture had threatened O’Roughage with.
“Still, it always makes me sad, knowing that none of my brothers will ever appreciate the thrill of a good game of Quidditch, a sparring match with a young whomping-willow sapling, or a display of Abraxan horses flying in formation...” O’Roughage sighed again. Then he did a double take at the sundial. “Isn’t that odd,” he said. “I could have sworn it was two o’clock before, but now it seems to be a quarter of one.”
“That will do,” said Harvey, taking his hand off the tree trunk.
O’Roughage stepped away from the tree, stumbling slightly. “And there’s another odd thing. While I could swear that I planted this tree myself, I now suddenly recall that it was standing here since before Hogsmeade was settled. In fact, there’s a plaque among the roots, designating it as the Hogsmeade Grandfather Tree. How silly of me, not to point that out to you before...” He scratched his head. “I wonder why I still recall it growing, twig and bough. I must have dreamed it.”
“Success!” Harvey exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “This proves that casual contact with a retrotemporal being can induce a non-permanent, parallel state of retrotemporality. What a chapter this will make in the guide-book that I shall write at some future point in the past!”
“Er...I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind,” said Harvey, suddenly overflowing with good humor. He squeezed the old herbologist’s shoulders and said, “A reward is in store for you. My house-elf Dinty is waiting outside with some well-preserved grape-pips, the likes of which have not been planted in a thousand years. It’s an unusual type of grape, which I like to call Vitis leprosa. There’s a special project in it for you. But it all depends on whether you can grow a new vine out of very, very old pips. Believe me, it’s an exciting project for which I will reward you beyond anything that the Office of Abraculture can offer.”
“Will you really?” said O’Roughage, his gloomy face brightening for the first time all day. He patted Cecil’s trunk. “And do you know, the old stick doesn’t seem quite done for, after all. All right, let’s see these pips of yours!”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: Which of the following describes the relationship between wizardry and religion in the world of Harry Potter? (A) Wizardry or witchcraft is a religion unto itself. (B) Wizards and witches, in general, have no religion. (C) Witches and wizards can belong to any religion, but they hide their magical background from their fellow worshippers. (D) Witches and wizards can belong to any religion, but they generally limit themselves to all-magical congregations.
CONTEST: Describe something that might happen in a duel between two house-elves.
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #106. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 10/8/06]
When Harvey arrived at his greenhouse, Dr. Miles O’Roughage clasped his hand in both of his own, beaming with pleasure. Harvey noted that O’Roughage was wearing filthy, floral-patterned gardening gloves, as he waved round at his vast kingdom of shrub, tree, and vine.
“Welcome to my garden,” he cried.
“I never knew there would be so much of it,” said Harvey, impressed in spite of himself.
“I did all this with one hand tied behind my back. Literally.” He pulled off his gloves and showed Harvey his digits – the right thumb stained green, the left thumb brown. “I don’t dare touch any of my children with my left hand,” he explained, wiggling both thumbs. “I call it ‘demmed if I do,’ and the other one ‘demmed if I don’t.’ What, what?”
Harvey smiled politely. “I can see why Sadie likes this place. Clearly, she does more around here than deliver dodgy dragon dung.”
“Good job she does,” O’Roughage agreed. “Without her pair of ordinary thumbs to help with repotting and pruning, I wouldn’t have accomplished half so much. For instance, take this Obstinut seedling...”
“I’m very grateful to you for agreeing to my little experiment,” Harvey interrupted. “In return, of course, I have something that should interest you endlessly. Where is the tree in question?”
O’Roughage hesitated, looking briefly sad. Then, stifling a sigh, he led Harvey over to an alder tree that sprang up through a hole in the brick-paved floor. It had peeling bark, droopy branches, and sparse, ragged, blighted-looking leaves. “I’m afraid Cecil isn’t long for this world,” he said, patting the tree’s trunk with a brave attempt at cheerfulness. “But if he must go, it might as well be for the furtherance of herbological knowledge. So do whatever you wish. I shall assist you in any way that you need.”
“Excellent,” said Harvey, a bit too excited to empathize with O’Roughage’s troubled feelings. “What time is it?”
O’Roughage glanced at a nearby sundial and said, “About two o’clock.”
“Splendid. Now, keep your right hand on Cecil’s trunk until I say otherwise. All right, here goes.” Harvey unstoppered a tiny beaker of some murky, oily liquid. Pressing his left hand to the trunk of the tree, he emptied the beaker over the tree’s roots.
Both men stood there, each with a hand pressed to the tree’s trunk, saying nothing for a while. O’Roughage grew increasingly fidgety. Finally he said, “Nothing seems to be happening.”
“Just wait a bit,” said Harvey. “The difference may not become apparent for a few minutes.”
O’Roughage squirmed, scraping his feet against the cobbles. Harvey hummed to himself absently.
“I say,” O’Roughage burst out. “Didn’t you come here quite a few years ago, when I had the walls redone? I remember it quite clearly. Those young hooligans kept shooting the windows out, so I had them replaced with magical walls – solid brick on one side, clear glass on the other. You helped install them, didn’t you?”
“You have quite a memory,” said Harvey.
Another seeming age passed, during which O’Roughage repeatedly squinted in the direction of the sundial, then rubbed his eyes with his brown thumb. By and by he burst out again: “I must have mistaken you for a common delivery man, all those years back. I take it you were the heir to the company.”
“I’m merely carrying on a long family tradition,” Harvey said modestly. Then he clammed up again.
After singing all the songs he knew under his breath, O’Roughage overcame his natural shyness and said, “It must have been grand, growing up in one of the old magical families, eh? I sometimes wonder what it would be like. My parents were Muggles, you know. Father was an aerospace engineer. All my brothers dreamed of becoming spacemen, but here I turned out to be a wizard. Isn’t life something?”
Harvey found himself intrigued, against his will, by the wistfulness in O’Roughage’s manner. The man almost seemed to regret being the only magical member of his family.
“I’m not familiar with spacemen,” Harvey said, pitying his host just enough to feign interest. “Are they a kind of estate agent?”
“No, I mean astronauts,” said O’Roughage. Noting Harvey’s blank expression, he added, “Like the men who flew up to the moon, don’t you know.”
“They really did that?” said Harvey. “I always supposed that was just another one of their fanciful wireless plays.”
“Oh, no,” said O’Roughage. “Men actually landed on the moon and walked around, and looked up at the Earth in the sky.”
Harvey shook his head, bemused. “I don’t see any sense in it,” he said. “I mean, it’s amazing what Muggles can do, even without magic. But what was the use of it?”
“Proving that it could be done, I suppose,” said O’Roughage. “Being able to point up at the night sky and say, ‘I wiped my feet on that.’”
“I’ll never understand Muggles,” said Harvey. “So much magic comes from moonlight, or happens in connection with its tides and phases. If I had tracked my muddy boots all over the moon, my mother, of witchy memory, would have taken her broomstick to my backside.”
“That’s the difference in how we were raised,” said O’Roughage. “I suppose I learned my scientific ways from my parents. And they didn’t get punished or scolded for what they did. In fact, my father was given the key to Birmingham.”
“The key to Birmingham what?” said Harvey. “You don’t mean the city? Why would Birmingham give anyone the key to itself?”
“I suppose they meant it as a gesture of respect,” said O’Roughage, looking mildly irritated.
“It isn’t as though one couldn’t get into the city without a key, though,” Harvey argued. “That is, unless the key was meant to open every door in town.”
“It wasn’t,” said O’Roughage, rubbing his eyes again. “It was symbolic only.”
“That’s the trouble with Muggles,” said Harvey. “They’re always waving symbols about, without any regard for their power.”
“Well, as to that,” O’Roughage said rather sharply, “I believe the Muggles left some of their symbols permanently fixed on the moon. How’s that for power? You could try to fetch them down, out of respect for your late mother’s feelings, but I wonder whether your broom would take you so far. Then there’s the small matter of air, heat, and radiation shielding...we wizards would have to work a long time to accomplish what the Muggles managed with a bit of duct tape, some gold foil, and a few canisters of liquid hydrogen.”
Harvey realized that he was on shaky ground, so he kept his peace again.
After a long pause, O’Roughage sighed. “That’s an argument I’ve had with my brothers countless times. I never expected to be on their side of it, until now.”
“What do they do?” asked Harvey. He was really curious, for once, about what happens to the family of a Muggleborn wizard.
“One designs clocks that keep metric time. Another crashes experimental aircraft to test their pilot-ejection systems. And the youngest is a full-time obituary writer for In Memoriam magazine. Really, they all play golf a lot, and live off the earnings from my patents.”
“Really? Do you earn that much, then?”
“Well, I get a subsidy from the Office of Abraculture at the Ministry, as long as I don’t sell or plant certain breeds of magical plants. For example, just last month I patented a recreational fruit called Tomacco – I got the idea from a television program that my brother Rivers showed me – and the Ministry offered me the cash value of the Bailiwick of Jersey to destroy all the plants, and never to allow it to be grown again. I would have turned down their offer, on principle, if they hadn’t added an ‘or else’ clause that mentioned a gryphon, twelve yards of Acromantula silk, a Time Turner, and a round of mooncalf cheese.” Miles O’Roughage shuddered. “Those Abraculture blokes can be demmed persuasive.”
Harvey tried in vain to imagine what kind of penalty the Office of Abraculture had threatened O’Roughage with.
“Still, it always makes me sad, knowing that none of my brothers will ever appreciate the thrill of a good game of Quidditch, a sparring match with a young whomping-willow sapling, or a display of Abraxan horses flying in formation...” O’Roughage sighed again. Then he did a double take at the sundial. “Isn’t that odd,” he said. “I could have sworn it was two o’clock before, but now it seems to be a quarter of one.”
“That will do,” said Harvey, taking his hand off the tree trunk.
O’Roughage stepped away from the tree, stumbling slightly. “And there’s another odd thing. While I could swear that I planted this tree myself, I now suddenly recall that it was standing here since before Hogsmeade was settled. In fact, there’s a plaque among the roots, designating it as the Hogsmeade Grandfather Tree. How silly of me, not to point that out to you before...” He scratched his head. “I wonder why I still recall it growing, twig and bough. I must have dreamed it.”
“Success!” Harvey exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “This proves that casual contact with a retrotemporal being can induce a non-permanent, parallel state of retrotemporality. What a chapter this will make in the guide-book that I shall write at some future point in the past!”
“Er...I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind,” said Harvey, suddenly overflowing with good humor. He squeezed the old herbologist’s shoulders and said, “A reward is in store for you. My house-elf Dinty is waiting outside with some well-preserved grape-pips, the likes of which have not been planted in a thousand years. It’s an unusual type of grape, which I like to call Vitis leprosa. There’s a special project in it for you. But it all depends on whether you can grow a new vine out of very, very old pips. Believe me, it’s an exciting project for which I will reward you beyond anything that the Office of Abraculture can offer.”
“Will you really?” said O’Roughage, his gloomy face brightening for the first time all day. He patted Cecil’s trunk. “And do you know, the old stick doesn’t seem quite done for, after all. All right, let’s see these pips of yours!”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: Which of the following describes the relationship between wizardry and religion in the world of Harry Potter? (A) Wizardry or witchcraft is a religion unto itself. (B) Wizards and witches, in general, have no religion. (C) Witches and wizards can belong to any religion, but they hide their magical background from their fellow worshippers. (D) Witches and wizards can belong to any religion, but they generally limit themselves to all-magical congregations.
CONTEST: Describe something that might happen in a duel between two house-elves.
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #106. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 10/8/06]
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
96. Britannin
Inspired by contest winners: jatibbal, Shiri and _houdini
“Yves the Leper,” Endora said knowledgeably, lecturing Spanky and the party of goblins that were gathered in Vault 1,066, “was not only the greatest potionier since the Norman Conquest, but also a giant among apothecaries and herbalists. In fact, much of the English lore in those disciplines descends from him. Yet some of Yves’ most powerful discoveries are all but forgotten today, surviving only as vague legends or rumors – and perhaps, in the contents of this vault. It is possible that this vault contains, or until the break-in did contain, some potion or potion ingredient that exists no where else in the world today.”
“What would it be worth?” said an oily goblin at the front of the class.
Endora suppressed a sigh of disgust and replied, “We can hardly know until we learn what is – or was – here.”
“What’s here is not your concern,” snapped another goblin. “We only want to know what’s gone.”
“I can’t very well find that out without studying what’s still here,” said an irritated Endora. “I may have a great nose, but it can only smell what is here to be smelled. But I may be able to fill in the gaps by deduction...”
“Then get on with it,” the second goblin bristled.
Endora got on with it. Spanky stood by and took notes while she moved along the shelves of flasks and jars. She temporarily vanished each lead cork and wax seal, gently wafting the scent of the ancient potions toward her rather large nose. Then the seal and cork were replaced, intact, and Endora described what she had smelled. Spanky scribbled: twice-distilled falcon feather – crushed, desiccated stag beetle wings – pickled spoonbill tongue – great auk toes in an infusion of arrow root – the list went on and on.
By and by, the observing goblins grew bored. Some of them went outside the vault to play a game like quoits with what appeared to be human hyoid bones, tied together in pairs. Spanky tried not to think about it. Others became disgusted and left altogether. The two or three goblins who remained, stayed near the door muttering among themselves, keeping an eye or perhaps half an eye on their human guests.
“So let me get this straight,” Endora whispered to Spanky, while pretending to identify the contents of a row of dusty flasks. “That huge heist that we planned and executed was only a trick, to get the goblins to let us in – and this is where we actually steal what it’s all been about? And all those people’s skills were needed, more or less, to create a deception?”
“From what Harvey has told me,” said Spanky, “that isn’t entirely true, but it’s not entirely false. What we stole the other night was, after all, something that Harvey needs.”
“All those flasks of something that smelled like essence of human being? I would be seriously nauseated, if I didn’t know for certain that Yves the Leper had a potion for extracting the essence of any living thing from a fragment of tissue, like a hair follicle. I wrote an essay on it for NEWT potions, you know. I believe the essence-extractor potion was an ancestor of Polyjuice...erm...silk spun from the hairs on poplar seeds...is he gone? All right, now that potion, the essence-extractor, could be worth something. Only I wouldn’t know how to identify it without trying every potion in this vault; and that, clearly, is not what we’ve come for.”
“What was that again?” Spanky said loudly, as another goblin paced near them.
“I said, concentrated milkweed juice...all right, the coast is clear. The trouble with what we stole is that there’s no way of knowing which human being’s essence is in each flask. They’ll all have died 1,000 years ago, and unless Harvey has someone who knows a lot more about ancient runes than I do...”
“Did you say grated satsuma bark?”
“Not bark – peel.”
Another goblin sauntered by while Spanky and Endora pretended to ignore him.
“The other thing I don’t understand is why we had to nick a thousand-year-old cask of sack from this vault, when your team was pinching a bottle of 1922 Bouché-Leclercq from Il Comte’s vault. I mean, really! There’s no question which wine I’d rather drink.”
Spanky looked sheepish. “Actually,” he said, “that was my personal business. The Bouché-Leclercq, I mean.”
“Oh,” said Endora, with wide eyes and lifted brows. “I see.”
After another hour or so of poking through potions and ingredients, Endora brushed the dust off the front of her robes and made an announcement to the goblins. Patting an enormous rack of ancient, oak barrels, she declared, “All of these will have to go to my laboratory for analysis.”
Several goblins tried to speak at once, some of them stammering. A spokesman finally came forward, quieted them, and said, “We regret that what you request is not possible.”
Endora met the goblin’s stare with steeliness to spare. “Nevertheless,” she said, “it is necessary.”
“I was assured that the RMB would have your full cooperation,” Spanky said tragically. “Surely, the bank wants this crime solved as much as we do, if not more. I mean, what would the wizarding public think if the bank that they trust did not prosecute a break-in like this to the utmost of the...”
“Can you at least explain,” sighed the spokesgoblin, “what twenty-eight barrels of dragon bogeys have to do with solving the burglary?”
Endora inhaled deeply. Most of the goblins winced, realizing that another lecture was about to begin. Endora held forth on the uses of dragon’s blood, dragon dung, dragon scales, crushed dragon claw, and even the fragments of dragon eggshells. At last she got round to adding, “Though all of these dragon-related substances have multiple uses, there is one that has but a single known use: dragon phlegm, reknowned since ancient times as a powerful preservative.
“Of course, the market for dragon phlegm has fallen off a bit since it was proven to cause one to have Squib children and gradually to lose control of one’s magical powers, also known as Lynde’s Syndrome. But they weren’t to know that in the eleventh century, were they? Now if the burglars’ potions expert analyzed these barrels to determine what they contained – as I am sure they did – then some trace of the burglars may have gotten preserved in the dragon phlegm, where it is just waiting for us to track it down. But if you would rather...”
“One barrel only,” the goblin said doggedly.
“But that’s ridiculous,” said Endora. “How can we tell which one, if any, contains a clue? Except by opening all of them, that is.”
The goblin ground his teeth, then turned toward his associates and held a short, rapid discussion with them in Gobbledygook.
As they sat in the first of a long row of carts, loaded with barrels of dragon phlegm, racing towards the ground level of Gringotts, Spanky wondered aloud, “Why dragon phlegm, really?”
“I believe I have it all worked out,” said Endora with a small, smug smile. “I myself was wondering, why a thousand-year-old cask of sack wine? It was only when I recognized the rune Harvey made me memorize that I put it together. Well, actually, since he forbade me to open the barrels, it really needed the goblin to tell me what the rune meant – dragon phlegm.”
“I’m no more enlightened than I was before you answered my question,” said Spanky.
“No ordinary wine could stay drinkable for a thousand years,” said Endora, after making sure no goblins were listening in. “But I had forgotten what a great herbalist Yves the Leper was. He was one of William the Conqueror’s household wizards. He specialized in creating varietals and potions that had power or grandeur befitting the first true king of all England. Power to help in the conquest, grandeur to solidify the king’s power, to impress people with a sense of durability, legitimacy, destiny...”
“I hope your theory is going somewhere,” said Spanky. “Because this cart certainly is, and it will be arriving shortly.”
“Then shush,” said Endora. “What I’m trying to say is – think about it – why would there be wine in the Vault of Yves the Leper? Unless – unless he was not only a herbalist, apothecary, and potionier, but also a vintner! Suppose Yves cultivated a kind of grape containing a magical sort of tannin – a supertannin – something befitting the power and grandeur of the new English kingdom, which was to last at least a thousand years...”
“Britannin,” Spanky whispered with awe.
“That’s good,” said Endora. “Yes, Britannin. A preservative nearly as strong as dragon phlegm – breaking down slowly as the wine aged – taking perhaps a thousand years for the vintage to reach its peak...”
“By now, that wine would be well worth drinking,” said Spanky.
“And suppose,” said Endora, “that there was more to this Britannin than giving King William’s wine the richest, smoothest flavor in the history of wine. Perhaps it had other magical properties, such as making the drinker feel very good without all the poisonous side effects...”
“...impaired judgment, loss of motor control...”
“...sickness, hangover...”
“...addiction, liver disease...”
“You get the picture,” said Endora. “In fact, such a magical vintage could change the whole world for the better.”
“But is it likely?” Spanky asked doubtfully.
“I think it is,” said Endora. “Otherwise, we would only be nicking a bit of wine, for our private enjoyment. But if it turns out to have the magical properties that I think it has – and that, surely, Harvey suspects it to have – then he would want more than just a taste of this wine. He would want to be able to make more of it.”
“And how would he do that?” said Spanky. “And what, for the love of magic, does it have to do with dragon bogeys?”
Endora’s smirk was nearing the point of becoming a criminal offense. “Who put up all these barrels of dragon bogeys?”
“Yves the Leper, presumably.”
“And if Yves the Leper was also a viniculturist, what do you suppose might have gotten into these barrels of highly preservative dragon phlegm?”
“Er...grapes?”
“Or pips, or pollen, or little fragments of grape vine, or what have you. Perhaps enough to start a new culture of Britannin-bearing grapes...with a bit of magical help, of course.”
“Doesn’t our Sadie have a friend who specializes in helping things like that along?” Spanky said with a look of growing comprehension.
“Miles O’Roughage,” Endora affirmed. “Won’t Harvey act surprised when I don’t act surprised to find old Miles waiting with him at my laboratory.”
The two of them were occupied with their own thoughts for a while. Then, as the turns of the cart track grew more familiar and better lit – signalling their approach to the ground level of the bank – Spanky muttered, “I still don’t get one thing.”
“What’s that?” asked Endora.
“If it’s going to take a thousand years to make the next batch of this stuff,” said Spanky, “why would Harvey bother? It’s not just that none of us will live to taste it. We’ll be ancient history by then.”
Endora frowned. “That’s a good one,” she said. “Can’t say. I suppose that destroys my Britannin theory.”
“That’s all right,” said Spanky. “It was interesting while it lasted.”
+++ THIS WEEK’S DOUBLE CHALLENGE! +++
Because #99 will be a “Who’s Who” edition of the Magic Quill, and #100 will be a “What’s What” retrospective of the chapters since #50, this will be the last “Double Challenge” before the Magic Quill turns 100.
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: More than any other character in the Magic Quill, which one: (A) Rocks your world? (B) Leaves you completely cold? (C) Would you like to know more about? [Hint: you can choose a different person for each part.]
CONTEST: Describe a really stupid magical blunder – and, if possible, the counterspell to fix it.
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #98. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 7/30/06]
“Yves the Leper,” Endora said knowledgeably, lecturing Spanky and the party of goblins that were gathered in Vault 1,066, “was not only the greatest potionier since the Norman Conquest, but also a giant among apothecaries and herbalists. In fact, much of the English lore in those disciplines descends from him. Yet some of Yves’ most powerful discoveries are all but forgotten today, surviving only as vague legends or rumors – and perhaps, in the contents of this vault. It is possible that this vault contains, or until the break-in did contain, some potion or potion ingredient that exists no where else in the world today.”
“What would it be worth?” said an oily goblin at the front of the class.
Endora suppressed a sigh of disgust and replied, “We can hardly know until we learn what is – or was – here.”
“What’s here is not your concern,” snapped another goblin. “We only want to know what’s gone.”
“I can’t very well find that out without studying what’s still here,” said an irritated Endora. “I may have a great nose, but it can only smell what is here to be smelled. But I may be able to fill in the gaps by deduction...”
“Then get on with it,” the second goblin bristled.
Endora got on with it. Spanky stood by and took notes while she moved along the shelves of flasks and jars. She temporarily vanished each lead cork and wax seal, gently wafting the scent of the ancient potions toward her rather large nose. Then the seal and cork were replaced, intact, and Endora described what she had smelled. Spanky scribbled: twice-distilled falcon feather – crushed, desiccated stag beetle wings – pickled spoonbill tongue – great auk toes in an infusion of arrow root – the list went on and on.
By and by, the observing goblins grew bored. Some of them went outside the vault to play a game like quoits with what appeared to be human hyoid bones, tied together in pairs. Spanky tried not to think about it. Others became disgusted and left altogether. The two or three goblins who remained, stayed near the door muttering among themselves, keeping an eye or perhaps half an eye on their human guests.
“So let me get this straight,” Endora whispered to Spanky, while pretending to identify the contents of a row of dusty flasks. “That huge heist that we planned and executed was only a trick, to get the goblins to let us in – and this is where we actually steal what it’s all been about? And all those people’s skills were needed, more or less, to create a deception?”
“From what Harvey has told me,” said Spanky, “that isn’t entirely true, but it’s not entirely false. What we stole the other night was, after all, something that Harvey needs.”
“All those flasks of something that smelled like essence of human being? I would be seriously nauseated, if I didn’t know for certain that Yves the Leper had a potion for extracting the essence of any living thing from a fragment of tissue, like a hair follicle. I wrote an essay on it for NEWT potions, you know. I believe the essence-extractor potion was an ancestor of Polyjuice...erm...silk spun from the hairs on poplar seeds...is he gone? All right, now that potion, the essence-extractor, could be worth something. Only I wouldn’t know how to identify it without trying every potion in this vault; and that, clearly, is not what we’ve come for.”
“What was that again?” Spanky said loudly, as another goblin paced near them.
“I said, concentrated milkweed juice...all right, the coast is clear. The trouble with what we stole is that there’s no way of knowing which human being’s essence is in each flask. They’ll all have died 1,000 years ago, and unless Harvey has someone who knows a lot more about ancient runes than I do...”
“Did you say grated satsuma bark?”
“Not bark – peel.”
Another goblin sauntered by while Spanky and Endora pretended to ignore him.
“The other thing I don’t understand is why we had to nick a thousand-year-old cask of sack from this vault, when your team was pinching a bottle of 1922 Bouché-Leclercq from Il Comte’s vault. I mean, really! There’s no question which wine I’d rather drink.”
Spanky looked sheepish. “Actually,” he said, “that was my personal business. The Bouché-Leclercq, I mean.”
“Oh,” said Endora, with wide eyes and lifted brows. “I see.”
After another hour or so of poking through potions and ingredients, Endora brushed the dust off the front of her robes and made an announcement to the goblins. Patting an enormous rack of ancient, oak barrels, she declared, “All of these will have to go to my laboratory for analysis.”
Several goblins tried to speak at once, some of them stammering. A spokesman finally came forward, quieted them, and said, “We regret that what you request is not possible.”
Endora met the goblin’s stare with steeliness to spare. “Nevertheless,” she said, “it is necessary.”
“I was assured that the RMB would have your full cooperation,” Spanky said tragically. “Surely, the bank wants this crime solved as much as we do, if not more. I mean, what would the wizarding public think if the bank that they trust did not prosecute a break-in like this to the utmost of the...”
“Can you at least explain,” sighed the spokesgoblin, “what twenty-eight barrels of dragon bogeys have to do with solving the burglary?”
Endora inhaled deeply. Most of the goblins winced, realizing that another lecture was about to begin. Endora held forth on the uses of dragon’s blood, dragon dung, dragon scales, crushed dragon claw, and even the fragments of dragon eggshells. At last she got round to adding, “Though all of these dragon-related substances have multiple uses, there is one that has but a single known use: dragon phlegm, reknowned since ancient times as a powerful preservative.
“Of course, the market for dragon phlegm has fallen off a bit since it was proven to cause one to have Squib children and gradually to lose control of one’s magical powers, also known as Lynde’s Syndrome. But they weren’t to know that in the eleventh century, were they? Now if the burglars’ potions expert analyzed these barrels to determine what they contained – as I am sure they did – then some trace of the burglars may have gotten preserved in the dragon phlegm, where it is just waiting for us to track it down. But if you would rather...”
“One barrel only,” the goblin said doggedly.
“But that’s ridiculous,” said Endora. “How can we tell which one, if any, contains a clue? Except by opening all of them, that is.”
The goblin ground his teeth, then turned toward his associates and held a short, rapid discussion with them in Gobbledygook.
As they sat in the first of a long row of carts, loaded with barrels of dragon phlegm, racing towards the ground level of Gringotts, Spanky wondered aloud, “Why dragon phlegm, really?”
“I believe I have it all worked out,” said Endora with a small, smug smile. “I myself was wondering, why a thousand-year-old cask of sack wine? It was only when I recognized the rune Harvey made me memorize that I put it together. Well, actually, since he forbade me to open the barrels, it really needed the goblin to tell me what the rune meant – dragon phlegm.”
“I’m no more enlightened than I was before you answered my question,” said Spanky.
“No ordinary wine could stay drinkable for a thousand years,” said Endora, after making sure no goblins were listening in. “But I had forgotten what a great herbalist Yves the Leper was. He was one of William the Conqueror’s household wizards. He specialized in creating varietals and potions that had power or grandeur befitting the first true king of all England. Power to help in the conquest, grandeur to solidify the king’s power, to impress people with a sense of durability, legitimacy, destiny...”
“I hope your theory is going somewhere,” said Spanky. “Because this cart certainly is, and it will be arriving shortly.”
“Then shush,” said Endora. “What I’m trying to say is – think about it – why would there be wine in the Vault of Yves the Leper? Unless – unless he was not only a herbalist, apothecary, and potionier, but also a vintner! Suppose Yves cultivated a kind of grape containing a magical sort of tannin – a supertannin – something befitting the power and grandeur of the new English kingdom, which was to last at least a thousand years...”
“Britannin,” Spanky whispered with awe.
“That’s good,” said Endora. “Yes, Britannin. A preservative nearly as strong as dragon phlegm – breaking down slowly as the wine aged – taking perhaps a thousand years for the vintage to reach its peak...”
“By now, that wine would be well worth drinking,” said Spanky.
“And suppose,” said Endora, “that there was more to this Britannin than giving King William’s wine the richest, smoothest flavor in the history of wine. Perhaps it had other magical properties, such as making the drinker feel very good without all the poisonous side effects...”
“...impaired judgment, loss of motor control...”
“...sickness, hangover...”
“...addiction, liver disease...”
“You get the picture,” said Endora. “In fact, such a magical vintage could change the whole world for the better.”
“But is it likely?” Spanky asked doubtfully.
“I think it is,” said Endora. “Otherwise, we would only be nicking a bit of wine, for our private enjoyment. But if it turns out to have the magical properties that I think it has – and that, surely, Harvey suspects it to have – then he would want more than just a taste of this wine. He would want to be able to make more of it.”
“And how would he do that?” said Spanky. “And what, for the love of magic, does it have to do with dragon bogeys?”
Endora’s smirk was nearing the point of becoming a criminal offense. “Who put up all these barrels of dragon bogeys?”
“Yves the Leper, presumably.”
“And if Yves the Leper was also a viniculturist, what do you suppose might have gotten into these barrels of highly preservative dragon phlegm?”
“Er...grapes?”
“Or pips, or pollen, or little fragments of grape vine, or what have you. Perhaps enough to start a new culture of Britannin-bearing grapes...with a bit of magical help, of course.”
“Doesn’t our Sadie have a friend who specializes in helping things like that along?” Spanky said with a look of growing comprehension.
“Miles O’Roughage,” Endora affirmed. “Won’t Harvey act surprised when I don’t act surprised to find old Miles waiting with him at my laboratory.”
The two of them were occupied with their own thoughts for a while. Then, as the turns of the cart track grew more familiar and better lit – signalling their approach to the ground level of the bank – Spanky muttered, “I still don’t get one thing.”
“What’s that?” asked Endora.
“If it’s going to take a thousand years to make the next batch of this stuff,” said Spanky, “why would Harvey bother? It’s not just that none of us will live to taste it. We’ll be ancient history by then.”
Endora frowned. “That’s a good one,” she said. “Can’t say. I suppose that destroys my Britannin theory.”
“That’s all right,” said Spanky. “It was interesting while it lasted.”
+++ THIS WEEK’S DOUBLE CHALLENGE! +++
Because #99 will be a “Who’s Who” edition of the Magic Quill, and #100 will be a “What’s What” retrospective of the chapters since #50, this will be the last “Double Challenge” before the Magic Quill turns 100.
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
SURVEY: More than any other character in the Magic Quill, which one: (A) Rocks your world? (B) Leaves you completely cold? (C) Would you like to know more about? [Hint: you can choose a different person for each part.]
CONTEST: Describe a really stupid magical blunder – and, if possible, the counterspell to fix it.
The Survey answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #98. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 7/30/06]
82. The Catfish Burglar, Part 2
Contest Winners: TWZRD, _houdini, eagleanimagus, Shadow Phoenix, and zanaboo
“After I fought off all the grindylows,” Sadie went on with her tale, “I swam further upstream with my powerful, tireless stroke. I had to squeeze through a tight gap in a network of curses strung across the fjord. Then, wearing dragon-hide gloves to protect my skin from the hallucinogenic algae, I pushed myself along...”
Actually, what happened was this:
Haakon Tran was having tea with a security consultant named (as luck would have it) Merlin.
“I see you’ve worked for Seymour Entwistle,” Tran said, browsing through the references Merlin had brought with him. “You know, if this works out, I should recommend you to a dear friend of mine, name of Oldmanson. Orion Oldmanson. Sad story. Endless trouble with that brat of his. Well, you’ve had a chance to look around; you’ve seen the dungeon where I brew my Subterfuge Solvent; you’ve been over the room where the thieves tried to sneak in last time, and they would have robbed me blind, too, if it hadn’t been for the sick dragon my niece was nursing. It’s too bad that not enough was left of them to identify, but we must assume that more thieves will follow them, and take steps – especially now that the dragon has gone – to deter them in a gentler, but equally decisive, way. So, what do you propose?”
Merlin smiled gravely. “The first line of defense could be planted all around the house.” He conjured a seed-packet out of the air and handed it over to Tran.
“Dandelions?” Tran said, incredulously.
“Wizard’s Dandelion,” Merlin corrected. “Read the packet. I found out about this in Miles O’Roughage’s Compendium of Botanical Contraband. Miles is a friend of a friend, so he was happy to furnish me with this sample. Read what it says on the envelope.”
Tran read: “Wizard's Dandelion (Taraxacum illegalis). Muggle Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is well known for its laxative and diuretic properties. The non-approved illegale variety of the plant has been found in the gardens of some wizarding homes. In it, the aforementioned effects are enhanced so that unauthorized guests foolish enough to step on the lawn get a face-full of seed fluff that will send them racing for the nearest restroom or dense hedge. The plant is believed to have been bred as a deterrent to solicitors, and carries the advantage that, if it should act on an acquaintance, they are likely to request admission to the residence to seek relief, and so are not repelled from the property. Few prosecutions for possession have been successful, as the home owner can always claim the seeds blew in on the wind.”
“How will my family and staff move around the compound when this stuff is getting all over them?” Tran asked sharply.
Merlin smiled and held up a small phial. “The antidote,” he said. “Take it with your morning pumpkin juice, and all will be well.” His smile became a bit wan as, through the window behind Haakon Tran, he saw a strange sight. The water near the shore of the loch below Tran’s window was disturbed, though nothing visible seemed to be causing the disturbance.
“What else do you have?” Tran asked, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“We could also plant a hedge of Guardbush all round the garden,” said Merlin, trying not to watch as water poured off the head and shoulders of an otherwise invisible person, rising from beneath the surface of the loch. “When looked at from a distance it seems to be a normal hedge. But when anyone approaches, it grows quickly and blocks the path to the house. If they get too close, it whacks them with its branches until they either run away or are captured.”
“Again, how can trusted people get around this Guard-shrub?”
Merlin focused directly on Tran’s face, to avoid the sight of a familiar, veiled head emerging from the hood of a weird, ripply, semi- invisible wetsuit.
“The Guardbush obeys verbal commands. If you train it up from a seedling, it will trust you and allow you to train it. Then, anyone who says the password you've given it will be allowed to pass unmolested.”
Behind Tran, Sadie had pulled out her pipe and a map, and was trying to smoke and figure out where the Hidden Fjord might be at the same time. Merlin rolled his eyes (fortunately, when Tran was looking at his watch).
“What else do you have?” Tran asked, a bit impatiently.
“The Doromat is a wonderful product,” said Merlin. He stood up and went over to the fireplace, where he vanished the hearth-rug and, over Tran’s stifled exclamations, conjured a bristly doormat with an Irish insult worked into it: MAY THE ROAD RISE UP BEFORE YOU...WITHOUT DELAY. “Watch this,” he said, and then he stepped on the doormat. At once it began to scream in a shrill, hysterical voice: “Help! Murder! Intruders at large! Hide the babies! Arm yourselves! Call the Ministry!”
Tran winced and covered his ears. Fortunately his back was now to the side window, so that he could neither see Sadie, nor hear her swearing loudly as she stumbled over a loose stone in the path and was obliged to stamp out a small fire started by an ember that had escaped from her pipe.
“As you can see,” shouted Merlin, tugging uselessly with the leg that was standing on the mat, “I am stuck to the Doromat, and the Doromat is stuck to the hearthstone. The only way for me to escape is to get out of my shoe and run away without it. By that time, half the household should be down about my ears.”
“I’ll say,” yelled Tran. “Can you make it stop?”
“Heel,” said Merlin, and the screaming stopped. The mat released his shoe with a slightly flatulent sound.
“That was very good,” said Tran, with an approving nod. “But what if the intruder has the sense to step over the mat, rather than onto it?”
“In that event, you may want to spritz a bit of this fluid on the outside doorknob,” said Merlin, as a small spray bottle appeared in his hand. He unscrewed the top of the bottle, pulled out the straw attached to the nozzle, and blew through a plastic ring at the end of the straw. Several beautiful, shiny soap bubbles appeared.
“Bubble juice?” Tran said, incredulously.
“Extra-strength bubble juice,” said Merlin, wincing as Sadie tumbled down a well-concealed slope into what must have been the cliffs overlooking the Hidden Fjord. Fortunately, Tran was distracted from the commotion when one of the soap bubbles collided with a crystal bowl on the side table, and the bowl shattered – but the bubble remained intact.
“Very impressive,” said Tran. “But what good does it do?”
“Spritz this on the doorknob, I say, and if anyone touches the doorknob within say, twelve hours, they find themselves trapped inside a bubble until the next morning. A bubble that, as you have seen, is harder than crystal, though air passes through it, and it will dissolve in water. The thief is helpless until you come down in the morning to hose him down and take him into custody; yet he can come to no harm, either. Which is a comfort in case of accidental entrapment.”
“What do you have that can protect my product specifically?” asked Haakon Tran, with a warmer interest than at first.
Merlin almost lost his train of thought as Sadie staggered back up the slope from the Hidden Fjord, covered in dust and scratches, carrying a huge bundle of reeds on her back. Merlin coughed, cleared his throat, and conjured up a cloth nappy and a couple of safety-pins.
“You must be joking,” Tran said with evident disgust.
“Not at all,” said Merlin, who had in fact planned to conjure something else. Inventing furiously, he said, “This nappy has been magically modified to protect whatever little treasure you may think of as your ‘baby'. Simply wrap it up in this cloth, then pin the edges together with these little fellows, and there it is! A soft, absorbent safe which can only be safely unlocked when the appropriate password-spell has been spoken. Otherwise, when you undo the pins, they start poking you all over, and the nappie tries to stuff itself up your nose. Most unpleasant, and if you change your password-spells regularly, very difficult to penetrate. I would demonstrate it, but...”
“No need,” said Tran. “I’ll take the lot.”
Shouldn’t you just, thought Merlin, as Tran counted out a pile of galleons and sickles and as (through the window behind him) Sadie could be seen diving back into the loch with the bundle of reeds still on her back. Merlin wondered if she would drown, considering how much the reeds impeded her movement. But since he had no prior knowledge of Sadie’s plan to steal sannheten from Haakon Tran, and since (until the last galleon was counted out) Merlin was not officially on Tran’s payroll, he felt no guilt about passing over Sadie’s breach of security in silence.
“It’s all there,” said Merlin, banishing the money to his Gringotts vault with a wave of his wand. “I will begin installing your new security system immediately. Send me an owl if ever there are any problems, or if you want to make changes.”
“Very well,” said Haakon Tran. “Thank goodness that’s settled. I would hate to let my formula fall into the wrong hands...”
“...Then I turned my toenails into propellers and left Tran’s pursuing henchmen floundering in my wake,” Sadie boasted to a deeply impressed Endora. “Once I was past the null-apparition zone, I popped back to the Thames and swam to that underground quay below the Leaky Cauldron. Bloke who worked for Madam Hardbiscuit was waiting in me room by the time I got there, still drippin’ wet. He took the bundle of reeds from me, paid me enough galleons to buy the whole Leaky Cauldron right off, and vanished into the fireplace in a flash of green flames. That’s how I made my first fortune.”
“Wow,” said Endora. “And how did you lose it, then?”
“A week later, I bet the lot on a hippogriff named Sannheten at the Hogsmeade Stakes,” said Sadie, unrepentantly. “Easy come, easy go.”
Joe Albuquerque piped up from across the aisle: “Did you ever find out how that Hardbiscuit woman used Haakon Tran’s secret potion?”
Sadie brightened. “Ah! That’s the story of how I made my second fortune,” she said.
Just then, a very old man and a boy of about eleven years turned up in the hospital waiting room. Sadie, Endora, and Joe forgot about their conversation and turned to stare at the pair. “Blimey,” Sadie whispered. “It's himself and...”
The boy, whose head was shaved bald on one side and covered with tall, sharp, lacquered spikes of unnaturally black hair on the other, also wore white powder on his face, heavy black eyeliner, black lipstick, and genuine fairy skulls dangling from both ears. His clothing was ripped and soiled, but it was just possible to make out a Weird Sisters slogan on his shirt. Grimy chains were stitched into the seams of his faded, black jeans. His trainers were artfully ripped, showing a bit of black-painted toenail here, and a demon-shaped tattoo there.
“Rigel, are you sure...” said the old man, glancing nervously at the scruffy, untrustworthy lot seated in the waiting room, who in turn were looking warily at them.
“Shut up, father,” said the youngster. “I’ve got to see me Dad.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” said the old man, miserably.
“No doubt,” said the boy without a trace of concern. “Oi! Orderly! Where have you lot put the wizard that calls himself Merlin?”
An assistant healer looked scandalized at this rude address. The old man clapped his hand over his eyes.
“You’re never Rigel?” said the asssitant healer, suspiciously.
“The very same,” said Rigel, grinning (it seemed) for the express purpose of displaying his sharp, gleaming teeth.
The assistant healer, who had been contemplating a display of passive-aggressive obstructionism, changed his mind and said, “Right this way,” very meekly.
“Stay put, you old fool,” the child barked at the old man, when the latter moved to follow him with the assistant healer. Discouraged and humiliated, the old man sank sadly into a seat near Joe Albuquerque, who at least (in his disguise as a vicar) looked a bit more reliable than the two characters across the asile.
“I expect it’s harder the second time you raise them,” said Joe sympathetically.
The old man sighed, and nodded. “He knows all the tricks already. I can’t get anything past that one.”
“Maybe, if he calls Merlin his Dad,” Sadie said distastefully, “you should let Merlin bring him up.”
“Oh, we’ve tried that off and on,” said the old man, shamedfacedly. “The simple fact is, Rigel likes having money of all things...”
+++ Double Challenge for The Magic Quill #84 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Will Merlin be (A) mostly a good influence, (B) mostly a bad influence, or (C) unable to influence young Rigel as he grows up again?
The CONTEST: Give the name and description of an amulet (a magical object worn for some kind of protection).
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #84. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 2/24/06]
“After I fought off all the grindylows,” Sadie went on with her tale, “I swam further upstream with my powerful, tireless stroke. I had to squeeze through a tight gap in a network of curses strung across the fjord. Then, wearing dragon-hide gloves to protect my skin from the hallucinogenic algae, I pushed myself along...”
Actually, what happened was this:
Haakon Tran was having tea with a security consultant named (as luck would have it) Merlin.
“I see you’ve worked for Seymour Entwistle,” Tran said, browsing through the references Merlin had brought with him. “You know, if this works out, I should recommend you to a dear friend of mine, name of Oldmanson. Orion Oldmanson. Sad story. Endless trouble with that brat of his. Well, you’ve had a chance to look around; you’ve seen the dungeon where I brew my Subterfuge Solvent; you’ve been over the room where the thieves tried to sneak in last time, and they would have robbed me blind, too, if it hadn’t been for the sick dragon my niece was nursing. It’s too bad that not enough was left of them to identify, but we must assume that more thieves will follow them, and take steps – especially now that the dragon has gone – to deter them in a gentler, but equally decisive, way. So, what do you propose?”
Merlin smiled gravely. “The first line of defense could be planted all around the house.” He conjured a seed-packet out of the air and handed it over to Tran.
“Dandelions?” Tran said, incredulously.
“Wizard’s Dandelion,” Merlin corrected. “Read the packet. I found out about this in Miles O’Roughage’s Compendium of Botanical Contraband. Miles is a friend of a friend, so he was happy to furnish me with this sample. Read what it says on the envelope.”
Tran read: “Wizard's Dandelion (Taraxacum illegalis). Muggle Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is well known for its laxative and diuretic properties. The non-approved illegale variety of the plant has been found in the gardens of some wizarding homes. In it, the aforementioned effects are enhanced so that unauthorized guests foolish enough to step on the lawn get a face-full of seed fluff that will send them racing for the nearest restroom or dense hedge. The plant is believed to have been bred as a deterrent to solicitors, and carries the advantage that, if it should act on an acquaintance, they are likely to request admission to the residence to seek relief, and so are not repelled from the property. Few prosecutions for possession have been successful, as the home owner can always claim the seeds blew in on the wind.”
“How will my family and staff move around the compound when this stuff is getting all over them?” Tran asked sharply.
Merlin smiled and held up a small phial. “The antidote,” he said. “Take it with your morning pumpkin juice, and all will be well.” His smile became a bit wan as, through the window behind Haakon Tran, he saw a strange sight. The water near the shore of the loch below Tran’s window was disturbed, though nothing visible seemed to be causing the disturbance.
“What else do you have?” Tran asked, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“We could also plant a hedge of Guardbush all round the garden,” said Merlin, trying not to watch as water poured off the head and shoulders of an otherwise invisible person, rising from beneath the surface of the loch. “When looked at from a distance it seems to be a normal hedge. But when anyone approaches, it grows quickly and blocks the path to the house. If they get too close, it whacks them with its branches until they either run away or are captured.”
“Again, how can trusted people get around this Guard-shrub?”
Merlin focused directly on Tran’s face, to avoid the sight of a familiar, veiled head emerging from the hood of a weird, ripply, semi- invisible wetsuit.
“The Guardbush obeys verbal commands. If you train it up from a seedling, it will trust you and allow you to train it. Then, anyone who says the password you've given it will be allowed to pass unmolested.”
Behind Tran, Sadie had pulled out her pipe and a map, and was trying to smoke and figure out where the Hidden Fjord might be at the same time. Merlin rolled his eyes (fortunately, when Tran was looking at his watch).
“What else do you have?” Tran asked, a bit impatiently.
“The Doromat is a wonderful product,” said Merlin. He stood up and went over to the fireplace, where he vanished the hearth-rug and, over Tran’s stifled exclamations, conjured a bristly doormat with an Irish insult worked into it: MAY THE ROAD RISE UP BEFORE YOU...WITHOUT DELAY. “Watch this,” he said, and then he stepped on the doormat. At once it began to scream in a shrill, hysterical voice: “Help! Murder! Intruders at large! Hide the babies! Arm yourselves! Call the Ministry!”
Tran winced and covered his ears. Fortunately his back was now to the side window, so that he could neither see Sadie, nor hear her swearing loudly as she stumbled over a loose stone in the path and was obliged to stamp out a small fire started by an ember that had escaped from her pipe.
“As you can see,” shouted Merlin, tugging uselessly with the leg that was standing on the mat, “I am stuck to the Doromat, and the Doromat is stuck to the hearthstone. The only way for me to escape is to get out of my shoe and run away without it. By that time, half the household should be down about my ears.”
“I’ll say,” yelled Tran. “Can you make it stop?”
“Heel,” said Merlin, and the screaming stopped. The mat released his shoe with a slightly flatulent sound.
“That was very good,” said Tran, with an approving nod. “But what if the intruder has the sense to step over the mat, rather than onto it?”
“In that event, you may want to spritz a bit of this fluid on the outside doorknob,” said Merlin, as a small spray bottle appeared in his hand. He unscrewed the top of the bottle, pulled out the straw attached to the nozzle, and blew through a plastic ring at the end of the straw. Several beautiful, shiny soap bubbles appeared.
“Bubble juice?” Tran said, incredulously.
“Extra-strength bubble juice,” said Merlin, wincing as Sadie tumbled down a well-concealed slope into what must have been the cliffs overlooking the Hidden Fjord. Fortunately, Tran was distracted from the commotion when one of the soap bubbles collided with a crystal bowl on the side table, and the bowl shattered – but the bubble remained intact.
“Very impressive,” said Tran. “But what good does it do?”
“Spritz this on the doorknob, I say, and if anyone touches the doorknob within say, twelve hours, they find themselves trapped inside a bubble until the next morning. A bubble that, as you have seen, is harder than crystal, though air passes through it, and it will dissolve in water. The thief is helpless until you come down in the morning to hose him down and take him into custody; yet he can come to no harm, either. Which is a comfort in case of accidental entrapment.”
“What do you have that can protect my product specifically?” asked Haakon Tran, with a warmer interest than at first.
Merlin almost lost his train of thought as Sadie staggered back up the slope from the Hidden Fjord, covered in dust and scratches, carrying a huge bundle of reeds on her back. Merlin coughed, cleared his throat, and conjured up a cloth nappy and a couple of safety-pins.
“You must be joking,” Tran said with evident disgust.
“Not at all,” said Merlin, who had in fact planned to conjure something else. Inventing furiously, he said, “This nappy has been magically modified to protect whatever little treasure you may think of as your ‘baby'. Simply wrap it up in this cloth, then pin the edges together with these little fellows, and there it is! A soft, absorbent safe which can only be safely unlocked when the appropriate password-spell has been spoken. Otherwise, when you undo the pins, they start poking you all over, and the nappie tries to stuff itself up your nose. Most unpleasant, and if you change your password-spells regularly, very difficult to penetrate. I would demonstrate it, but...”
“No need,” said Tran. “I’ll take the lot.”
Shouldn’t you just, thought Merlin, as Tran counted out a pile of galleons and sickles and as (through the window behind him) Sadie could be seen diving back into the loch with the bundle of reeds still on her back. Merlin wondered if she would drown, considering how much the reeds impeded her movement. But since he had no prior knowledge of Sadie’s plan to steal sannheten from Haakon Tran, and since (until the last galleon was counted out) Merlin was not officially on Tran’s payroll, he felt no guilt about passing over Sadie’s breach of security in silence.
“It’s all there,” said Merlin, banishing the money to his Gringotts vault with a wave of his wand. “I will begin installing your new security system immediately. Send me an owl if ever there are any problems, or if you want to make changes.”
“Very well,” said Haakon Tran. “Thank goodness that’s settled. I would hate to let my formula fall into the wrong hands...”
“...Then I turned my toenails into propellers and left Tran’s pursuing henchmen floundering in my wake,” Sadie boasted to a deeply impressed Endora. “Once I was past the null-apparition zone, I popped back to the Thames and swam to that underground quay below the Leaky Cauldron. Bloke who worked for Madam Hardbiscuit was waiting in me room by the time I got there, still drippin’ wet. He took the bundle of reeds from me, paid me enough galleons to buy the whole Leaky Cauldron right off, and vanished into the fireplace in a flash of green flames. That’s how I made my first fortune.”
“Wow,” said Endora. “And how did you lose it, then?”
“A week later, I bet the lot on a hippogriff named Sannheten at the Hogsmeade Stakes,” said Sadie, unrepentantly. “Easy come, easy go.”
Joe Albuquerque piped up from across the aisle: “Did you ever find out how that Hardbiscuit woman used Haakon Tran’s secret potion?”
Sadie brightened. “Ah! That’s the story of how I made my second fortune,” she said.
Just then, a very old man and a boy of about eleven years turned up in the hospital waiting room. Sadie, Endora, and Joe forgot about their conversation and turned to stare at the pair. “Blimey,” Sadie whispered. “It's himself and...”
The boy, whose head was shaved bald on one side and covered with tall, sharp, lacquered spikes of unnaturally black hair on the other, also wore white powder on his face, heavy black eyeliner, black lipstick, and genuine fairy skulls dangling from both ears. His clothing was ripped and soiled, but it was just possible to make out a Weird Sisters slogan on his shirt. Grimy chains were stitched into the seams of his faded, black jeans. His trainers were artfully ripped, showing a bit of black-painted toenail here, and a demon-shaped tattoo there.
“Rigel, are you sure...” said the old man, glancing nervously at the scruffy, untrustworthy lot seated in the waiting room, who in turn were looking warily at them.
“Shut up, father,” said the youngster. “I’ve got to see me Dad.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” said the old man, miserably.
“No doubt,” said the boy without a trace of concern. “Oi! Orderly! Where have you lot put the wizard that calls himself Merlin?”
An assistant healer looked scandalized at this rude address. The old man clapped his hand over his eyes.
“You’re never Rigel?” said the asssitant healer, suspiciously.
“The very same,” said Rigel, grinning (it seemed) for the express purpose of displaying his sharp, gleaming teeth.
The assistant healer, who had been contemplating a display of passive-aggressive obstructionism, changed his mind and said, “Right this way,” very meekly.
“Stay put, you old fool,” the child barked at the old man, when the latter moved to follow him with the assistant healer. Discouraged and humiliated, the old man sank sadly into a seat near Joe Albuquerque, who at least (in his disguise as a vicar) looked a bit more reliable than the two characters across the asile.
“I expect it’s harder the second time you raise them,” said Joe sympathetically.
The old man sighed, and nodded. “He knows all the tricks already. I can’t get anything past that one.”
“Maybe, if he calls Merlin his Dad,” Sadie said distastefully, “you should let Merlin bring him up.”
“Oh, we’ve tried that off and on,” said the old man, shamedfacedly. “The simple fact is, Rigel likes having money of all things...”
+++ Double Challenge for The Magic Quill #84 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Will Merlin be (A) mostly a good influence, (B) mostly a bad influence, or (C) unable to influence young Rigel as he grows up again?
The CONTEST: Give the name and description of an amulet (a magical object worn for some kind of protection).
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #84. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 2/24/06]
81. The Catfish Burglar
Contest Winners: budd2nd and Shadow Phoenix
“The job what made my first fortune,” Sadie began her tale, “didn’t come my way till I had been workin’ in the property transferin’ line for several years. I had worked me way up, like, from charmin’ galleons out of the pockets of patrons at Axel Exum’s Exhibition of Muggle Marvels, and sellin’ unlicensed commemorative earmuffs in the neighborhood of any Nasal Drip concert. Through a combination of steady effort, skill, daring, and a bit of luck, I had earned a solid reputation as one of the most dependable fetchers of hard-to-fetch things in the country. Not that this reputation helped me get along with the Ministry of Magic. Those blokes just don’t understand that rescuin’ valuables from slobs as don’t want ‘em enough to protect ‘em, and givin’ ‘em to folks as want them enough to pay top galleon for ‘em, is as worthy a use of magic as any.
“But apart from them, my business was startin’ to flourish. Clients were comin’ to me, beggin’ me to nick things for ‘em. My share of the take, I mean, my fee went up. I was actually able to get choosy about which jobs to take...”
Actually, what happened was like this....
SECURITY GUARD: Oi. I say! Where do you think you’re going?
SADIE: I have an appointment with Madam Hardbiscuit.
SECURITY GUARD: Not so fast, there. What’s your name?
SADIE: My name? Hildegard Van Bingen. [Wiggles wand concealed in handbag.]
SECURITY GUARD: There ain’t any Dutch witches on the list.
SADIE: Are you sure? [Wiggle, wiggle.]
SECURITY GUARD: I’ve only looked at it ten times to-- Merlin’s beard. Where did that come from?
SADIE: May I go up now?
SECURITY GUARD: Hold on a sec. What’s with the veil?
SADIE: Little mishap last week. Invisibility charm went bad. Made the front half of my head transparent. It’s very icky to look at, but if you’d like...
SECURITY GUARD: No, no. Never mind. Can I at least see some identification?
SADIE: Will this do?
SECURITY GUARD: You wore a veil for your apparition license photo, did you?
SADIE: They didn’t want to allow it, but after strip-searching me to confirm that I am female, it was the least they could do. Good times.
SECURITY GUARD: I say, when did you say that invisibility charm backfired? Only, this photo was taken eight years ago.
SADIE: Oh, that was different. I was married to an Egyptian flying-carpet dealer at the time. This was taken either during our marriage, or during my period of mourning after his favorite Persian unravelled over the Black Sea. Either way, my husband’s religion required...[Gets choked up.]
SECURITY GUARD: [Shuffles awkwardly] I’m so sorry. May I say, you hardly have any accent at all, for a Dutch-Egyptian woman.
SADIE: Why, thank you. I’ve always been good at learning languages. Now may I go up?
SECURITY GUARD: Right this way, Madam Van Bingen.
SADIE: One born every minute....[Whistles a chorus of Que será, será while going up the stairs.]
RECEPTIONIST: I beg your pardon, Madam....?
SADIE: Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher.
RECEPTIONIST: Madam Thatcher, you can’t go in there without an appointment.
SADIE: But I had an appointment for an interview, at two o’clock.
RECEPIONIST: But it’s only...well, I’ll be hexed from here to next week! It’s five to two already! But that’s neither here nor there. You weren’t expected.
SADIE: But I got an owl. Here’s one of its droppings. I’m sorry I don’t have the original memo from Madam Hardbiscuit, but I had to send it back with my acceptance of her offer. Didn’t the owl come?
RECEPTIONIST: I’m sorry, but no one sends owls out of this office except me, and I would remember...
SADIE: Oh, look. The owl is at the window now. [Zaps receptionist with wand when her back is turned.]
RECEPTIONIST: I beg your pardon, Madam Thatcher. Madam Hardbiscuit will be right out to see you. Would you like me to take your veil for you?
SADIE: No, thank you. I got some potion in my eyes this morning. Anyone who looks directly at my eyes turns into a teacup full of tepid Darjeerling. It’s been such a bother wearing it all day, but if you don’t mind...
RECEPTIONIST: Not at all. Not at all. By all means, keep it on. [Uses her wand to pipe her voice into Madam Hardbiscuit’s office] Extremely important caller to see you, Madam.
MADAM HARDBISCUIT: [Coming out of office] Who’s this?
SADIE: I think we had best discuss it in private. [Pushes Madam Hardbiscuit back into her office and closes door.] Now, then, about that job you advertised for in Wizard of Fortune...
M.H.: What job? Who advertised? And who, pray, are you?
SADIE: Eleanor Roosevelt is the name. Before you ask about the veil, I might as well tell you that it was stuck on me with a permanent fixing charm when I was eight years old. Broke my parents’ heart, it did, but I’ve gotten used to it. Now let’s get down to galleons.
M.H.: Excuse me, but I still don’t understand what this is about.
SADIE: [Pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, which in better days was used to wrap cheap tobacco.] That reminds me, do you mind if I smoke?
M.H.: Yes, I do. Aaargh! You mean THAT advert. Wait a moment. [Performs an imperturbable spell on each of the doors, windows, and air ducts in the room.] Now see here, Madam Roosevelt, you can’t just come...
SADIE: Time is of the essence, isn’t it, though?
M.H.: Yes, yes, but this is a PRIVATE matter, a very...
SADIE: No better cover for our meeting than a regular job interview.
M.H.: Well! Erm! Be that as it may, I asked for a very athletic WIZARD, not a...
SADIE: I can give you excellent references. Satisfied customers, outraged victims, baffled coppers...
M.H.: But this is DANGEROUS, and it involves a good deal of swimming, much of it underwater; and it also requires a head for herbology.
SADIE: It’s all in me ray-zoo-may. Learnt everythin’ I know about plants from Miles O’Roughage himself. Certificates in bubble-head snorkeling and underwater apparition.
M.H.: Can you speak Norwegian, then?
SADIE: Tolerably well. Can’t understand a word of it, though. I was a test subject for those language-in-seven-seconds spells, but they never worked both ways for me. The stipend paid my way through tobacco rehab, though.
M.H. All right, you have all the qualifications. But you must never come here again. Take this. [Conjures a thick envelope out of thin air.] It explains what we want, where you can find it, and what to do once you’ve got it. You needn’t open it here...[Sighs as the contents of the envelope pour out on the floor.]
SADIE: [Gawking at a moving picture of a flat, undulating fish.] Crikey! A ripply? Is that what I’m to nick for you, then?
M.H.: No, that’s something you will need to accomplish your mission. As you can see, the ripply almost seems to disappear into the surrounding water as it moves. It’s a combination of its distinctive way of swimming, and the magical skin. Catch enough of those to sew their skins into a wetsuit, and you’ll not only be protected from the cold, but also virtually invisible as you attempt your assignment. I’m sure you can appreciate that, being as obsessed with concealment as you are.
SADIE: I beg your pardon?
M.H.: Never mind. No, your assignment is to penetrate the Hidden Fjord of Haakon Tran. It is well guarded by Haakon’s spells, fierce creatures, and diabolical illusions. Then, come away with at least twenty of these reedy stalks, that grow along the banks of just that one fjord. These are sannheten, highly valued for a potion that enables one to see through disguises and lies.
SADIE: [Shudders.] Why on earth would you want that?
M.H.: That is none of your concern. I could just as easily ask you why you want this job so badly.
SADIE: Well, actually, I just need tobacco money...
M.H.: Very well. Bring me a nice, thick bundle of sannheten, and I will make sure you have enough tobacco to die a happy, though early, death.
SADIE: That’s good enough for me! And when I return from Norway...
M.H.: Don’t be silly. The Hidden Fjord of Haakon Tran is in Scotland.
SADIE: Oh. But aren’t all the fjords in Norway?
M.H.: [Wearily] All but the hidden one, yes. Now if you would be so kind as to disapparate, we can avoid advertising our conspiracy to everyone in the building.
SADIE: But I mean, how will I know where to...?
M.H.: My people will find you, don’t worry. Good day.
And now we rejoin Sadie’s narrative...
“'And that’s my final offer,’ she says, looking so desperate that my heart went out to her. So I says, ‘All right. It goes against my better judgment, but since it’s got to be done, and no one else can do it, you have my word.’”
“Excuse me,” said an assistant healer, shifting from one foot to the other as Sadie’s tale came to the end of a paragraph. “Excuse me, but the patient is starting to talk.”
“Oh!” said Endora, beginning to rise from her seat.
“I will see him alone,” said Harvey, firmly.
“And so will I,” Spanky added. Harvey shrugged, and the two of them followed the assistant healer out of the wating room while Endora sank, sulkily, back into her seat.
“Should I wait until they come back?” Sadie wondered, as she stuffed tobacco into her pipe.
“Bother them,” said Endora. “Keep talking. It keeps my mind off...you know.”
“All right then,” said Sadie. “So as soon as I chivvy her out of my office, the first thing I do is..”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE for The Magic Quill #83 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Under her veil, is Sadie (A) too pretty to be taken seriously as a criminal; (B) too ugly or weird-looking to get away unrecognized; (C) has coarse, mannish features and a bit of a mustache; or (D) looks completely ordinary, but has really sensitive skin.
The CONTEST: Give the name and symptoms of a magical malady or injury.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #83. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 2/10/06]
“The job what made my first fortune,” Sadie began her tale, “didn’t come my way till I had been workin’ in the property transferin’ line for several years. I had worked me way up, like, from charmin’ galleons out of the pockets of patrons at Axel Exum’s Exhibition of Muggle Marvels, and sellin’ unlicensed commemorative earmuffs in the neighborhood of any Nasal Drip concert. Through a combination of steady effort, skill, daring, and a bit of luck, I had earned a solid reputation as one of the most dependable fetchers of hard-to-fetch things in the country. Not that this reputation helped me get along with the Ministry of Magic. Those blokes just don’t understand that rescuin’ valuables from slobs as don’t want ‘em enough to protect ‘em, and givin’ ‘em to folks as want them enough to pay top galleon for ‘em, is as worthy a use of magic as any.
“But apart from them, my business was startin’ to flourish. Clients were comin’ to me, beggin’ me to nick things for ‘em. My share of the take, I mean, my fee went up. I was actually able to get choosy about which jobs to take...”
Actually, what happened was like this....
SECURITY GUARD: Oi. I say! Where do you think you’re going?
SADIE: I have an appointment with Madam Hardbiscuit.
SECURITY GUARD: Not so fast, there. What’s your name?
SADIE: My name? Hildegard Van Bingen. [Wiggles wand concealed in handbag.]
SECURITY GUARD: There ain’t any Dutch witches on the list.
SADIE: Are you sure? [Wiggle, wiggle.]
SECURITY GUARD: I’ve only looked at it ten times to-- Merlin’s beard. Where did that come from?
SADIE: May I go up now?
SECURITY GUARD: Hold on a sec. What’s with the veil?
SADIE: Little mishap last week. Invisibility charm went bad. Made the front half of my head transparent. It’s very icky to look at, but if you’d like...
SECURITY GUARD: No, no. Never mind. Can I at least see some identification?
SADIE: Will this do?
SECURITY GUARD: You wore a veil for your apparition license photo, did you?
SADIE: They didn’t want to allow it, but after strip-searching me to confirm that I am female, it was the least they could do. Good times.
SECURITY GUARD: I say, when did you say that invisibility charm backfired? Only, this photo was taken eight years ago.
SADIE: Oh, that was different. I was married to an Egyptian flying-carpet dealer at the time. This was taken either during our marriage, or during my period of mourning after his favorite Persian unravelled over the Black Sea. Either way, my husband’s religion required...[Gets choked up.]
SECURITY GUARD: [Shuffles awkwardly] I’m so sorry. May I say, you hardly have any accent at all, for a Dutch-Egyptian woman.
SADIE: Why, thank you. I’ve always been good at learning languages. Now may I go up?
SECURITY GUARD: Right this way, Madam Van Bingen.
SADIE: One born every minute....[Whistles a chorus of Que será, será while going up the stairs.]
RECEPTIONIST: I beg your pardon, Madam....?
SADIE: Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher.
RECEPTIONIST: Madam Thatcher, you can’t go in there without an appointment.
SADIE: But I had an appointment for an interview, at two o’clock.
RECEPIONIST: But it’s only...well, I’ll be hexed from here to next week! It’s five to two already! But that’s neither here nor there. You weren’t expected.
SADIE: But I got an owl. Here’s one of its droppings. I’m sorry I don’t have the original memo from Madam Hardbiscuit, but I had to send it back with my acceptance of her offer. Didn’t the owl come?
RECEPTIONIST: I’m sorry, but no one sends owls out of this office except me, and I would remember...
SADIE: Oh, look. The owl is at the window now. [Zaps receptionist with wand when her back is turned.]
RECEPTIONIST: I beg your pardon, Madam Thatcher. Madam Hardbiscuit will be right out to see you. Would you like me to take your veil for you?
SADIE: No, thank you. I got some potion in my eyes this morning. Anyone who looks directly at my eyes turns into a teacup full of tepid Darjeerling. It’s been such a bother wearing it all day, but if you don’t mind...
RECEPTIONIST: Not at all. Not at all. By all means, keep it on. [Uses her wand to pipe her voice into Madam Hardbiscuit’s office] Extremely important caller to see you, Madam.
MADAM HARDBISCUIT: [Coming out of office] Who’s this?
SADIE: I think we had best discuss it in private. [Pushes Madam Hardbiscuit back into her office and closes door.] Now, then, about that job you advertised for in Wizard of Fortune...
M.H.: What job? Who advertised? And who, pray, are you?
SADIE: Eleanor Roosevelt is the name. Before you ask about the veil, I might as well tell you that it was stuck on me with a permanent fixing charm when I was eight years old. Broke my parents’ heart, it did, but I’ve gotten used to it. Now let’s get down to galleons.
M.H.: Excuse me, but I still don’t understand what this is about.
SADIE: [Pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, which in better days was used to wrap cheap tobacco.] That reminds me, do you mind if I smoke?
M.H.: Yes, I do. Aaargh! You mean THAT advert. Wait a moment. [Performs an imperturbable spell on each of the doors, windows, and air ducts in the room.] Now see here, Madam Roosevelt, you can’t just come...
SADIE: Time is of the essence, isn’t it, though?
M.H.: Yes, yes, but this is a PRIVATE matter, a very...
SADIE: No better cover for our meeting than a regular job interview.
M.H.: Well! Erm! Be that as it may, I asked for a very athletic WIZARD, not a...
SADIE: I can give you excellent references. Satisfied customers, outraged victims, baffled coppers...
M.H.: But this is DANGEROUS, and it involves a good deal of swimming, much of it underwater; and it also requires a head for herbology.
SADIE: It’s all in me ray-zoo-may. Learnt everythin’ I know about plants from Miles O’Roughage himself. Certificates in bubble-head snorkeling and underwater apparition.
M.H.: Can you speak Norwegian, then?
SADIE: Tolerably well. Can’t understand a word of it, though. I was a test subject for those language-in-seven-seconds spells, but they never worked both ways for me. The stipend paid my way through tobacco rehab, though.
M.H. All right, you have all the qualifications. But you must never come here again. Take this. [Conjures a thick envelope out of thin air.] It explains what we want, where you can find it, and what to do once you’ve got it. You needn’t open it here...[Sighs as the contents of the envelope pour out on the floor.]
SADIE: [Gawking at a moving picture of a flat, undulating fish.] Crikey! A ripply? Is that what I’m to nick for you, then?
M.H.: No, that’s something you will need to accomplish your mission. As you can see, the ripply almost seems to disappear into the surrounding water as it moves. It’s a combination of its distinctive way of swimming, and the magical skin. Catch enough of those to sew their skins into a wetsuit, and you’ll not only be protected from the cold, but also virtually invisible as you attempt your assignment. I’m sure you can appreciate that, being as obsessed with concealment as you are.
SADIE: I beg your pardon?
M.H.: Never mind. No, your assignment is to penetrate the Hidden Fjord of Haakon Tran. It is well guarded by Haakon’s spells, fierce creatures, and diabolical illusions. Then, come away with at least twenty of these reedy stalks, that grow along the banks of just that one fjord. These are sannheten, highly valued for a potion that enables one to see through disguises and lies.
SADIE: [Shudders.] Why on earth would you want that?
M.H.: That is none of your concern. I could just as easily ask you why you want this job so badly.
SADIE: Well, actually, I just need tobacco money...
M.H.: Very well. Bring me a nice, thick bundle of sannheten, and I will make sure you have enough tobacco to die a happy, though early, death.
SADIE: That’s good enough for me! And when I return from Norway...
M.H.: Don’t be silly. The Hidden Fjord of Haakon Tran is in Scotland.
SADIE: Oh. But aren’t all the fjords in Norway?
M.H.: [Wearily] All but the hidden one, yes. Now if you would be so kind as to disapparate, we can avoid advertising our conspiracy to everyone in the building.
SADIE: But I mean, how will I know where to...?
M.H.: My people will find you, don’t worry. Good day.
And now we rejoin Sadie’s narrative...
“'And that’s my final offer,’ she says, looking so desperate that my heart went out to her. So I says, ‘All right. It goes against my better judgment, but since it’s got to be done, and no one else can do it, you have my word.’”
“Excuse me,” said an assistant healer, shifting from one foot to the other as Sadie’s tale came to the end of a paragraph. “Excuse me, but the patient is starting to talk.”
“Oh!” said Endora, beginning to rise from her seat.
“I will see him alone,” said Harvey, firmly.
“And so will I,” Spanky added. Harvey shrugged, and the two of them followed the assistant healer out of the wating room while Endora sank, sulkily, back into her seat.
“Should I wait until they come back?” Sadie wondered, as she stuffed tobacco into her pipe.
“Bother them,” said Endora. “Keep talking. It keeps my mind off...you know.”
“All right then,” said Sadie. “So as soon as I chivvy her out of my office, the first thing I do is..”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE for The Magic Quill #83 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Under her veil, is Sadie (A) too pretty to be taken seriously as a criminal; (B) too ugly or weird-looking to get away unrecognized; (C) has coarse, mannish features and a bit of a mustache; or (D) looks completely ordinary, but has really sensitive skin.
The CONTEST: Give the name and symptoms of a magical malady or injury.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #83. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 2/10/06]
78. The Thestramule
Contest Winners: Linda Carrig and Shadow Phoenix
“So I said, ‘We’ve been had!’”
With these words, Merlin shook his head and took a long drink from his smoking goblet.
Endora clucked sympathetically. “It’s like a nightmare,” she said. “It keeps goin’ and goin’ around, and you can’t ever get out.”
“Well, thank goodness, he did get out,” said Harvey, mopping his brow with a corner of the handkerchief that covered the lower half of his face. “But before Merlin goes on with his heartbreaking tale, we need to discuss...”
“Oi!” a rude voice interruped. The shabby, bearded proprietor of the pub poked his head around the drapery that usually lent this back parlor a bit of privacy, and studied its occupants with a beady eye.
“I believe the expression you are searching for is, ‘I beg your pardon,’” Harvey suggested mildly.
Ignoring him, the proprietor muttered, “All right, he’s not here, then.”
“Who?” Sadie asked, earning a dig in the ribs from Joe Albuquerque.
“Aye! Just that tallish, gamekeeper chap from up at the school. Somebody’s thestramule found its way onto the roof, and I’m guessing whose.”
“What’s a thestramule?” Joe wondered as the proprietor’s shaggy head withdrew.
“It’s what you get when a male thestral sneaks up on an unsuspecting female unicorn,” said Endora, blushing. “They’re meant to be very rare outside of the Forbidden Forest. They can’t reproduce themselves...”
“I’d like to have a look at that,” said Joe, and a moment later the parlor was empty. Last to leave was Sadie, who was careful to drain every goblet.
A small crowd had gathered outside the Hog’s Head and were gazing up at the top of the crooked building. Heads in nightcaps craned out of the upstairs windows. But only those who had alcohol in their blood could see the strange creature that perched restlessly among the chimneys.
Sadie gasped when she saw it. Tears came to Endora’s eyes. Merlin took off his funny glasses with the fake nose and mustache, and squinted upward with puzzlement while wiping the lenses on a corner of his cloak. Spanky licked the tip of a pencil and began sketching the animal in a small notebook that he always carried. Joe scratched his head, his mouth agape, like many of the other wizards in the crowd. Only Harvey seemed interested in other things – most notably, a bright-orange feather on the ground a few yards away.
The thestramule shuffled nervously. It clearly did not like being looked at by such a crowd of people. But they couldn’t help it. It isn’t every day one sees a horse-like creature with a shiny, rose-colored coat. Its body seemed powerful and delicate at the same time, all lean muscle stretched across graceful bones. Instead of a horn, its forehead was marked with a carrot-shaped streak of pure white which somehow changed position as the thestramule moved its head. In fact, all thestramules had such marks, and they always pointed due north. But most remarkable of all were the creature’s vast wings – covered not with feathers, but with a smooth, suede-like skin covered with a thin, pinkish down.
The sound of a glass bottle shattering on the cobblestones startled everyone. A voice swore that it would never touch the stuff again. Looking round, Merlin saw Harvey stooping to pick up the orange feather.
“That didn’t come from the beast up there,” Merlin said, when Harvey straightened up and showed him what he had found.
“No,” said Harvey. “I believe someone charmed wings onto a carrot. Then they let the carrot fly away, but it lost this feather.”
“Who would do such a daft thing?” Endora snorted.
Sadie looked away awkwardly, and whistled. The rest of the group turned on her suspiciously.
“Don’t be silly,” cried Joe. “Sadie was with us the whole evening.”
“And I doubt that even her mate Miles O’Roughage would do this,” Harvey announced. Sadie blushed as Harvey continued, “The winged carrot was meant to lure the thestramule up onto the roof. But why?”
The answer came suddenly. A gasp arose from the crowd as a soot-blackened figure emerged from the largest chimney atop the Hog’s Head – cloaked, hooded, and hauling a sack that clanked loudly, as if filled with bottles of firewhisky. Once free of the chimney, the figure staggered, nearly fell off the roof (wringing another gasp from the crowd), and then waved a carrot in front of the face of the uneasy, winged mule.
“Why doesn’t it just fly off?” Endora moaned, wringing her hands. “They aren’t meant to like men, are they?”
“There are three things you should know about thestramules,” said Harvey. “For one, they are stubborn. For another, they are quite stupid and poor judges of character...”
“To say nothing of a poor judge of sex,” Sadie added under her breath.
“I suppose they prefer the company of the cripplingly drunk,” Joe speculated.
“And worst of all,” Harvey concluded, “they will do anything for a carrot.”
Crippled or not, the mysterious figure on the roof was now clambering onto the back of the thestramule, which was contentedly munching its carrot.
“He must be drunk to fly on that thing,” Merlin observed with awe.
“That’s exactly so,” Spanky said knowledgeably. “Once he starts to sober up, he will no longer be able to see the thestramule. At that point he might fall off the creature’s back. Or at least, he won’t be able to tell his direction by the thestramule’s carrot mark.”
“That would explain all the bottles the blighter is nicking from my pub!” screamed the proprietor of the Hog’s Head, running outside to join the crowd. “Stop thief!”
A lot of wands came out just then, and many in the crowd were momentarily blinded by a barrage of flashing spells. But in the confusion, the thestramule and its larcenous passenger had gotten away.
“What was the point of all that?” Joe grumbled. “Just to stop someone nicking a few bottles of the cheapest, blended firewhisky this side of Inverness?”
“Do you think I care about the drink?” the innkeeper growled.
“Besides,” observed Sadie, “who in his right mind would go to so much trouble to nick that?”
“Then what seems to be the problem?” Harvey asked, with an air of authority that made all around him feel suddenly calm and ready for action.
“The firewhisky was just something the burglar needed to make his getaway,” Spanky said. “It was a means to an end.”
“What was the end, then?” Harvey turned toward the proprietor. “What did that thief come for?”
“Something my late brother entrusted to me,” the innkeeper barked, almost dancing with impatience. “This is no time to give me the third degree. Has anybody got a broom? They might still catch him!”
“I’ve got one,” said Merlin, and he muttered a summoning charm.
“Of course he does,” Sadie snorted, remembering the Iwixarod.
Endora grabbed Merlin’s arm and gazed into his bespectacled eyes. “Don’t go,” she said. “You mustn’t fly drunk.”
“If I don’t, I’ll never be able to see that thestramule,” Merlin said wisely. By now his broom had arrived, and off he flew.
The street grew quiet after that, and the crowd began to disperse.
“Well, that throws our agenda right out the window,” Harvey sighed. He gathered the other members of his group with a glance and said, “Let’s meet here again next week.”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR #80 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form.
To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum.
The SURVEY: Which member of Harvey’s “club” will start to tell their story now?
The CONTEST: Describe the magical OBJECT that someone has stolen from the proprietor of the Hog’s Head. Just one restriction: it must NOT be a horcrux.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in The Magic Quill #80. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 1/19/06]
“So I said, ‘We’ve been had!’”
With these words, Merlin shook his head and took a long drink from his smoking goblet.
Endora clucked sympathetically. “It’s like a nightmare,” she said. “It keeps goin’ and goin’ around, and you can’t ever get out.”
“Well, thank goodness, he did get out,” said Harvey, mopping his brow with a corner of the handkerchief that covered the lower half of his face. “But before Merlin goes on with his heartbreaking tale, we need to discuss...”
“Oi!” a rude voice interruped. The shabby, bearded proprietor of the pub poked his head around the drapery that usually lent this back parlor a bit of privacy, and studied its occupants with a beady eye.
“I believe the expression you are searching for is, ‘I beg your pardon,’” Harvey suggested mildly.
Ignoring him, the proprietor muttered, “All right, he’s not here, then.”
“Who?” Sadie asked, earning a dig in the ribs from Joe Albuquerque.
“Aye! Just that tallish, gamekeeper chap from up at the school. Somebody’s thestramule found its way onto the roof, and I’m guessing whose.”
“What’s a thestramule?” Joe wondered as the proprietor’s shaggy head withdrew.
“It’s what you get when a male thestral sneaks up on an unsuspecting female unicorn,” said Endora, blushing. “They’re meant to be very rare outside of the Forbidden Forest. They can’t reproduce themselves...”
“I’d like to have a look at that,” said Joe, and a moment later the parlor was empty. Last to leave was Sadie, who was careful to drain every goblet.
A small crowd had gathered outside the Hog’s Head and were gazing up at the top of the crooked building. Heads in nightcaps craned out of the upstairs windows. But only those who had alcohol in their blood could see the strange creature that perched restlessly among the chimneys.
Sadie gasped when she saw it. Tears came to Endora’s eyes. Merlin took off his funny glasses with the fake nose and mustache, and squinted upward with puzzlement while wiping the lenses on a corner of his cloak. Spanky licked the tip of a pencil and began sketching the animal in a small notebook that he always carried. Joe scratched his head, his mouth agape, like many of the other wizards in the crowd. Only Harvey seemed interested in other things – most notably, a bright-orange feather on the ground a few yards away.
The thestramule shuffled nervously. It clearly did not like being looked at by such a crowd of people. But they couldn’t help it. It isn’t every day one sees a horse-like creature with a shiny, rose-colored coat. Its body seemed powerful and delicate at the same time, all lean muscle stretched across graceful bones. Instead of a horn, its forehead was marked with a carrot-shaped streak of pure white which somehow changed position as the thestramule moved its head. In fact, all thestramules had such marks, and they always pointed due north. But most remarkable of all were the creature’s vast wings – covered not with feathers, but with a smooth, suede-like skin covered with a thin, pinkish down.
The sound of a glass bottle shattering on the cobblestones startled everyone. A voice swore that it would never touch the stuff again. Looking round, Merlin saw Harvey stooping to pick up the orange feather.
“That didn’t come from the beast up there,” Merlin said, when Harvey straightened up and showed him what he had found.
“No,” said Harvey. “I believe someone charmed wings onto a carrot. Then they let the carrot fly away, but it lost this feather.”
“Who would do such a daft thing?” Endora snorted.
Sadie looked away awkwardly, and whistled. The rest of the group turned on her suspiciously.
“Don’t be silly,” cried Joe. “Sadie was with us the whole evening.”
“And I doubt that even her mate Miles O’Roughage would do this,” Harvey announced. Sadie blushed as Harvey continued, “The winged carrot was meant to lure the thestramule up onto the roof. But why?”
The answer came suddenly. A gasp arose from the crowd as a soot-blackened figure emerged from the largest chimney atop the Hog’s Head – cloaked, hooded, and hauling a sack that clanked loudly, as if filled with bottles of firewhisky. Once free of the chimney, the figure staggered, nearly fell off the roof (wringing another gasp from the crowd), and then waved a carrot in front of the face of the uneasy, winged mule.
“Why doesn’t it just fly off?” Endora moaned, wringing her hands. “They aren’t meant to like men, are they?”
“There are three things you should know about thestramules,” said Harvey. “For one, they are stubborn. For another, they are quite stupid and poor judges of character...”
“To say nothing of a poor judge of sex,” Sadie added under her breath.
“I suppose they prefer the company of the cripplingly drunk,” Joe speculated.
“And worst of all,” Harvey concluded, “they will do anything for a carrot.”
Crippled or not, the mysterious figure on the roof was now clambering onto the back of the thestramule, which was contentedly munching its carrot.
“He must be drunk to fly on that thing,” Merlin observed with awe.
“That’s exactly so,” Spanky said knowledgeably. “Once he starts to sober up, he will no longer be able to see the thestramule. At that point he might fall off the creature’s back. Or at least, he won’t be able to tell his direction by the thestramule’s carrot mark.”
“That would explain all the bottles the blighter is nicking from my pub!” screamed the proprietor of the Hog’s Head, running outside to join the crowd. “Stop thief!”
A lot of wands came out just then, and many in the crowd were momentarily blinded by a barrage of flashing spells. But in the confusion, the thestramule and its larcenous passenger had gotten away.
“What was the point of all that?” Joe grumbled. “Just to stop someone nicking a few bottles of the cheapest, blended firewhisky this side of Inverness?”
“Do you think I care about the drink?” the innkeeper growled.
“Besides,” observed Sadie, “who in his right mind would go to so much trouble to nick that?”
“Then what seems to be the problem?” Harvey asked, with an air of authority that made all around him feel suddenly calm and ready for action.
“The firewhisky was just something the burglar needed to make his getaway,” Spanky said. “It was a means to an end.”
“What was the end, then?” Harvey turned toward the proprietor. “What did that thief come for?”
“Something my late brother entrusted to me,” the innkeeper barked, almost dancing with impatience. “This is no time to give me the third degree. Has anybody got a broom? They might still catch him!”
“I’ve got one,” said Merlin, and he muttered a summoning charm.
“Of course he does,” Sadie snorted, remembering the Iwixarod.
Endora grabbed Merlin’s arm and gazed into his bespectacled eyes. “Don’t go,” she said. “You mustn’t fly drunk.”
“If I don’t, I’ll never be able to see that thestramule,” Merlin said wisely. By now his broom had arrived, and off he flew.
The street grew quiet after that, and the crowd began to disperse.
“Well, that throws our agenda right out the window,” Harvey sighed. He gathered the other members of his group with a glance and said, “Let’s meet here again next week.”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR #80 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form.
To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum.
The SURVEY: Which member of Harvey’s “club” will start to tell their story now?
The CONTEST: Describe the magical OBJECT that someone has stolen from the proprietor of the Hog’s Head. Just one restriction: it must NOT be a horcrux.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in The Magic Quill #80. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 1/19/06]
Monday, December 22, 2008
52. Smart Food
Concepts Contributed by: Jack Blanton
Spanky found himself, once again, poking around on the skirts of the Forbidden Forest, within hailing distance of Hogsmeade. “Curious,” he muttered to himself, as he followed several sets of tire marks that seemed to go in parallel gorups of three. “The tricycles must be bigger than I remembered. And what’s this?”
He stooped to examine a burn mark on a long tussock of grass. “I don’t remember them being motorized,” he mused aloud. “Could they be growing?”
“Perhaps they’re not the same ones,” answered an unexpected voice nearby.
Spanky jumped. His face reddened as, too late, the relief of recognition set in. “You gave me a bit of start,” he said to his companion.
“Did I?” Harvey said coolly as he tucked in the last corner of the handkerchief that concealed the lower part of his face.
“But other than the size,” Spanky added, indicating the tracks in a patch of mud, “the tread marks are very similar to the ones I found on my cloak after last week’s, er, accident.”
“One never runs out of puzzles and mysteries to ponder,” said Harvey. “At least, that is so if one never gives up on solving them. And you strike me as a man who must always be solving something.”
“I have spent so much time working puzzles until now,” said Spanky, “that it hardly seems possible to break the habit.”
“And what, besides the provenance of these tracks in the mud, is puzzling you right now?” Harvey asked, and in an odd way he already seemed to know the answer.
Spanky shrugged and turned back up toward the high street. “I suppose I’m just anxious to know what you want with all of us.”
“Oh, that,” said Harvey with a vague chuckle. “In due time, Mr. – do I call you Spankison or, whatsit, Dandruff Baldric...?”
“Spankison will do,” Spanky said, almost snappishly. “I was always Spanky to my friends, all the way back to the primary school days on Mr. Niblet’s manor. And my father was called Spanky too, so it’s as much my real name as that absurd thing on the parish registry. Whenever a head pops up in my fireplace and asks for Mister or Missus Ethelbaldricson, I know the head is attached to some vile peddler in Knockturn Alley, and I close the grate on him.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Harvey replied absently, half his mind deciding that it might not be too late to halt plans to use Floo Powder communication to solicit business for some of his concerns. “And how is Mrs. Spankison these days, then?”
“More beautiful than ever,” Spanky said with an oddly bashful grin.
“It’s too bad about your children, though, isn’t it?”
Spanky looked startled and offended. “How did you know about that?”
Harvey hastened to pacify him. “I do my own share of sleuthing, dear man. I meant no harm, truly. I believe you have nearly found a way to break the curse, at any rate?”
“It’s nearly under control,” said Spanky. “It’s the sort of thing you have to expect when their mother has been in the strange places she has.”
“Yes, indeed. I am dying to hear what you have to say about that.”
“Just as I am dying to hear about our mission together,” Spanky retorted. “You have a gift for evasion.”
“It’s a necessity in my career,” said Harvey. “Trust me, if I were to tell you more than you need to know at any given time, you would be faced with a choice that I would rather spare you. One day you will thank me for parceling out the information in this way.”
“That remains--” Spanky began, but he was startled again by a hoarse yet piercing shout nearby:
“Oy, there! Walk up and sample the very latest revolution in victuals! Be among the first to try SMART FOOD!”
“Oh, dear,” Harvey groaned. The two men rounded a corner and found Sadie, veil and all, standing at a booth on the pavement, pressing tins on passersby—tins that poured forth murky smoke that smelled equally of overcooked cabbage, turpentine, and ozone. The veiled witch nodded politely at her acquaintances and then resumed bawling at the top of her harsh voice:
“Straight from the newly-rebuilt dungeon laboratory of Wizard Miles O’Roughage, what burnt down under most mysterious circumstances after being struck by thirty-four bolts of lightning in the space of an hour! Try it—it tastes better than it smells! In fact, it tastes like whatever you fancy having right now! That’s the beauty of it, mates! Dr. O’Roughage specially cur-...hem. I mean, charmed each and every tin to respond to the subtlest variations in your tastebuds, memories, and desires to taste exactly like your heart’s desire. Plus, it gives you the exact nutrition your body needs, no more, no less; and the last spoonful leaves you feeling pleasantly full.”
As a dirty-faced child walked away from Sadie clutching an armload of sample tins, Harvey made a sign to Spanky. The latter slipped off after the child and sent him home, tearful and emptyhanded, but better off in the long run no doubt.
Meanwhile, a passerby who had stopped to try a tin had begun complaining. “Look here, witch,” said the stooped wizard. “This tinned what- have-you won’t stand still. Every time I poke my fork at it, it dodges out of the way. What do you mean by it?”
“Er,” Sadie stammered. “Perhaps a few wrinkles have to be smoothed out, yet.”
“I daresay your friend Miles made the food a bit too smart,” Harvey quipped. The crowd around the booth tittered. Even through her nearly opaque veil, Sadie’s glower was meant to turn Harvey to stone. Instead he added, “I know what to do. Let’s give some of it to that mangy old cat and see what comes of it. Perhaps the cat can catch it.”
The cat, though nimble for its years, had enough difficulty catching the lump of what looked like gray aspic that kept wiggling around on the pavement. The crowd gapsed, giggled, gossiped, and minced out of the way of the cat and the aspic until a final pounce ended the chase.
“Oh, dear,” said Harvey, after the cat had belched and turned into a slightly spoiled haddock. “That would seem to be another wrinkle; the food doesn’t know when to stop changing itself.”
“That gives fresh life to the words, ‘You are what you eat,’ that does,” sneered a portly witch, as the crowd dispersed. Some of them, in departing, dropped the sample tins they had been given. Others more or less threw them at Sadie, who sheltered herself behind the booth. “Take care!” she rasped. “If that gets on my skin, I’m done for!”
“You would be well served,” Harvey said, vanishing the stand and all the tins with an angry twirl of his wand.
“I think it’s rather good, actually,” said a hag (this time Harvey jumped in surprise). The hag smacked her lips and crushing up her empty tin. “I’ll give you eight shrunken heads for a gross of them.”
“Enough of this,” Spanky said, pushing up the sleeve of his cloak up to his elbow to reveal an RMB armband. The hag stomped away disgruntled.
“You came back in the very nick,” Harvey said, patting Spanky on the shoulder. “Now, my dear Ms. Sadie, I perceive that you are very upset, but I won’t apologize for spoiling your business venture. Take it from one who knows, it never pays to sell a product that can go so wrong so quickly. Why, suppose someone had turned into a steak-and-kidney pie, right there in front of everyone; you would have been finished! Don’t you agree?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Sadie said with a very painful-looking smile, then followed the two men toward the Hog’s Head muttering something that sounded like, “Interfering busybodies...”
“We’re quite early for tonight’s symposium,” Harvey observed as the gory pub sign hove into view. “I don’t suppose there’s much chance of the others arriving so early. I wonder what we shall do until Merlin comes, when he can continue his interesting story.”
“I’d like to hear more from him,” Sadie grumbled, with a sullen nod toward Spanky.
Spanky pretended to be taken aback. “What more is there to hear?”
The dark, dingy, greasy interior of the Hog’s Head public room enveloped them. Cloaked, masked, and veiled faces looked up briefly from their whispered conversations and brooding, solitary drinks. The proprietor scowled and slammed three empty goblets on the bar, looking as if the new customers were the next-to-last misfortune he could possibly bear.
“Well,” Harvey said cheerfully, surveying the pub as if he owned it. “I, for one, am eager to hear your account of how you located your beloved Ilona...”
[Originally posted 5/27/05]
Spanky found himself, once again, poking around on the skirts of the Forbidden Forest, within hailing distance of Hogsmeade. “Curious,” he muttered to himself, as he followed several sets of tire marks that seemed to go in parallel gorups of three. “The tricycles must be bigger than I remembered. And what’s this?”
He stooped to examine a burn mark on a long tussock of grass. “I don’t remember them being motorized,” he mused aloud. “Could they be growing?”
“Perhaps they’re not the same ones,” answered an unexpected voice nearby.
Spanky jumped. His face reddened as, too late, the relief of recognition set in. “You gave me a bit of start,” he said to his companion.
“Did I?” Harvey said coolly as he tucked in the last corner of the handkerchief that concealed the lower part of his face.
“But other than the size,” Spanky added, indicating the tracks in a patch of mud, “the tread marks are very similar to the ones I found on my cloak after last week’s, er, accident.”
“One never runs out of puzzles and mysteries to ponder,” said Harvey. “At least, that is so if one never gives up on solving them. And you strike me as a man who must always be solving something.”
“I have spent so much time working puzzles until now,” said Spanky, “that it hardly seems possible to break the habit.”
“And what, besides the provenance of these tracks in the mud, is puzzling you right now?” Harvey asked, and in an odd way he already seemed to know the answer.
Spanky shrugged and turned back up toward the high street. “I suppose I’m just anxious to know what you want with all of us.”
“Oh, that,” said Harvey with a vague chuckle. “In due time, Mr. – do I call you Spankison or, whatsit, Dandruff Baldric...?”
“Spankison will do,” Spanky said, almost snappishly. “I was always Spanky to my friends, all the way back to the primary school days on Mr. Niblet’s manor. And my father was called Spanky too, so it’s as much my real name as that absurd thing on the parish registry. Whenever a head pops up in my fireplace and asks for Mister or Missus Ethelbaldricson, I know the head is attached to some vile peddler in Knockturn Alley, and I close the grate on him.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Harvey replied absently, half his mind deciding that it might not be too late to halt plans to use Floo Powder communication to solicit business for some of his concerns. “And how is Mrs. Spankison these days, then?”
“More beautiful than ever,” Spanky said with an oddly bashful grin.
“It’s too bad about your children, though, isn’t it?”
Spanky looked startled and offended. “How did you know about that?”
Harvey hastened to pacify him. “I do my own share of sleuthing, dear man. I meant no harm, truly. I believe you have nearly found a way to break the curse, at any rate?”
“It’s nearly under control,” said Spanky. “It’s the sort of thing you have to expect when their mother has been in the strange places she has.”
“Yes, indeed. I am dying to hear what you have to say about that.”
“Just as I am dying to hear about our mission together,” Spanky retorted. “You have a gift for evasion.”
“It’s a necessity in my career,” said Harvey. “Trust me, if I were to tell you more than you need to know at any given time, you would be faced with a choice that I would rather spare you. One day you will thank me for parceling out the information in this way.”
“That remains--” Spanky began, but he was startled again by a hoarse yet piercing shout nearby:
“Oy, there! Walk up and sample the very latest revolution in victuals! Be among the first to try SMART FOOD!”
“Oh, dear,” Harvey groaned. The two men rounded a corner and found Sadie, veil and all, standing at a booth on the pavement, pressing tins on passersby—tins that poured forth murky smoke that smelled equally of overcooked cabbage, turpentine, and ozone. The veiled witch nodded politely at her acquaintances and then resumed bawling at the top of her harsh voice:
“Straight from the newly-rebuilt dungeon laboratory of Wizard Miles O’Roughage, what burnt down under most mysterious circumstances after being struck by thirty-four bolts of lightning in the space of an hour! Try it—it tastes better than it smells! In fact, it tastes like whatever you fancy having right now! That’s the beauty of it, mates! Dr. O’Roughage specially cur-...hem. I mean, charmed each and every tin to respond to the subtlest variations in your tastebuds, memories, and desires to taste exactly like your heart’s desire. Plus, it gives you the exact nutrition your body needs, no more, no less; and the last spoonful leaves you feeling pleasantly full.”
As a dirty-faced child walked away from Sadie clutching an armload of sample tins, Harvey made a sign to Spanky. The latter slipped off after the child and sent him home, tearful and emptyhanded, but better off in the long run no doubt.
Meanwhile, a passerby who had stopped to try a tin had begun complaining. “Look here, witch,” said the stooped wizard. “This tinned what- have-you won’t stand still. Every time I poke my fork at it, it dodges out of the way. What do you mean by it?”
“Er,” Sadie stammered. “Perhaps a few wrinkles have to be smoothed out, yet.”
“I daresay your friend Miles made the food a bit too smart,” Harvey quipped. The crowd around the booth tittered. Even through her nearly opaque veil, Sadie’s glower was meant to turn Harvey to stone. Instead he added, “I know what to do. Let’s give some of it to that mangy old cat and see what comes of it. Perhaps the cat can catch it.”
The cat, though nimble for its years, had enough difficulty catching the lump of what looked like gray aspic that kept wiggling around on the pavement. The crowd gapsed, giggled, gossiped, and minced out of the way of the cat and the aspic until a final pounce ended the chase.
“Oh, dear,” said Harvey, after the cat had belched and turned into a slightly spoiled haddock. “That would seem to be another wrinkle; the food doesn’t know when to stop changing itself.”
“That gives fresh life to the words, ‘You are what you eat,’ that does,” sneered a portly witch, as the crowd dispersed. Some of them, in departing, dropped the sample tins they had been given. Others more or less threw them at Sadie, who sheltered herself behind the booth. “Take care!” she rasped. “If that gets on my skin, I’m done for!”
“You would be well served,” Harvey said, vanishing the stand and all the tins with an angry twirl of his wand.
“I think it’s rather good, actually,” said a hag (this time Harvey jumped in surprise). The hag smacked her lips and crushing up her empty tin. “I’ll give you eight shrunken heads for a gross of them.”
“Enough of this,” Spanky said, pushing up the sleeve of his cloak up to his elbow to reveal an RMB armband. The hag stomped away disgruntled.
“You came back in the very nick,” Harvey said, patting Spanky on the shoulder. “Now, my dear Ms. Sadie, I perceive that you are very upset, but I won’t apologize for spoiling your business venture. Take it from one who knows, it never pays to sell a product that can go so wrong so quickly. Why, suppose someone had turned into a steak-and-kidney pie, right there in front of everyone; you would have been finished! Don’t you agree?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Sadie said with a very painful-looking smile, then followed the two men toward the Hog’s Head muttering something that sounded like, “Interfering busybodies...”
“We’re quite early for tonight’s symposium,” Harvey observed as the gory pub sign hove into view. “I don’t suppose there’s much chance of the others arriving so early. I wonder what we shall do until Merlin comes, when he can continue his interesting story.”
“I’d like to hear more from him,” Sadie grumbled, with a sullen nod toward Spanky.
Spanky pretended to be taken aback. “What more is there to hear?”
The dark, dingy, greasy interior of the Hog’s Head public room enveloped them. Cloaked, masked, and veiled faces looked up briefly from their whispered conversations and brooding, solitary drinks. The proprietor scowled and slammed three empty goblets on the bar, looking as if the new customers were the next-to-last misfortune he could possibly bear.
“Well,” Harvey said cheerfully, surveying the pub as if he owned it. “I, for one, am eager to hear your account of how you located your beloved Ilona...”
[Originally posted 5/27/05]
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