"Grand Prize" contest winners: voldymortus, jatibbal, zanaboo
Honorable mentions: i6uuaq, Norman Greene, pdhorner, swing667, dele, PotterPig, TWZRD, _houdini, charlottexgf, theotherminister, Dragonic, Poet, and rory86
The group of thinly disguised witches and wizards muttered to each other around the dingy parlor table. Once again, their leader was missing.
“I went by The Drains this morning,” said Joe Albuquerque, who was disguised as a Japanese tourist. “The doorman hasn’t seen him since Christmas. I tried to peek through the windows, but they were on screensaver mode.”
“What’s that?” Endora said while digging under her fake nose to scratch her real one.
“Tinted pitch black, covered by an unbreakable charm, and locked by the sort of spell that only a password can open.”
“Curious,” said Merlin, noticing the uneasy look that passed between Endora and Spanky.
“Then it’s a good job I found this note,” Sadie said cheerfully, pulling a thin, tightly rolled strip of paper out from under her veil — Endora shuddered to think where it had been hidden — and unrolling it between her agile hands.
“It says — ahem — ‘Esteemed colleagues, please be patient during my extended absence. I am deeply embarrassed to confess that my erstwhile mishap involving a waterfall, a crystal cave, and a hag wearing a tooth-studded vest has happened again. Though I do not think it will take long to escape, there are other things I must do before I can join you again. Until then, please continue to gather at the usual time and place, and amuse yourselves as you see fit. I hope that I can soon furnish you with a means of following my exploits. Yours in fellowship, H.’”
“Well, that leaves us nothing to do except drink and swap stories,” Joe said wistfully, though perhaps owing to the unfamiliarity of his new disguise, he looked oddly elated by the prospect. “Where were we last time?”
“I had just finished telling mine,” said Merlin. “There’s nothing else to tell about except odd jobs and broomstick races.”
“No, thank you,” Sadie muttered, rolling her eyes.
“I still don’t think we’ve heard all of Spanky’s story,” Endora chirped. “The last bit I can remember had to do with the night Harry Potter was born.”
“Oh, yes!” said Sadie enthusiastically. “That was when you located Ilona. Did you marry her right away?”
“Was it a lovely wedding?” Endora gushed.
“Were there any werewolves on the guest list?” Merlin suggested.
“Give,” said Joe, with an ironic flick of his eyebrow.
“All right!” Spanky cried, gesturing for peace with both hands. Then, after tugging his hood forward, he resumed his long-suspended tale with a sigh.
“After all the commotion with the Death Eaters, and the genie, and Harry’s birth, and so on, we were all questioned by Aurors and checked out by healers, and then there was a bit of cleaning up. By this time I had realized my mistake, in telling the genie that I wished to see Ilona again. No one else could see her; it was as if she existed for me alone. Had I been able to tell anyone that I could see her, they would have thought me mad; but some freak accident thwarted my every attempt to explain that Ilona was right there. A colossal thunderclap would come out of the clear sky, or a rack of pots and pans would come off the kitchen wall, or if I tried to sign it, a gust of wind would blow through the room and put out all the lamps.”
One of the oil lamps on the parlor wall flickered as if in sympathy with Spanky’s tale. He coughed and went on:
“I tried to write to Ilona’s parents about finding her, and wanting to marry her, but every time I got to that point in my letter, either the quill would drop a massive ink blot covering an entire paragraph, or a spark from the fireplace would ignite the page, or a draft would blow it out the window. Once, when I had done everything in my power to prevent these things from happening, I had actually finished the letter and was about to tie it to my owl’s leg when a huge bat flew down from the rafters and snatched it out of my hand.”
“The owl’s leg?” Endora gasped.
“No, the letter,” snapped Merlin, smacking the back of Endora’s head.
“My brother Festus,” said Sadie, “once tried to compete with the Owl Post Service, only using bats instead of owls.” She shook her head grimly.
“What happened?” asked Spanky, momentarily dropping the thread of his story.
“Turns out owls are a bit higher on the food chain,” Sadie said, and left it at that.
Before Spanky could question her further, Joe cut in: “At any rate, you were saying...?”
Spanky shook his head, shrugged, and continued: “It was a problem. We couldn’t get legally married. No one would license us to marry without seeing proof of the bride’s existence. Family, friends, ministers, judges — none of them could see her or hear her. We couldn’t even declare ourselves married, because there was no way to explain Ilona’s condition. The problem wasn’t merely making people believe, but even getting them to understand what was going on.
“Ilona didn’t want to start living together without getting married, but ever since the Owlympics she had been lonelier than a ghost. No one could see her, hear her, or detect her presence in any way; it was a miracle that she survived at all. Now, at least, one person recognized that she was there. It was the only way she could live. So we wrote out our vows on parchment — knowing that if anyone tried to read it, the parchment would probably crumble into pieces — signed and dated it, and sealed it with an ensorcelled wafer, ensuring that it could not be opened until after Ilona was freed from the djinn curse. From that time on, we considered ourselves married, and I was even able to speak of her as my wife, so long as I didn’t try to explain her whereabouts.”
Endora raised her hand tentatively. “So your marriage...”
“Wasn’t a matter of public record until after our Gringotts caper, when the third djinn finally removed the curse,” said Spanky. “That’s when the scroll was unsealed, and the Hogsmeade magistrate officially made our marriage license retroactive to the date we signed the scroll. You can’t imagine how many difficulties this has cleared up...our children’s schools, healers, neighbors...but never mind that now. The Potters had Harry, and Ilona and I had each other, and even though the times were pretty dangerous, we were all very happy.
“My supervisors at the RMB noted the improvement in my behavior, and I was allowed to return to full duty for the first time since the Owlympics. This made our living situation a bit more comfortable. Even better was when Ilona found out that, by leaving anonymous tips, she could continue battling dark magic, and was especially effective in ‘undercover’ situations because nobody could tell that she was there. This didn’t bring in any income, but she did it because she felt it was right. The RMB is only now recognizing how much she has done for them all these years.”
“Wow,” breathed Sadie. “But...er...what does this have to do with...?”
The dark hood turned slowly toward her, and Sadie gulped.
“What I mean is, do go on,” she said in a rush.
“My first RMB assignment following the Godric’s Hollow incident was the one that eventually put me on the trail of a Death Eater who planned to make Harry Potter’s first Christmas his last. I was put in charge of security for the British entrant in that year’s All-Europe Wizarding Garden Contest. The contestants were generally very wealthy, very fussy, very determined to win — and very concerned about their competitors spying on them, stealing their ideas, or sabotaging their gardens.
“That year, the British champion happened to be my old friend, Sir Lionel Niblet. I was already very familiar with his grounds, having played on them and even worked on them during my youth. I knew that half of my job would be easy: I wouldn’t have to work very hard to keep Sir Lionel out of trouble. Most of the RMB agents working the contest spent so much time keeping tabs on their hosts that the gardens mostly had to protect themselves. But Sir Lionel was a fair player, and his gardens had a good deal of protection of their own. So at first, the assignment looked like a pleasant vacation, even a honeymoon.”
“What kind of protection?” Merlin asked, before Joe could say, “And then what?”
“There were screaming gargoyles at intervals around the perimeter, and fence fungus that grew all over the walls around Sir Lionel’s prize garden.”
“Fence fungus?” asked Endora.
“When crushed, it gives off a gas that puts intruders to sleep,” said Spanky. “Also, they had stone scaregnomes, and flowers that sprayed an anti-pest venom, and medusa nettle hedges— ”
“I’ve seen those,” said Sadie, bitterly. “Stinging, clinging little gits, once they get a hold of you, only the voice of their owner will induce them to let go.”
“Very good deterrent for intruders,” Spanky agreed. “My favorite, though, were the pirate frogs that guarded the freshwater oysters and their transparent pearls. Any would-be pearl thief had only to hear the pirate frogs’ distinctive croak, which sounds closer to ‘Shiver me, shiver me, timbers, timbers’ than ‘Ribbit, ribbit,’ and he would run for dear life.”
“I thought pirate frogs were a garden pest,” Merlin remarked.
“Only if you don’t pay them tribute,” Spanky argued. “Then they plunder and pillage every flowerbed in sight. But throw a few galleons into their pond now and then, and they come over to your side. Good at pest control, too. After the pirate frogs moved in, he never had to spray against coin beetles.”
“What beetles?” Endora demanded, digging in her ear. “I thought you said coin beetles.”
“Beastly insects,” Spanky went on. “They were destroying Sir Lionel’s money tree.”
Sadie coughed up a mouthful of firewhisky.
“This even I’ve never heard of,” she wheezed, an awed gleam in her eye.
“They’re not as good as they sound,” Joe assured her knowledgeably. “All they do is exchange money; they don’t create it.”
“Exactly,” said Spanky. “If you need to change galleons into sickles, or wizard money into Muggle money, all you have to do is fertilize the tree with money, then pick the fruit and open it up and — voila! — the equivalent amount of whatever kind of currency you want is inside. Money trees give a much better exchange rate than goblins, but they’re hard on the soil and they suffer from a lot of pests, such as the spendthrift vine, embezzleworms, and inflationary fungus. They’re also very difficult to graft, so they’re close to extinction.”
“Where does this Niblet character live again?” Sadie asked with studied innocence.
Spanky ignored her. “There were a lot of rare treasures in that garden, a lot of good reasons for all that protection. Sir Lionel had one of the few Dentistrees ever found on British soil. He used to let the village children chew on its leaves, which did more for our dental health than monthly visits to the dentist would have. He had a Valenvine, which every year on the fourteenth of February produced a crop of chocolate-covered cordial cherries. He had a Truffle Bush, distantly related to the Whomping Willow, that was trained to dig up truffles, and a Flowsha Bush whose cuttings mimicked the favorite flower of anyone who looked at them.
“Sir Lionel always said the key to a harmonious and well-tended garden was to have the plants themselves do most of the tending. So he had spent decades cultivating self-fertilizing rosebushes, self-weeding aspidistras, self-trimming grass, and even a rare variety of self-filling fairy-feeder that, unlike the common type, didn’t actually eat the fairies. It was also a terribly comfortable garden to spend time in, with hammock vines around all the trees, providing a comfortable place to stretch out whenever and wherever one wanted to rest. Right next to the oyster pond was another pond full of everlasting ice, where Sir Lionel let the village children skate all through the summer. And the garden paths were shaded by a portable ceiling, which allowed sunlight to come through while keeping rain, acorns, and bird droppings off the path, and off the head of anyone walking the path.”
“It must have been a lovely assignment,” said Endora, dreamily.
“On the contrary,” said Spanky. “On the fourth day after I arrived, weird things started happening and from then on, I never had an hour’s rest. The first casualty was the broom tree...”
“I thought brooms were made, not grown,” said Joe accusingly.
“I’m not talking about the flying kind,” said Spanky. “I’m talking about a flowering shrub, related to gorse. Sir Lionel liked to pickle the flowers and serve them in a salad.
“The fourth morning of my assignment, I was awakened by a sharp tapping on the window above my bed. Ilona and I were sleeping in the summerhouse, which was basically a one-room apartment built over the potting shed. I looked out the window and saw the broom tree standing there, beckoning at me with its branches. It had uprooted itself and walked across the garden to knock on my window.”
“That’s odd,” observed Endora. Then she observed, “Huff!” as Merlin drove his elbow into her ribs.
“Yes, I thought it was odd, too,” said Spanky. “But that was nothing to the oddness I found when I dressed and went outdoors and found the broom sitting in a lawn chair with its roots crossed, holding my Daily Prophet open with its branches and apparently reading it with its bright yellow flowers. I suppose you can guess what I learned from this?”
“That you should never keep a walking shrub waiting,” Joe suggested.
“That the literacy of Daily Prophet readers deserves concerned attention,” Merlin put in.
“That Sir Lionel’s favorite salad is full of eyeballs,” gagged Endora.
“That your security problems were worse than expected,” Sadie added.
Spanky sighed, and said, “Fourth time lucky.”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE for TMQ Nos. 112 and 113 +++
Contact Robbie through the CoS Discussion Forum, or through the Feedback System, to share your ideas about how the Magic Quill should continue [EDIT: This discussion is now closed]. Survey answers that get the most votes, and contest answers that Robbie chooses, will be in the next two chapters!
SURVEY for Chapter 112: Will the bad guy in Spanky’s story turn out to be his old nemesis Sid Shmedly?
CONTEST for Chapter 112: At the time of Spanky’s story, Ilona is not only invisible but actually undetectable to anyone except Spanky. This doesn’t mean she is completely helpless. What are some things she could do to help Spanky in a fight?
SURVEY for Chapter 113: In Chamber of Secrets, Tom Riddle claimed that Hagrid tried to raise “werewolf pups” under his bed. This raises at least two questions: (A) Was Tom exaggerating, or can werewolves be born by normal reproduction as well as through humans being bitten? (B) And if baby werewolves can be born that way, do they ever turn into people or are they always in their wild, hairy state?
CONTEST for Chapter 113: What do werewolves eat when they can’t have human?
[Originally posted 1/21/07]
Showing posts with label Owlympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Owlympics. Show all posts
Friday, December 26, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
27. Single Combat
Concepts contributed by: Ronald Weasley (PS/SS, Chapter 9)
"I would have gone on searching for Ilona straight through the Single event, but Ruff put a hex on me that made me come over unbearably itchy--with a burning rash--with every yard I put between myself and the dueling arena. And Crinkle forced a whole pint of Determination Draught down my throat, which got me through the quarter- and semi-final. I scarcely remember them. I only know that when I found out I would meet Shmedly again in the final, I looked forward to it with bitter joy.
"The Single final came on the last day of the Owlympics, literally after the closing ceremonies. Most countries' delegations had planned to leave before then, but after the Freestyle Final everyone was interested to see what would happen next. The sun had already gone down, and many of the other arenas had been vanished or dismantled already; but as the hour came for the Single final, the crowd of spectators overflowed the arena.
"The first task was given us: We were each supposed to cut or untie a Gordian knot, leaving the rope whole. The bell rang, and both Shmedly and I considered our knots for some minutes. I could not think straight. The pain of losing Ilona, the outrage and injustice, the frustration at not being able to go look for her filled my mind with racing thoughts. Shmedly looked as if he would win when he conjured one of those pen-knives that can undo any knot. But I lost my head and bewitched my knot to butt Shmedly's out of his reach, the ends of the rope alternately tripping his feet and banging against his arms and trunk. The officials were outraged, and Shmedly was finally so bruised and cowed that he curled up in a ball and let my knotted rope flail against him until the round was halted. After considerable debate, it was called a draw. So into the second round we went.
"Again, I was hardly able to think about what items I should choose from the chest of junk placed before us. I believe Shmedly picked a prickly pincushion, a cake tin, and an old sweater, and I picked a pig's bladder, a magnifying glass with a missing lens, and a horse's skull. Shmedly drew the first move, and the pincushion came to life, walking on its pins toward my pig's bladder. But I caused the bladder to fill up with gluey gum, which splattered all over the pincushion when it was punctured, putting both items out of commission. Shmedly took his next turn to send the cake tin after the magnifying glass, but I didn't bother to defend it. I conjured the rest of the horse's skeleton, assembled the bones by magic, and send it galloping toward Shmedly. He dived out of its way, but it turned and came at him again. Soon it was chasing him round and round the arena, screaming a horse's hideous death-scream, trying to trample him with its sharp bony feet. Shmedly called for help, but I had also erected a barrier of fire around the enchanted circle so that none of the officials could enter to save him, and waited for the horse skeleton to destroy my enemy.
"It was Dumbledore, bless him, who got through the barrier of protective spells and flame and terminated the horse skeleton enchantment just as it was about to run Shmedly down. He knocked me down with an Impediment curse, hauled me roughly to my feet again and shook me, gave me one of his famous quelling looks, and said some very firm words that I would rather not repeat. At that point, the duel should have been ended-I should have been disqualified. But when Shmedly's ranting had subsided a bit, and Dumbledore had thoroughly humbled me, and our team coach had pointedly reminded the judges of what had happened in the Freestyle event. They grudgingly (and foolishly) decided to let the third round of Single go forward.
"The objects were removed from the circle. The enchantments were erected again. Shmedly and I faced each other, both of us trembling for one reason or another. I felt sick to my stomach. My brain buzzed in my skull. Guilt, grief, and impotent rage twisted inside me. The bell rang for the final round, and Shmedly found himself at an advantage over me--competitively and, perhaps for the first time, morally. For at this point he only wanted to win the duel, and take home just one Owlympic Galleon. As for me, I wanted to kill him. And I was too busy battling that desire within me to be much use battling him.
"So his first curse hit me unshielded, unprepared. My whole left arm went numb to the shoulder, and the wand dropped out of my hand. I managed to throw up a shield with my right wand before he could do anything else, but from then on it was all I could do to keep his steady stream of jinxes, hexes, and maledictions off me. By the fifteen-minute mark, I was worn down, backed against the edge of the enchanted circle, tiring of holding up my defenses. Shmedly advanced on me until his wand was less than a hand's span from my face, so that I had less time and less power to block his spells. I didn't have time to get anything out of my wand except some kind of curse-deflecting spell or another. I hardly knew which one I was using.
"Finally I felt something get by my defenses. Whatever it was, it set my skin on fire. Whether it was a result of the curse or not, I saw red. I shoved my wand-tip against Shmedly's shoulder, pushing him off balance. The wand snapped and dropped out of my hand. I swatted his wand hand away clumsily with my still-numb left arm and swung at his face with my right fist. He leaned into the punch, so that it glanced off the side of his head and pushed me out of the circle. A second later we were rolling around on the stage, right up to the judges' table and under it, among their legs. Witches and wizards shouted and hopped out of the way; some of them fell over us. Curses exploded around my head, and finally I felt myself restrained. Someone had hit me with a body-bind.
"The upshot of my unsportswizardlike behavior was that I was banned from competitive dueling for life, my record in the Freestyle event was expunged, I was stripped of my Owlympic titles--even the team ones--which were given to the runners-up instead and, when I returned to Blokebury-on-Rye late that night, I found that an owl had come informing me that I was suspended from the RMB pending a disciplinary hearing. The worst of it was how badly I had let down Crinkle and Ruff, who had to give up their Galleons too. Several of those Galleons went, after all, to Romania. What really got me was the realization that I had probably handed Shmedly exactly the thing he was aiming for.
"But soon I found that I didn't care for any of that. Nor for the awful publicity my actions got, or the fact that some shops in Diagon Alley refused to serve me for awhile, or that people who saw me in the streets of Hogsmeade or in the Three Broomsticks refused to look at me or speak to me. What hurt the most was that I still could not find Ilona, though I used much of my forced holiday from the RMB searching for her."
Spanky concluded his story with a deep sigh, a deeper drink of firewhisky, and an apologetic belch.
"That's mortal sad," Endora sniveled from behind her invisibility cloak.
Harvey reached across the table with one of his inexhaustible supply of handkerchiefs. It vanished out of his hand, and a moment later the blowing of an invisible nose was heard.
"It was," Harvey commented, "a crying shame, I will give you that. But all's well that ends well, what? You did, after all, find and marry Ilona after all, what? And now we come to the reason I insisted that you tell this long, painful tale, my lad. The financial, er, misunderstanding that followed the reversal of your Freestyle victory leads, by one way and another, to the bit of business we shall have to discuss before this night is out. And each of the people at this table has a part of the tale to tell..."
[Originally posted 11/5/04]
"I would have gone on searching for Ilona straight through the Single event, but Ruff put a hex on me that made me come over unbearably itchy--with a burning rash--with every yard I put between myself and the dueling arena. And Crinkle forced a whole pint of Determination Draught down my throat, which got me through the quarter- and semi-final. I scarcely remember them. I only know that when I found out I would meet Shmedly again in the final, I looked forward to it with bitter joy.
"The Single final came on the last day of the Owlympics, literally after the closing ceremonies. Most countries' delegations had planned to leave before then, but after the Freestyle Final everyone was interested to see what would happen next. The sun had already gone down, and many of the other arenas had been vanished or dismantled already; but as the hour came for the Single final, the crowd of spectators overflowed the arena.
"The first task was given us: We were each supposed to cut or untie a Gordian knot, leaving the rope whole. The bell rang, and both Shmedly and I considered our knots for some minutes. I could not think straight. The pain of losing Ilona, the outrage and injustice, the frustration at not being able to go look for her filled my mind with racing thoughts. Shmedly looked as if he would win when he conjured one of those pen-knives that can undo any knot. But I lost my head and bewitched my knot to butt Shmedly's out of his reach, the ends of the rope alternately tripping his feet and banging against his arms and trunk. The officials were outraged, and Shmedly was finally so bruised and cowed that he curled up in a ball and let my knotted rope flail against him until the round was halted. After considerable debate, it was called a draw. So into the second round we went.
"Again, I was hardly able to think about what items I should choose from the chest of junk placed before us. I believe Shmedly picked a prickly pincushion, a cake tin, and an old sweater, and I picked a pig's bladder, a magnifying glass with a missing lens, and a horse's skull. Shmedly drew the first move, and the pincushion came to life, walking on its pins toward my pig's bladder. But I caused the bladder to fill up with gluey gum, which splattered all over the pincushion when it was punctured, putting both items out of commission. Shmedly took his next turn to send the cake tin after the magnifying glass, but I didn't bother to defend it. I conjured the rest of the horse's skeleton, assembled the bones by magic, and send it galloping toward Shmedly. He dived out of its way, but it turned and came at him again. Soon it was chasing him round and round the arena, screaming a horse's hideous death-scream, trying to trample him with its sharp bony feet. Shmedly called for help, but I had also erected a barrier of fire around the enchanted circle so that none of the officials could enter to save him, and waited for the horse skeleton to destroy my enemy.
"It was Dumbledore, bless him, who got through the barrier of protective spells and flame and terminated the horse skeleton enchantment just as it was about to run Shmedly down. He knocked me down with an Impediment curse, hauled me roughly to my feet again and shook me, gave me one of his famous quelling looks, and said some very firm words that I would rather not repeat. At that point, the duel should have been ended-I should have been disqualified. But when Shmedly's ranting had subsided a bit, and Dumbledore had thoroughly humbled me, and our team coach had pointedly reminded the judges of what had happened in the Freestyle event. They grudgingly (and foolishly) decided to let the third round of Single go forward.
"The objects were removed from the circle. The enchantments were erected again. Shmedly and I faced each other, both of us trembling for one reason or another. I felt sick to my stomach. My brain buzzed in my skull. Guilt, grief, and impotent rage twisted inside me. The bell rang for the final round, and Shmedly found himself at an advantage over me--competitively and, perhaps for the first time, morally. For at this point he only wanted to win the duel, and take home just one Owlympic Galleon. As for me, I wanted to kill him. And I was too busy battling that desire within me to be much use battling him.
"So his first curse hit me unshielded, unprepared. My whole left arm went numb to the shoulder, and the wand dropped out of my hand. I managed to throw up a shield with my right wand before he could do anything else, but from then on it was all I could do to keep his steady stream of jinxes, hexes, and maledictions off me. By the fifteen-minute mark, I was worn down, backed against the edge of the enchanted circle, tiring of holding up my defenses. Shmedly advanced on me until his wand was less than a hand's span from my face, so that I had less time and less power to block his spells. I didn't have time to get anything out of my wand except some kind of curse-deflecting spell or another. I hardly knew which one I was using.
"Finally I felt something get by my defenses. Whatever it was, it set my skin on fire. Whether it was a result of the curse or not, I saw red. I shoved my wand-tip against Shmedly's shoulder, pushing him off balance. The wand snapped and dropped out of my hand. I swatted his wand hand away clumsily with my still-numb left arm and swung at his face with my right fist. He leaned into the punch, so that it glanced off the side of his head and pushed me out of the circle. A second later we were rolling around on the stage, right up to the judges' table and under it, among their legs. Witches and wizards shouted and hopped out of the way; some of them fell over us. Curses exploded around my head, and finally I felt myself restrained. Someone had hit me with a body-bind.
"The upshot of my unsportswizardlike behavior was that I was banned from competitive dueling for life, my record in the Freestyle event was expunged, I was stripped of my Owlympic titles--even the team ones--which were given to the runners-up instead and, when I returned to Blokebury-on-Rye late that night, I found that an owl had come informing me that I was suspended from the RMB pending a disciplinary hearing. The worst of it was how badly I had let down Crinkle and Ruff, who had to give up their Galleons too. Several of those Galleons went, after all, to Romania. What really got me was the realization that I had probably handed Shmedly exactly the thing he was aiming for.
"But soon I found that I didn't care for any of that. Nor for the awful publicity my actions got, or the fact that some shops in Diagon Alley refused to serve me for awhile, or that people who saw me in the streets of Hogsmeade or in the Three Broomsticks refused to look at me or speak to me. What hurt the most was that I still could not find Ilona, though I used much of my forced holiday from the RMB searching for her."
Spanky concluded his story with a deep sigh, a deeper drink of firewhisky, and an apologetic belch.
"That's mortal sad," Endora sniveled from behind her invisibility cloak.
Harvey reached across the table with one of his inexhaustible supply of handkerchiefs. It vanished out of his hand, and a moment later the blowing of an invisible nose was heard.
"It was," Harvey commented, "a crying shame, I will give you that. But all's well that ends well, what? You did, after all, find and marry Ilona after all, what? And now we come to the reason I insisted that you tell this long, painful tale, my lad. The financial, er, misunderstanding that followed the reversal of your Freestyle victory leads, by one way and another, to the bit of business we shall have to discuss before this night is out. And each of the people at this table has a part of the tale to tell..."
[Originally posted 11/5/04]
26. The Freestyle Event, Part 2
Concepts contributed by: Alessandro Simoni, Aidan Raelyn, & Jessica Parker
"The most intense five minutes of my life, up to that day, began. The final of the Owlympic Freestyle Duel, between me and my most hated enemy, Sid Shmedly..."
Spanky continued his story, while a small audience of invisible, veiled, and masked witches and wizards listened in rapt silence--broken only by an occasional sneeze as a sizzle of firewhisky got up someone's nose.
"I had learned to suspect Shmedly of a having a talent for legilimency, so the fact that we both started with the same kind of spell did not surprise me much. For I had decided during the last, long second before the bell rang to open a Vegetable spell--and so did he. My spell struck the stage at Shmedly's feet, and the ground beneath him suddenly budded into a dense patch of four-leafed shamrocks. Shmedly didn't have time to chuckle, but he sneered as a tendril of Devil's Snare wound its way up my leg. I didn't hesitate. My left wand shot flames at the vine--which, unfortunately, burned my leg and my robes very badly, but also took care of the Devil's Snare.
"At the same time, my right wand caused a small rain cloud to appear above Shmedly's head. It wasn't much of a rain cloud; it drizzled on him rather. But as it was late afternoon, the low angle of the sun combined with the fine drizzle above Shmedly's head to create a gorgeous rainbow down which, as will happen when you stand in a patch of shamrocks at the end of a rainbow, a leprechaun who had come to support the Irish side dropped a pot of gold. (Well, a saucepan really--which was fortunate for Shmedly, because a cauldron of Galleons might have killed him.) As it was a small rainbow, and a small patch of shamrocks, the Leprechaun felt it only warranted a small pot of gold. As it was, Shmedly was nearly knocked senseless.
"I pressed the advantage. I summoned a swarm of doxies, which rose up out of the shamrocks and got inside Shmedly's robes, tickling and pinching and biting him all over. He squirmed and staggered but still managed to shield himself when I tried to hurl a load of profoundly smelly fish entrails at his knees. Even from where I stood, I was forced to put a bubble-head charm on myself, which took precious time while Shmedly vanished the doxies and prepared to go on attack.
"He first attempted to call down lightning upon me, but I conjured a weather balloon which took the bolt instead and burst with a deafening sound. Fortunately, with my bubble-head on, I was spared--as were most of the people within twenty meters of the fish entrails that lay in the middle of the stage. Then, while I turned the bed of shamrocks beneath him into a bed of quicksand, he summoned a huge rock which squirted up out of the ground, reducing the stage to splinters. It saved him from the quicksand and knocked me off my feet. Still, even lying down, I had two wands. With one, I summoned a bitterly cold wind which, combined with the rain still falling on Shmedly's head, sent him shivering and cowering behind the great stone that had thrust up between us. As I tried to pursue him, Shmedly sent a chain of bright red handkerchiefs snaking after me, trying to trip me up. I turned the rain storm into a shower of cod-liver oil, which soon had Shmedly sputtering and gagging as it dripped off the brim of his hat into his mouth.
"Our five minutes were little more than half over, and by my reckoning I only had to attack Shmedly's sense of sight to fulfill the Freestyle tradition in record time. But once again, Shmedly stooped to a new and unexpected low. He yelled, 'Accio bottle!' Out of the crowd of spectators, where someone must have been waiting with it for just this eventuality, the spell summoned a dirty old stone bottle that had been covered and sealed with wax. As soon as it came to Shmedly's hand, he dashed it to the ground, where it shattered. A tiny man inside it rolled out on the ground, then rapidly grew to enormous size--bigger than the bull that had charged Crinkle earlier in the event. The man seemed to be covered in gold leaf, powerfully built, dressed in oriental attire, very insolent, and very angry. While I was still working out the fact that Shmedly had, in fact, summoned a genie, he commanded it.
"'See, I have set you free,' Shmedly said. 'My wish is your command. I wish you to curse my enemy until he submits.'
"I should have put a silencing charm on Shmedly before he got all this out, but I was too staggered by the enormity before me. I don't just mean the size of the genie, nor do I mean the fact that I had neither seen nor heard of anyone, in living memory, who had seen a genie. I was simply appalled that, once again, the contest was going forward after Shmedly had done something truly vile--like enslaving a being, like meddling with a powerful spirit, like enlisting the help of another person to curse me in the middle of a duel. Once again, it became clear that Shmedly's money had silenced the objections of the Owlympic officials. As I stood there marveling, the genie raised his hand as if to take an oath.
"'Meaning you no harm, sir, but being bound by my master's wish,' the genie said, in a nearly deafening but surprisingly pleasant voice, 'I am afraid I must curse you to lose your heart's desire, and spend your entire life searching for it in vain.'
"At that moment, I heard the voice of the woman I loved screaming what might have been the first syllable of my name--then there was a sound like a door slamming and a flash of light from the foot of the stage where Ilona had stood; a number of people who had been standing near her gasped aloud. I didn't have to look for her to know that Ilona was gone. I simply exploded with fury. As the genie raised his hand to swear another friendly, hideous curse, I turned the rain of cod-liver oil into wine and moved the cloud over the genie's head. He stopped in mid-curse, looked up, and smacked his lips as the wine began running into his mouth. Then, greedily, forgetting everything else including his master--who hopped around screaming profanities and only just restraining himself from kicking the genie's shins--the genie began to guzzle wine. I strengthened the little winestorm so that it poured down on the genie, but especially down his throat. Every so often, the genie belched, and with each belch he grew a little smaller.
"By the time Shmedly started cursing me again with his own wand, the genie was only a little taller than I am. I conjured a rack of rare wine bottles and a corkscrew, which the already somewhat inebriated genie began to use with gusto. Though I had never met a genie before, I had read the right kind of books and studied under the right kind of teacher, so I knew that within a few minutes the genie would be drunk enough, and small enough, to be forced down the neck of an empty wine bottle and sealed inside.
"But only bare seconds remained of the five minutes allotted to us. I fended off several truly nasty curses from Shmedly, while hitting him with a conjunctivitis curse, oozing boils, rash, inappropriate hair, ingrown toenails, athlete's foot, irritable bowel syndrome, ringing in the ears, carpal tunnel syndrome, spider hallucinations combined with arachnophobia, lactose intolerance combined with a craving for cheese, and bleeding gums combined with halitosis. I gave him hemorrhoids, astygmatism, a pinched nerve, a bad case of lice, a compulsion to duck his head in a bucket of icewater, and one of those sinus infections that make you think something has crawled up into your head and died. I caused every rook in the forbidden forest to fly over his head and perform, er, surgical strikes on him. I signed him up for a 30-day subscription to hand tremors, persuaded him to bite the inside of his own cheek, and arranged for him to have some private problems that I needn't explain in detail, other than to say that they might upset his young wife, Jonquil. In other words, I inflicted as much physical suffering on Shmedly as I could, though it did not begin to feel like revenge for what he had done to Ilona. And I easily deflected all his curses with my other wand.
"Eventually the officials had to shield Shmedly from me and carry him away, and others restrained me when I tried to follow. I had kept cursing him long after the bell rang to end the final. The rooks were still relieving themselves on him as they carried him away, uselessly trying to shield his face with their robes. Finally I was tackled by my mates Crinkle and Ruff, Otis from the quodplot team, and several of Ilona's friends from magymnastics, as well as others. They held my hands to my sides, took my wands away, and patted my back while I howled with rage.
"The fact was that I did set a time record for completing a traditional Freestyle programme, without conjuring a miserable gilded man to help me. But remember, we were in a climate where a good pedigree and a fat purse meant more to people than a wizard's merit or ability--as the case of the poor Russian lad had proved. Even though Shmedly had ruthlessly exploited a creature whose entire life is divided between hateful servitude and tedious imprisonment--except for brief, wild benders in which he did literally "fall into the bottle"--and even though Shmedly had once again used danger or harm to someone outside the shielded area to work to his advantage, and even though Shmedly had not even come close to finishing a traditional programme, and even though I had given him the sort of magical beating that every schoolboy dreams of giving to his least favorite bully, the judges actually voted to declare Shmedly the winner.
"Fortunately, the tie-breaking vote came from a Belgian judge who later admitted that he was persuaded to vote for Shmedly when he was offered free tuition at Durmstrang for all of his children. Another judge who had voted for Shmedly came forward and said he had received a wad of gillyweed wrapped in a Union Jack handkerchief, along with a note that said, 'This is a Romanian message. It means: If you vote for England, you'd better grow gills.' So I won the Galleon after all, though the Daily Prophet had already run a story trumpeting that I had been robbed. And apparently, those judges' last-minute confessions saved Mr. Harvey here--"
"Just Harvey," said the gentleman whose face was covered by a handkerchief. "Indeed, the hour or so between the posting of the scores and the medal ceremony was one of the most exciting parts of that duel, for me."
"I would imagine so," said Spanky. "By then I had searched up and down the entire Owlympic village and, of course, I found no sign of Ilona. I did not attend the medal ceremony in which Shmedly was dramatically stripped of his Galleon--Crinkle, who was off the crutches by then but still limping, accepted it for me. I had an Owlympic record, another Galleon, and an opportunity to see Shmedly humiliated in public. But I didn't care. I believed that I would never see Ilona again, but I couldn't dream of doing anything except search for her."
He sighed. It was infectious, passing around the table like a save on a beach.
"I suppose that's why you muffed the Singles Final so," said Harvey.
"Did you ever see her again?" Endora asked anxiously.
"Shouldn't you still be looking for her?" Merlin said, tactlessly.
"What did he mean about muffing it?" Sadie demanded.
"You've all got it wrong," said Spanky. "Why, if I hadn't lived to marry Ilona by now, I wouldn't be here talking to you. I would still be looking for her. But that's a tale for another time. Now is the time to finish the tale of my Owlympic career, with the duel that finished it. And when you've just set a record and won five Galleons in six events, and your boyhood enemy has been made to look the fool in front of the whole wizarding world, and you are young enough to have a good chance of competing in another Owlympiad or two, it ought to take a good deal to finish your sporting career in just one duel. But I managed it..."
[Originally posted 11/1/04]
"The most intense five minutes of my life, up to that day, began. The final of the Owlympic Freestyle Duel, between me and my most hated enemy, Sid Shmedly..."
Spanky continued his story, while a small audience of invisible, veiled, and masked witches and wizards listened in rapt silence--broken only by an occasional sneeze as a sizzle of firewhisky got up someone's nose.
"I had learned to suspect Shmedly of a having a talent for legilimency, so the fact that we both started with the same kind of spell did not surprise me much. For I had decided during the last, long second before the bell rang to open a Vegetable spell--and so did he. My spell struck the stage at Shmedly's feet, and the ground beneath him suddenly budded into a dense patch of four-leafed shamrocks. Shmedly didn't have time to chuckle, but he sneered as a tendril of Devil's Snare wound its way up my leg. I didn't hesitate. My left wand shot flames at the vine--which, unfortunately, burned my leg and my robes very badly, but also took care of the Devil's Snare.
"At the same time, my right wand caused a small rain cloud to appear above Shmedly's head. It wasn't much of a rain cloud; it drizzled on him rather. But as it was late afternoon, the low angle of the sun combined with the fine drizzle above Shmedly's head to create a gorgeous rainbow down which, as will happen when you stand in a patch of shamrocks at the end of a rainbow, a leprechaun who had come to support the Irish side dropped a pot of gold. (Well, a saucepan really--which was fortunate for Shmedly, because a cauldron of Galleons might have killed him.) As it was a small rainbow, and a small patch of shamrocks, the Leprechaun felt it only warranted a small pot of gold. As it was, Shmedly was nearly knocked senseless.
"I pressed the advantage. I summoned a swarm of doxies, which rose up out of the shamrocks and got inside Shmedly's robes, tickling and pinching and biting him all over. He squirmed and staggered but still managed to shield himself when I tried to hurl a load of profoundly smelly fish entrails at his knees. Even from where I stood, I was forced to put a bubble-head charm on myself, which took precious time while Shmedly vanished the doxies and prepared to go on attack.
"He first attempted to call down lightning upon me, but I conjured a weather balloon which took the bolt instead and burst with a deafening sound. Fortunately, with my bubble-head on, I was spared--as were most of the people within twenty meters of the fish entrails that lay in the middle of the stage. Then, while I turned the bed of shamrocks beneath him into a bed of quicksand, he summoned a huge rock which squirted up out of the ground, reducing the stage to splinters. It saved him from the quicksand and knocked me off my feet. Still, even lying down, I had two wands. With one, I summoned a bitterly cold wind which, combined with the rain still falling on Shmedly's head, sent him shivering and cowering behind the great stone that had thrust up between us. As I tried to pursue him, Shmedly sent a chain of bright red handkerchiefs snaking after me, trying to trip me up. I turned the rain storm into a shower of cod-liver oil, which soon had Shmedly sputtering and gagging as it dripped off the brim of his hat into his mouth.
"Our five minutes were little more than half over, and by my reckoning I only had to attack Shmedly's sense of sight to fulfill the Freestyle tradition in record time. But once again, Shmedly stooped to a new and unexpected low. He yelled, 'Accio bottle!' Out of the crowd of spectators, where someone must have been waiting with it for just this eventuality, the spell summoned a dirty old stone bottle that had been covered and sealed with wax. As soon as it came to Shmedly's hand, he dashed it to the ground, where it shattered. A tiny man inside it rolled out on the ground, then rapidly grew to enormous size--bigger than the bull that had charged Crinkle earlier in the event. The man seemed to be covered in gold leaf, powerfully built, dressed in oriental attire, very insolent, and very angry. While I was still working out the fact that Shmedly had, in fact, summoned a genie, he commanded it.
"'See, I have set you free,' Shmedly said. 'My wish is your command. I wish you to curse my enemy until he submits.'
"I should have put a silencing charm on Shmedly before he got all this out, but I was too staggered by the enormity before me. I don't just mean the size of the genie, nor do I mean the fact that I had neither seen nor heard of anyone, in living memory, who had seen a genie. I was simply appalled that, once again, the contest was going forward after Shmedly had done something truly vile--like enslaving a being, like meddling with a powerful spirit, like enlisting the help of another person to curse me in the middle of a duel. Once again, it became clear that Shmedly's money had silenced the objections of the Owlympic officials. As I stood there marveling, the genie raised his hand as if to take an oath.
"'Meaning you no harm, sir, but being bound by my master's wish,' the genie said, in a nearly deafening but surprisingly pleasant voice, 'I am afraid I must curse you to lose your heart's desire, and spend your entire life searching for it in vain.'
"At that moment, I heard the voice of the woman I loved screaming what might have been the first syllable of my name--then there was a sound like a door slamming and a flash of light from the foot of the stage where Ilona had stood; a number of people who had been standing near her gasped aloud. I didn't have to look for her to know that Ilona was gone. I simply exploded with fury. As the genie raised his hand to swear another friendly, hideous curse, I turned the rain of cod-liver oil into wine and moved the cloud over the genie's head. He stopped in mid-curse, looked up, and smacked his lips as the wine began running into his mouth. Then, greedily, forgetting everything else including his master--who hopped around screaming profanities and only just restraining himself from kicking the genie's shins--the genie began to guzzle wine. I strengthened the little winestorm so that it poured down on the genie, but especially down his throat. Every so often, the genie belched, and with each belch he grew a little smaller.
"By the time Shmedly started cursing me again with his own wand, the genie was only a little taller than I am. I conjured a rack of rare wine bottles and a corkscrew, which the already somewhat inebriated genie began to use with gusto. Though I had never met a genie before, I had read the right kind of books and studied under the right kind of teacher, so I knew that within a few minutes the genie would be drunk enough, and small enough, to be forced down the neck of an empty wine bottle and sealed inside.
"But only bare seconds remained of the five minutes allotted to us. I fended off several truly nasty curses from Shmedly, while hitting him with a conjunctivitis curse, oozing boils, rash, inappropriate hair, ingrown toenails, athlete's foot, irritable bowel syndrome, ringing in the ears, carpal tunnel syndrome, spider hallucinations combined with arachnophobia, lactose intolerance combined with a craving for cheese, and bleeding gums combined with halitosis. I gave him hemorrhoids, astygmatism, a pinched nerve, a bad case of lice, a compulsion to duck his head in a bucket of icewater, and one of those sinus infections that make you think something has crawled up into your head and died. I caused every rook in the forbidden forest to fly over his head and perform, er, surgical strikes on him. I signed him up for a 30-day subscription to hand tremors, persuaded him to bite the inside of his own cheek, and arranged for him to have some private problems that I needn't explain in detail, other than to say that they might upset his young wife, Jonquil. In other words, I inflicted as much physical suffering on Shmedly as I could, though it did not begin to feel like revenge for what he had done to Ilona. And I easily deflected all his curses with my other wand.
"Eventually the officials had to shield Shmedly from me and carry him away, and others restrained me when I tried to follow. I had kept cursing him long after the bell rang to end the final. The rooks were still relieving themselves on him as they carried him away, uselessly trying to shield his face with their robes. Finally I was tackled by my mates Crinkle and Ruff, Otis from the quodplot team, and several of Ilona's friends from magymnastics, as well as others. They held my hands to my sides, took my wands away, and patted my back while I howled with rage.
"The fact was that I did set a time record for completing a traditional Freestyle programme, without conjuring a miserable gilded man to help me. But remember, we were in a climate where a good pedigree and a fat purse meant more to people than a wizard's merit or ability--as the case of the poor Russian lad had proved. Even though Shmedly had ruthlessly exploited a creature whose entire life is divided between hateful servitude and tedious imprisonment--except for brief, wild benders in which he did literally "fall into the bottle"--and even though Shmedly had once again used danger or harm to someone outside the shielded area to work to his advantage, and even though Shmedly had not even come close to finishing a traditional programme, and even though I had given him the sort of magical beating that every schoolboy dreams of giving to his least favorite bully, the judges actually voted to declare Shmedly the winner.
"Fortunately, the tie-breaking vote came from a Belgian judge who later admitted that he was persuaded to vote for Shmedly when he was offered free tuition at Durmstrang for all of his children. Another judge who had voted for Shmedly came forward and said he had received a wad of gillyweed wrapped in a Union Jack handkerchief, along with a note that said, 'This is a Romanian message. It means: If you vote for England, you'd better grow gills.' So I won the Galleon after all, though the Daily Prophet had already run a story trumpeting that I had been robbed. And apparently, those judges' last-minute confessions saved Mr. Harvey here--"
"Just Harvey," said the gentleman whose face was covered by a handkerchief. "Indeed, the hour or so between the posting of the scores and the medal ceremony was one of the most exciting parts of that duel, for me."
"I would imagine so," said Spanky. "By then I had searched up and down the entire Owlympic village and, of course, I found no sign of Ilona. I did not attend the medal ceremony in which Shmedly was dramatically stripped of his Galleon--Crinkle, who was off the crutches by then but still limping, accepted it for me. I had an Owlympic record, another Galleon, and an opportunity to see Shmedly humiliated in public. But I didn't care. I believed that I would never see Ilona again, but I couldn't dream of doing anything except search for her."
He sighed. It was infectious, passing around the table like a save on a beach.
"I suppose that's why you muffed the Singles Final so," said Harvey.
"Did you ever see her again?" Endora asked anxiously.
"Shouldn't you still be looking for her?" Merlin said, tactlessly.
"What did he mean about muffing it?" Sadie demanded.
"You've all got it wrong," said Spanky. "Why, if I hadn't lived to marry Ilona by now, I wouldn't be here talking to you. I would still be looking for her. But that's a tale for another time. Now is the time to finish the tale of my Owlympic career, with the duel that finished it. And when you've just set a record and won five Galleons in six events, and your boyhood enemy has been made to look the fool in front of the whole wizarding world, and you are young enough to have a good chance of competing in another Owlympiad or two, it ought to take a good deal to finish your sporting career in just one duel. But I managed it..."
[Originally posted 11/1/04]
Friday, December 19, 2008
25. The Freestyle Event, Part 1
Concepts contributed by: Alessandro Simoni & Angelbot
"So," said Spanky gruffly, stalling for time because he wasn't in much of a mood for telling stories, "you're a betting man, then."
"You bet your life I am," said Harvey. He somehow appeared smug, even with a handkerchief covering his features. "I have put together a list of 54,239 betting games, magical and otherwise. And I have a system for at least a third of them. Naturally..."
"A third?" Endora sputtered. "That's over 17,000 games. Where did you find the time to develop a system for all of them?"
"Well, all right," Harvey said peevishly. "I and my associates. I've spent a lot of good money hiring the greatest experts in the field to research and design--"
"Yes, yes," said Endora, with what sounded like a knowing smile (though, like the rest of her, it was invisible). "I see now. You spend your good money on brilliant researchers who will find out for you which highly-favored hippogriff will be fed a ferret laced with a sluggishness solution, or which broom is likely to develop a tendency to turn somersaults thirty-eight minutes into the game..."
"And then," added Merlin, picking up the tale, "you wager enough bad money to feed, clothe, and educate all of, say, Arthur Weasley's children on one mer-boxing match, betting against the longest odds your own hand-picked handicapper can cook up..."
"And finally," Sadie concluded, waving her foul smoldering pipe around for emphasis, "after throwing bad money after good, you win the worst money of all, and enough of it to spend on the next bit of research and design..."
"Yes," said Harvey unrepentantly. "That's the general idea. But see here, our champion was about to tell of one of the greatest risks I ever took, and it paid me well. The fact that I didn't do enough research to be even mostly sure of the match's outcome; the fact that I bet on the person I wanted to win, rather than the one I expected to win; and the fact that I bet a lot of money that rightfully belonged, not to me, but to a dear friend who is known, to some in my profession, as Eye-for-an-Ivan-all made that year's Freestyle Dueling Final quite exciting enough to be getting on with. I need hardly add that, after fixing a Lithuanian hopscotch tournament the previous summer for the same lovely gentleman, I was under considerable pressure to continue to impress my generous associate. But what happened between Mr. Spankison and Mr. Shmedly in that duel was so exciting that I forgot about all that--well, almost. I must admit that at times, a mental image of my eyeballs in a glass jar, in the middle of a wall-to-wall shelf full of identical jars, contributed a certain frisson to the already sufficient level of tension that I exp--"
"All right, you can quit now," said Spanky. He took a weary sip of firewhisky, then added, "I'm ready."
"Very well," said Harvey. His eyes twinkled above the edge of his handkerchief. "The floor is yours."
The cloaked, hooded storyteller took a deep breath. Then, as if his unmasking and the sordid business of the Interview had not intervened, Spanky plunged into the stream of his story where he had left it.
"Ilona was wearing my ring as she stood at the foot of the shielded stage and watched my last duel in the Freestyle event. It was the one for which I had trained the hardest. By all rights, it should have been Crinkle up there on that stage. He had a really creative mind, you could never predict what connection he would make. But he was disabled out of the event in the second round, when a charging bull that his opponent had set on him gored his right leg, piercing his Achilles tendon. It was a good job Crinkle had at least managed to shrink the bull to the size of a bulldog. Nevertheless, I had to do my best to represent the English team. Beyond all expectations, I made it to the semi-final...and even more surprising, to myself above all, I scraped a win over the great Armand Hammer of the U.S. And when a Russian wizard trounced Shmedly in the other semi-final, I began to hope that I could win, or at least make a good account of myself, in a final that was nothing but pure competition, without the taint of personal enmity and dirty dealing.
"But an hour before I was to fight that final duel against that Russian lad, an Owlympic judge--tipped off, no doubt, by a member of Shmedly's entourage--discovered that the Russian lad's great-times-four-grandmother was a house-elf who wore clothes and married her master's son. Imagine, having your family tree picked over just to be able to play a game! The news, of course, scandalized all the important sort of people, and the Russian lad was declared ineligible to compete because of his impure blood. There was also a suggestion that non-wizarding magic gave him an edge over other competitors. So my hope turned to dread, and I had an hour to prepare myself to face Shmedly once again. And I dare say Shmedly was more viciously determined to put paid to me, with my impure blood and lack of proper wizarding pride.
"The Freestyle is very much like the Single duel, except that it dispenses with the first two rounds and is limited to the face-to-face wandplay. Also, there is a time limit of five minutes, and at the Owlympic level a clear winner or loser in that time is virtually unheard of. Instead, the winner is decided by the judges, based on the variety, difficulty, and number of spells performed, as well as the style and form in which they are carried out. Doing a higher number of spells was the one bit that came naturally to me, with my two wands. But having to concentrate on doing the widest possible variety of spells--and difficult ones at that--while shielding myself from my opponent's jinxes made this an event that taxed all my strength to the utmost and forced me to face my own weaknesses.
"There is a tradition in the Freestyle event. It isn't exactly a rule; you could ignore it and not be disqualified. You might even do rather well, up to a certain point; but the judges generally seemed impressed by duelers whose spells touched on each of the three Kingdoms, four Elements, five Senses, and six Colors. So to curry favor with the judges, I also had to aim--in five minutes, mind you--to conjure something Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral; something earthy, watery, airy, and fiery; something that attacked my opponent's eyes, ears, nose, palate, and skin; and something red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet...all while dodging and deflecting the opponent's spells.
"I was still almost staggering from the shock of what was happening as Shmedly and I faced each other inside the enchanted circle, upon the shielded stage. A bell rang. A five-minute hourglass was flipped over. The most intense five minutes of my life, up to that day, began..."
[Originally posted 10/22/04]
"So," said Spanky gruffly, stalling for time because he wasn't in much of a mood for telling stories, "you're a betting man, then."
"You bet your life I am," said Harvey. He somehow appeared smug, even with a handkerchief covering his features. "I have put together a list of 54,239 betting games, magical and otherwise. And I have a system for at least a third of them. Naturally..."
"A third?" Endora sputtered. "That's over 17,000 games. Where did you find the time to develop a system for all of them?"
"Well, all right," Harvey said peevishly. "I and my associates. I've spent a lot of good money hiring the greatest experts in the field to research and design--"
"Yes, yes," said Endora, with what sounded like a knowing smile (though, like the rest of her, it was invisible). "I see now. You spend your good money on brilliant researchers who will find out for you which highly-favored hippogriff will be fed a ferret laced with a sluggishness solution, or which broom is likely to develop a tendency to turn somersaults thirty-eight minutes into the game..."
"And then," added Merlin, picking up the tale, "you wager enough bad money to feed, clothe, and educate all of, say, Arthur Weasley's children on one mer-boxing match, betting against the longest odds your own hand-picked handicapper can cook up..."
"And finally," Sadie concluded, waving her foul smoldering pipe around for emphasis, "after throwing bad money after good, you win the worst money of all, and enough of it to spend on the next bit of research and design..."
"Yes," said Harvey unrepentantly. "That's the general idea. But see here, our champion was about to tell of one of the greatest risks I ever took, and it paid me well. The fact that I didn't do enough research to be even mostly sure of the match's outcome; the fact that I bet on the person I wanted to win, rather than the one I expected to win; and the fact that I bet a lot of money that rightfully belonged, not to me, but to a dear friend who is known, to some in my profession, as Eye-for-an-Ivan-all made that year's Freestyle Dueling Final quite exciting enough to be getting on with. I need hardly add that, after fixing a Lithuanian hopscotch tournament the previous summer for the same lovely gentleman, I was under considerable pressure to continue to impress my generous associate. But what happened between Mr. Spankison and Mr. Shmedly in that duel was so exciting that I forgot about all that--well, almost. I must admit that at times, a mental image of my eyeballs in a glass jar, in the middle of a wall-to-wall shelf full of identical jars, contributed a certain frisson to the already sufficient level of tension that I exp--"
"All right, you can quit now," said Spanky. He took a weary sip of firewhisky, then added, "I'm ready."
"Very well," said Harvey. His eyes twinkled above the edge of his handkerchief. "The floor is yours."
The cloaked, hooded storyteller took a deep breath. Then, as if his unmasking and the sordid business of the Interview had not intervened, Spanky plunged into the stream of his story where he had left it.
"Ilona was wearing my ring as she stood at the foot of the shielded stage and watched my last duel in the Freestyle event. It was the one for which I had trained the hardest. By all rights, it should have been Crinkle up there on that stage. He had a really creative mind, you could never predict what connection he would make. But he was disabled out of the event in the second round, when a charging bull that his opponent had set on him gored his right leg, piercing his Achilles tendon. It was a good job Crinkle had at least managed to shrink the bull to the size of a bulldog. Nevertheless, I had to do my best to represent the English team. Beyond all expectations, I made it to the semi-final...and even more surprising, to myself above all, I scraped a win over the great Armand Hammer of the U.S. And when a Russian wizard trounced Shmedly in the other semi-final, I began to hope that I could win, or at least make a good account of myself, in a final that was nothing but pure competition, without the taint of personal enmity and dirty dealing.
"But an hour before I was to fight that final duel against that Russian lad, an Owlympic judge--tipped off, no doubt, by a member of Shmedly's entourage--discovered that the Russian lad's great-times-four-grandmother was a house-elf who wore clothes and married her master's son. Imagine, having your family tree picked over just to be able to play a game! The news, of course, scandalized all the important sort of people, and the Russian lad was declared ineligible to compete because of his impure blood. There was also a suggestion that non-wizarding magic gave him an edge over other competitors. So my hope turned to dread, and I had an hour to prepare myself to face Shmedly once again. And I dare say Shmedly was more viciously determined to put paid to me, with my impure blood and lack of proper wizarding pride.
"The Freestyle is very much like the Single duel, except that it dispenses with the first two rounds and is limited to the face-to-face wandplay. Also, there is a time limit of five minutes, and at the Owlympic level a clear winner or loser in that time is virtually unheard of. Instead, the winner is decided by the judges, based on the variety, difficulty, and number of spells performed, as well as the style and form in which they are carried out. Doing a higher number of spells was the one bit that came naturally to me, with my two wands. But having to concentrate on doing the widest possible variety of spells--and difficult ones at that--while shielding myself from my opponent's jinxes made this an event that taxed all my strength to the utmost and forced me to face my own weaknesses.
"There is a tradition in the Freestyle event. It isn't exactly a rule; you could ignore it and not be disqualified. You might even do rather well, up to a certain point; but the judges generally seemed impressed by duelers whose spells touched on each of the three Kingdoms, four Elements, five Senses, and six Colors. So to curry favor with the judges, I also had to aim--in five minutes, mind you--to conjure something Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral; something earthy, watery, airy, and fiery; something that attacked my opponent's eyes, ears, nose, palate, and skin; and something red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet...all while dodging and deflecting the opponent's spells.
"I was still almost staggering from the shock of what was happening as Shmedly and I faced each other inside the enchanted circle, upon the shielded stage. A bell rang. A five-minute hourglass was flipped over. The most intense five minutes of my life, up to that day, began..."
[Originally posted 10/22/04]
24. The Interview
Concepts contributed by: Bexy & Dave
"Well, since you’ve seen my face now, I might as well show you this," said Spanky, pulling a dog-eared magazine out of his cloak. It was a very old issue of Broom and Wand, with the caption "Who Will Laugh Last?" and a picture of two angry young wizards brandishing wands at each other. One of them was Spanky. The other was...
"Hey, I know him," Merlin exclaimed. "Why, he’s--"
"Shmedly," said Spanky. "I don’t care what name you know him by. That name is not spoken around me. I’ve even altered the text of this interview so that I don’t have to hear it. I would rather hear the entire Three-Sickle Opera sung to the words ‘Lord Voldemort.’ So let’s just keep calling him Shmedly, right?"
The others murmured agreement as Spanky flipped the well-thumbed pages to the interview. "This was done between our Team duel and the final of the Freestyle event. Even though our side was clearly ahead of Romania in the Galleon race, they had beaten us a couple of times and, as you can see, the press was aware that we were closely matched and bitter rivals. So this sporting journal decided to do a double interview, and our team coach decided it was a good idea. Ah! Here it is. Touch your wand-tips there."
Five wand-tips emerged from various robes and invisibility cloaks and touched a little blank square beneath the headline of the interview. All at once, the wizards and witches around the parlor table found themselves in a dingy little office furnished with three stools. They gathered around, watching the two young duelers glowering at each other from either side of a bald, barrel-chested man whose Quick Quotes Quill was scribbling away.
"Wow," said Endora. "I forgot they used to do this pop-up kind of thing, before the duty on mnemonic ink went--"
"Shush!" warned Sadie. "They’re about to begin!"
INTERVIEWER: Testing, testing. Excellent. This is Bo Dwyer, feature writer for Broom and Wand, covering the Hogsmeade Owlympics. With me today are Spanky Spankison, four-time Galleon-winning captain of the English duelling team, and his sometime schoolmate and Romanian opposite-number, Sid Shmedly. Throughout the duelling events so far, the wizarding world has been riveted by the obviously fierce competition between your teams--especially between the two of you. I wonder, Sid, is this a personal thing, or is it purely a sporting rivalry?
SHMEDLY: Oh dear me, no, there’s nothing personal about it at all. In fact, Spanky and I are dear old compatriots. Aren’t we, Old Spank?
"I always hated that man," whispered Merlin, confidentially, as the interviewer put the same question to young Spanky.
"Shmedly?" said Harvey. "I suppose that’s natural. Though he is a smashing good whist player."
SPANKISON: Well, actually, Bo, we loathe...
SHMEDLY: We loathe having to face each other with our wands drawn. It’s always been this way, but we seem fated to be at opposite ends of a major duel. But having a worthy opponent, one who is so nearly your equal in almost every aspect of the game, is what makes competition so rewarding...
The present-day Spanky ground his teeth almost as loudly as the image of his younger self.
DWYER: I understand that, in spite of your avowed mutual friendship, you come from very different personal and political backgrounds. Mr. Spankison, is it true that you are Muggleborn?
SPANKISON: Actually, Bo--not that I think it matters one bit--I’m a halfblood. My father, you see, was an Animagus who did some dangerous work in the Forties against the Dark Lord of that time. He was the head of an anti-Grindelwald cell in the Bavarian Alps (this was shortly after my mother conceived me), and he was helping witches and wizards escape Grindelwald’s followers. Apparently Grindelwald got wise and conjured a huge blizzard that buried their whole village under yards of snow. Everyone would have perished, trapped for weeks in a snowed-under ski lodge, had not Dad turned into a dormouse and burrowed his way out of the snowdrift. Then he scurried for help and somehow got it, but he must have run into some other dark workings of Grindelwald’s, because he was never able to convert into a man again. He was sent home in a cigar box, and my mother took care of him for the rest of his life; but she herself was a Muggle and could not do much to support my older sisters and me. So she sent me to live in Mangeford with my Aunt Violet, my father’s sister, who was a squib and married to the owner of the local alehouse, known as the Dog Biscuit. I washed dishes for them and took magic lessons from the landlord, Lionel Nib--
SHMEDLY (yawning): I daresay, I love hearing about your sordid personal history, my dear Spankimus Maximus, but chiefly at bedtime. Suffice it to say that your heritage is as patchy as a calico cat, and you could draw up your wizarding pedigree on a cigarette paper, which would then be all the more suitable to roll up, daub with saliva, and ignite.
DWYER: Oho! Listen to the man! What a delicious example of the--I’m sure--friendly ribbing that keeps your competitive natures on edge. What do you say to that, Spankster?
SPANKISON: I’m sure I don’t know, Blow--I beg your pardon--Bo. It’s only that I sincerely do not understand what difference a wizard’s pedigree makes. I believe I and my teammates are proving that wizards of mixed or even non-magical heritage can perfom just as well as--
SHMEDLY: I wonder what my dear friend thinks the word "prove" means. As I understand the word, it involves the slow, patient, exhaustive application of an impartial research method on both a focus group (say, for example, wizards) as well as a control group--such as Muggles. This is precisely what the wizarding race has been doing, through centuries of refining and proving the wizarding bloodline, while mavericks and sports like this--
SPANKISON: Bloodline, shmoodline! Did you hear yourself say the words wizarding race? What about the human race, Sid? Aren’t you a member of that?
SHMEDLY: But you see, Spanky, for a Muggle that term means something quite different from what it means to a wizard. For a Muggle, there is nothing else for a person to be; you’re either a human being or you’re no being at all. So there is nothing in particular to inspire his loyalty to mankind, nothing to measure himself against. For a wizard, it is different. A wizard coexists with other beings, like goblins and centaurs and so forth, so a wizard has a stake in maintaining the superiority of his order of beings. And therefore it is in wizardkind, not in mankind, that I take my place with pride.
SPANKY: But why do you hate Muggles so much, Sid? They’re human too, aren’t they? What did they ever do to you?
SHMEDLY: It’s not so much what they’ve done as what they haven’t done, and cannot do. I sometimes wonder whether Muggles are people at all.
DWYER: Now wait just a moment, Sid. I’ll have you know--
SHMEDLY: Yes, yes, yes, let’s take it as already said. It’s not that I’m angry at Muggles, or what have you. None of their feeble witch hunts or witch trials or witch burnings ever harmed a true wizard. They’re like ants running around on the anthill, building and feeding and conspiring and conquering and murdering each other, all unaware of the wide world outside of the anthill. The real world is unknown to them; perhaps it is they who are not real.
SPANKY: You make it sound so sophisticated, but all it boils down to is senseless hatred and a blind sense of your own superiority!
SHMEDLY: There’s nothing blind about it. Muggles are the ones who are blind. Or rather, our world strives to keep them in the dark, to keep them unaware of our existence. Why should it be so? Why should we not work our magics in the open, in full view of all? Why should we hide from them? They cannot harm us, but we can harm them. They should hide from us!
SPANKY (surging to his feet): Those are the words of a dark wizard!
DWYER (flustered): Well, this has been an interesting avenue of discussion, but let’s get back to the upcoming Freestyle final...
SHMEDLY (calm, scornful): Spanky, Spanky, Spanky! You are so stuck in the past, afraid of the future. Why should true beings hide their nature, while mere talking animals go about their dumb-show? Why should we protect their delicate sense of reality? Why shouldn’t we step forth boldly and show ourselves to be what we are? Why shouldn’t Muggles learn to adjust to the reality that there is magic in the world, and the right destiny of mankind is to be ruled by magic?
SPANKY (spitting with fury): Right? You dare to speak of right?
DWYER (very loudly): So, Mr. Spankison, since your less-than-stellar showing in the Freestyle event at Nationals, what have you done to strengthen your routine?
SHMEDLY: Yes, right! How many Muggles did you tread on in order to hoist yourself onto that high horse? I happen to know another heartwarming anecdote from your adolescence, Spankison. I happen to know about that Muggle sweetheart in Mangeford, to whom you gave a salamander on Bonfire Night. What became of that poor girl? I wonder, did her family rebuild their hovel after it burnt down, or did they move as far away from your dear Mr. Niblet’s lands as they could?
SPANKY (pulling out both wands): I’ll take you right here, you smug b--
"Silencio!" cried Harvey. The escalating mayhem went on in silence while the older Shmedly stood, stoop-shouldered, in the corner. "I think that will do nicely. Shall we go back to our cozy little parlor and wash this bitter memory down with a nice drink?"
Spanky nodded wearily, waved his wand, and the scene disappeared. Two invisible figures, one veiled, one masked and one hooded sighed deeply, and picked up their still-steaming goblets.
"Well, I take it your Freestyle match was something to remember," said Sadie, sardonically.
"That, if I remember well," said Harvey, "is the understatement of the night. May I warm up your drinks, chaps?"
[Originally posted 10/15/04]
"Well, since you’ve seen my face now, I might as well show you this," said Spanky, pulling a dog-eared magazine out of his cloak. It was a very old issue of Broom and Wand, with the caption "Who Will Laugh Last?" and a picture of two angry young wizards brandishing wands at each other. One of them was Spanky. The other was...
"Hey, I know him," Merlin exclaimed. "Why, he’s--"
"Shmedly," said Spanky. "I don’t care what name you know him by. That name is not spoken around me. I’ve even altered the text of this interview so that I don’t have to hear it. I would rather hear the entire Three-Sickle Opera sung to the words ‘Lord Voldemort.’ So let’s just keep calling him Shmedly, right?"
The others murmured agreement as Spanky flipped the well-thumbed pages to the interview. "This was done between our Team duel and the final of the Freestyle event. Even though our side was clearly ahead of Romania in the Galleon race, they had beaten us a couple of times and, as you can see, the press was aware that we were closely matched and bitter rivals. So this sporting journal decided to do a double interview, and our team coach decided it was a good idea. Ah! Here it is. Touch your wand-tips there."
Five wand-tips emerged from various robes and invisibility cloaks and touched a little blank square beneath the headline of the interview. All at once, the wizards and witches around the parlor table found themselves in a dingy little office furnished with three stools. They gathered around, watching the two young duelers glowering at each other from either side of a bald, barrel-chested man whose Quick Quotes Quill was scribbling away.
"Wow," said Endora. "I forgot they used to do this pop-up kind of thing, before the duty on mnemonic ink went--"
"Shush!" warned Sadie. "They’re about to begin!"
INTERVIEWER: Testing, testing. Excellent. This is Bo Dwyer, feature writer for Broom and Wand, covering the Hogsmeade Owlympics. With me today are Spanky Spankison, four-time Galleon-winning captain of the English duelling team, and his sometime schoolmate and Romanian opposite-number, Sid Shmedly. Throughout the duelling events so far, the wizarding world has been riveted by the obviously fierce competition between your teams--especially between the two of you. I wonder, Sid, is this a personal thing, or is it purely a sporting rivalry?
SHMEDLY: Oh dear me, no, there’s nothing personal about it at all. In fact, Spanky and I are dear old compatriots. Aren’t we, Old Spank?
"I always hated that man," whispered Merlin, confidentially, as the interviewer put the same question to young Spanky.
"Shmedly?" said Harvey. "I suppose that’s natural. Though he is a smashing good whist player."
SPANKISON: Well, actually, Bo, we loathe...
SHMEDLY: We loathe having to face each other with our wands drawn. It’s always been this way, but we seem fated to be at opposite ends of a major duel. But having a worthy opponent, one who is so nearly your equal in almost every aspect of the game, is what makes competition so rewarding...
The present-day Spanky ground his teeth almost as loudly as the image of his younger self.
DWYER: I understand that, in spite of your avowed mutual friendship, you come from very different personal and political backgrounds. Mr. Spankison, is it true that you are Muggleborn?
SPANKISON: Actually, Bo--not that I think it matters one bit--I’m a halfblood. My father, you see, was an Animagus who did some dangerous work in the Forties against the Dark Lord of that time. He was the head of an anti-Grindelwald cell in the Bavarian Alps (this was shortly after my mother conceived me), and he was helping witches and wizards escape Grindelwald’s followers. Apparently Grindelwald got wise and conjured a huge blizzard that buried their whole village under yards of snow. Everyone would have perished, trapped for weeks in a snowed-under ski lodge, had not Dad turned into a dormouse and burrowed his way out of the snowdrift. Then he scurried for help and somehow got it, but he must have run into some other dark workings of Grindelwald’s, because he was never able to convert into a man again. He was sent home in a cigar box, and my mother took care of him for the rest of his life; but she herself was a Muggle and could not do much to support my older sisters and me. So she sent me to live in Mangeford with my Aunt Violet, my father’s sister, who was a squib and married to the owner of the local alehouse, known as the Dog Biscuit. I washed dishes for them and took magic lessons from the landlord, Lionel Nib--
SHMEDLY (yawning): I daresay, I love hearing about your sordid personal history, my dear Spankimus Maximus, but chiefly at bedtime. Suffice it to say that your heritage is as patchy as a calico cat, and you could draw up your wizarding pedigree on a cigarette paper, which would then be all the more suitable to roll up, daub with saliva, and ignite.
DWYER: Oho! Listen to the man! What a delicious example of the--I’m sure--friendly ribbing that keeps your competitive natures on edge. What do you say to that, Spankster?
SPANKISON: I’m sure I don’t know, Blow--I beg your pardon--Bo. It’s only that I sincerely do not understand what difference a wizard’s pedigree makes. I believe I and my teammates are proving that wizards of mixed or even non-magical heritage can perfom just as well as--
SHMEDLY: I wonder what my dear friend thinks the word "prove" means. As I understand the word, it involves the slow, patient, exhaustive application of an impartial research method on both a focus group (say, for example, wizards) as well as a control group--such as Muggles. This is precisely what the wizarding race has been doing, through centuries of refining and proving the wizarding bloodline, while mavericks and sports like this--
SPANKISON: Bloodline, shmoodline! Did you hear yourself say the words wizarding race? What about the human race, Sid? Aren’t you a member of that?
SHMEDLY: But you see, Spanky, for a Muggle that term means something quite different from what it means to a wizard. For a Muggle, there is nothing else for a person to be; you’re either a human being or you’re no being at all. So there is nothing in particular to inspire his loyalty to mankind, nothing to measure himself against. For a wizard, it is different. A wizard coexists with other beings, like goblins and centaurs and so forth, so a wizard has a stake in maintaining the superiority of his order of beings. And therefore it is in wizardkind, not in mankind, that I take my place with pride.
SPANKY: But why do you hate Muggles so much, Sid? They’re human too, aren’t they? What did they ever do to you?
SHMEDLY: It’s not so much what they’ve done as what they haven’t done, and cannot do. I sometimes wonder whether Muggles are people at all.
DWYER: Now wait just a moment, Sid. I’ll have you know--
SHMEDLY: Yes, yes, yes, let’s take it as already said. It’s not that I’m angry at Muggles, or what have you. None of their feeble witch hunts or witch trials or witch burnings ever harmed a true wizard. They’re like ants running around on the anthill, building and feeding and conspiring and conquering and murdering each other, all unaware of the wide world outside of the anthill. The real world is unknown to them; perhaps it is they who are not real.
SPANKY: You make it sound so sophisticated, but all it boils down to is senseless hatred and a blind sense of your own superiority!
SHMEDLY: There’s nothing blind about it. Muggles are the ones who are blind. Or rather, our world strives to keep them in the dark, to keep them unaware of our existence. Why should it be so? Why should we not work our magics in the open, in full view of all? Why should we hide from them? They cannot harm us, but we can harm them. They should hide from us!
SPANKY (surging to his feet): Those are the words of a dark wizard!
DWYER (flustered): Well, this has been an interesting avenue of discussion, but let’s get back to the upcoming Freestyle final...
SHMEDLY (calm, scornful): Spanky, Spanky, Spanky! You are so stuck in the past, afraid of the future. Why should true beings hide their nature, while mere talking animals go about their dumb-show? Why should we protect their delicate sense of reality? Why shouldn’t we step forth boldly and show ourselves to be what we are? Why shouldn’t Muggles learn to adjust to the reality that there is magic in the world, and the right destiny of mankind is to be ruled by magic?
SPANKY (spitting with fury): Right? You dare to speak of right?
DWYER (very loudly): So, Mr. Spankison, since your less-than-stellar showing in the Freestyle event at Nationals, what have you done to strengthen your routine?
SHMEDLY: Yes, right! How many Muggles did you tread on in order to hoist yourself onto that high horse? I happen to know another heartwarming anecdote from your adolescence, Spankison. I happen to know about that Muggle sweetheart in Mangeford, to whom you gave a salamander on Bonfire Night. What became of that poor girl? I wonder, did her family rebuild their hovel after it burnt down, or did they move as far away from your dear Mr. Niblet’s lands as they could?
SPANKY (pulling out both wands): I’ll take you right here, you smug b--
"Silencio!" cried Harvey. The escalating mayhem went on in silence while the older Shmedly stood, stoop-shouldered, in the corner. "I think that will do nicely. Shall we go back to our cozy little parlor and wash this bitter memory down with a nice drink?"
Spanky nodded wearily, waved his wand, and the scene disappeared. Two invisible figures, one veiled, one masked and one hooded sighed deeply, and picked up their still-steaming goblets.
"Well, I take it your Freestyle match was something to remember," said Sadie, sardonically.
"That, if I remember well," said Harvey, "is the understatement of the night. May I warm up your drinks, chaps?"
[Originally posted 10/15/04]
23. Team Dueling
Concepts contributed by: Jessica Parker & Norman Greene
"The next event in which I faced Shmedly," said the cloaked wizard after a long, thoughtful sip of firewhisky, "was the Owlympic Team Duel. The Romanian team met ours in the semifinal, and the match was delayed because the judges wanted to make sure our spells wouldn't break through the magic circle around the combatants, as mine had in the final of the Relay event. Part of me accepted this, and understood it, for otherwise Shmedly could have tried hurting someone in the stands--Ilona, maybe--to distract me from dueling with him. But part of me was miffed. I had, after all, saved a lot of people from being crushed by a collapsing, flame-tipped, giant wand. Heigh ho.
"In the quarterfinal, Crinkle, Ruff and I overcame a relentless bombardment from a Chinese side that had obviously trained for years under merciless coaches. It seemed that those lads never needed to rest. We hardly had time to take a breath as we stood in one line, they in another facing us, and spells flew both ways as thick and fast as anything. The judges had trouble keeping up with what was going on. The Daily Prophet correspondent who wrote it up said that he was only able to follow the match by noting the missed spells that bounced off the magic circle. After it was over, our team took the Chinese team out for a few pints, and we spent six hours just trying to reconstruct what had happened. The Priori Incantatem spell came in rather handy. So we ended up in the semifinal against Romania, and the Chinese got their revenge by beating Romania in the final."
Spanky sighed. So did his audience of one wizard and two witches--only one of whom was visible.
"So you lost to Shmedly and his mates," Merlin said compassionately.
"But they lost to the Chinese, what you'd defeated," Endora added, sounding angry on Spanky's behalf.
"Well, yes," said Spanky. "Remember, it was a double elimination. China stayed in because their match against us was their only defeat. Our match against Romania was our only defeat. And as it was the semi-final, and China trounced Rwanda in their semi-final, we ended up beating Rwanda for the Knut. It wasn't what we had hoped, but at least Shmedly's side didn't get a Galleon. And that, by the way, is what clinched the All-Round Dueling Galleon for us. We had won three Galleons and a Knut, and they only two Sickles and a Knut; there were only two more events, so they couldn't improve on us overall. It's ironic, when you consider that Romania beat us. Our Chinese friends, who respected us as much as they despised Shmedly and his mates, were really the ones who won the Overall Galleon for us."
Though his face was hidden in the shadow of his hood, the way he sipped his drink seemed somehow glum.
"Well, tell us about it," Sadie, the veiled witch, snapped irritably as she tamped a wad of coarse, nasty-looking tobacco into the bowl of her pipe.
"All right," Spanky said sullenly. "On our side of the center line, I stood in the center and somewhat forward. Ruff was on my right, Crinkle on my left, a step or two back. In a straight line opposite us stood Lobster, Shmedly, and Quadrille. The rule was, you could block any spell that came your way, but you could not aim a curse at the same member of the opposing team twice in a row. There we stood, in rubber galoshes and rain slickers, trembling with the thought of facing Shmedly's invincible bolts of lightning.
"The bell rang. I continued my sound strategy of conjuring a rubber mat under my side of the ring, and a lightning rod grounded near Shmedly's feet, using both wands at the same time. Crinkle shielded me, and Ruff provided covering fire by shooting boiled eggs at Shmedly. But Lobster put a jelly-legs jinx on Ruff, Shmedly turned the eggs back at him with a simple shield spell, and Quadrille finished Ruff with the Incarcerous curse. That left Crinkle and me against three, and little more than a second had elapsed.
"Crinkle shot icewater at Shmedly next, and I cast an engorgement charm on Lobster's right ear and a psoriasis curse on Quadrille at the same time. Then I switched to shielding Crinkle with my left wand and causing Shmedly's eyebrows to turn into centipedes with my right, while Crinkle filled Quadrille's trousers with pistachio shells. This would have been great fun except that at the same time, Lobster was trying to barbecue us with a miniature solar flare, Shmedly was attempting to turn the grass at our feet into deadly snakes, and Quadrille was hurling tinned salmon on us--tins and all. Shmedly yanked the rubber mat out from under our feet, but before he could throw lightning at us I conjured another mat and, with my other wand, summoned a swarm of potato bugs to join the pistachio shells in Quadrille's trousers. Lobster and Crinkle fired curses at each other at the same time, but the spells ricocheted off each other and hit the magic circle to no effect. Quadrille, managing to keep his head (even though he clearly wanted to rip his robes off and roll naked in the grass), almost got me with a shower of fewmets--still fresh enough to cause serious burns--but he was shaking so hard that he missed. And then Shmedly did something so despicable that even I didn't expect it and it turned the tide of the duel.
"Through all this, you may remember, Ruff was lying off to the side, bound tightly in ropes and jiggling from the knees down like a bowl of jelly every time something went bang or boom. By the wizarding code of honor, he was out of the duel. But apparently, this rule was not spelled out in the official Owlympic Dueling rules, because Shmedly began hurling curses at Ruff and no one did anything to stop the duel. I was, for a moment, frozen by outrage, as a thousand pounds of sugar beets rained down over the corner where Ruff lay. Then I used my right wand to create a dome of protection over him. But since Shmedly now alternated between pulling rubber mats out from under my feet and dropping heavy objects over poor Ruff, I was now kept busy with shielding Ruff and conjuring more mats. Crinkle, meanwhile, could only shield one of us, while both Quadrille and Lobster remained free to curse Crinkle and myself by turns. I barked at Crinkle to stop playing defensive magic and do something to Shmedly, but as soon as Crinkle dropped his guard, Lobster conjured a stuffed swordfish which hit Crinkle in the chest and knocked him flat. Pinned, Crinkle could do nothing while Shmedly covered him in Yeti bogeys. I tried to stun Shmedly while his back was turned, but I wasn't fast enough. Lobster got in under my defenses and hit me with a Silencio charm, then Shmedly wrapped me up in a spider's web and threw me down between my two mates.
"So it ended. Shmedly and his mates won the Sickle--the first time they had come out ahead of us in an Owlympic event. But we won the Knut and another Galleon for the Overall category, so that was all right. It took ages to clean ourselves up, and Crinkle still smelled somewhat of Yeti when we stood up for the award ceremony, victorious in defeat. I needn't tell you that Shmedly was furious, nor that Ilona was very, very proud. That night, I asked her to marry me..."
Spanky's voice trailed off. This time, he didn't lift the goblet of firewhisky to his lips. He just sat very still. Something about the way he said or did nothing gave Sadie and the others a shiver of dread.
"Well, what did she say?" Endora asked hesitantly.
Spanky said nothing for a while. Then he held up his goblet, sniffed it, threw its contents on the floor, and squirted something from his wand tip into the goblet. Something that frothed and bubbled, with an evil green color and a sour smell. "Time for a real drink," Spanky explained, taking a sip that caused him to shudder so hard that his hood slipped. Coughing, he put the goblet down and pulled the hood over his features again. But it was too late. Sadie dropped her pipe with a clunk.
"So it is you," she said hoarsely.
"Indeed," said an unexpected voice from the corner, between the places where Endora's and Merlin's disembodied voices came. A cloak of invisibility fell shimmering to the floor, and the figure of Harvey--with his face swathed in a handkerchief--appeared. "And it's about time I had a drink too," he added. "It's tried my patience, sitting still for so long, pretending not to be here. But not in vain! A round for everyone?"
"Cor," said Merlin, who, for his part, had every intention of staying invisible.
"Blimey," added Endora, still ditto.
"I fought I smelled something rotten," Sadie said smugly, as she swept a bowlful of spilled tobacco into a heap and began trying to reintroduce it to her pipe.
"Well, now you know who I am," said Spanky, shaken. "What now? Introductions all around?"
"Save that for later," said Harvey, conjuring a round of drinks (and very emphatically vanishing the one Spanky had poured for himself). "First, you have a tale to finish. I believe you were up to the Freestyle event, which I remember vividly. You made me considerably richer than I already was in that duel. I wonder if you remember it as vividly as I do."
"You must be joking," Spanky.
"I never joke about business," Harvey said, and he obviously meant it. "Now clear your palate with some good, wholesome firewhisky and get on with the story, there's a good lad..."
[Originally posted 10/11/04]
"The next event in which I faced Shmedly," said the cloaked wizard after a long, thoughtful sip of firewhisky, "was the Owlympic Team Duel. The Romanian team met ours in the semifinal, and the match was delayed because the judges wanted to make sure our spells wouldn't break through the magic circle around the combatants, as mine had in the final of the Relay event. Part of me accepted this, and understood it, for otherwise Shmedly could have tried hurting someone in the stands--Ilona, maybe--to distract me from dueling with him. But part of me was miffed. I had, after all, saved a lot of people from being crushed by a collapsing, flame-tipped, giant wand. Heigh ho.
"In the quarterfinal, Crinkle, Ruff and I overcame a relentless bombardment from a Chinese side that had obviously trained for years under merciless coaches. It seemed that those lads never needed to rest. We hardly had time to take a breath as we stood in one line, they in another facing us, and spells flew both ways as thick and fast as anything. The judges had trouble keeping up with what was going on. The Daily Prophet correspondent who wrote it up said that he was only able to follow the match by noting the missed spells that bounced off the magic circle. After it was over, our team took the Chinese team out for a few pints, and we spent six hours just trying to reconstruct what had happened. The Priori Incantatem spell came in rather handy. So we ended up in the semifinal against Romania, and the Chinese got their revenge by beating Romania in the final."
Spanky sighed. So did his audience of one wizard and two witches--only one of whom was visible.
"So you lost to Shmedly and his mates," Merlin said compassionately.
"But they lost to the Chinese, what you'd defeated," Endora added, sounding angry on Spanky's behalf.
"Well, yes," said Spanky. "Remember, it was a double elimination. China stayed in because their match against us was their only defeat. Our match against Romania was our only defeat. And as it was the semi-final, and China trounced Rwanda in their semi-final, we ended up beating Rwanda for the Knut. It wasn't what we had hoped, but at least Shmedly's side didn't get a Galleon. And that, by the way, is what clinched the All-Round Dueling Galleon for us. We had won three Galleons and a Knut, and they only two Sickles and a Knut; there were only two more events, so they couldn't improve on us overall. It's ironic, when you consider that Romania beat us. Our Chinese friends, who respected us as much as they despised Shmedly and his mates, were really the ones who won the Overall Galleon for us."
Though his face was hidden in the shadow of his hood, the way he sipped his drink seemed somehow glum.
"Well, tell us about it," Sadie, the veiled witch, snapped irritably as she tamped a wad of coarse, nasty-looking tobacco into the bowl of her pipe.
"All right," Spanky said sullenly. "On our side of the center line, I stood in the center and somewhat forward. Ruff was on my right, Crinkle on my left, a step or two back. In a straight line opposite us stood Lobster, Shmedly, and Quadrille. The rule was, you could block any spell that came your way, but you could not aim a curse at the same member of the opposing team twice in a row. There we stood, in rubber galoshes and rain slickers, trembling with the thought of facing Shmedly's invincible bolts of lightning.
"The bell rang. I continued my sound strategy of conjuring a rubber mat under my side of the ring, and a lightning rod grounded near Shmedly's feet, using both wands at the same time. Crinkle shielded me, and Ruff provided covering fire by shooting boiled eggs at Shmedly. But Lobster put a jelly-legs jinx on Ruff, Shmedly turned the eggs back at him with a simple shield spell, and Quadrille finished Ruff with the Incarcerous curse. That left Crinkle and me against three, and little more than a second had elapsed.
"Crinkle shot icewater at Shmedly next, and I cast an engorgement charm on Lobster's right ear and a psoriasis curse on Quadrille at the same time. Then I switched to shielding Crinkle with my left wand and causing Shmedly's eyebrows to turn into centipedes with my right, while Crinkle filled Quadrille's trousers with pistachio shells. This would have been great fun except that at the same time, Lobster was trying to barbecue us with a miniature solar flare, Shmedly was attempting to turn the grass at our feet into deadly snakes, and Quadrille was hurling tinned salmon on us--tins and all. Shmedly yanked the rubber mat out from under our feet, but before he could throw lightning at us I conjured another mat and, with my other wand, summoned a swarm of potato bugs to join the pistachio shells in Quadrille's trousers. Lobster and Crinkle fired curses at each other at the same time, but the spells ricocheted off each other and hit the magic circle to no effect. Quadrille, managing to keep his head (even though he clearly wanted to rip his robes off and roll naked in the grass), almost got me with a shower of fewmets--still fresh enough to cause serious burns--but he was shaking so hard that he missed. And then Shmedly did something so despicable that even I didn't expect it and it turned the tide of the duel.
"Through all this, you may remember, Ruff was lying off to the side, bound tightly in ropes and jiggling from the knees down like a bowl of jelly every time something went bang or boom. By the wizarding code of honor, he was out of the duel. But apparently, this rule was not spelled out in the official Owlympic Dueling rules, because Shmedly began hurling curses at Ruff and no one did anything to stop the duel. I was, for a moment, frozen by outrage, as a thousand pounds of sugar beets rained down over the corner where Ruff lay. Then I used my right wand to create a dome of protection over him. But since Shmedly now alternated between pulling rubber mats out from under my feet and dropping heavy objects over poor Ruff, I was now kept busy with shielding Ruff and conjuring more mats. Crinkle, meanwhile, could only shield one of us, while both Quadrille and Lobster remained free to curse Crinkle and myself by turns. I barked at Crinkle to stop playing defensive magic and do something to Shmedly, but as soon as Crinkle dropped his guard, Lobster conjured a stuffed swordfish which hit Crinkle in the chest and knocked him flat. Pinned, Crinkle could do nothing while Shmedly covered him in Yeti bogeys. I tried to stun Shmedly while his back was turned, but I wasn't fast enough. Lobster got in under my defenses and hit me with a Silencio charm, then Shmedly wrapped me up in a spider's web and threw me down between my two mates.
"So it ended. Shmedly and his mates won the Sickle--the first time they had come out ahead of us in an Owlympic event. But we won the Knut and another Galleon for the Overall category, so that was all right. It took ages to clean ourselves up, and Crinkle still smelled somewhat of Yeti when we stood up for the award ceremony, victorious in defeat. I needn't tell you that Shmedly was furious, nor that Ilona was very, very proud. That night, I asked her to marry me..."
Spanky's voice trailed off. This time, he didn't lift the goblet of firewhisky to his lips. He just sat very still. Something about the way he said or did nothing gave Sadie and the others a shiver of dread.
"Well, what did she say?" Endora asked hesitantly.
Spanky said nothing for a while. Then he held up his goblet, sniffed it, threw its contents on the floor, and squirted something from his wand tip into the goblet. Something that frothed and bubbled, with an evil green color and a sour smell. "Time for a real drink," Spanky explained, taking a sip that caused him to shudder so hard that his hood slipped. Coughing, he put the goblet down and pulled the hood over his features again. But it was too late. Sadie dropped her pipe with a clunk.
"So it is you," she said hoarsely.
"Indeed," said an unexpected voice from the corner, between the places where Endora's and Merlin's disembodied voices came. A cloak of invisibility fell shimmering to the floor, and the figure of Harvey--with his face swathed in a handkerchief--appeared. "And it's about time I had a drink too," he added. "It's tried my patience, sitting still for so long, pretending not to be here. But not in vain! A round for everyone?"
"Cor," said Merlin, who, for his part, had every intention of staying invisible.
"Blimey," added Endora, still ditto.
"I fought I smelled something rotten," Sadie said smugly, as she swept a bowlful of spilled tobacco into a heap and began trying to reintroduce it to her pipe.
"Well, now you know who I am," said Spanky, shaken. "What now? Introductions all around?"
"Save that for later," said Harvey, conjuring a round of drinks (and very emphatically vanishing the one Spanky had poured for himself). "First, you have a tale to finish. I believe you were up to the Freestyle event, which I remember vividly. You made me considerably richer than I already was in that duel. I wonder if you remember it as vividly as I do."
"You must be joking," Spanky.
"I never joke about business," Harvey said, and he obviously meant it. "Now clear your palate with some good, wholesome firewhisky and get on with the story, there's a good lad..."
[Originally posted 10/11/04]
22. The Relay Final
Concepts contributed by: Jessica Parker and B*
“In the first round of the Owlympic Relay Dueling Final, Crinkle and Lobster were given the task of tying a knot in a tree trunk. This time, Crinkle proved himself the cleverer wizard. Lobster conjured an oak seedling, which he bespelled to grow extremely fast. He was still busy bending and straining and trying to bend the growing thing into a loop when Crinkle simply conjured a large hollow log, crawled inside, and made a knot in his handkerchief. I remember he was still picking woodlice out of his robes at the closing ceremonies. He received full marks, and the duel proceeded to the second round.
“Ruff and Quadrille matched each other in the transfiguration task. Ruff picked a ceramic cat, a small handbell, and a skeleton key; Quadrille rummaged through the pile of junk presented for their choosing, and came up with a toy dog, a rare Chocolate Frog card of Dunstan MacBone, and a twisted piece of copper tubing. Quadrille drew the first move, so he turned the MacBone card into a walking skeleton which went toward the ceramic cat with threatening, bony fists. I was surprised by this, because I was expecting Ruff to turn his skeleton key into a skeleton. Quadrille had anticipated him, with more cleverness than I had expected of him. But Ruff simply animated the key, which attacked the joints of the skeleton and unlocked them, causing the bones to collapse in a heap.
“Once again, Quadrille must have been anticipating that Ruff would do this. I can think of no other reason for him to choose the MacBone trading card when Ruff had chosen a skeleton key. For while Ruff was busy directing the key, Quadrille animated the stuffed dog, which also chased after the fragile ceramic cat. Just in time, Ruff saw the danger and transfigured the cat into a cat-o’-nine-tails, which slithered around on its nine leathery legs and attacked the dog. The dog, leaking stuffing, ran whimpering off the stage. The cat-o-nine-tails turned on the copper tubing, but this had turned into a cobra, which rapidly coiled itself around the cat-o’-nine-tails and immobilized it. It lookeed like Ruff was going to win--and the Galleon would be ours in only two rounds--because he still had his bell. Ruff put an engorgement charm on it, so that it grew to the size of a church bell, and it looked as if it was going to come down over the cobra and trap it. Ilona was already jumping up and down in the stands, cheering our victory.
“But it turned out that, joints or no joints, Quadrille’s skeleton still had some life in it. The individual bones slid and hopped and rolled so that the bell came down resting on them, and the snake was not trapped. Then more of the bones began beating the bell, creating such a deafening noise that the judges themselves put a Silencio spell on the bell. They argued over the points on the second round of the duel; some thought Ruff had won because the bones were legally out of play and the bell would have stopped the cobra. The other judges said Quadrille had won the round, because Ruff’s bell hadn’t succeeded in trapping the snake, and the bones were still living as a result of Quadrille’s original charm on them, so there was nothing illegal about them continuing to participate. After a long deliberation, the judges decided to call the round a draw.
“And so, with one round to England and a draw, the Relay final went into its third round: a duel between Shmedly and me, which I had been dreading more and more, ever since his bolt of lightning in the quarter-final knocked me off my feet.
“When the judges rang the starting bell, I instantly conjured a thick leather matt under my feet with one hand, and another lightning rod with my left. This time I wasn’t going to get a shock through the ground. Infuriated, Shmedly threw the last spell I would have expected from him (one I had never dreamed of preparing for): Legilimens. As memories of long, hard practices, strategy sessions, and tender moments with Ilona coursed through my mind, I struggled to understand why the judges weren’t calling foul. Shmedly was basically reading my playbook! How could I defend myself when he would know every move I was going to make?
“Bitter, vibrating wrath filled me from the toes upward. I concentrated my power on creating a shield spell, which deflected the Legilimens spell. Looking back, I realize that he must have known I was going to do it. I think he planned it that way, for now I could see into Shmedly’s mind, see what he and his cronies had planned. And it wasn’t good. Lobster, Quadrille, certain other members of the Romanian team and their trainers were sneaking around while everyone else’s eyes were riveted on our duel. One group was going about the Owlympic village, marking the places where Muggleborn competitors were staying with foul sigils, placing runespoors between people’s bedsheets, and turning the foundations under the magymnastics grandstand into spotted dick. Another group, wearing Bubblehead charms, was deep in the Forbidden Forest preparing to open an enormous crate on which warnings were stenciled: "DANGER. PLAGUE RISK. NUNDU INSIDE. APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION." And perhaps even more dreadful than this, the seventy-seven-foot wand right next to the aerohippodrome, on which the Owlympic flame was balanced, was tilting slowly toward that arena and its unsuspecting crowd of cheering spectators.
“Suddenly I knew that Shmedly and his mates were about to unleash a huge, deadly, and highly-coordinated terrorist attack in the midst of the most sacred international event known to wizardkind. If I could possibly have been more furious, it would have been because I knew Shmedly had given me the chance to read his mind on purpose, at this critical moment, so that I would have to choose between winning the Owlympic Galleon, or doing my duty as an RMB agent and trying to stop those dastardly attacks. If anything could make terrorism even worse, it was that lousy, dirty trick!
“But as the rage was about to explode out of me, I suddenly realized what I could do to save both the Relay Galleon and the Owlympic games. Holding the reflected Legilimens curse on Shmedly with my right wand, I conjured a Fabergé roc’s egg with my left, placed a Portus charm on it, and threw it toward Shmedly just as I lifted the mind-reading spell. Knowing that a person of his tastes wouldn’t let such an enormous, gaudy piece of magical haute couture fall to the ground and shatter, I didn’t worry that he would try to bespell me. I instantly turned both my wands on the tottering tower of flame beside the aerohippodrome. With my right wand, I cast a series of high-intensity shield spells until it tilted upright again. With my left wand, meanwhile, I transformed the soft sand that someone had placed at its base into solid rock. That wand was going nowhere, for the time being.
“Meanwhile, you may as well know that Shmedly had vanished from the stage the instant he caught the portkey I had thrown at him. He thereby forfeited the duel, and England won the Galleon. But this was all by the way. He had instantly appeared inside the Nundu’s cage. How he escaped being breathed upon I do not know. What I do know is that no Nundu was ever seen near the Owlympic village, and that Shmedly showed up for the medal ceremony looking very windswept and bothered. He must have banished the Nundu back to its Himalayan lair before it could so much as sniff in his direction. He’s a quick thinker, Shmedly, I’ll give him that. And the Owlympic Security Force, thanks to an anonymous tip, had already rounded up all the runespoors, removed the sigils, and reinforced the foundations of the magymnastics arena, besides foiling a few plots they discovered on their own. Seven members of the Romanian contingent--unfortunately not including Shmedly and his cronies, who had made themselves scarce during the OSF purge--were thrown out of the games and deported.
“So far, my competition with Shmedly had gone mainly in my favor. Other than beating me in the Relay quarter-final, he had nothing to boast of except one Knut and one Sickle. I had three Galleons, and I had foiled a plot to disrupt the games with terrorism. But he wasn’t done yet. If anything, he was more determined than ever to defeat me in the remaining Dueling events. Indeed, our most intense duels were yet to come...”
[Originally posted 10/1/04]
“In the first round of the Owlympic Relay Dueling Final, Crinkle and Lobster were given the task of tying a knot in a tree trunk. This time, Crinkle proved himself the cleverer wizard. Lobster conjured an oak seedling, which he bespelled to grow extremely fast. He was still busy bending and straining and trying to bend the growing thing into a loop when Crinkle simply conjured a large hollow log, crawled inside, and made a knot in his handkerchief. I remember he was still picking woodlice out of his robes at the closing ceremonies. He received full marks, and the duel proceeded to the second round.
“Ruff and Quadrille matched each other in the transfiguration task. Ruff picked a ceramic cat, a small handbell, and a skeleton key; Quadrille rummaged through the pile of junk presented for their choosing, and came up with a toy dog, a rare Chocolate Frog card of Dunstan MacBone, and a twisted piece of copper tubing. Quadrille drew the first move, so he turned the MacBone card into a walking skeleton which went toward the ceramic cat with threatening, bony fists. I was surprised by this, because I was expecting Ruff to turn his skeleton key into a skeleton. Quadrille had anticipated him, with more cleverness than I had expected of him. But Ruff simply animated the key, which attacked the joints of the skeleton and unlocked them, causing the bones to collapse in a heap.
“Once again, Quadrille must have been anticipating that Ruff would do this. I can think of no other reason for him to choose the MacBone trading card when Ruff had chosen a skeleton key. For while Ruff was busy directing the key, Quadrille animated the stuffed dog, which also chased after the fragile ceramic cat. Just in time, Ruff saw the danger and transfigured the cat into a cat-o’-nine-tails, which slithered around on its nine leathery legs and attacked the dog. The dog, leaking stuffing, ran whimpering off the stage. The cat-o-nine-tails turned on the copper tubing, but this had turned into a cobra, which rapidly coiled itself around the cat-o’-nine-tails and immobilized it. It lookeed like Ruff was going to win--and the Galleon would be ours in only two rounds--because he still had his bell. Ruff put an engorgement charm on it, so that it grew to the size of a church bell, and it looked as if it was going to come down over the cobra and trap it. Ilona was already jumping up and down in the stands, cheering our victory.
“But it turned out that, joints or no joints, Quadrille’s skeleton still had some life in it. The individual bones slid and hopped and rolled so that the bell came down resting on them, and the snake was not trapped. Then more of the bones began beating the bell, creating such a deafening noise that the judges themselves put a Silencio spell on the bell. They argued over the points on the second round of the duel; some thought Ruff had won because the bones were legally out of play and the bell would have stopped the cobra. The other judges said Quadrille had won the round, because Ruff’s bell hadn’t succeeded in trapping the snake, and the bones were still living as a result of Quadrille’s original charm on them, so there was nothing illegal about them continuing to participate. After a long deliberation, the judges decided to call the round a draw.
“And so, with one round to England and a draw, the Relay final went into its third round: a duel between Shmedly and me, which I had been dreading more and more, ever since his bolt of lightning in the quarter-final knocked me off my feet.
“When the judges rang the starting bell, I instantly conjured a thick leather matt under my feet with one hand, and another lightning rod with my left. This time I wasn’t going to get a shock through the ground. Infuriated, Shmedly threw the last spell I would have expected from him (one I had never dreamed of preparing for): Legilimens. As memories of long, hard practices, strategy sessions, and tender moments with Ilona coursed through my mind, I struggled to understand why the judges weren’t calling foul. Shmedly was basically reading my playbook! How could I defend myself when he would know every move I was going to make?
“Bitter, vibrating wrath filled me from the toes upward. I concentrated my power on creating a shield spell, which deflected the Legilimens spell. Looking back, I realize that he must have known I was going to do it. I think he planned it that way, for now I could see into Shmedly’s mind, see what he and his cronies had planned. And it wasn’t good. Lobster, Quadrille, certain other members of the Romanian team and their trainers were sneaking around while everyone else’s eyes were riveted on our duel. One group was going about the Owlympic village, marking the places where Muggleborn competitors were staying with foul sigils, placing runespoors between people’s bedsheets, and turning the foundations under the magymnastics grandstand into spotted dick. Another group, wearing Bubblehead charms, was deep in the Forbidden Forest preparing to open an enormous crate on which warnings were stenciled: "DANGER. PLAGUE RISK. NUNDU INSIDE. APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION." And perhaps even more dreadful than this, the seventy-seven-foot wand right next to the aerohippodrome, on which the Owlympic flame was balanced, was tilting slowly toward that arena and its unsuspecting crowd of cheering spectators.
“Suddenly I knew that Shmedly and his mates were about to unleash a huge, deadly, and highly-coordinated terrorist attack in the midst of the most sacred international event known to wizardkind. If I could possibly have been more furious, it would have been because I knew Shmedly had given me the chance to read his mind on purpose, at this critical moment, so that I would have to choose between winning the Owlympic Galleon, or doing my duty as an RMB agent and trying to stop those dastardly attacks. If anything could make terrorism even worse, it was that lousy, dirty trick!
“But as the rage was about to explode out of me, I suddenly realized what I could do to save both the Relay Galleon and the Owlympic games. Holding the reflected Legilimens curse on Shmedly with my right wand, I conjured a Fabergé roc’s egg with my left, placed a Portus charm on it, and threw it toward Shmedly just as I lifted the mind-reading spell. Knowing that a person of his tastes wouldn’t let such an enormous, gaudy piece of magical haute couture fall to the ground and shatter, I didn’t worry that he would try to bespell me. I instantly turned both my wands on the tottering tower of flame beside the aerohippodrome. With my right wand, I cast a series of high-intensity shield spells until it tilted upright again. With my left wand, meanwhile, I transformed the soft sand that someone had placed at its base into solid rock. That wand was going nowhere, for the time being.
“Meanwhile, you may as well know that Shmedly had vanished from the stage the instant he caught the portkey I had thrown at him. He thereby forfeited the duel, and England won the Galleon. But this was all by the way. He had instantly appeared inside the Nundu’s cage. How he escaped being breathed upon I do not know. What I do know is that no Nundu was ever seen near the Owlympic village, and that Shmedly showed up for the medal ceremony looking very windswept and bothered. He must have banished the Nundu back to its Himalayan lair before it could so much as sniff in his direction. He’s a quick thinker, Shmedly, I’ll give him that. And the Owlympic Security Force, thanks to an anonymous tip, had already rounded up all the runespoors, removed the sigils, and reinforced the foundations of the magymnastics arena, besides foiling a few plots they discovered on their own. Seven members of the Romanian contingent--unfortunately not including Shmedly and his cronies, who had made themselves scarce during the OSF purge--were thrown out of the games and deported.
“So far, my competition with Shmedly had gone mainly in my favor. Other than beating me in the Relay quarter-final, he had nothing to boast of except one Knut and one Sickle. I had three Galleons, and I had foiled a plot to disrupt the games with terrorism. But he wasn’t done yet. If anything, he was more determined than ever to defeat me in the remaining Dueling events. Indeed, our most intense duels were yet to come...”
[Originally posted 10/1/04]
21. Bewitched Bewitched
Concepts contributed by: Misheal
Someone was drumming invisible fingers on the table.
Sadie, the veiled witch, sighed. “Either the lad has a bladder the size of a football,” she said in a gruff voice, “or he’s been held up by those muggers again.”
“The devil take them,” groused the voice of Merlin, also invisible. “Muggers. Don’t even have the sense to restrict themselves to law-abiding victims. There ought to be honor among thieves, but I tell you--I’ve been robbed twice in the past year of things that I nicked fair and square.”
“What is the world comin’ to?” snorted the invisible witch--Endora by name--beside him.
“And I’ll tell you somethin’ else,” Merlin declared, getting into his stride. “I was hoverin’ on my broom outside the bedroom window of a Muggle couple, thinkin’ of rescuin’ their dog that they hadn’t noticed was a krup; but I took an interest in the box they had that showed them moving, talking pictures.”
“Ah, those Muggles,” Sadie said wistfully. “They’ll put magic out of business, yet.”
“Be that as it may,” said Merlin testily, “they was watchin’ something called Bewitched. It was supposed to be about our kind.”
“Huh! How would they know?” Endora sneered.
“Well, they don’t know much, that was clear,” said Merlin. “It was the most absurd thing I ever saw. They showed several short dramas in a row. I think they called it a marathon. Spanky’s story about the dueling marathon is what brought it to mind. Well, it was so silly. They actually meant to show the same witch and her Muggle husband in episode after episode, doing gross magic by wiggling their noses and trying to hide it from the neighbors. The witches and wizards in that serial didn’t have a clue! Whistling up storms, making historical people appear and disappear...pointless! And then, wonder of wonders, the Muggle husband changed to a different man, yet he had the same name and nobody commented on it.
“I had had enough. I decided to throw a little real magic on the situation, to liven things up. I pointed my wand at the picture machine, said a few well-chosen words, and sat back to watch what happened. The husband in the drama was getting dressed, and when he looked in the mirror to see how his cravat was coming along, he screamed. His wife ran into the room and asked what was the matter and the man sobbed, ‘Why didn’t someone tell me? I didn’t even know!’ The wife asked what he was talking about, and the man pointed at himself and said, ‘Can’t you see? They’ve got a different actor playing me!’
“Well, that was starting to make it interesting. Then, when it looked like the witch was going to do something totally out of character, I pointed my wand again, and the witch said, ‘I don’t care what those lousy writers say, I’m not going to do it. It just isn’t me.’ By now the Muggle couple watching the play were on their feet, using the talky-phone thing to tell their neighbors about what was going on, so I decided to leave things alone for a while. But another stupid moment came up, where an elderly witch appeared out of nowhere to make everything all right. And I had all the characters grab her and hoist her out of the picture, saying, ‘Madam, you’re not even a character. You’re a plot device, and a thin one at that!’
“By then, of course, my plans to rescue the poor krup were spoiled. That couple wasn’t about to go to sleep for the rest of the night. So I just enjoyed myself, improving the storyline of their picture-play now and then. The show had this cheesy device that played a recording of an audience laughing, and for one entire episode I had them hissing and throwing fruit instead. The actors took to wearing slickers and holding open umbrellas over their heads whenever they came to a punchline. Then I decided to spice up the adverts that came on between acts of the programme. I invented a toothpaste that turns teeth green, a hair gel that turns your hair into feathers, a mouthwash that causes you to squawk like a chicken, and a drug for people who see silly things on late-night picture shows, only its side effect is that it causes the user’s dog to grow a second tail. I was still thinkin’ about that krup, you see.
“At last,” Merlin said, picking up the pace as Spanky resumed his seat at the end of the table, “I had to leave, because some of the people the couple had called had called some other people, and a fair number of individuals with butterfly nets had assembled in the square in front of the house. As I was flyin’ away on me broom, I heard the lady of the house screaming to her husband, ‘Alfred! It’s true! The dog has two tails! But we haven’t had any of that medicine...’ I believe the krup escaped in the confusion, bless it. So, lad, what event was next? The Team duel?”
“No,” said Spanky, pouring another goblet of firewhisky from the tip of his wand. “I haven’t finished with the Relay yet. You see, when Shmedly beat me, it was only the quarter-final. And as his team had already been defeated once, and that was our team’s first defeat, we weren’t put out of the running. In the semi-final, Crinkle and Ruff put paid to the American team in only two rounds, so I didn’t even have to compete again until the final. Meanwhile, the Romanian team--that is, Shmedly and his cronies--squeaked past Japan by a very narrow margin. Shmedly’s lightning curse seemed to have no reliable defense; it ensured his victory for a third round in a row. So I knew I would have to face Shmedly a second time in one event, battling for the Relay Galleon...”
[Originally posted 9/24/04]
Someone was drumming invisible fingers on the table.
Sadie, the veiled witch, sighed. “Either the lad has a bladder the size of a football,” she said in a gruff voice, “or he’s been held up by those muggers again.”
“The devil take them,” groused the voice of Merlin, also invisible. “Muggers. Don’t even have the sense to restrict themselves to law-abiding victims. There ought to be honor among thieves, but I tell you--I’ve been robbed twice in the past year of things that I nicked fair and square.”
“What is the world comin’ to?” snorted the invisible witch--Endora by name--beside him.
“And I’ll tell you somethin’ else,” Merlin declared, getting into his stride. “I was hoverin’ on my broom outside the bedroom window of a Muggle couple, thinkin’ of rescuin’ their dog that they hadn’t noticed was a krup; but I took an interest in the box they had that showed them moving, talking pictures.”
“Ah, those Muggles,” Sadie said wistfully. “They’ll put magic out of business, yet.”
“Be that as it may,” said Merlin testily, “they was watchin’ something called Bewitched. It was supposed to be about our kind.”
“Huh! How would they know?” Endora sneered.
“Well, they don’t know much, that was clear,” said Merlin. “It was the most absurd thing I ever saw. They showed several short dramas in a row. I think they called it a marathon. Spanky’s story about the dueling marathon is what brought it to mind. Well, it was so silly. They actually meant to show the same witch and her Muggle husband in episode after episode, doing gross magic by wiggling their noses and trying to hide it from the neighbors. The witches and wizards in that serial didn’t have a clue! Whistling up storms, making historical people appear and disappear...pointless! And then, wonder of wonders, the Muggle husband changed to a different man, yet he had the same name and nobody commented on it.
“I had had enough. I decided to throw a little real magic on the situation, to liven things up. I pointed my wand at the picture machine, said a few well-chosen words, and sat back to watch what happened. The husband in the drama was getting dressed, and when he looked in the mirror to see how his cravat was coming along, he screamed. His wife ran into the room and asked what was the matter and the man sobbed, ‘Why didn’t someone tell me? I didn’t even know!’ The wife asked what he was talking about, and the man pointed at himself and said, ‘Can’t you see? They’ve got a different actor playing me!’
“Well, that was starting to make it interesting. Then, when it looked like the witch was going to do something totally out of character, I pointed my wand again, and the witch said, ‘I don’t care what those lousy writers say, I’m not going to do it. It just isn’t me.’ By now the Muggle couple watching the play were on their feet, using the talky-phone thing to tell their neighbors about what was going on, so I decided to leave things alone for a while. But another stupid moment came up, where an elderly witch appeared out of nowhere to make everything all right. And I had all the characters grab her and hoist her out of the picture, saying, ‘Madam, you’re not even a character. You’re a plot device, and a thin one at that!’
“By then, of course, my plans to rescue the poor krup were spoiled. That couple wasn’t about to go to sleep for the rest of the night. So I just enjoyed myself, improving the storyline of their picture-play now and then. The show had this cheesy device that played a recording of an audience laughing, and for one entire episode I had them hissing and throwing fruit instead. The actors took to wearing slickers and holding open umbrellas over their heads whenever they came to a punchline. Then I decided to spice up the adverts that came on between acts of the programme. I invented a toothpaste that turns teeth green, a hair gel that turns your hair into feathers, a mouthwash that causes you to squawk like a chicken, and a drug for people who see silly things on late-night picture shows, only its side effect is that it causes the user’s dog to grow a second tail. I was still thinkin’ about that krup, you see.
“At last,” Merlin said, picking up the pace as Spanky resumed his seat at the end of the table, “I had to leave, because some of the people the couple had called had called some other people, and a fair number of individuals with butterfly nets had assembled in the square in front of the house. As I was flyin’ away on me broom, I heard the lady of the house screaming to her husband, ‘Alfred! It’s true! The dog has two tails! But we haven’t had any of that medicine...’ I believe the krup escaped in the confusion, bless it. So, lad, what event was next? The Team duel?”
“No,” said Spanky, pouring another goblet of firewhisky from the tip of his wand. “I haven’t finished with the Relay yet. You see, when Shmedly beat me, it was only the quarter-final. And as his team had already been defeated once, and that was our team’s first defeat, we weren’t put out of the running. In the semi-final, Crinkle and Ruff put paid to the American team in only two rounds, so I didn’t even have to compete again until the final. Meanwhile, the Romanian team--that is, Shmedly and his cronies--squeaked past Japan by a very narrow margin. Shmedly’s lightning curse seemed to have no reliable defense; it ensured his victory for a third round in a row. So I knew I would have to face Shmedly a second time in one event, battling for the Relay Galleon...”
[Originally posted 9/24/04]
20. Marathons and Relays
Concepts contributed by: "Angelbot," B* and Katya S.
“The Marathon,” Spanky continued after a dramatic pause, “is the one event in which Shmedly and I didn’t face each other. But make no mistake: this was part of his overall strategy. The Romanian team got themselves eliminated in the qualifying round (something about Lobster transfiguring himself into a shield so that Quadrille could fend off spells), which is such a blatant and elementary rule-violation that they had to be trying to get kicked out. Of course, this meant potentially one more Galleon for us and one less for them; but the Marathon is a very chancy event: anything can happen, anyone can win. And it can seriously wear out a wizard who must then be at his best for the remaining four events. In fact, it has been the custom in recent years to have the Marathon at the very end of the games, so it doesn’t spoil a team’s best players before they can compete in the other events.
“So Shmedly and his cronies reckoned on having an overall advantage in the games, simply by getting thrown out of the Marathon. They got a pleasant evening off, while I had to survive a barrage of spells from dozens of desperate wizards that went on for hours. Having teammates watching your back helps. Crinkle and Ruff were both very handy with a wand, and they held out nearly as long as I did. We covered each other as we blasted away.
“The Marathon is pretty crude work, though. After awhile, no one has the energy to be creative. Near the end, I was fending off a shower of rotten swan’s eggs from a Georgian witch with one wand and shooting cod-liver oil at the legs of a New Zealand wizard with the other, while Crinkle covered my back and Ruff tried to clear up the pool of spoiled milk at our feet. A Jamaican wizard on Crinkle’s side, who was running out of ideas, shot a basic Avis spell at Crinkle, who ducked as a flight of songbirds flew low over his head. Crinkle overbalanced, slipped on the milk, and went down with a splash.
“Now it was down to Ruff and me and about fifteen other wizards, and we had been at it so long that the crowd had gone except for a few people, like Ilona, who were mostly asleep. It was the dead of night, and I was so tired that I could barely hold up my wands. What kept me going was the thought that Shmedly was counting on me to get knocked out cold, or injured, or in some other way compromised. I wanted to get this over with. I wanted to fight him.
“My frustration rose within me. Throwing caution to the wind, I canceled my shield spell and let the rotten eggs do their worst. Meanwhile, I blasted a gale of freezing arctic air out of my left wand, and with my right wand I swept a stream of scalding coffee in a wide, wet arc. Wizards and witches in all directions--whether they were trying to curse me or each other--were either blown over or forced to flee from the ring in self-protection. I’m afraid some of them received burns, but the healers on the sidelines set them right in the bat of an eye. I hardly realized what I was doing and was still turning round and round, hosing down my fleeing opponents with coffee and frigid air, until Ruff grabbed my shoulders and shook me. ‘We won, mate!’ he yelled hoarsely. Like me, he was covered in putrid-smelling, broken eggs. ‘Galleon to you, Sickle to me, and a Knut to that Italian feller who conjured a mug to catch your coffee in.’ Ruff pointed to an exhausted-looking lad who was sitting amid the mess, sipping from a steaming mug.
“I believe Shmedly was furious. He was hoping I would come out of the marathon too exhausted or injured or addled by curses to face his team in the Relay. Instead, I had nearly four hours of sleep, a huge breakfast, and a flush of triumph from winning Galleons in my first two events. Meanwhile, Shmedly and his friends had caroused the night away, secure in their belief they would triumph over me and my team; so I was actually in the better condition when the sixty-four teams that had qualified for the Relay assembled for the first round of double-elimination play.
“It should come as no surprise, then, that Shmedly’s team lost their first-round match against Senegal. This didn’t necessarily put them out of contention, though: it only meant they were sent to the bottom of the rankings, and would have to win every other match in order to stay in the event. It also meant they would be dueling mainly against other teams that had lost in an early round, so for a few rounds they probably had easier opponents than Crinkle, Ruff and me. I figured this, also, was by their design. My teammates and I were pushed to the limit as we dueled and defeated tough teams like the Netherlands, Norway, Nigeria, and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, safely in the bottom of the rankings, Shmedly and his cronies pummeled such teams as Ethiopia, Haiti, Bolivia, and Belarus into smithereens. He couldn’t have had an easier time if he had bribed the judges to give him the weakest opponents--and I wouldn’t discount that possibility.
“We came to the point when only sixteen teams remained that hadn’t been defeated twice. My team was fairly worn-out and bruised, but undefeated. We had a knock-down, drag-out against Germany, which was also undefeated, and we won by a hair. Meanwhile, would you believe, Romania’s team was facing Senegal again. That kind of thing doesn’t happen often, and I don’t think it happened by accident. Shmedly’s crew already knew all of Senegal’s tricks, and they hadn’t shown half of theirs. While Crinkle and I sat on the sidelines, rubbing Anti-Cramping Potion into Ruff’s wand arm, we watched Shmedly face the captain of the Senegal team for the second time. It was over in one shocking second. Shmedly brought down a bolt of lightning, first thing after the starting bell. The Senegal wizard didn’t have a chance. He was carried off the pitch, smoking and giggling, with his hair on end and holes burned in the soles of his shoes. Only by the great skill of the healers was he ever able to hold a wand again. And yet, not a single judge questioned the legality of Shmedly’s curse. My guess is, galleons exchanged hands.
“So in the Relay quarter-final, Romania and Britain faced each other. The first task went to Ruff and Quadrille, who were supposed to unpop a balloon. Ruff was the cleverer of the two: he realized that all he needed to do was cast a Silencio charm on the balloon before sticking a pin in it. He managed this before Quadrille had even found all the bits of his balloon. The second task was between Crinkle and Lobster--the transfiguration routine. Crinkle chose a book, a length of hose, and a coat hanger; Lobster an electric torch, a stuffed trout, and a bottle of spirit gum. Well, Lobster turned the electric torch into a flaming torch, which set fire to Crinkle’s book. When Crinkle tried to put out the fire with water from his hose, Lobster turned his spirit gum into a rubber stopper which plugged the hose. Finally, Crinkle’s coat hanger turned into a fishhook and tried to catch Lobster’s trout, but the trout simply came to life and swallowed the hook. So that round went to Romania, and the Relay went into a third round: the wand duel between Shmedly and me. I had been waiting for this since our school days. And so had he...”
Spanky began to stand up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” snapped the voice of Endora, the invisible witch seated on Spanky’s right.
“It’s time for a lavatory break,” Spanky said. “I won’t be long.”
“Yes, you will,” Endora said. A hand emerged from her invisibility cloak, grabbed the front of Spanky’s coat and yanked him down into his seat. “You finish this Relay thing first. You can hold it till then.”
“All right,” Spanky said resentfully. “It’s just that I hate this part.
"As soon as the bell rang, I conjured a lightning rod to block the bolt of lightning I was sure Shmedly was about to call down on me. With my other wand, I put up a shield in front of me in case he decided to try another form of attack. But Shmedly had anticipated both defensive moves and got around them. He conjured a huge, poisonous-looking snake which slithered at me as fast as a man could run. I had to drop my shield to put an impediment on the snake and, when I did that, Shmedly turned my hat into a cat. It dug its claws into my temples and sprayed me right in the face. I dropped my left wand then, taking swipes at the cat to get it off my head, while trying to hit Shmedly with the custard-trap spell I had used on Otis years ago. But he blocked it with a shield spell, then sent a swarm of wasps at me.
“Now, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I had without dueling against some very tough wizards. It isn’t as if this level of competition was new to me; but for some reason, this duel was going all wrong. I had just knocked the cat off my head--which, fortunately, pounced on the snake as it recovered from my impediment jinx--and was driving the wasps away with blasts of hot air from my only remaining wand, when Shmedly let loose with the lightning. Even with the lightning rod absorbing the main blast of it, I got enough of a shock through the ground that it knocked me flat on my back. My right hand went numb to the fingertips, so that I dropped my other wand as well. And before I could get up, Shmedly put a leg-locker curse on me, and shot ropes at me that tied me hand and foot. I was beaten. My undefeated team was defeated.”
“No!” Endora gasped.
“May I go to the toilet now?” Spanky asked caustically.
[Originally posted 9/17/04]
“The Marathon,” Spanky continued after a dramatic pause, “is the one event in which Shmedly and I didn’t face each other. But make no mistake: this was part of his overall strategy. The Romanian team got themselves eliminated in the qualifying round (something about Lobster transfiguring himself into a shield so that Quadrille could fend off spells), which is such a blatant and elementary rule-violation that they had to be trying to get kicked out. Of course, this meant potentially one more Galleon for us and one less for them; but the Marathon is a very chancy event: anything can happen, anyone can win. And it can seriously wear out a wizard who must then be at his best for the remaining four events. In fact, it has been the custom in recent years to have the Marathon at the very end of the games, so it doesn’t spoil a team’s best players before they can compete in the other events.
“So Shmedly and his cronies reckoned on having an overall advantage in the games, simply by getting thrown out of the Marathon. They got a pleasant evening off, while I had to survive a barrage of spells from dozens of desperate wizards that went on for hours. Having teammates watching your back helps. Crinkle and Ruff were both very handy with a wand, and they held out nearly as long as I did. We covered each other as we blasted away.
“The Marathon is pretty crude work, though. After awhile, no one has the energy to be creative. Near the end, I was fending off a shower of rotten swan’s eggs from a Georgian witch with one wand and shooting cod-liver oil at the legs of a New Zealand wizard with the other, while Crinkle covered my back and Ruff tried to clear up the pool of spoiled milk at our feet. A Jamaican wizard on Crinkle’s side, who was running out of ideas, shot a basic Avis spell at Crinkle, who ducked as a flight of songbirds flew low over his head. Crinkle overbalanced, slipped on the milk, and went down with a splash.
“Now it was down to Ruff and me and about fifteen other wizards, and we had been at it so long that the crowd had gone except for a few people, like Ilona, who were mostly asleep. It was the dead of night, and I was so tired that I could barely hold up my wands. What kept me going was the thought that Shmedly was counting on me to get knocked out cold, or injured, or in some other way compromised. I wanted to get this over with. I wanted to fight him.
“My frustration rose within me. Throwing caution to the wind, I canceled my shield spell and let the rotten eggs do their worst. Meanwhile, I blasted a gale of freezing arctic air out of my left wand, and with my right wand I swept a stream of scalding coffee in a wide, wet arc. Wizards and witches in all directions--whether they were trying to curse me or each other--were either blown over or forced to flee from the ring in self-protection. I’m afraid some of them received burns, but the healers on the sidelines set them right in the bat of an eye. I hardly realized what I was doing and was still turning round and round, hosing down my fleeing opponents with coffee and frigid air, until Ruff grabbed my shoulders and shook me. ‘We won, mate!’ he yelled hoarsely. Like me, he was covered in putrid-smelling, broken eggs. ‘Galleon to you, Sickle to me, and a Knut to that Italian feller who conjured a mug to catch your coffee in.’ Ruff pointed to an exhausted-looking lad who was sitting amid the mess, sipping from a steaming mug.
“I believe Shmedly was furious. He was hoping I would come out of the marathon too exhausted or injured or addled by curses to face his team in the Relay. Instead, I had nearly four hours of sleep, a huge breakfast, and a flush of triumph from winning Galleons in my first two events. Meanwhile, Shmedly and his friends had caroused the night away, secure in their belief they would triumph over me and my team; so I was actually in the better condition when the sixty-four teams that had qualified for the Relay assembled for the first round of double-elimination play.
“It should come as no surprise, then, that Shmedly’s team lost their first-round match against Senegal. This didn’t necessarily put them out of contention, though: it only meant they were sent to the bottom of the rankings, and would have to win every other match in order to stay in the event. It also meant they would be dueling mainly against other teams that had lost in an early round, so for a few rounds they probably had easier opponents than Crinkle, Ruff and me. I figured this, also, was by their design. My teammates and I were pushed to the limit as we dueled and defeated tough teams like the Netherlands, Norway, Nigeria, and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, safely in the bottom of the rankings, Shmedly and his cronies pummeled such teams as Ethiopia, Haiti, Bolivia, and Belarus into smithereens. He couldn’t have had an easier time if he had bribed the judges to give him the weakest opponents--and I wouldn’t discount that possibility.
“We came to the point when only sixteen teams remained that hadn’t been defeated twice. My team was fairly worn-out and bruised, but undefeated. We had a knock-down, drag-out against Germany, which was also undefeated, and we won by a hair. Meanwhile, would you believe, Romania’s team was facing Senegal again. That kind of thing doesn’t happen often, and I don’t think it happened by accident. Shmedly’s crew already knew all of Senegal’s tricks, and they hadn’t shown half of theirs. While Crinkle and I sat on the sidelines, rubbing Anti-Cramping Potion into Ruff’s wand arm, we watched Shmedly face the captain of the Senegal team for the second time. It was over in one shocking second. Shmedly brought down a bolt of lightning, first thing after the starting bell. The Senegal wizard didn’t have a chance. He was carried off the pitch, smoking and giggling, with his hair on end and holes burned in the soles of his shoes. Only by the great skill of the healers was he ever able to hold a wand again. And yet, not a single judge questioned the legality of Shmedly’s curse. My guess is, galleons exchanged hands.
“So in the Relay quarter-final, Romania and Britain faced each other. The first task went to Ruff and Quadrille, who were supposed to unpop a balloon. Ruff was the cleverer of the two: he realized that all he needed to do was cast a Silencio charm on the balloon before sticking a pin in it. He managed this before Quadrille had even found all the bits of his balloon. The second task was between Crinkle and Lobster--the transfiguration routine. Crinkle chose a book, a length of hose, and a coat hanger; Lobster an electric torch, a stuffed trout, and a bottle of spirit gum. Well, Lobster turned the electric torch into a flaming torch, which set fire to Crinkle’s book. When Crinkle tried to put out the fire with water from his hose, Lobster turned his spirit gum into a rubber stopper which plugged the hose. Finally, Crinkle’s coat hanger turned into a fishhook and tried to catch Lobster’s trout, but the trout simply came to life and swallowed the hook. So that round went to Romania, and the Relay went into a third round: the wand duel between Shmedly and me. I had been waiting for this since our school days. And so had he...”
Spanky began to stand up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” snapped the voice of Endora, the invisible witch seated on Spanky’s right.
“It’s time for a lavatory break,” Spanky said. “I won’t be long.”
“Yes, you will,” Endora said. A hand emerged from her invisibility cloak, grabbed the front of Spanky’s coat and yanked him down into his seat. “You finish this Relay thing first. You can hold it till then.”
“All right,” Spanky said resentfully. “It’s just that I hate this part.
"As soon as the bell rang, I conjured a lightning rod to block the bolt of lightning I was sure Shmedly was about to call down on me. With my other wand, I put up a shield in front of me in case he decided to try another form of attack. But Shmedly had anticipated both defensive moves and got around them. He conjured a huge, poisonous-looking snake which slithered at me as fast as a man could run. I had to drop my shield to put an impediment on the snake and, when I did that, Shmedly turned my hat into a cat. It dug its claws into my temples and sprayed me right in the face. I dropped my left wand then, taking swipes at the cat to get it off my head, while trying to hit Shmedly with the custard-trap spell I had used on Otis years ago. But he blocked it with a shield spell, then sent a swarm of wasps at me.
“Now, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I had without dueling against some very tough wizards. It isn’t as if this level of competition was new to me; but for some reason, this duel was going all wrong. I had just knocked the cat off my head--which, fortunately, pounced on the snake as it recovered from my impediment jinx--and was driving the wasps away with blasts of hot air from my only remaining wand, when Shmedly let loose with the lightning. Even with the lightning rod absorbing the main blast of it, I got enough of a shock through the ground that it knocked me flat on my back. My right hand went numb to the fingertips, so that I dropped my other wand as well. And before I could get up, Shmedly put a leg-locker curse on me, and shot ropes at me that tied me hand and foot. I was beaten. My undefeated team was defeated.”
“No!” Endora gasped.
“May I go to the toilet now?” Spanky asked caustically.
[Originally posted 9/17/04]
19. The Owlympic Sprint
Concepts contributed by: Jessica Parker & "Angelbot"
“There are seven Owlympic dueling events,” narrated the cloaked and hooded narrator, as his three listeners--one veiled, two covered by invisibility cloaks--drank their drinks and listened. Sparks danced in the smoke haze that hung over their goblets of firewhisky. The distant cheers and applause from a nearby fire-breathing cockfight helped them imagine a cheering crowd of spectators from all the countries of the world, spectating at the wizarding games.
“Seven events?” Merlin echoed.
“Seven. First, there is the Single, like what our school Dueling Club practiced. Then there’s the Team event, in which two entire teams face each other willy-nilly. Then there is the Relay event, in which each member of the team takes a different round of the duel. The fourth event is the Sprint, in which each wizard has to do so many things and the one who completes them in the least time wins. The fifth is the Marathon, in which the last wizard standing wins. The sixth is the Freestyle, in which you accumulate points for the variety, originality, and difficulty of your routine. And finally, there is the Overall category in which the team and wizard with the most total points in the other six events are awarded medals.
“I'm sure you know that for each event--you must have watched the Owlympics that year, at least--they award a commemorative Galleon, Sickle, and Knut to the top three competitors. I believed I had a shot at a Sickle, at least, in all the categories except maybe the Freestyle. But when I realized I would be competing against Sid Shmedly, I decided I couldn’t settle for any less than gold--not if it meant letting him win the Galleon!
“Of course, you must realize how exhausting it was, competing in all seven events. It seemed we were either practicing or competing in the qualifying round of some event or other round the clock for the first three days. We snatched an hour of sleep or a bite of food where and when we could. On top of everything else, I was trying to go to all of Ilona’s events, even though the Magymnastics Arena was located deep in the Forbidden Forest, while Dueling events were tucked between the hippodrome, where they held flying-steeplechase, and the lake where, they had mer-wrestling.
“So I was stretched pretty thin, even with my RMB Detective-Level Apparition and Portkey License. Believe it or not, I slept through the Galleon round in Dancing-on-the-Tips-of-Bamboo, in which Ilona’s victory was a major upset for the Chinese. And I totally missed the final round of Ceiling Tumbling, in which she scraped a Sickle. That time it was because I was dueling with Sid Shmedly.
“As much as I had improved since leaving Hogwarts, Shmedly and I were still evenly matched. Beyond belief, but not beyond my expectations, we competed against each other in the final or semi-final of five different events. And though I faced many tough wizards and witches--clever, agile, creative, and powerful--he was consistently my most dangerous opponent. I had an interesting duel in the Singles quarter-final with a witch from Uzbekistan, and I tied for a Galleon in the Sprint final against the great Gustavo de la Mora of Argentina, who was competing for the last time. But mostly what I remember of those events is a succession of duels in which I faced Sid Shmedly. Our rivalry became so intense that the Daily Prophet commented on it, and I had dreams about it for weeks afterward. It is these five duels that I will describe to you now. I remember them as clearly as if they had happened yesterday.
“Our first confrontation was in the Sprint semi-final. You’ll know already that I won it, because I mentioned tying De la Mora for the Galleon. But it wasn’t easy to beat Shmedly, by any means. He had been very strong in the earlier rounds; in fact, he had broken a record in the quarter-final. Now, each round of Sprint dueling is different; the task is chosen at random from an official list. In my final against De la Mora, for example, the idea was that the first to hit his opponent with three spells won; and in Shmedly’s record quarter-final, the object was to be the first to blast through a succession of shields and barriers. In one of my earlier rounds, my opponent and I were placed on opposite sides of a table that had a hundred nails driven halfway into it, and I was supposed to pound them in and my opponent was supposed to pull them out--all by magic--until all the nails were either fully inserted, removed, or broken. You really had to be quick to win a Sprint.
“The variant drawn for the Sprint between Shmedly and me was a transfiguration task. The judges conjured a platform between us with seventy-two eggs on it. My task was to turn as many eggs as possible into living things--Shmedly’s, to turn them into inanimate objects. Eggs that were broken would not count either way, and the twist was: we couldn’t turn any two eggs into the same thing. Each one had to be different, or the duplicate would be disqualified.
“At the starting bell, I started turning the eggs into all the different kinds of flowers I could think of, ignoring what Shmedly was doing so I could work faster. This was a mistake. I started to wonder why I wasn’t having to skip over eggs he had turned into dead things, but when I got to the second row I saw it. He was turning my living flowers into pieces of stained glass, statues, jewelry, coins, and painted miniatures. I was disgusted with this tactic, and I was even more disgusted when none of the officials cried foul. So, daring them to fault me for an unfair advantage, I pulled out my left wand and started adding shield charms to the eggs I had changed into flowers.
“The crowd roared, and the judges began arguing in various languages, but I ignored everything but Shmedly’s grunt of annoyance. I had soon run out of different kinds of flowers, so I went on to small animals--a snail, a rabbit, a mouse, and so on. I had lost a lot of time because Shmedly had turned almost a whole row of my blooming flowers into bric-a-brac, so I put on some more speed. I left off the shield charms, reasoning that Shmedly didn’t have time to resort to his old trick again, and used both wands to transform eggs. Shmedly was working from his end of the table now, and the gap was rapidly narrowing. But when the last egg turned into a live partridge, it was a good way over onto Shmedly’s side of the table. The officials counted and counted again. Even taking into account that first row Shmedly had ruined for me, and the fact that I had turned two different eggs into sparrows (though, in fairness, one was female and the other male), I still had thirty-six points to Shmedly’s thirty-five.
“The deliberations went on a long time before the judges decided that my double-barreled wandplay did not violate any rules. Then, to Shmedly’s fury and the delight of my team, the score was posted on a flaming marquee, and I was sent up to the final and my first Galleon (or rather, half-Galleon). Ilona ran out of the crowd and kissed me. But I wasn’t as happy as she and Crinkle and Ruff were. I had hoped I could beat Shmedly with one wand tied behind my back, but it wasn’t going to be that easy...”
Spanky squirted firewhisky out of his left wand until his goblet was full, then drank deeply.
“Huh,” said Merlin’s voice, as an empty goblet materalized from under his invisibility cloak. “If I was you, lad, I’d have turned an egg into a Niffler. It would have gone after old Shmedly’s shiny buttons and brooches and things with a vengeance.”
“Well, that’s an idea,” said Spanky, mildly.
Sadie snorted as she scraped at the bowl of her pipe with a thin knife. “Merle, you fool,” she said scathingly. “He won the Galleon, didn’t he? If you can improve on that, why don’t you try out for the Owlympics next time?”
“Maybe I will,” Merlin sniffed.
Between the muttering under Sadie’s veil and Merlin’s continued grumbling, another invisible person spoke. “Just ignore them, luv,” Endora cooed from her seemingly unoccupied corner of the parlor table. “Wasn’t you going to tell us about the next event?”
“Oh yes,” said Spanky, his voice half-muffled by the rim of his goblet. He took another sip, gave a satisfied sigh, and said, “What shall I say about the Marathon?”
[Originally posted 9/10/04]
“There are seven Owlympic dueling events,” narrated the cloaked and hooded narrator, as his three listeners--one veiled, two covered by invisibility cloaks--drank their drinks and listened. Sparks danced in the smoke haze that hung over their goblets of firewhisky. The distant cheers and applause from a nearby fire-breathing cockfight helped them imagine a cheering crowd of spectators from all the countries of the world, spectating at the wizarding games.
“Seven events?” Merlin echoed.
“Seven. First, there is the Single, like what our school Dueling Club practiced. Then there’s the Team event, in which two entire teams face each other willy-nilly. Then there is the Relay event, in which each member of the team takes a different round of the duel. The fourth event is the Sprint, in which each wizard has to do so many things and the one who completes them in the least time wins. The fifth is the Marathon, in which the last wizard standing wins. The sixth is the Freestyle, in which you accumulate points for the variety, originality, and difficulty of your routine. And finally, there is the Overall category in which the team and wizard with the most total points in the other six events are awarded medals.
“I'm sure you know that for each event--you must have watched the Owlympics that year, at least--they award a commemorative Galleon, Sickle, and Knut to the top three competitors. I believed I had a shot at a Sickle, at least, in all the categories except maybe the Freestyle. But when I realized I would be competing against Sid Shmedly, I decided I couldn’t settle for any less than gold--not if it meant letting him win the Galleon!
“Of course, you must realize how exhausting it was, competing in all seven events. It seemed we were either practicing or competing in the qualifying round of some event or other round the clock for the first three days. We snatched an hour of sleep or a bite of food where and when we could. On top of everything else, I was trying to go to all of Ilona’s events, even though the Magymnastics Arena was located deep in the Forbidden Forest, while Dueling events were tucked between the hippodrome, where they held flying-steeplechase, and the lake where, they had mer-wrestling.
“So I was stretched pretty thin, even with my RMB Detective-Level Apparition and Portkey License. Believe it or not, I slept through the Galleon round in Dancing-on-the-Tips-of-Bamboo, in which Ilona’s victory was a major upset for the Chinese. And I totally missed the final round of Ceiling Tumbling, in which she scraped a Sickle. That time it was because I was dueling with Sid Shmedly.
“As much as I had improved since leaving Hogwarts, Shmedly and I were still evenly matched. Beyond belief, but not beyond my expectations, we competed against each other in the final or semi-final of five different events. And though I faced many tough wizards and witches--clever, agile, creative, and powerful--he was consistently my most dangerous opponent. I had an interesting duel in the Singles quarter-final with a witch from Uzbekistan, and I tied for a Galleon in the Sprint final against the great Gustavo de la Mora of Argentina, who was competing for the last time. But mostly what I remember of those events is a succession of duels in which I faced Sid Shmedly. Our rivalry became so intense that the Daily Prophet commented on it, and I had dreams about it for weeks afterward. It is these five duels that I will describe to you now. I remember them as clearly as if they had happened yesterday.
“Our first confrontation was in the Sprint semi-final. You’ll know already that I won it, because I mentioned tying De la Mora for the Galleon. But it wasn’t easy to beat Shmedly, by any means. He had been very strong in the earlier rounds; in fact, he had broken a record in the quarter-final. Now, each round of Sprint dueling is different; the task is chosen at random from an official list. In my final against De la Mora, for example, the idea was that the first to hit his opponent with three spells won; and in Shmedly’s record quarter-final, the object was to be the first to blast through a succession of shields and barriers. In one of my earlier rounds, my opponent and I were placed on opposite sides of a table that had a hundred nails driven halfway into it, and I was supposed to pound them in and my opponent was supposed to pull them out--all by magic--until all the nails were either fully inserted, removed, or broken. You really had to be quick to win a Sprint.
“The variant drawn for the Sprint between Shmedly and me was a transfiguration task. The judges conjured a platform between us with seventy-two eggs on it. My task was to turn as many eggs as possible into living things--Shmedly’s, to turn them into inanimate objects. Eggs that were broken would not count either way, and the twist was: we couldn’t turn any two eggs into the same thing. Each one had to be different, or the duplicate would be disqualified.
“At the starting bell, I started turning the eggs into all the different kinds of flowers I could think of, ignoring what Shmedly was doing so I could work faster. This was a mistake. I started to wonder why I wasn’t having to skip over eggs he had turned into dead things, but when I got to the second row I saw it. He was turning my living flowers into pieces of stained glass, statues, jewelry, coins, and painted miniatures. I was disgusted with this tactic, and I was even more disgusted when none of the officials cried foul. So, daring them to fault me for an unfair advantage, I pulled out my left wand and started adding shield charms to the eggs I had changed into flowers.
“The crowd roared, and the judges began arguing in various languages, but I ignored everything but Shmedly’s grunt of annoyance. I had soon run out of different kinds of flowers, so I went on to small animals--a snail, a rabbit, a mouse, and so on. I had lost a lot of time because Shmedly had turned almost a whole row of my blooming flowers into bric-a-brac, so I put on some more speed. I left off the shield charms, reasoning that Shmedly didn’t have time to resort to his old trick again, and used both wands to transform eggs. Shmedly was working from his end of the table now, and the gap was rapidly narrowing. But when the last egg turned into a live partridge, it was a good way over onto Shmedly’s side of the table. The officials counted and counted again. Even taking into account that first row Shmedly had ruined for me, and the fact that I had turned two different eggs into sparrows (though, in fairness, one was female and the other male), I still had thirty-six points to Shmedly’s thirty-five.
“The deliberations went on a long time before the judges decided that my double-barreled wandplay did not violate any rules. Then, to Shmedly’s fury and the delight of my team, the score was posted on a flaming marquee, and I was sent up to the final and my first Galleon (or rather, half-Galleon). Ilona ran out of the crowd and kissed me. But I wasn’t as happy as she and Crinkle and Ruff were. I had hoped I could beat Shmedly with one wand tied behind my back, but it wasn’t going to be that easy...”
Spanky squirted firewhisky out of his left wand until his goblet was full, then drank deeply.
“Huh,” said Merlin’s voice, as an empty goblet materalized from under his invisibility cloak. “If I was you, lad, I’d have turned an egg into a Niffler. It would have gone after old Shmedly’s shiny buttons and brooches and things with a vengeance.”
“Well, that’s an idea,” said Spanky, mildly.
Sadie snorted as she scraped at the bowl of her pipe with a thin knife. “Merle, you fool,” she said scathingly. “He won the Galleon, didn’t he? If you can improve on that, why don’t you try out for the Owlympics next time?”
“Maybe I will,” Merlin sniffed.
Between the muttering under Sadie’s veil and Merlin’s continued grumbling, another invisible person spoke. “Just ignore them, luv,” Endora cooed from her seemingly unoccupied corner of the parlor table. “Wasn’t you going to tell us about the next event?”
“Oh yes,” said Spanky, his voice half-muffled by the rim of his goblet. He took another sip, gave a satisfied sigh, and said, “What shall I say about the Marathon?”
[Originally posted 9/10/04]
18. The Double-Barreled Wizard, Part 5
Concepts contributed by: Jessica Parker, Aidan Raelyn, Jamie Peters, Armand, "Angelbot" & Leanne
Spanky found Sadie at dusk, standing in the street outside the Hog’s Head, ringing a handbell loudly and already wearing her broom-veil. Enough of the veil was pushed aside by the pipe clenched in Sadie’s teeth that Spanky could glimpse the forest of pale stubble on the witch’s chin. Between every series of four or five rings, Sadie bellowed in a hoarse, coarse voice: “Oy! Walk up and give your life-saving donation to the ETHF, wot is workin’ to put an end to starvin’ witches and wizards in the Fird World!” Beside her a cauldron was set up on a tripod. It was already half-full of knuts and sickles, and even the occasional galleon.
Spanky sidled over and bunged a knut into the cauldron. “I’ve never heard of this ETHF,” he remarked. Though his face was hidden by the hood of his cloak, one gathered from the sound of his voice that he was smirking. “What do the letters stand for?”
Out of the side of her mouth Sadie muttered, “Exterminate the Hungry Foundation. Run by the Eighth Earl of Fishtoft, a former Death Eater wot reformed and travels the world looking for good deeds to do.”
“Exterminate the Hungry?” Spanky scritched in the cauldron until he had got his knut back. “That’s not on, mate. I mean, mam. Not exactly what I would call a good deed.”
“Well, for a reformed Death Eater, it’s a start,” growled Sadie. “Besides, seein’ as what they’re doin’ ain’t strictly good work, skimmin’ the donations ain’t strictly stealin, is it? Oy! You there, with the hairy mole! Give us some chink for the ETHF! I guarantee you that not one knut of your donation will be used for any purpose besides feedin’ the hungry!” She added in an aside to Spanky, “Or at least, givin’ drink to the thirsty. You seen Harve yet?”
“Hard to tell,” said Spanky, “as I don’t really know what he looks like. Shall we go back to his parlor and wait for him? It must be nearly time.”
Sadie managed to dump the contents of the cauldron into her voluminous pockets, then vanished the cauldron, tripod, and bell with a wave of her wand. Taking Spanky’s arm with a hard, hairy hand, she allowed him to escort her through the noise and bustle of the Hog’s Head public room, where a fire-breathing cockfight was taking place on the same shielded stage where Nasal Drip had been playing the week before. Once past the beaded curtain at the top of the room, Sadie let go of Spanky’s arm and cleared her throat loudly. “I can manage from here,” she muttered in an unnaturally deep voice.
“As you wish,” said Spanky, who felt oddly like clearing his own throat.
When they reached the parlor where they had exchanged so many stories the previous week, they found two goblets of firewhisky already hovering in midair, being tipped down the throats of invisible drinkers.
“Back to the old invisibility cloaks, I see,” Sadie observed with disdain as she squeezed alongside the table.
“They’re much cooler than those heavy old cloaks,” said the voice of a wizard who liked to be called Merlin.
“The color goes better with my eyes,” the witch Endora remarked at the same time.
“No sign of Harve, then?” Sadie asked. She snapped her fingers and two more drinks appeared. She nodded toward Spanky, who sat down before one of the drinks with a whispered, “Cheers.”
At that moment, flames burst out of the air above the center of the table. Endora started, splashing firewhisky everywhere. She hastily mopped it up with a scouring charm before it could burn holes in the table. Meanwhile, Spanky had caught the roll of parchment that fell out of the flames, before they sizzled out with a puff of sulfurous smoke.
“Whew,” said Sadie, waving the smoke away. “Almost enough to put me off my drink! What a ‘orrible, smelly, hinconsiderate thing to do!” At once she began preparations to light her pipe.
“Well, mates,” said Spanky, spreading the parchment on the table, “I suppose this means Harvey won’t be making his business proposal tonight. Listen: ‘Esteemed colleagues...’”
“Esmoked would be more accurate,” Merlin coughed.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Spanky made as if to roll up the parchment again.
“Oh yes, do go on,” said Merlin hastily.
Spanky slowly unrolled the parchment, training the opening of his dark hood directly on Merlin’s end of the table. Then he lowered his head and continued to read. “’Esteemed colleagues, please forgive my absence this evening. My reasons for being unable to keep our appointment are so complicated that I haven’t time to relate them here. Suffice it to say that it involves a spill over a waterfall, a crystal cave, and a hag who wears a mail vest studded with men’s teeth. I need hardly express to you how inconvient all this is for a man in my position. I fully expect to make my escape within a day or two; but if I’m not with you by this time next week, please have my subscription to The Goblin canceled. Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves. Yours in fellowship, H.’”
“That’s all right,” said Merlin, smacking his lips after a long draught of firewhisky. “Old Harve’s gotten himself out of worse, he has. Anyway, I’ve been dyin’ to hear what happened next.” When Spanky showed no sign of understanding, Merlin added, “You know, with you and Joe Albuquerque.”
“Oh, that,” said Spanky. He sighed loudly, drained his goblet, then refilled it with his wand.
“All right. After the Bette Noir affair, Joe and I went our separate ways for a while. I went back to England, took a leave of absence from the RMB, and went into training. I’m sure you all know of the international magical games that are held every five years. That year was to be the 2000th Owlympiad, and it was to be held right here in Hogsmeade during the summer holidays. A lot of the events took place down the road at Hogwarts. You must remember it: the whole country was aflutter over hosting the Owlympics; England had high hopes for many of its teams. My friend, the one whose name came up on the Gryffindor tapestry, was expected to do wonders on the Quidditch team. My school mate, Otis, had gone in for Quodpot. I knew people who were competing in nearly every event: from the Defense Against the Dark Arts Decathlon to Levitation Weightlifting, from the Wand Throw to Transfiguring Objects in Flight. But I was training for the most anticipated event of all, save Quidditch. Guess which.”
“Er,” said Endora.
Sadie jabbed her elbow at the empty air from which Endora’s voice came. “Dueling, you nit,” she said over Endora’s grunt of pain.
“Right-o. I was also looking forward to meeting Ilona, who was training for the Romanian Magymnastics team. I had seen some of her moves during the time we both worked out of the Bucharest Mission. You take a witch or wizard in top physical and magical form, and it’s amazing what they can do. Ilona held a national record for riding a bucking pommel-horse. Her uneven-brooms routine was so daring that I once passed out while watching it. Well, nearly. And her quintuple-backflip-with-a-twist dismount from the levitating-stepping-stones has gone into the repertory as “the Ilonera.” But when she wrote to me about an old school mate of mine who had joined the Romanian Dueling squad--one who was eager to meet with me again--I was perplexed and concerned. I asked her what old mate she meant. Her return owl said his name was Sid Shmedly.”
“He never!” Endora gasped.
“Oh, yes, he did,” Spanky said grimly. “It seems the entire Romanian Dueling team had come down with a mysterious case of dragon pox, and their ministry’s Department of Magical Games and Sports was so desperate to compete in the event that they advertised for expatriates to fill up the team. And by some amazing coincidence, Sid Shmedly’s family owned vast estates along the Prut River, almost directly opposite the castle where I had been stationed on Worm Patrol. Shmedly and a couple of his school cronies happened to have been staying in a lodge on those estates for just long enough to meet the Romanian Ministry’s residency requirements. They passed all the usual blood tests--polyjuice potion, strengthening solution, rapidity rub, supercharge salve, and so forth--and they were all clean. Their wands were weighed and approved. And in trial duels against the national team’s trainers, Shmedly and his cronies--let’s call them Lobster and Quadrille--had proved themselves formidable duelers indeed. It was almost as if they had been training to be on the Romanian team all along.
“You can imagine how this news thrilled and unnerved me. Though I could end up facing the most talented duelers from around the world, the idea of facing my old school nemesis made me determined to work my very hardest. There was even a rumor that Shmedly had perfected a new kind of curse that would be difficult to block, and the Owlympic Commission had approved of its use. It had something to do with lightning shooting out of a wand and even the thought of it made my hair stand on end. I had to be fast, and I had to be strong. I practiced dueling with just my left wand, then with just my right. I labored tirelessly, wearing out the other members of my team--their names were Crinkle and Ruff--in my fierce determination to be ready for Sid Shmedly. I believed that if I was ready for him, I would be ready for anyone.
“The Owlympics finally opened on a blazing summer day. I’m told the opening ceremonies, held out on the grounds at Hogwarts, were spectacular. I’m also told that several of the matches were very exciting, and that records were set and rivalries settled in many events. But I missed it all, because I couldn’t bring myself to stop preparing for what I knew was coming. With Dueling teams from a hundred and twelve countries in a double-elimination tournament, statistical chances were good that I would never face Shmedly in these Owlympics. But in my heart, I was sure it would happen...”
[Originally posted 9/3/04]
Spanky found Sadie at dusk, standing in the street outside the Hog’s Head, ringing a handbell loudly and already wearing her broom-veil. Enough of the veil was pushed aside by the pipe clenched in Sadie’s teeth that Spanky could glimpse the forest of pale stubble on the witch’s chin. Between every series of four or five rings, Sadie bellowed in a hoarse, coarse voice: “Oy! Walk up and give your life-saving donation to the ETHF, wot is workin’ to put an end to starvin’ witches and wizards in the Fird World!” Beside her a cauldron was set up on a tripod. It was already half-full of knuts and sickles, and even the occasional galleon.
Spanky sidled over and bunged a knut into the cauldron. “I’ve never heard of this ETHF,” he remarked. Though his face was hidden by the hood of his cloak, one gathered from the sound of his voice that he was smirking. “What do the letters stand for?”
Out of the side of her mouth Sadie muttered, “Exterminate the Hungry Foundation. Run by the Eighth Earl of Fishtoft, a former Death Eater wot reformed and travels the world looking for good deeds to do.”
“Exterminate the Hungry?” Spanky scritched in the cauldron until he had got his knut back. “That’s not on, mate. I mean, mam. Not exactly what I would call a good deed.”
“Well, for a reformed Death Eater, it’s a start,” growled Sadie. “Besides, seein’ as what they’re doin’ ain’t strictly good work, skimmin’ the donations ain’t strictly stealin, is it? Oy! You there, with the hairy mole! Give us some chink for the ETHF! I guarantee you that not one knut of your donation will be used for any purpose besides feedin’ the hungry!” She added in an aside to Spanky, “Or at least, givin’ drink to the thirsty. You seen Harve yet?”
“Hard to tell,” said Spanky, “as I don’t really know what he looks like. Shall we go back to his parlor and wait for him? It must be nearly time.”
Sadie managed to dump the contents of the cauldron into her voluminous pockets, then vanished the cauldron, tripod, and bell with a wave of her wand. Taking Spanky’s arm with a hard, hairy hand, she allowed him to escort her through the noise and bustle of the Hog’s Head public room, where a fire-breathing cockfight was taking place on the same shielded stage where Nasal Drip had been playing the week before. Once past the beaded curtain at the top of the room, Sadie let go of Spanky’s arm and cleared her throat loudly. “I can manage from here,” she muttered in an unnaturally deep voice.
“As you wish,” said Spanky, who felt oddly like clearing his own throat.
When they reached the parlor where they had exchanged so many stories the previous week, they found two goblets of firewhisky already hovering in midair, being tipped down the throats of invisible drinkers.
“Back to the old invisibility cloaks, I see,” Sadie observed with disdain as she squeezed alongside the table.
“They’re much cooler than those heavy old cloaks,” said the voice of a wizard who liked to be called Merlin.
“The color goes better with my eyes,” the witch Endora remarked at the same time.
“No sign of Harve, then?” Sadie asked. She snapped her fingers and two more drinks appeared. She nodded toward Spanky, who sat down before one of the drinks with a whispered, “Cheers.”
At that moment, flames burst out of the air above the center of the table. Endora started, splashing firewhisky everywhere. She hastily mopped it up with a scouring charm before it could burn holes in the table. Meanwhile, Spanky had caught the roll of parchment that fell out of the flames, before they sizzled out with a puff of sulfurous smoke.
“Whew,” said Sadie, waving the smoke away. “Almost enough to put me off my drink! What a ‘orrible, smelly, hinconsiderate thing to do!” At once she began preparations to light her pipe.
“Well, mates,” said Spanky, spreading the parchment on the table, “I suppose this means Harvey won’t be making his business proposal tonight. Listen: ‘Esteemed colleagues...’”
“Esmoked would be more accurate,” Merlin coughed.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Spanky made as if to roll up the parchment again.
“Oh yes, do go on,” said Merlin hastily.
Spanky slowly unrolled the parchment, training the opening of his dark hood directly on Merlin’s end of the table. Then he lowered his head and continued to read. “’Esteemed colleagues, please forgive my absence this evening. My reasons for being unable to keep our appointment are so complicated that I haven’t time to relate them here. Suffice it to say that it involves a spill over a waterfall, a crystal cave, and a hag who wears a mail vest studded with men’s teeth. I need hardly express to you how inconvient all this is for a man in my position. I fully expect to make my escape within a day or two; but if I’m not with you by this time next week, please have my subscription to The Goblin canceled. Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves. Yours in fellowship, H.’”
“That’s all right,” said Merlin, smacking his lips after a long draught of firewhisky. “Old Harve’s gotten himself out of worse, he has. Anyway, I’ve been dyin’ to hear what happened next.” When Spanky showed no sign of understanding, Merlin added, “You know, with you and Joe Albuquerque.”
“Oh, that,” said Spanky. He sighed loudly, drained his goblet, then refilled it with his wand.
“All right. After the Bette Noir affair, Joe and I went our separate ways for a while. I went back to England, took a leave of absence from the RMB, and went into training. I’m sure you all know of the international magical games that are held every five years. That year was to be the 2000th Owlympiad, and it was to be held right here in Hogsmeade during the summer holidays. A lot of the events took place down the road at Hogwarts. You must remember it: the whole country was aflutter over hosting the Owlympics; England had high hopes for many of its teams. My friend, the one whose name came up on the Gryffindor tapestry, was expected to do wonders on the Quidditch team. My school mate, Otis, had gone in for Quodpot. I knew people who were competing in nearly every event: from the Defense Against the Dark Arts Decathlon to Levitation Weightlifting, from the Wand Throw to Transfiguring Objects in Flight. But I was training for the most anticipated event of all, save Quidditch. Guess which.”
“Er,” said Endora.
Sadie jabbed her elbow at the empty air from which Endora’s voice came. “Dueling, you nit,” she said over Endora’s grunt of pain.
“Right-o. I was also looking forward to meeting Ilona, who was training for the Romanian Magymnastics team. I had seen some of her moves during the time we both worked out of the Bucharest Mission. You take a witch or wizard in top physical and magical form, and it’s amazing what they can do. Ilona held a national record for riding a bucking pommel-horse. Her uneven-brooms routine was so daring that I once passed out while watching it. Well, nearly. And her quintuple-backflip-with-a-twist dismount from the levitating-stepping-stones has gone into the repertory as “the Ilonera.” But when she wrote to me about an old school mate of mine who had joined the Romanian Dueling squad--one who was eager to meet with me again--I was perplexed and concerned. I asked her what old mate she meant. Her return owl said his name was Sid Shmedly.”
“He never!” Endora gasped.
“Oh, yes, he did,” Spanky said grimly. “It seems the entire Romanian Dueling team had come down with a mysterious case of dragon pox, and their ministry’s Department of Magical Games and Sports was so desperate to compete in the event that they advertised for expatriates to fill up the team. And by some amazing coincidence, Sid Shmedly’s family owned vast estates along the Prut River, almost directly opposite the castle where I had been stationed on Worm Patrol. Shmedly and a couple of his school cronies happened to have been staying in a lodge on those estates for just long enough to meet the Romanian Ministry’s residency requirements. They passed all the usual blood tests--polyjuice potion, strengthening solution, rapidity rub, supercharge salve, and so forth--and they were all clean. Their wands were weighed and approved. And in trial duels against the national team’s trainers, Shmedly and his cronies--let’s call them Lobster and Quadrille--had proved themselves formidable duelers indeed. It was almost as if they had been training to be on the Romanian team all along.
“You can imagine how this news thrilled and unnerved me. Though I could end up facing the most talented duelers from around the world, the idea of facing my old school nemesis made me determined to work my very hardest. There was even a rumor that Shmedly had perfected a new kind of curse that would be difficult to block, and the Owlympic Commission had approved of its use. It had something to do with lightning shooting out of a wand and even the thought of it made my hair stand on end. I had to be fast, and I had to be strong. I practiced dueling with just my left wand, then with just my right. I labored tirelessly, wearing out the other members of my team--their names were Crinkle and Ruff--in my fierce determination to be ready for Sid Shmedly. I believed that if I was ready for him, I would be ready for anyone.
“The Owlympics finally opened on a blazing summer day. I’m told the opening ceremonies, held out on the grounds at Hogwarts, were spectacular. I’m also told that several of the matches were very exciting, and that records were set and rivalries settled in many events. But I missed it all, because I couldn’t bring myself to stop preparing for what I knew was coming. With Dueling teams from a hundred and twelve countries in a double-elimination tournament, statistical chances were good that I would never face Shmedly in these Owlympics. But in my heart, I was sure it would happen...”
[Originally posted 9/3/04]
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