Contest winner: Quercitron
Mrs. Ahmed scouted ahead (by sticking her head through the outer door of Harvey's flat) and reported: "It's a jungle in there."
"That many of them?" Joe Albuquerque growled in his disguise as General Patton. "It won't take them long to wreck the place."
"No," said Mrs. Ahmed, her vague form flickering with irritation. "I meant, everything has been taken over by vines. Grape, by the look of it."
"Oh," said Joe, suspending his mental calculations about potential casualties on both sides. "That's a hippogriff of a different color. What about people? Did you see anything going on?"
The see-through lady shrugged. "Just one bloke, it looked like, pulling down vines and rifling through the cupboards."
The word was passed, and Harvey came forward. "Well?" he said.
"I think a frontal assault will do," said the general, pitching his whisper so it could be heard all the way down the hallway - the recently constructed hallway off the back of the lobby of the high-rise apartment building known as the Drains - the hallway where each door led to a different floor, so that stairs and elevators were no longer needed. The people at the back of the line, near the street door, could hear Joe Albuquerque's rasping voice as he announced: "People! Bear in mind that your job is not to be cursed for your country, but to curse some other poor wizard for his. On my signal...CHARGE!"
The door imploded into the flat. A monocled wizard with a frowning moustache, a walking-stick topped by a silver cat's head, and a silk ascot fashionably printed with an illusion of cascading water in motion, glanced up from his business with very little concern, then resumed pulling vines off the wall above the fireplace. As Mrs. Ahmed had reported, the walls, ceiling, floors, and furniture were nearly invisible under a carpet of Vitis Leprosa, except in areas where the ascot-wearing interloper had done his work - areas that looked bare and scarred. The vines kept going into a rather small sack that hovered in front of the wizard, holding its mouth wide open as he stuffed more and more vines into it; the sack never seemed to grow full.
All this Harvey took in as the wave of his supporters swept him toward the intruder. The monocled man seemed little concerned by the approaching mob. The reason for his unconcern became clear a moment later, when Harvey, Joe, and Spanky - all at the front of the line - tried to tackle the man, and missed.
After several frustrating passes, Harvey stood back and watched what was happening. Every time someone surged toward the monocled man from one side, he suddenly came out on the other side without seeming to pass through the middle, where the stranger continued calmly stealing the fruits of Harvey's long journey through time.
Harvey tried to call everyone off, then tugged on Joe's shoulder - just before the latter dived back into the assault line - and got him to bellow, "STAND DOWN!" Then he approached what he took to be the edge of the stranger's invisible bubble of invulnerability, and said: "A word with you, sir."
Monocle gave him a slow look with one lifted eyebrow, then nodded and offered his hand to Harvey. Harvey took it, and was suddenly in another place - a gentleman's study paneled in dark wood and crammed with trophies. Not stuffed bears and mounted fish; no, a different kind of trophy - shiny, complicated machines that gyred and gimbaled and hummed; potions that bubbled and frothed inside sealed jars; a clock with two pendula swinging at right angles, passing through the same point at the bottom of their swing, yet never touching each other; an incandescent dark-bulb standing next to a prism that refracted its plain, radiant darkness into an anti-rainbow of unimaginable hues; and standing on one small table, an autographed photo showing a portly, bearded man (somewhat similar to Hagrid), whose signature read: "To one character who never let me put one over him - all the best, Robbie Fischer."
"Who are you?" Harvey asked, feeling himself on thinner ice than ever.
"I am the Reality Sorcerer," said Monocle Man. "The Magistrate of the Laws of Nature. The Judge of the Intangible, the Jury of the Illogical, the Executioner of the Impossible. I am the Counter of Contradictions, the Midwife of the Inconceivable, the Spell-Checker of the Inexpressible . I am the Censor of the Ineffable and the Squeezer of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. I am the Plumber of Paradoxes - you would be surprised how often they get stopped up. I am He Who Assays the Iron Content of Irony. I am He Who Checks the Thread Count of the Fabric of the Universe. I am the Warlock of Wisdom, the Sage Mage, the Popinjay of Punctiliousness, the Lifetime Honorary Recorder of the Islington 'Are You There, Moriarty' Society, and the Number One Supporter of Pride of Portree (annually since 1982). Those are merely my official titles, however. My real name is Robertus Magnus Carolus Johannes etc. etc. etc. de Quipthorne-Westbrookfieldstonehillcrestwoodsmillburyington the Sixth times Two to the Eighth Power, K.B.E., Ph.D., Order of Merlin, First Class. You may call me Bobs."
Harvey blinked. "Is that all?" he asked.
"Well," said Bobs, "My schoolfellows once voted me 'Most Likely to Become a Mystical Hermit,' and I am listed in the Who's Who of Wizardry in the Lower Thames Valley, but I don't like to boast."
"Well, I'm Mr. H. Harvey of the Harvey & Sons' Wall Magic Harveys. I would like to know what business..."
"Have a seat," Bobs interrupted, with the casual air of one not used to listening to others. He conjured up a tray crammed with cups, pots, spoons, a sugar bowl, a milk boat, and a plate of biscuits. "Coffee or tea?"
"Coffee, if you please. I was saying, what right have you..."
"Please forgive me," said Bobs, before dropping what looked like a couple of ice cubes into Harvey's coffee. "It's my house-elf's half-day off, so the pot has gone lukewarm. Hopefully these will help." Clink, clink.
"That's quite all right," Harvey lied. "But may I ask..."
"Milk?" the other man cut in. "Sugar? Perhaps a dash of Irish whisky?"
"None of the above, thank you. But perhaps you could tell me..."
"I hope you don't mind that the biscuits have flaxseed in them," said Bobs. "I find they aid my digestion. Do try your coffee before it gets cold again!"
Harvey, perplexed, sipped his coffee and found it piping hot. "But I don't understand," he said. "If it was lukewarm before you put ice in it..."
"Hot ice," said the Reality Sorcerer with an airy smugness. "When one is charged with stopping the magical world disrupting the Laws of the Universe, one confisc-... that is to say, one comes across some truly amazing things. I don't know what I would do without cold fire during the summer, for example. And this hot ice - so handy, melting in cold liquid, giving off heat as it does so - was invented by the same wizard. Pity I had to destroy him. If more people found out how to make these things, the laws of thermodynamics would be in jeopardy - and all life on this planet with it."
Harvey swallowed discreetly, then blurted out: "What business have you in my flat, and what gives you the right to tear down my vineyard?"
"I should think that would be perfectly obvious," said Bobs. "You have already risked enough with your foolish Draught of Merlin..."
"I was about to destroy every trace of it," Harvey snapped. "I understand the danger, and I have it well in hand."
"I am not interested in your silly potion," Bobs said, almost laughing (but not quite smiling). "It is this thousand-year grape that you planted at the far end of your round trip through time. I cannot allow you to make wine with it."
"What could happen?" Harvey cried. "Could it be worse than a time paradox?"
"As falling off a cliff is worse than stubbing your toe," Bobs assured him. "But you can hardly know what you are working with; nor can you formulate the Essence of Merlin on your own. Both potions belong to the lost art of Yves the Leper. So, if you do as you planned and destroy the Essence, and, if you turn over every twig, leaf, and berry of your cultivar for secure disposal and study, I may not have to destroy you."
"You forget where I've been - and when I've been," said Harvey. "I've learned a great deal in the matter of not being destroyed."
"Don't make this hard," said Bobs, with a pained expression. "I so hate to be forced to threaten large groups of relatively innocent people. Though, to be sure, I spotted one Miles O'Roughage back there, among your little army. One of these days I may be forced to come for him as well. It would be rather like killing two augureys with..."
"I have put a substantial investment on the line," said Harvey. "You can't just go around confiscating things on which so much depends. I must have some kind of compensation."
"Compensation!" the Sage Mage's monocle fogged up. His moustache bristled. "Don't you know who I am?"
"You made that quite clear," said Harvey. "So clear that I suspect you know what has gone into this project, and what depends on it. We are discussing a major portion of the wizarding economy - several large fortunes, the assets of some important businesses - besides the trials and travails of the people who have carried it this far. Did you know some of my people spent years escaping from Gringotts to prepare for this? And knowing as much as you seem to know of things, you must perceive the broken state of health - physical, mental, and magical health - in so many of my supporters..."
"All right!" groaned Robertus Magnus. "I shall restore full value. Merlin knows I can afford it, what with my formula to turn plastic poker chips into galleons. And when we return to your flat, you will find all your friends restored to their, shall we say, 'baseline' condition, mad though they may be in that natural state. Do you have a personal goblin at Gringotts? Very well, have him write to my goblin and they will settle the financial side of the deal. Spit and shake on it?"
And so a magical contract was sealed, and within a few hours Harvey and his party had taken over the entire Hog's Head. Mrs. Ahmed, once back to her fully visible form, had beaten everybody in Spanky's therapy group in an armwrestling tournament. Mr. O'Hare had lost his orange fuzz and looked glum and sheepish until Mrs. Yenta offered to dance with him. Rigel grew up quite suddenly into a disreputable-looking man of about 30, and was now slow-dancing with Sadie while Miles O'Roughage, Anatoly, and the illustrated wizard from Minsk looked on glumly. Siobhan was singing with the band, head thrown back and mouth open wide, while her father Niall wished (to no avail) that she weren't quite so tone-deaf. Mr. Surdo sat next to him, wincing, and trying to stuff napkins into his ears, while Mr. Sphaeris slouched over his firewhisky, not feeling like doing anything in particular. This made a striking contrast to Mrs. Sedulus, who had gone behind the bar (much to the innkeeper's annoyance) and was cleaning everything from the mugs to the floor with grim determination. "This place is disgusting!" she was frequently heard to say.
Among the happiest members of the party was Ilona Spankison, who beamed at her husband, her eyes brimming with tears, as he spell-sparred with Joe Albuquerque and Merlin, deftly defending himself with a wand in each hand. But no one watched these goings-on with greater satisfaction than Harvey, who sat between Ilona and Endora at the corner table, complacent with the success of his plan. As he had hoped, Robertus Magnus had paid off every knut that the Vitis Leprosa adventure had cost him and everyone else - going all the way back to Orion Olmandson's standing debt toward Merlin, whom he had retained to look after his son before their first Gringotts caper; to say nothing of the money he had invested in Spanky's education, channeled through his cousin Lionel Niblet, whom Spanky still believed to be his benefactor. And at last, Harvey was rid of all the receipts he had collected during his 3,000-year trek up and down the mountain of time, which had been reimbursed with interest.
In short, he was the wealthiest wizard in the world, though much of his wealth was already held in trust for the people who had helped him. Some day they would find out how very, very rich they were... but not until Harvey had extracted one more favor from them. For now he could finally afford to carry out his most ambitious plan... He smiled, and seeing his look of satisfaction, Endora and Ilona widened their grins and hugged him from both sides.
"It turned out all right!" said Endora, who for once was not ashamed to show her remarkable nose in public.
"Everything is as it should be," Ilona sighed.
Harvey nodded, and added in a softer voice: "So far, so good."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR #136 +++
Don't worry. We're not skipping #135 (as if...!). In order to get things back on track, I am going to use some "leftover" ideas from the incredible discussion on TMQ #133 to generate the magic of #135. So this "Double Challenge" isn't for the next chapter, but the one after that. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Which female character of The Magic Quill should feature in the next big plot line?
CONTEST: Come up with a brief joke such as one might find in a wizarding joke book. Anything on the order of "Knock, knock?" or "How many house-elves does it take to change a light bulb?" or even "A hag walks into a bar" is welcome, but PLEASE keep it clean - and PRETTY-PLEASE keep it short. More than one winner may be selected.
[Originally posted 4/6/08]
Showing posts with label St. Mungo's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Mungo's. Show all posts
Saturday, December 27, 2008
132. Harvey Face to Face
Contest winners in ABC order: Dragonic, Echoreyn, greyniffler, h_morgan, Linda_Carrig, PotterPig, Snuffleupagus, TWZRD, and zanaboo
[Transcript of group session on Lewis Bell Ward at St. Mungo's]
HEALER: All right, Mr. Sphaeris, let's hear from you. Have you learned what started you on the road to this place?
PATIENT SPHAERIS: I suppose it was my wife's cooking.
HEALER: Is that so?
SPHAERIS: You have no idea what an awful cook she is. She can burn water. Her bangers and mash taste like tinned sardines with a side of sweaty socks. The neighbors have complained about the taste of her tikka masala getting into their food. Fresh meat begins to turn when it sees her coming. I'm only alive today because she can give food poisoning food poisoning. Once, while pulling a batch of croissants out of the oven, she dropped one and it went right through the floor, then cracked a six-inch concrete slab in the cellar.
HEALER: I see. So all this is your wife's fault?
SPHAERIS: No. She does her best. Only, I couldn't take it any more. So I asked a friend for help. He mentioned a friend of a friend, who was an ace potioneer. I went to my friend's friend's friend's place and explained my problem. He offered me a free sample of Saborlite.
HEALER: Ah, yes!
SPHAERIS: He told me to mix a little of this powder with a cup of water, and anything I ate for an hour afterward would taste just like water. And it worked! I was able to eat anything my wife cooked without choking, and she was so much happier...
HEALER: But that isn't all the Saborlite did, was it?
SPHAERIS: Well, no.
PATIENT SPANKISON: The RMB has tagged Saborlite as a "gateway potion."
HEALER: Exactly. It establishes a form of dependency that leads you to other habit-forming potions. Go on, Mr. Sphaeris.
SPHAERIS: Well...I knew I shouldn't have, but I decided to try mixing the Saborlite into something with more flavor than water. I would slip over to Madam Puddifoot's for a cup of chocolate, tip the powder in, then go home for dinner, and...
SPANKISON: And everything tasted like chocolate.
SPHAERIS: I ate more and more of my wife's food. I must have gained fifty pounds in three months. I knew I had to keep using the Saborlite, because my wife's cooking was just as bad as ever and I did like a good chocolate. So I went back to my friend's friend's friend, and he gave me another potion.
HEALER: Ah! Let me guess. Gravis Reducto?
SPHAERIS: How did you know?
HEALER: Mrs. Ahmed here had that little problem with Coco Replenis, don't you remember? Take one sip of the potion and a chocolate drop appears in your mouth every hour for six hours? Take two drops, and you get two chocolate drops an hour, and so on.
SPHAERIS: Really? I wouldn't have minded that.
PATIENT AHMED: Neither did I, so I took bigger and bigger doses till I was all but choking on the stuff.
SPHAERIS: Er...who said that?
AHMED: Then I had your problem, and needed to drop some weight. And it was Gravis Reducto with me, too.
SPHAERIS: I'm sorry, but...where are you?
AHMED: Not the result I was looking for, was it? I'm as fat as ever, only no one ever complains that I'm standing in one's light these days. Here, I'll move over to the wall, where the light will be between us...
SPHAERIS: Dumbledore's nose! I didn't know...I can see the wall through her...!
AHMED: Be thankful you stopped in time.
SPHAERIS: I didn't even start. The git gave me the wrong potion. It was mislabeled. Whatever it was, every time I took it I couldn't stop doing the next thing I did. I took a sip of it before fixing the nib of my pen, and before I could stop myself I had whittled every quill in the house down to nothing. Everywhere I went, if I saw a quill, I pulled out my penknife and hacked at it till it was gone. I couldn't stop myself, because while I was doing it I was delirious with joy.
HEALER: The term for this effect is PISCES: Potion-Induced, Sorcerous-Compulsive Excitation Syndrome.
SPHAERIS: I destroyed all the pens at work, so they sent me home on forced sick leave until such time as I should ask, in writing, to come back. But as long as I had this obsession with trimming quills, I couldn't write anything. I got thrown out of Gringotts, Flourish and Blotts, and the stationer's, who now has a thick-necked fellow guarding the door, looking out for me. Meanwhile, I tried another couple of doses of this so-called Gravis Reducto...
HEALER: Oh, no.
SPHAERIS: After the second dose, I went walkies with the dog. For once I didn't feel in any hurry to finish the walk, which at first made the dog happy. But then I couldn't stop walking, until the dog was so tired that he made me pick him up and carry him. Which is no small matter, when you have a Bassett hound. I had to carry that fat beast twelve miles. Felt like my back had been flayed with hot wires by the time we got home. Then, as soon as I set him down on the floor, I had an urge to take him out for another walk! Poor animal only made it half a mile that time, then he bit me so that I dropped his lead, ran home, and hid from me. I spent half a week on my hands and knees, trying to get him to go walkies with me, while my wife sneaked out with him whenever my back was turned - or when an owl would come with a load of owl-order quills for me to shred.
HEALER: And you took this potion one other time?
SPHAERIS: Yes, but that time I took too much of it, and then I couldn't stop drinking it, so I took it all. Afterward I had an agonizing thirst for the stuff, and all I wanted to do was get to that potioneering git and buy some more of it. But I couldn't get anywhere, because I found myself repeating everything I did. I had to turn the doorknob five times to the right, three times to the left, and repeat eleven times before I could open a door. I couldn't use the toilet without first lifting the lid and setting it down eighty-eight times. I opened and closed the curtains until they fell apart. I scrubbed a hole in my teacup. I shaved myself bloody, cut the grass till the lawn was bald, and spent one whole afternoon opening and closing my zipper. That's when my wife Stunned me, and I woke up here.
HEALER: And right lucky you are. Do you know what that second potion was?
SPHAERIS: Not what that faint lady took, I reckon.
HEALER: No, it wasn't Gravis Reducto; it was Training Potion.
SPHAERIS: Eh?
HEALER: When it was first invented, Training Potion was meant to help people break bad habits, or to form good ones. But the proper dosage is one drop, diluted in a cup of water. The next thing you choose to do, or not to do, will then become a lifelong habit. Unfortunately, Training Potion turned out to be incredibly dangerous. Do the wrong thing after taking it, and you're messed up for life. Take a bit too much, and the result is PISCES. Take a great deal too much, and the potion itself becomes a habit. It's ironic, really, how such a well-intended elixir caused more torment than the problems it was meant to address.
SPHAERIS: But there is a cure, isn't there?
HEALER: No, I'm sorry. Your case is hopeless. All right, let's welcome Mrs. Yenta back to our circle. Mrs. Yenta has been fighing an addiction to Polypense Potion, which does what, Mr. Dillworth?
PATIENT DILLWORTH: Depending on what you put into it, it enables you to witness a past event from the point of view of another person, or object.
HEALER: And what danger of this potion did you learn about, Mrs. Yenta?
PATIENT YENTA: You lose touch with what's going on around you, that's what. Got the ingredients out of proportion and spent six hours thinking I was a tree overlooking my neighbor's garden, when I meant to be experiencing Mrs. Next Door's thoughts and feelings. When I came out of it, burglars had cleaned out my whole house, while I stood there like a statue, powerless to stop them.
DILLWORTH: It must have been very frightening, waking up in an empty house like that.
YENTA: Actually, the frightening bit was that the burglars stole me, thinking I was a priceless sculpture. I had to blast my way out of a cargo container and Obliviate half a dozen dock workers.
SPHAERIS: Serves you right, in my opinion, you nosy cow.
YENTA: You weren't asked for your opinion. Anyway, this is the third time this has happened. Can't see any way to stop it, since the ringleader of the burglars is my late husband's nephew, who always seems to know when my mind is elsewhere. Poor Herbert had a soft spot for the boy, wanted to make sure he was provided for, so he left a loophole in the house security spells, just for kin.
DILLWORTH: If you closed the loophole, you could go on being a nosy cow with no risk.
YENTA: I have considered that, but there was one other side-effect...The whole time I was that tree in the back garden, a woodpecker was hammering on my head. I had a headache for three days, and my ears are still ringing. No, it's time to quit. Only...well, Mrs. Next Door has such a colorful love-life. It will be hard.
HEALER: We're all here to support you.
SPHAERIS: Except me, that is.
YENTA: That's all right, dear. Your case is hopeless.
HEALER: All right, who else haven't we heard from? We have, er, Mrs. Sedulus, who discovered a heretofore unknown side-effect of Mrs. Skower's Magical Mess Remover. Mrs. Sedulus?
PATIENT SEDULUS: Oooh. Shiny. You're shiny. You, too. Everything is sooooo shiny.
HEALER: Are you with us, Mrs. Sedulus? Perhaps you can explain why you're wearing two pairs of sunglasses in here?
SEDULUS: Can't see anything without them. Everything becomes a blaze of glory. Ooooooh!
YENTA: I don't understand. I've used Mrs. Skower's Magical Mess Remover for years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me.
HEALER: Yes, but evidently you applied the potion to the object that needed to be cleaned.
YENTA: You don't mean...she didn't drink it?
SEDULUS: I wish you would keep your mouth shut. Your teeth are so bright, they hurt my eyes.
YENTA: But that's absurd! There are warnings on the label!
SEDULUS: I have a horror of dust, dear. Had to do something.
YENTA: Yes, but the thing to do is get rid of the dust, not dose yourself with a potion that makes everything look shiny!
SEDULUS: That's easy to say when you don't have a horror, I say a horror, of dust. And really, please, lips closed.
YENTA: Is there any hope for her?
HEALER: Yes, of course. Mrs. Skower is whipping up a batch of the antidote right now. But Mrs. Sedulus is here to redirect her...
PATIENT O'HARE: She's here for vocational rehabilitation.
HEALER: Sorry?
O'HARE: She used to char for me. Worst charwitch I ever had, never so much as touched a dust-rag. Seemed to think getting soused on cleaning fluid would make everything look cleaner than it was, but it doesn't work on other people, you see. Daft old biddy.
DILLWORTH: And yet, here you are, in the same predicament as the rest of us - including her. A little less of the superior tone, if you please.
O'HARE: I did not choose to come here, and I don't have a problem.
DILLWORTH: And I'm sure that orange fuzz all over you is completely normal.
O'HARE: I don't know what you're talking about.
YENTA: Sure you do. You look like a walking peach.
HEALER: Mr. O'Hare was hospitalized against his wishes, at his family's request.
O'HARE: I don't see how it is anybody's business. If I want to grow a little hair...
HEALER: Yes, but Hauston's Hair Potion is supposed to be rubbed on your scalp. You took it orally, hence the orange fuzz all over, and the cravings. It's intoxicating, isn't it?
O'HARE: I have nothing to say.
HEALER: You may not want to say anything to us now, but you will be going through withdrawal pains soon. We're all here to support you.
SPHAERIS: Except me.
HEALER: Yes, all of us except Mr. Sphaeris.
SPHAERIS: I mean, face reality, man. Nobody wants their husband or father to look like a shaved orangutan.
HEALER: Now that's enough.
O'HARE: You're just envious.
SPHAERIS: Too right. I can't stand the fact that my skin lacks that freshly upholstered look. And that healthy, glow-in-the-dark color must really come in handy when you come to cross a busy street. Better than a traffic policeman's vest, it is.
HEALER: Mr. Sphaeris, one more remark and I must ask you to leave.
O'HARE: Don't worry, it's all right. Anyone can see he is with child to try the same look on himself. Of course, I doubt it would look anything like as distinguished on him as it does on me.
HEALER: Oh, my. Don't tell me you've been taking Charisma Potion as well?
O'HARE: Of course not. My personal magnetism is perfectly natural. People have always found me irresistably attractive.
YENTA: Ha!
PATIENT SIOBHAN: Chngh!
SEDULUS: Shiny.
HEALER: This is even more serious. Even a small overdose of Charisma Potion can result in delusional self-infatuation. I've seen it before - the effects are irreversible. I know of a case, here in St. Mungo's right now, whose effects persist even after the patient's long-term memory was wiped out.
PATIENT NIALL: I wish my memory of this bunch of loonies...
HEALER: No! Niall, don't!
NIALL: ...could be wiped out.
HEALER: [Profanity deleted]! Who removed the [profanity deleted]'s [profanity deleted] lip seal?
NIALL: Excuse me? Are you all right?
HEALER: Linguetta Legata! That should hold you for a while.
NIALL: Mmmf? Vrrf hnng fffft?
HEALER: You're in the Lewis Bell Ward at Saint...oh, never mind. We'll fill you in later. And that brings us to our last new patient, Mr. Surdo. Would you like to share your story with the group? ... Mr. Surdo? Hello? ...
PATIENT SURDO: What did he say?
HARVEY: He wants you to say something about what brought you here.
SURDO: Oh. Beg pardon. I had an ear infection with a cough, so I browsed around the apothecary for something to make me feel better. There was a small section labeled "Hearing Remedies," and one of them sounded like it would be good for coughs, as well...
HEALER: What was it called?
SURDO: Eh?
HARVEY: He asked what it was called.
SURDO: Er...Kophos something...
HEALER: Whoops. It wasn't kophos epilektika, was it?
HARVEY: He asked if it was kophos epilektika.
SURDO: Yes, that's it exactly! How did he know?
HEALER: It's an ancient liquor that used to be given to men on their wedding night. Its name means "selectively deaf..."
SURDO: I'm terribly sorry, but I can't hear a word you're saying.
HEALER: It makes you unable to hear the voice of anyone you find annoying.
SURDO: What is he saying?
HARVEY: He says there's nothing wrong with you.
SURDO: Poor fellow. Must have lost his voice. Hee hee.
HARVEY 2 [charging into room]: So! There you are!
SPANKISON: Harvey! It's you too! Both of you!
HEALER: I say, this is a closed session, you can't...
HARVEY 1: What are you doing here?
HARVEY 2: Gathering reinforcements. Something has gone wrong at the Drains. I should ask you the same thing.
HARVEY 1: I'm just recuperating from a bit of time-travel fatigue. You're supposed to be in the Crystal Cave, aren't you?
RIGEL: I let him out.
HARVEY 1: Did you?
HEALER: Who is this? I must protest. Underage visitors are not allowed on this...
RIGEL: Bite a sock, sawbones. I'm older than you are. That is, I would be if I hadn't taken all those Yesterday Pills...
HEALER: Aha! Potion abuse! You'll be admitted...
RIGEL: Shut it.
HARVEY 2: You know, Harvey, I've been a bit irritated with you for the past five or six centuries.
HARVEY 1: Really? Why, Harvey, what ever for?
HARVEY 2: Must you ask? You shut me in that miserable cave, after all the help I was going to be to you.
HARVEY 1: I think you'll find that you're quite wrong. I let you out of the cave. Rigel here is the one who put you in.
RIGEL: What?
HARVEY 2: How's that?
HARVEY 1: Nothing sensitizes you to the subtleties of cause and effect quite like living backwards in time.
HARVEY 2: This is a waste of time. We can argue about it later. Everybody who can wave a wand without hurting himself had better come with us. We have to storm a penthouse flat.
SPHAERIS: Will there be quills there?
HARVEY 1: Hundreds of them.
SPHAERIS: I'm in, then.
SEDULUS: Shiny.
RIGEL: Hey! Hands off!
SURDO: I'll go.
DILLWORTH: Count me in.
YENTA: Me too.
HEALER: I say! This is quite out of order!
O'HARE: Linguetta Legata!
HEALER: Mmmmf!
O'HARE: Thank you for that. It makes me feel dangerous. Take me with you!
HARVEY 2: All right. Anybody else?
[pause]
HARVEY 2: Spanky?
SPANKISON: I don't know. I can't control my powers. I may use deadly force without meaning to.
HARVEY 1: If you realized what's at stake here, you might consider it worth the risk.
RIGEL: Er...what exactly do you have hidden in your flat?
HARVEY 1: Well...
HARVEY 2: Leftovers.
RIGEL: Leftover what?
HARVEY 1: Er...
HARVEY 2: Well...
SPANKISON: Oh. That.
HARVEY 2: You see our problem.
HARVEY 1: I...that is, we...did all that we could not to interfere with history. But we had a lot of close calls.
HARVEY 2: It's a wonder we didn't blow up the universe.
SPANKISON: Yes, I see. In the wrong hands...
HARVEY 1: The Essence of Merlin could wipe out history as we know it.
[even longer pause]
O'HARE: Oh, my! We're about to save the world!
YENTA: That's right. You're going to look good. That's what matters.
SPANKISON: Well, let's go then. But everyone had better stay behind me.
[Originally posted 2/3/08]
[Transcript of group session on Lewis Bell Ward at St. Mungo's]
HEALER: All right, Mr. Sphaeris, let's hear from you. Have you learned what started you on the road to this place?
PATIENT SPHAERIS: I suppose it was my wife's cooking.
HEALER: Is that so?
SPHAERIS: You have no idea what an awful cook she is. She can burn water. Her bangers and mash taste like tinned sardines with a side of sweaty socks. The neighbors have complained about the taste of her tikka masala getting into their food. Fresh meat begins to turn when it sees her coming. I'm only alive today because she can give food poisoning food poisoning. Once, while pulling a batch of croissants out of the oven, she dropped one and it went right through the floor, then cracked a six-inch concrete slab in the cellar.
HEALER: I see. So all this is your wife's fault?
SPHAERIS: No. She does her best. Only, I couldn't take it any more. So I asked a friend for help. He mentioned a friend of a friend, who was an ace potioneer. I went to my friend's friend's friend's place and explained my problem. He offered me a free sample of Saborlite.
HEALER: Ah, yes!
SPHAERIS: He told me to mix a little of this powder with a cup of water, and anything I ate for an hour afterward would taste just like water. And it worked! I was able to eat anything my wife cooked without choking, and she was so much happier...
HEALER: But that isn't all the Saborlite did, was it?
SPHAERIS: Well, no.
PATIENT SPANKISON: The RMB has tagged Saborlite as a "gateway potion."
HEALER: Exactly. It establishes a form of dependency that leads you to other habit-forming potions. Go on, Mr. Sphaeris.
SPHAERIS: Well...I knew I shouldn't have, but I decided to try mixing the Saborlite into something with more flavor than water. I would slip over to Madam Puddifoot's for a cup of chocolate, tip the powder in, then go home for dinner, and...
SPANKISON: And everything tasted like chocolate.
SPHAERIS: I ate more and more of my wife's food. I must have gained fifty pounds in three months. I knew I had to keep using the Saborlite, because my wife's cooking was just as bad as ever and I did like a good chocolate. So I went back to my friend's friend's friend, and he gave me another potion.
HEALER: Ah! Let me guess. Gravis Reducto?
SPHAERIS: How did you know?
HEALER: Mrs. Ahmed here had that little problem with Coco Replenis, don't you remember? Take one sip of the potion and a chocolate drop appears in your mouth every hour for six hours? Take two drops, and you get two chocolate drops an hour, and so on.
SPHAERIS: Really? I wouldn't have minded that.
PATIENT AHMED: Neither did I, so I took bigger and bigger doses till I was all but choking on the stuff.
SPHAERIS: Er...who said that?
AHMED: Then I had your problem, and needed to drop some weight. And it was Gravis Reducto with me, too.
SPHAERIS: I'm sorry, but...where are you?
AHMED: Not the result I was looking for, was it? I'm as fat as ever, only no one ever complains that I'm standing in one's light these days. Here, I'll move over to the wall, where the light will be between us...
SPHAERIS: Dumbledore's nose! I didn't know...I can see the wall through her...!
AHMED: Be thankful you stopped in time.
SPHAERIS: I didn't even start. The git gave me the wrong potion. It was mislabeled. Whatever it was, every time I took it I couldn't stop doing the next thing I did. I took a sip of it before fixing the nib of my pen, and before I could stop myself I had whittled every quill in the house down to nothing. Everywhere I went, if I saw a quill, I pulled out my penknife and hacked at it till it was gone. I couldn't stop myself, because while I was doing it I was delirious with joy.
HEALER: The term for this effect is PISCES: Potion-Induced, Sorcerous-Compulsive Excitation Syndrome.
SPHAERIS: I destroyed all the pens at work, so they sent me home on forced sick leave until such time as I should ask, in writing, to come back. But as long as I had this obsession with trimming quills, I couldn't write anything. I got thrown out of Gringotts, Flourish and Blotts, and the stationer's, who now has a thick-necked fellow guarding the door, looking out for me. Meanwhile, I tried another couple of doses of this so-called Gravis Reducto...
HEALER: Oh, no.
SPHAERIS: After the second dose, I went walkies with the dog. For once I didn't feel in any hurry to finish the walk, which at first made the dog happy. But then I couldn't stop walking, until the dog was so tired that he made me pick him up and carry him. Which is no small matter, when you have a Bassett hound. I had to carry that fat beast twelve miles. Felt like my back had been flayed with hot wires by the time we got home. Then, as soon as I set him down on the floor, I had an urge to take him out for another walk! Poor animal only made it half a mile that time, then he bit me so that I dropped his lead, ran home, and hid from me. I spent half a week on my hands and knees, trying to get him to go walkies with me, while my wife sneaked out with him whenever my back was turned - or when an owl would come with a load of owl-order quills for me to shred.
HEALER: And you took this potion one other time?
SPHAERIS: Yes, but that time I took too much of it, and then I couldn't stop drinking it, so I took it all. Afterward I had an agonizing thirst for the stuff, and all I wanted to do was get to that potioneering git and buy some more of it. But I couldn't get anywhere, because I found myself repeating everything I did. I had to turn the doorknob five times to the right, three times to the left, and repeat eleven times before I could open a door. I couldn't use the toilet without first lifting the lid and setting it down eighty-eight times. I opened and closed the curtains until they fell apart. I scrubbed a hole in my teacup. I shaved myself bloody, cut the grass till the lawn was bald, and spent one whole afternoon opening and closing my zipper. That's when my wife Stunned me, and I woke up here.
HEALER: And right lucky you are. Do you know what that second potion was?
SPHAERIS: Not what that faint lady took, I reckon.
HEALER: No, it wasn't Gravis Reducto; it was Training Potion.
SPHAERIS: Eh?
HEALER: When it was first invented, Training Potion was meant to help people break bad habits, or to form good ones. But the proper dosage is one drop, diluted in a cup of water. The next thing you choose to do, or not to do, will then become a lifelong habit. Unfortunately, Training Potion turned out to be incredibly dangerous. Do the wrong thing after taking it, and you're messed up for life. Take a bit too much, and the result is PISCES. Take a great deal too much, and the potion itself becomes a habit. It's ironic, really, how such a well-intended elixir caused more torment than the problems it was meant to address.
SPHAERIS: But there is a cure, isn't there?
HEALER: No, I'm sorry. Your case is hopeless. All right, let's welcome Mrs. Yenta back to our circle. Mrs. Yenta has been fighing an addiction to Polypense Potion, which does what, Mr. Dillworth?
PATIENT DILLWORTH: Depending on what you put into it, it enables you to witness a past event from the point of view of another person, or object.
HEALER: And what danger of this potion did you learn about, Mrs. Yenta?
PATIENT YENTA: You lose touch with what's going on around you, that's what. Got the ingredients out of proportion and spent six hours thinking I was a tree overlooking my neighbor's garden, when I meant to be experiencing Mrs. Next Door's thoughts and feelings. When I came out of it, burglars had cleaned out my whole house, while I stood there like a statue, powerless to stop them.
DILLWORTH: It must have been very frightening, waking up in an empty house like that.
YENTA: Actually, the frightening bit was that the burglars stole me, thinking I was a priceless sculpture. I had to blast my way out of a cargo container and Obliviate half a dozen dock workers.
SPHAERIS: Serves you right, in my opinion, you nosy cow.
YENTA: You weren't asked for your opinion. Anyway, this is the third time this has happened. Can't see any way to stop it, since the ringleader of the burglars is my late husband's nephew, who always seems to know when my mind is elsewhere. Poor Herbert had a soft spot for the boy, wanted to make sure he was provided for, so he left a loophole in the house security spells, just for kin.
DILLWORTH: If you closed the loophole, you could go on being a nosy cow with no risk.
YENTA: I have considered that, but there was one other side-effect...The whole time I was that tree in the back garden, a woodpecker was hammering on my head. I had a headache for three days, and my ears are still ringing. No, it's time to quit. Only...well, Mrs. Next Door has such a colorful love-life. It will be hard.
HEALER: We're all here to support you.
SPHAERIS: Except me, that is.
YENTA: That's all right, dear. Your case is hopeless.
HEALER: All right, who else haven't we heard from? We have, er, Mrs. Sedulus, who discovered a heretofore unknown side-effect of Mrs. Skower's Magical Mess Remover. Mrs. Sedulus?
PATIENT SEDULUS: Oooh. Shiny. You're shiny. You, too. Everything is sooooo shiny.
HEALER: Are you with us, Mrs. Sedulus? Perhaps you can explain why you're wearing two pairs of sunglasses in here?
SEDULUS: Can't see anything without them. Everything becomes a blaze of glory. Ooooooh!
YENTA: I don't understand. I've used Mrs. Skower's Magical Mess Remover for years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me.
HEALER: Yes, but evidently you applied the potion to the object that needed to be cleaned.
YENTA: You don't mean...she didn't drink it?
SEDULUS: I wish you would keep your mouth shut. Your teeth are so bright, they hurt my eyes.
YENTA: But that's absurd! There are warnings on the label!
SEDULUS: I have a horror of dust, dear. Had to do something.
YENTA: Yes, but the thing to do is get rid of the dust, not dose yourself with a potion that makes everything look shiny!
SEDULUS: That's easy to say when you don't have a horror, I say a horror, of dust. And really, please, lips closed.
YENTA: Is there any hope for her?
HEALER: Yes, of course. Mrs. Skower is whipping up a batch of the antidote right now. But Mrs. Sedulus is here to redirect her...
PATIENT O'HARE: She's here for vocational rehabilitation.
HEALER: Sorry?
O'HARE: She used to char for me. Worst charwitch I ever had, never so much as touched a dust-rag. Seemed to think getting soused on cleaning fluid would make everything look cleaner than it was, but it doesn't work on other people, you see. Daft old biddy.
DILLWORTH: And yet, here you are, in the same predicament as the rest of us - including her. A little less of the superior tone, if you please.
O'HARE: I did not choose to come here, and I don't have a problem.
DILLWORTH: And I'm sure that orange fuzz all over you is completely normal.
O'HARE: I don't know what you're talking about.
YENTA: Sure you do. You look like a walking peach.
HEALER: Mr. O'Hare was hospitalized against his wishes, at his family's request.
O'HARE: I don't see how it is anybody's business. If I want to grow a little hair...
HEALER: Yes, but Hauston's Hair Potion is supposed to be rubbed on your scalp. You took it orally, hence the orange fuzz all over, and the cravings. It's intoxicating, isn't it?
O'HARE: I have nothing to say.
HEALER: You may not want to say anything to us now, but you will be going through withdrawal pains soon. We're all here to support you.
SPHAERIS: Except me.
HEALER: Yes, all of us except Mr. Sphaeris.
SPHAERIS: I mean, face reality, man. Nobody wants their husband or father to look like a shaved orangutan.
HEALER: Now that's enough.
O'HARE: You're just envious.
SPHAERIS: Too right. I can't stand the fact that my skin lacks that freshly upholstered look. And that healthy, glow-in-the-dark color must really come in handy when you come to cross a busy street. Better than a traffic policeman's vest, it is.
HEALER: Mr. Sphaeris, one more remark and I must ask you to leave.
O'HARE: Don't worry, it's all right. Anyone can see he is with child to try the same look on himself. Of course, I doubt it would look anything like as distinguished on him as it does on me.
HEALER: Oh, my. Don't tell me you've been taking Charisma Potion as well?
O'HARE: Of course not. My personal magnetism is perfectly natural. People have always found me irresistably attractive.
YENTA: Ha!
PATIENT SIOBHAN: Chngh!
SEDULUS: Shiny.
HEALER: This is even more serious. Even a small overdose of Charisma Potion can result in delusional self-infatuation. I've seen it before - the effects are irreversible. I know of a case, here in St. Mungo's right now, whose effects persist even after the patient's long-term memory was wiped out.
PATIENT NIALL: I wish my memory of this bunch of loonies...
HEALER: No! Niall, don't!
NIALL: ...could be wiped out.
HEALER: [Profanity deleted]! Who removed the [profanity deleted]'s [profanity deleted] lip seal?
NIALL: Excuse me? Are you all right?
HEALER: Linguetta Legata! That should hold you for a while.
NIALL: Mmmf? Vrrf hnng fffft?
HEALER: You're in the Lewis Bell Ward at Saint...oh, never mind. We'll fill you in later. And that brings us to our last new patient, Mr. Surdo. Would you like to share your story with the group? ... Mr. Surdo? Hello? ...
PATIENT SURDO: What did he say?
HARVEY: He wants you to say something about what brought you here.
SURDO: Oh. Beg pardon. I had an ear infection with a cough, so I browsed around the apothecary for something to make me feel better. There was a small section labeled "Hearing Remedies," and one of them sounded like it would be good for coughs, as well...
HEALER: What was it called?
SURDO: Eh?
HARVEY: He asked what it was called.
SURDO: Er...Kophos something...
HEALER: Whoops. It wasn't kophos epilektika, was it?
HARVEY: He asked if it was kophos epilektika.
SURDO: Yes, that's it exactly! How did he know?
HEALER: It's an ancient liquor that used to be given to men on their wedding night. Its name means "selectively deaf..."
SURDO: I'm terribly sorry, but I can't hear a word you're saying.
HEALER: It makes you unable to hear the voice of anyone you find annoying.
SURDO: What is he saying?
HARVEY: He says there's nothing wrong with you.
SURDO: Poor fellow. Must have lost his voice. Hee hee.
HARVEY 2 [charging into room]: So! There you are!
SPANKISON: Harvey! It's you too! Both of you!
HEALER: I say, this is a closed session, you can't...
HARVEY 1: What are you doing here?
HARVEY 2: Gathering reinforcements. Something has gone wrong at the Drains. I should ask you the same thing.
HARVEY 1: I'm just recuperating from a bit of time-travel fatigue. You're supposed to be in the Crystal Cave, aren't you?
RIGEL: I let him out.
HARVEY 1: Did you?
HEALER: Who is this? I must protest. Underage visitors are not allowed on this...
RIGEL: Bite a sock, sawbones. I'm older than you are. That is, I would be if I hadn't taken all those Yesterday Pills...
HEALER: Aha! Potion abuse! You'll be admitted...
RIGEL: Shut it.
HARVEY 2: You know, Harvey, I've been a bit irritated with you for the past five or six centuries.
HARVEY 1: Really? Why, Harvey, what ever for?
HARVEY 2: Must you ask? You shut me in that miserable cave, after all the help I was going to be to you.
HARVEY 1: I think you'll find that you're quite wrong. I let you out of the cave. Rigel here is the one who put you in.
RIGEL: What?
HARVEY 2: How's that?
HARVEY 1: Nothing sensitizes you to the subtleties of cause and effect quite like living backwards in time.
HARVEY 2: This is a waste of time. We can argue about it later. Everybody who can wave a wand without hurting himself had better come with us. We have to storm a penthouse flat.
SPHAERIS: Will there be quills there?
HARVEY 1: Hundreds of them.
SPHAERIS: I'm in, then.
SEDULUS: Shiny.
RIGEL: Hey! Hands off!
SURDO: I'll go.
DILLWORTH: Count me in.
YENTA: Me too.
HEALER: I say! This is quite out of order!
O'HARE: Linguetta Legata!
HEALER: Mmmmf!
O'HARE: Thank you for that. It makes me feel dangerous. Take me with you!
HARVEY 2: All right. Anybody else?
[pause]
HARVEY 2: Spanky?
SPANKISON: I don't know. I can't control my powers. I may use deadly force without meaning to.
HARVEY 1: If you realized what's at stake here, you might consider it worth the risk.
RIGEL: Er...what exactly do you have hidden in your flat?
HARVEY 1: Well...
HARVEY 2: Leftovers.
RIGEL: Leftover what?
HARVEY 1: Er...
HARVEY 2: Well...
SPANKISON: Oh. That.
HARVEY 2: You see our problem.
HARVEY 1: I...that is, we...did all that we could not to interfere with history. But we had a lot of close calls.
HARVEY 2: It's a wonder we didn't blow up the universe.
SPANKISON: Yes, I see. In the wrong hands...
HARVEY 1: The Essence of Merlin could wipe out history as we know it.
[even longer pause]
O'HARE: Oh, my! We're about to save the world!
YENTA: That's right. You're going to look good. That's what matters.
SPANKISON: Well, let's go then. But everyone had better stay behind me.
[Originally posted 2/3/08]
130. Wish Wash
Contest winners: zanaboo and greyniffler
[Transcript of group session on Lewis Bell Ward at St. Mungo's]
HEALER: All right, have you all taken your meds? Good. Morning, everyone. Thanks, I will. Mmm. Well, let's welcome our new members to the group, Niall and Siobhan. Why don't you start, Niall, and tell us what brings you here?
NIALL: Bloomin' git named Farnaby Joad is what brings us here, that's what.
HEALER: Er, perhaps you could give us a bit more detail on that.
NIALL: Well, old Farnaby invited us up to his flat for a New Year's toast, like. Only he decided at the last moment to whip up a gift to hand out at the door, and being a potioneer, naturally it was an elixir. Came in a fancy little bottle with a glass stopper and a ribbon worked into the wax seal. Looked a treat. Told us to drink it down at the stroke of midnight, and all our New Year's resolutions would come true. Wish Wash, he called it.
HEALER: Oh, dear. I think I see where this is going...
NIALL: Well, what with a bucket of firewhisky and eggnog, I didn't get around to making my New Year's resolution that night. No problem, I just save the Wish Wash until the next time I happened to be up at midnight - last night. Then I tossed back old Farnaby's draught, and BANG! There I was with one buttock blown right off. And what's more, it won't be joined back on - at least, not yet. Clearly, the daft old gasbag failed to deliver as promised.
HEALER: Sorry, are you referring to your buttock as a person?
NIALL: I am referring to Joad, you hopped-up bedpan jockey!
HEALER: Now, now...
NIALL: What I'd like to know is what any of this has to do with potion abuse. I mean, I like a good snort of firewhisky as much as the next wizard, but it's not firewhisky what took half my bum off. Poisoning, this is. I've been maliciously assaulted by a potioneer. Or maybe it's wand damage, since my wand did explode. And then there's my daughter Siobhan here, poor thing. Can't talk, jaw wired shut. She took her draught the same time I did, and just as I was going through the gluteal agony of a lifetime, she was flattened by a pair of runaway bludgers. Popped out of her Quidditch chest, just like that. Got her at close range, too.
SIOBHAN: Nng mmf nnkh fmf frrrg.
NIALL: That's right, dear. Let it out. So how about it, man?
HEALER: How about...? Er, is that a question for me?
NIALL: Tell me that magic quill isn't the only thing listening here! I was asking what any of this has to do with potion abuse?
HEALER: Ah! Right. Well, you see, you might have gone to any of several wards. The Bagman Ward for Magical Sport Mishaps, for example - only we've had to shut it, since the goblins sued the Endowment Committee for recovery of Ludo Bagman's debts. Or take, say, the Moody Memorial Ward for Wand-Related Buttock Injuries, but it's only now being built, and the wait list is surprisingly long. Luckily, we had just had two vacancies in the Lewis Bell Ward, so we were able to take you on right away.
NIALL: Vacancies, eh?
HEALER: You'll probably hear twenty versions of the story by lunchtime, so I might as well tell you the straight story now. The gentleman to your left - Do stop humming, Mr. Spankison, won't you? - I say, the gentleman to your left killed Mrs. Nonmonnom in self-defense. No one expected the old lady to turn out so dangerous. Should never have been allowed on the ward, but there was no way to tell.
NIALL: This fellow, you say? He hums and he kills, eh?
HEALER: The very same. And the other death...well, there's no delicate way to say it, but Mr. Faberhorn ate his roommate, and there it is. After three times we've decided to let him have his own room, so it shan't happen again.
NIALL: There's a relief. Er...which one is he?
HEALER: Oh, don't worry! Mr. Faberhorn doesn't come to groups. Not since he bit Healer Kilreare on the...
NIALL: On the what?
HEALER: Er, the winter solstice. That's the ticket.
NIALL: This still doesn't explain what this ward has to offer me and my daughter.
HEALER: Well, don't you see, you are victims of an illegal potion mishap. To begin with, Wish Wash is a Schedule "Thorn" potion, not to be dispensed without written authorization from the Rune Juice Office in the Department of Magical Fumes and Brews. Your friend Mr. Joad has a lot to answer for.
NIALL: It's all good news so far. Keep talking.
HEALER: Secondly, you mentioned that eggnog was served at Mr. Joad's party. Did I hear you right?
NIALL: Best eggnog ever made. It's a gift Farnaby has.
HEALER: Yes, but if he had applied himself more to his books, rather than relying on his gifts, Mr. Joad might have known that clove has a perverse effect on Rune Juice potions.
NIALL: Oi! That's it! I'm totally with you! Next you'll tell me F. J. mixed the eggnog and the Wish Wash in that order, in the same cauldron, without washing up in between. Am I right?
HEALER: You ARE right. So the Wish Wash was unintentionally contaminated with eggnog residue, which contains clove...
NIALL: And which caused our New Year's resolutions to backfire!
HEALER: Er. Ahem.
NIALL: What?
HEALER: Actually, the nutmeg contamination caused your resolutions to come true.
NIALL: How's that?
HEALER: It made the Wish Wash work in a spectacularly rapid and efficient way. Unpleasantly so.
NIALL: That's nonsense. Did I resolve to blow half my arse off?
HEALER: Er, no.
NIALL: Did Siobhan here resolve to let bludgers fly around the place?
HEALER: No, but that's exactly the point...after today, you'll both be very, very careful to act on your resolutions.
NIALL: Eh??
HEALER: Bear with me. Your resolution, as I recall, was to keep your wand out of your back pocket. Would you say there is a good chance you will keep your wand clear of your trousers in future?
NIALL: I most certainly would say so, after...aye!
HEALER: And if I may hazard a guess, Siobhan's resolution was to fix the dodgy clasp on her Quidditch chest. Am I right?
SIOBHAN: Mm-Hmmf!
NIALL: What! Merlin's beard....
HEALER: And would I also be right in supposing the chest repairs will be your highest priority after you recover from your injuries?
SIOBHAN: Nnn Hnng!
HEALER: There you are!
NIALL: My! You're a brilliant chap, aren't you? So all we need is a healing draught, a spell or two, and we'll be as good as new. Right?
HEALER: Actually...we have to get the Rune Juice out of your system. Otherwise there's no telling what might happen the next time you make a decision.
NIALL: You don't say! How long will that take, then?
HEALER: A month or two, probably.
NIALL: What! Why? Am I to be punished now, so Mr.Goody-Two-Cheeks can feel superior in his potionary ethics?
HEALER: Not really. I avoid potions in my everyday life. It's this work, you see...
NIALL: Arrgh! Spare me! I would like to see how you felt if...
HEALER: No! Don't say it!
NIALL: ...you had to spend all day on these bloomin' stools...
HEALER: Niall, I beg you!
NIALL: ...half-arsed!
HEALER: Bloody hell! That's enough from you, you great--
[At this point, the roll of parchment had to be changed. Due to the healer's indisposal, the next roll was not opened for several minutes. We apologize for the gap in the transcript.]
HEALER: --until I, or another healer, remove it! All right, let's get back to the meeting. Mr. Spankison, why don't you share what's on your mind?
SPANKY: I can blibber the tune of "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Listen: [The patient blibbered skillfully, and in tune, for 1 minute and 55 seconds.]
HEALER: That's lovely. Do you mind if I stand up? Crikey! This chair is killing me. Did anything else come to you? Any news on your powers returning, and so forth? The floor is entirely yours. Ow!
SPANKY: Well, I was working in the kitchen last night, and I tried to stir the soup with one wand, then the other, but I couldn't do it. Then I tried with both wands at once, and...
HEALER: And?
SPANKY: They made me scrub the walls and ceiling, then transferred me to pots and pans.
HEALER: Interesting. Have you noticed any patterns in the new way your magic is working?
SPANKY: No, but the soup left some interesting stains on the kitchen walls.
HEALER: I'm sure. All right, it's Mr. Harvey's turn. Harvey - hello? Ah, there you are. Have you reconsidered any of the things you said here yesterday?
HARVEY: Er - I beg your pardon.
HEALER: Well, that's a start, anyway.
HARVEY: No, I mean, are you speaking to me? Did I say something tomorrow? I mean, am I going to say something yesterday? It's all very confusing. I thought we were going to discuss the results of my blood analysis.
HEALER: Yes, we will, when those results arrive. They're not expected until tomorrow.
HARVEY: What? But you just told me yesterday - no, wait a minute. What day is this?
HEALER: Tuesday.
HARVEY: Right. OK. I've spotted it now. We were talking about my test results tomorrow, but now we're talking about something I am going to say here yesterday. Which means, drat it, I've started going backwards again. If I had known that Essence of Merlin was fat-soluble, I would have considered longer before taking enough of it to live round to the eighth century and back. The withdrawal is ENDLESS, and bits of it WILL seep into the blood time and again as fat cells are used up, especially the way you people starve us here.
SPANKY: Don't blame them. I'm the one who wrecked the soup.
HARVEY: So you see, I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Or said, rather.
HEALER: Harvey, we always seem to be facing the same issue with you: taking responsibility.
HARVEY: Responsibility? How's this for responsibility: I, personally and singlehandedly, triggered the Norman invasion, the great fire of Hogsmeade, two out of seven goblin rebellions in the fifteenth century, and the third war between the forest trolls and the mountain trolls. I faithfully carried a letter from Winston Churchill to Henry VIII, only to see it stolen and plagiarized piecemeal by Shakespeare. Also, I think - though memory doesn't quite serve me on this - I think history was going to remember the Venerable Bede as the Fairly Respectable Bede until I bumped into him.
HEALER: Now really!
HARVEY: I think I've had as much responsibility as any man who has ever lived a thousand lifetimes can take.
HEALER: Harvey, that's enough. We should continue this discussion privately. Besides, we're nearly out of time and most of the group hasn't spoken yet. Mrs. Ahmed...?
+++ SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT +++
The "Double Challenge" for TMQ #129 still needs your participation [EDIT: No, it doesn't]. Without more reader input, it is very hard to keep the ink flowing to the Magic Quill! So please, go to the Discussion Page for TMQ #129, and either post your Survey and Contest entries, or send them to Robbie through the feedback system. This is a collaborative fiction column...collaborators are sorely needed! And so, as a special bonus, the next chapter will have TWO double challenges, so you can take part in creating the next two chapters of The Magic Quill.
[Originally posted 1/14/08]
[Transcript of group session on Lewis Bell Ward at St. Mungo's]
HEALER: All right, have you all taken your meds? Good. Morning, everyone. Thanks, I will. Mmm. Well, let's welcome our new members to the group, Niall and Siobhan. Why don't you start, Niall, and tell us what brings you here?
NIALL: Bloomin' git named Farnaby Joad is what brings us here, that's what.
HEALER: Er, perhaps you could give us a bit more detail on that.
NIALL: Well, old Farnaby invited us up to his flat for a New Year's toast, like. Only he decided at the last moment to whip up a gift to hand out at the door, and being a potioneer, naturally it was an elixir. Came in a fancy little bottle with a glass stopper and a ribbon worked into the wax seal. Looked a treat. Told us to drink it down at the stroke of midnight, and all our New Year's resolutions would come true. Wish Wash, he called it.
HEALER: Oh, dear. I think I see where this is going...
NIALL: Well, what with a bucket of firewhisky and eggnog, I didn't get around to making my New Year's resolution that night. No problem, I just save the Wish Wash until the next time I happened to be up at midnight - last night. Then I tossed back old Farnaby's draught, and BANG! There I was with one buttock blown right off. And what's more, it won't be joined back on - at least, not yet. Clearly, the daft old gasbag failed to deliver as promised.
HEALER: Sorry, are you referring to your buttock as a person?
NIALL: I am referring to Joad, you hopped-up bedpan jockey!
HEALER: Now, now...
NIALL: What I'd like to know is what any of this has to do with potion abuse. I mean, I like a good snort of firewhisky as much as the next wizard, but it's not firewhisky what took half my bum off. Poisoning, this is. I've been maliciously assaulted by a potioneer. Or maybe it's wand damage, since my wand did explode. And then there's my daughter Siobhan here, poor thing. Can't talk, jaw wired shut. She took her draught the same time I did, and just as I was going through the gluteal agony of a lifetime, she was flattened by a pair of runaway bludgers. Popped out of her Quidditch chest, just like that. Got her at close range, too.
SIOBHAN: Nng mmf nnkh fmf frrrg.
NIALL: That's right, dear. Let it out. So how about it, man?
HEALER: How about...? Er, is that a question for me?
NIALL: Tell me that magic quill isn't the only thing listening here! I was asking what any of this has to do with potion abuse?
HEALER: Ah! Right. Well, you see, you might have gone to any of several wards. The Bagman Ward for Magical Sport Mishaps, for example - only we've had to shut it, since the goblins sued the Endowment Committee for recovery of Ludo Bagman's debts. Or take, say, the Moody Memorial Ward for Wand-Related Buttock Injuries, but it's only now being built, and the wait list is surprisingly long. Luckily, we had just had two vacancies in the Lewis Bell Ward, so we were able to take you on right away.
NIALL: Vacancies, eh?
HEALER: You'll probably hear twenty versions of the story by lunchtime, so I might as well tell you the straight story now. The gentleman to your left - Do stop humming, Mr. Spankison, won't you? - I say, the gentleman to your left killed Mrs. Nonmonnom in self-defense. No one expected the old lady to turn out so dangerous. Should never have been allowed on the ward, but there was no way to tell.
NIALL: This fellow, you say? He hums and he kills, eh?
HEALER: The very same. And the other death...well, there's no delicate way to say it, but Mr. Faberhorn ate his roommate, and there it is. After three times we've decided to let him have his own room, so it shan't happen again.
NIALL: There's a relief. Er...which one is he?
HEALER: Oh, don't worry! Mr. Faberhorn doesn't come to groups. Not since he bit Healer Kilreare on the...
NIALL: On the what?
HEALER: Er, the winter solstice. That's the ticket.
NIALL: This still doesn't explain what this ward has to offer me and my daughter.
HEALER: Well, don't you see, you are victims of an illegal potion mishap. To begin with, Wish Wash is a Schedule "Thorn" potion, not to be dispensed without written authorization from the Rune Juice Office in the Department of Magical Fumes and Brews. Your friend Mr. Joad has a lot to answer for.
NIALL: It's all good news so far. Keep talking.
HEALER: Secondly, you mentioned that eggnog was served at Mr. Joad's party. Did I hear you right?
NIALL: Best eggnog ever made. It's a gift Farnaby has.
HEALER: Yes, but if he had applied himself more to his books, rather than relying on his gifts, Mr. Joad might have known that clove has a perverse effect on Rune Juice potions.
NIALL: Oi! That's it! I'm totally with you! Next you'll tell me F. J. mixed the eggnog and the Wish Wash in that order, in the same cauldron, without washing up in between. Am I right?
HEALER: You ARE right. So the Wish Wash was unintentionally contaminated with eggnog residue, which contains clove...
NIALL: And which caused our New Year's resolutions to backfire!
HEALER: Er. Ahem.
NIALL: What?
HEALER: Actually, the nutmeg contamination caused your resolutions to come true.
NIALL: How's that?
HEALER: It made the Wish Wash work in a spectacularly rapid and efficient way. Unpleasantly so.
NIALL: That's nonsense. Did I resolve to blow half my arse off?
HEALER: Er, no.
NIALL: Did Siobhan here resolve to let bludgers fly around the place?
HEALER: No, but that's exactly the point...after today, you'll both be very, very careful to act on your resolutions.
NIALL: Eh??
HEALER: Bear with me. Your resolution, as I recall, was to keep your wand out of your back pocket. Would you say there is a good chance you will keep your wand clear of your trousers in future?
NIALL: I most certainly would say so, after...aye!
HEALER: And if I may hazard a guess, Siobhan's resolution was to fix the dodgy clasp on her Quidditch chest. Am I right?
SIOBHAN: Mm-Hmmf!
NIALL: What! Merlin's beard....
HEALER: And would I also be right in supposing the chest repairs will be your highest priority after you recover from your injuries?
SIOBHAN: Nnn Hnng!
HEALER: There you are!
NIALL: My! You're a brilliant chap, aren't you? So all we need is a healing draught, a spell or two, and we'll be as good as new. Right?
HEALER: Actually...we have to get the Rune Juice out of your system. Otherwise there's no telling what might happen the next time you make a decision.
NIALL: You don't say! How long will that take, then?
HEALER: A month or two, probably.
NIALL: What! Why? Am I to be punished now, so Mr.Goody-Two-Cheeks can feel superior in his potionary ethics?
HEALER: Not really. I avoid potions in my everyday life. It's this work, you see...
NIALL: Arrgh! Spare me! I would like to see how you felt if...
HEALER: No! Don't say it!
NIALL: ...you had to spend all day on these bloomin' stools...
HEALER: Niall, I beg you!
NIALL: ...half-arsed!
HEALER: Bloody hell! That's enough from you, you great--
[At this point, the roll of parchment had to be changed. Due to the healer's indisposal, the next roll was not opened for several minutes. We apologize for the gap in the transcript.]
HEALER: --until I, or another healer, remove it! All right, let's get back to the meeting. Mr. Spankison, why don't you share what's on your mind?
SPANKY: I can blibber the tune of "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Listen: [The patient blibbered skillfully, and in tune, for 1 minute and 55 seconds.]
HEALER: That's lovely. Do you mind if I stand up? Crikey! This chair is killing me. Did anything else come to you? Any news on your powers returning, and so forth? The floor is entirely yours. Ow!
SPANKY: Well, I was working in the kitchen last night, and I tried to stir the soup with one wand, then the other, but I couldn't do it. Then I tried with both wands at once, and...
HEALER: And?
SPANKY: They made me scrub the walls and ceiling, then transferred me to pots and pans.
HEALER: Interesting. Have you noticed any patterns in the new way your magic is working?
SPANKY: No, but the soup left some interesting stains on the kitchen walls.
HEALER: I'm sure. All right, it's Mr. Harvey's turn. Harvey - hello? Ah, there you are. Have you reconsidered any of the things you said here yesterday?
HARVEY: Er - I beg your pardon.
HEALER: Well, that's a start, anyway.
HARVEY: No, I mean, are you speaking to me? Did I say something tomorrow? I mean, am I going to say something yesterday? It's all very confusing. I thought we were going to discuss the results of my blood analysis.
HEALER: Yes, we will, when those results arrive. They're not expected until tomorrow.
HARVEY: What? But you just told me yesterday - no, wait a minute. What day is this?
HEALER: Tuesday.
HARVEY: Right. OK. I've spotted it now. We were talking about my test results tomorrow, but now we're talking about something I am going to say here yesterday. Which means, drat it, I've started going backwards again. If I had known that Essence of Merlin was fat-soluble, I would have considered longer before taking enough of it to live round to the eighth century and back. The withdrawal is ENDLESS, and bits of it WILL seep into the blood time and again as fat cells are used up, especially the way you people starve us here.
SPANKY: Don't blame them. I'm the one who wrecked the soup.
HARVEY: So you see, I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Or said, rather.
HEALER: Harvey, we always seem to be facing the same issue with you: taking responsibility.
HARVEY: Responsibility? How's this for responsibility: I, personally and singlehandedly, triggered the Norman invasion, the great fire of Hogsmeade, two out of seven goblin rebellions in the fifteenth century, and the third war between the forest trolls and the mountain trolls. I faithfully carried a letter from Winston Churchill to Henry VIII, only to see it stolen and plagiarized piecemeal by Shakespeare. Also, I think - though memory doesn't quite serve me on this - I think history was going to remember the Venerable Bede as the Fairly Respectable Bede until I bumped into him.
HEALER: Now really!
HARVEY: I think I've had as much responsibility as any man who has ever lived a thousand lifetimes can take.
HEALER: Harvey, that's enough. We should continue this discussion privately. Besides, we're nearly out of time and most of the group hasn't spoken yet. Mrs. Ahmed...?
+++ SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT +++
The "Double Challenge" for TMQ #129 still needs your participation [EDIT: No, it doesn't]. Without more reader input, it is very hard to keep the ink flowing to the Magic Quill! So please, go to the Discussion Page for TMQ #129, and either post your Survey and Contest entries, or send them to Robbie through the feedback system. This is a collaborative fiction column...collaborators are sorely needed! And so, as a special bonus, the next chapter will have TWO double challenges, so you can take part in creating the next two chapters of The Magic Quill.
[Originally posted 1/14/08]
128. Vivis Exion
Contest winner: greyniffler
Spanky hummed to himself as the hoverchair floated along the corridor. Ilona followed behind, fondling the hair on the back of his head.
The chair stopped in front of a shiny golden plate, fixed to the wall next to a door. There were four large words printed on the plate: "THE LEWIS BELL WARD." Under them a dense block of text was engraved in a thin, curling script:
At that moment the door of the ward opened, and a short, stocky wizard emerged, gowned in Chudley Cannons colors and beaming at the Spankisons. "Gets them every time," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Mr. and Mrs. Spankison, I presume? I'm Healer Higgins. Let me show you in."
Healer Higgins led them through what appeared to be a long corridor lined with doors. The odd thing about it was that, between the doors, there were no walls separating the rooms within from the corridor without. Beyond the doors were rooms that seemed to have no walls around them. In one room, witches and wizards sat around small, round tables, eating toast and yogurt while an orderly handed out cups of pills. In another room across the corridor, several people were seated in a circle of chairs, one of them standing and talking to the others. The Spankisons could not hear what was being said, however.
"Magical walls," Healer Higgins said with a sweeping motion of his hands.
"I believe we know the gentleman who set them up," said Ilona, while Spanky went back to humming cheerfully. "Friend of ours. His family has been in the magical wall business for generations."
"Oh yes," agreed Higgins. "Mr. Harvey. Such a sad case, what happened to him. You know him, do you? Then I expect he will enjoy having you in his recovery group. It might be good for both of you."
Ilona shivered. This was the first she had heard about Harvey's fate since last Christmas, when he had supposedly taken a draught of Essence of Merlin and began living backward in time. Had he, in fact, been here all this time?
They passed more rooms with transparent walls. One was occupied by a pair of thin, wan youths playing table-tennis with a snitch whose wings were held down by a strip of sticky-tape. Healer Higgins stuck his head through the invisible wall next to the door and said something to the young men, to which they replied with shrugs. He did the same to a room where a blindfolded lady was painting a picture, and another room where a house-elf was trying to spoon porridge into the mouth of a thin, elderly man who was standing on his head. Ilona and Spanky could not hear what the Healer said to these people, but he explained afterward that he was just saying good-morning and making sure everybody had taken his meds.
Still another room contained a simmering cauldron guarded by a massive, shaggy, apelike creature with enormous fangs. Healer Higgins walked past this room without pausing.
"Aren't you going to say good morning to that one?" Ilona asked.
The Healer's cheeks reddened. "Mr. Faberhorn? Er...I don't like to disturb him at this hour. He can be a little grouchy before he's had his first cuppa."
Ilona looked back and saw the monster stretch in its sleep, licking its considerable chops.
"I quite understand," she said nervously.
"We'll get you started in here," said the Healer, reaching through the wall and turning a doorknob from the other side. "Mind you, the walls are bespelled so that only healers can do this. Everyone else has to knock on the doors and be invited in. Please, after you!"
Ilona followed her husband's gliding chair into a small, brightly lit laboratory that, on this side, seemed to be surrounded by perfectly solid walls. Almost immediately Spanky yelled "Yowch!" A winged thing of silver and glass, which she took at first for a small bird, flapped away from him, dropping a red-tipped needle into a sharps bin and ejecting a sealed tube of blood onto a padded tray. While Spanky rubbed his shoulder resentfully, Ilona followed the tube with her eyes. First it was picked up by a little clockwork machine that stood on five joined legs; the machine began spinning around until it became a blur in her vision. Then other machines - each one similar in size but unique in shape and function - took over and did a variety of things to the blood sample, until finally a bell chimed and a slot on the Healer's desk belched up a shiny coupon that appeared to be printed on silver foil.
"Hecate's boil!" the Healer swore as he read the coupon. "I've never seen anything like this. Platypus venom...essence of frogwort...concentrated spider sweat...poison-ivy-berry wine with an infusion of dog-chestnut extract...34% nondescript...I don't know quite what those people put in you, Mr. Spankison, but at these concentrations you should not have lived!"
Spanky giggled softly, leaned his head against Ilona's chest, and began to snore.
"We should take him to the resting room," said the Healer, beckoning. Ilona followed him, pushing the hoverchair ahead of her. They rounded a corner and came suddenly to a large, sunny courtyard where a breeze stirred the leaves of a pair of trees and a small stream bubbled over rocks. Several other patients were there already, napping in hoverchair recliners while mechanical bees buzzed around them, monitoring their vital signs.
"Let's put him here, next to Madam Nonmonnom," Healer Higgins suggested. "He'll be all right here while we discuss a few things in my office."
Ilona tucked a cushion behind Spanky's head and, with a reluctant backward glance, followed the Healer out of the resting room.
Some little while later, Spanky was awakened by snoring even louder than his own. He peered irritably through his eyelashes at the elderly lady reclining next to him. "I say," Spanky said softly. This he repeated, each time less softly. By the sixth "I say" he had awakened everyone but the old witch beside him. Finally he reached across and shook her arm. The lady turned her head the other way and slept on, mercifully snoring no longer.
He closed his eyes and began to go back to sleep, ignoring the grumbling of the other patients, who were shuffling out of the resting room with sullen looks in his direction.
The next time he awoke, it was because something pointy was digging uncomfortably into his neck. Holding as still as he could, Spanky opened his eyes slowly. The old lady was leaning over him with a leer of triumph on her face.
"You're Agent Spankison of the Rogue Magic Bureau," the lady whispered, her breath smelling like throat lozenges.
"You have the advantage of me," Spanky replied coolly. Somehow, having a wand poked into his neck had cleared his mind wonderfully.
"You won't know me," said the elderly witch. "But I have been waiting for you, ever since my niece Ava came to visit me. She had to come in disguise, you know. That's down to you. You've destroyed the lives of my brother and his girls. Home and business wrecked, years of prison staring them in the face, Avarice on the run and hungry. That's down to you as well. But she warned me to look for you, and here you are."
"I'm touched," Spanky said, though this was less true than it had been a moment ago.
The old witch went on in a half-whisper: "'Auntie Viv,' she said. 'Auntie Viv, do this one thing for us, and Daddy will give you the antidote to that silly little potion he slipped to you all those years ago. He didn't mean it, you know. It was just his little joke. Do this one little thing and you won't have to be mad anymore. Isn't that worth forgiving Daddy? Do this one very little thing, and you can come and live with us again. Wouldn't you like that, dear, old, mad Aunt Vivis?' So I said I would. I said I would stop you before you could regain your wits, before you could tell your awful lies to the Wizengamot, before..."
"I don't need to hear it," Spanky cut in, his voice calm. "I'll be dead soon, anyway. So, if it's all the same, could you just get it over with?"
"All right," said Aunt Viv. She stepped backward, her wand-tip pointed at him with only the slightest tremor. "You asked for it. Incendio!"
A jet of flame erupted from the wand. Spanky was enveloped in fire, together with his levitating bath chair. Smoke, the smell of burning hair, the crackle and pop of the wood in the chair, filled the resting room. Aunt Viv blocked the doorway with a shield spell just in time to stop the Healer and his orderlies from running in. She laughed a high, wheezing laugh at their horrified faces, and waved at them with her free hand. So she was taken a bit off guard when Spanky, completely unharmed, stood up out of the ashes of his no-longer-hovering recliner, brandished not one but two wands at her, and said: "I arrest you in the name of the Queen."
This only made Aunt Viv laugh the louder. "You?" she said. "You can't do anything to hurt me. My brother saw to that."
"I think you've got it turned around," said Spanky. "I'm not sure, though. There's only one way to find out. Stupefy!"
A vague, diffuse glow came out the tip of his right wand. Aunt Vivis snorted with laughter.
Red in the face, Spanky cleared his throat, swished his left wand, and tried again. Sparks stuttered out of it, hitting Aunt Viv's shoulder, but having little effect. She did look a little tired, but she shook it off and laughed louder.
"You see?" crowed Auntie Viv, still holding off the orderlies with her shield spell. "My brother's potion worked! Only it had a little unforeseen side-effect. So we're at a stalemate! I reckon we'll have to do this the Muggle way. Hit me."
Spanky hesitated. It didn't seem right to take a swing at an old lady who wasn't doing anything to fight back.
"All right, I'll go first," she said. With her free hand, she grabbed him by the neck and hoisted him off the ground. Spanky struggled in midair, clawing at her hands. He couldn't make a sound.
"Oops!" said Aunt Viv. "Another side-effect. Who would have thought it? My poor brother will never make it in the potioneering field, at this rate!"
With the strength of madness, the elderly witch began to crush Spanky's windpipe. He was beginning to see stars when, with hardly a thought in his head, he brought his two wands together, held between both hands, and mouthed the stunning spell one last time...
...and was momentarily blinded by a flash of light, almost deafened by a crack of thunder. The witch's iron claw released him and he crashed to the ground, gasping. Voices and running footsteps suddenly surrounded him. Strong hands hoisted Spanky onto another recliner. Spanky saw the Healer's concerned face - Ilona's cheeks streaked with tears - and as the ringing in his ears faded, he heard a young orderly's hysterical voice shouting, "She's dead!"
"Oops," Spanky whispered hoarsely as his eyelids drooped. "Another side-effect."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To help choose the direction of the next few chapters of The Magic Quill, visit the Discussion Forum, or send Robbie feedback. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest entry (or entries) Robbie likes best, will be featured in the chapter after next. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Is Harvey really in the Lewis Ball Ward? (A) Yes, and he has been there all along. (B) Yes, but only after living backward through history and forward again. (C) No, it's somebody else claiming to be Harvey.
CONTEST: What kind of New Year's resolution might a witch or wizard make?
[Originally posted 12/22/07]
Spanky hummed to himself as the hoverchair floated along the corridor. Ilona followed behind, fondling the hair on the back of his head.
The chair stopped in front of a shiny golden plate, fixed to the wall next to a door. There were four large words printed on the plate: "THE LEWIS BELL WARD." Under them a dense block of text was engraved in a thin, curling script:
"Dedicated to the memory of Lewis 'Cannon' Bell, beater for the Chudley Cannons from 1921 to 1938, holder of six all-time records: most spectators hit by bludger in a single game (17), season (124), and career (1,227); most mascots struck by bludger (18 to his own side's mascots and 49 to the opposing side's, including two on one shot), and most bludgers put through a scoring hoop (11 in his career, though no one started counting these until 1929). In spite of the danger to spectators, he was considered the best beater of his time because of his record for protecting his side from the bludgers, though he was less successful at interfering with the opposing team. The Daily Prophet announced his retirement with the headline: 'Quidditch Now Safer to Watch than to Play.' Later in life, as head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports, 'Cannon' crusaded against the use of performance-enhancing spells and potions. Upon his death, Mr. Bell left his considerable fortune to the Hospital, with the express desire that it be used 'to help athletes and other witches/wizards recover from the use of, and dependency on, magic-altering potions.' This ward is the result of Mr. Bell's generous gift."Engraved at the top of the plate was a small, golden image representing a bludger in flight. When Spanky reached toward it, the tiny bludger popped out of the plate, knocked into the side of Spanky's head, and slammed back into the wall from which it had come. Spanky yelled, rubbed his sore head, and scowled murderously at the golden bludger.
At that moment the door of the ward opened, and a short, stocky wizard emerged, gowned in Chudley Cannons colors and beaming at the Spankisons. "Gets them every time," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Mr. and Mrs. Spankison, I presume? I'm Healer Higgins. Let me show you in."
Healer Higgins led them through what appeared to be a long corridor lined with doors. The odd thing about it was that, between the doors, there were no walls separating the rooms within from the corridor without. Beyond the doors were rooms that seemed to have no walls around them. In one room, witches and wizards sat around small, round tables, eating toast and yogurt while an orderly handed out cups of pills. In another room across the corridor, several people were seated in a circle of chairs, one of them standing and talking to the others. The Spankisons could not hear what was being said, however.
"Magical walls," Healer Higgins said with a sweeping motion of his hands.
"I believe we know the gentleman who set them up," said Ilona, while Spanky went back to humming cheerfully. "Friend of ours. His family has been in the magical wall business for generations."
"Oh yes," agreed Higgins. "Mr. Harvey. Such a sad case, what happened to him. You know him, do you? Then I expect he will enjoy having you in his recovery group. It might be good for both of you."
Ilona shivered. This was the first she had heard about Harvey's fate since last Christmas, when he had supposedly taken a draught of Essence of Merlin and began living backward in time. Had he, in fact, been here all this time?
They passed more rooms with transparent walls. One was occupied by a pair of thin, wan youths playing table-tennis with a snitch whose wings were held down by a strip of sticky-tape. Healer Higgins stuck his head through the invisible wall next to the door and said something to the young men, to which they replied with shrugs. He did the same to a room where a blindfolded lady was painting a picture, and another room where a house-elf was trying to spoon porridge into the mouth of a thin, elderly man who was standing on his head. Ilona and Spanky could not hear what the Healer said to these people, but he explained afterward that he was just saying good-morning and making sure everybody had taken his meds.
Still another room contained a simmering cauldron guarded by a massive, shaggy, apelike creature with enormous fangs. Healer Higgins walked past this room without pausing.
"Aren't you going to say good morning to that one?" Ilona asked.
The Healer's cheeks reddened. "Mr. Faberhorn? Er...I don't like to disturb him at this hour. He can be a little grouchy before he's had his first cuppa."
Ilona looked back and saw the monster stretch in its sleep, licking its considerable chops.
"I quite understand," she said nervously.
"We'll get you started in here," said the Healer, reaching through the wall and turning a doorknob from the other side. "Mind you, the walls are bespelled so that only healers can do this. Everyone else has to knock on the doors and be invited in. Please, after you!"
Ilona followed her husband's gliding chair into a small, brightly lit laboratory that, on this side, seemed to be surrounded by perfectly solid walls. Almost immediately Spanky yelled "Yowch!" A winged thing of silver and glass, which she took at first for a small bird, flapped away from him, dropping a red-tipped needle into a sharps bin and ejecting a sealed tube of blood onto a padded tray. While Spanky rubbed his shoulder resentfully, Ilona followed the tube with her eyes. First it was picked up by a little clockwork machine that stood on five joined legs; the machine began spinning around until it became a blur in her vision. Then other machines - each one similar in size but unique in shape and function - took over and did a variety of things to the blood sample, until finally a bell chimed and a slot on the Healer's desk belched up a shiny coupon that appeared to be printed on silver foil.
"Hecate's boil!" the Healer swore as he read the coupon. "I've never seen anything like this. Platypus venom...essence of frogwort...concentrated spider sweat...poison-ivy-berry wine with an infusion of dog-chestnut extract...34% nondescript...I don't know quite what those people put in you, Mr. Spankison, but at these concentrations you should not have lived!"
Spanky giggled softly, leaned his head against Ilona's chest, and began to snore.
"We should take him to the resting room," said the Healer, beckoning. Ilona followed him, pushing the hoverchair ahead of her. They rounded a corner and came suddenly to a large, sunny courtyard where a breeze stirred the leaves of a pair of trees and a small stream bubbled over rocks. Several other patients were there already, napping in hoverchair recliners while mechanical bees buzzed around them, monitoring their vital signs.
"Let's put him here, next to Madam Nonmonnom," Healer Higgins suggested. "He'll be all right here while we discuss a few things in my office."
Ilona tucked a cushion behind Spanky's head and, with a reluctant backward glance, followed the Healer out of the resting room.
Some little while later, Spanky was awakened by snoring even louder than his own. He peered irritably through his eyelashes at the elderly lady reclining next to him. "I say," Spanky said softly. This he repeated, each time less softly. By the sixth "I say" he had awakened everyone but the old witch beside him. Finally he reached across and shook her arm. The lady turned her head the other way and slept on, mercifully snoring no longer.
He closed his eyes and began to go back to sleep, ignoring the grumbling of the other patients, who were shuffling out of the resting room with sullen looks in his direction.
The next time he awoke, it was because something pointy was digging uncomfortably into his neck. Holding as still as he could, Spanky opened his eyes slowly. The old lady was leaning over him with a leer of triumph on her face.
"You're Agent Spankison of the Rogue Magic Bureau," the lady whispered, her breath smelling like throat lozenges.
"You have the advantage of me," Spanky replied coolly. Somehow, having a wand poked into his neck had cleared his mind wonderfully.
"You won't know me," said the elderly witch. "But I have been waiting for you, ever since my niece Ava came to visit me. She had to come in disguise, you know. That's down to you. You've destroyed the lives of my brother and his girls. Home and business wrecked, years of prison staring them in the face, Avarice on the run and hungry. That's down to you as well. But she warned me to look for you, and here you are."
"I'm touched," Spanky said, though this was less true than it had been a moment ago.
The old witch went on in a half-whisper: "'Auntie Viv,' she said. 'Auntie Viv, do this one thing for us, and Daddy will give you the antidote to that silly little potion he slipped to you all those years ago. He didn't mean it, you know. It was just his little joke. Do this one little thing and you won't have to be mad anymore. Isn't that worth forgiving Daddy? Do this one very little thing, and you can come and live with us again. Wouldn't you like that, dear, old, mad Aunt Vivis?' So I said I would. I said I would stop you before you could regain your wits, before you could tell your awful lies to the Wizengamot, before..."
"I don't need to hear it," Spanky cut in, his voice calm. "I'll be dead soon, anyway. So, if it's all the same, could you just get it over with?"
"All right," said Aunt Viv. She stepped backward, her wand-tip pointed at him with only the slightest tremor. "You asked for it. Incendio!"
A jet of flame erupted from the wand. Spanky was enveloped in fire, together with his levitating bath chair. Smoke, the smell of burning hair, the crackle and pop of the wood in the chair, filled the resting room. Aunt Viv blocked the doorway with a shield spell just in time to stop the Healer and his orderlies from running in. She laughed a high, wheezing laugh at their horrified faces, and waved at them with her free hand. So she was taken a bit off guard when Spanky, completely unharmed, stood up out of the ashes of his no-longer-hovering recliner, brandished not one but two wands at her, and said: "I arrest you in the name of the Queen."
This only made Aunt Viv laugh the louder. "You?" she said. "You can't do anything to hurt me. My brother saw to that."
"I think you've got it turned around," said Spanky. "I'm not sure, though. There's only one way to find out. Stupefy!"
A vague, diffuse glow came out the tip of his right wand. Aunt Vivis snorted with laughter.
Red in the face, Spanky cleared his throat, swished his left wand, and tried again. Sparks stuttered out of it, hitting Aunt Viv's shoulder, but having little effect. She did look a little tired, but she shook it off and laughed louder.
"You see?" crowed Auntie Viv, still holding off the orderlies with her shield spell. "My brother's potion worked! Only it had a little unforeseen side-effect. So we're at a stalemate! I reckon we'll have to do this the Muggle way. Hit me."
Spanky hesitated. It didn't seem right to take a swing at an old lady who wasn't doing anything to fight back.
"All right, I'll go first," she said. With her free hand, she grabbed him by the neck and hoisted him off the ground. Spanky struggled in midair, clawing at her hands. He couldn't make a sound.
"Oops!" said Aunt Viv. "Another side-effect. Who would have thought it? My poor brother will never make it in the potioneering field, at this rate!"
With the strength of madness, the elderly witch began to crush Spanky's windpipe. He was beginning to see stars when, with hardly a thought in his head, he brought his two wands together, held between both hands, and mouthed the stunning spell one last time...
...and was momentarily blinded by a flash of light, almost deafened by a crack of thunder. The witch's iron claw released him and he crashed to the ground, gasping. Voices and running footsteps suddenly surrounded him. Strong hands hoisted Spanky onto another recliner. Spanky saw the Healer's concerned face - Ilona's cheeks streaked with tears - and as the ringing in his ears faded, he heard a young orderly's hysterical voice shouting, "She's dead!"
"Oops," Spanky whispered hoarsely as his eyelids drooped. "Another side-effect."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To help choose the direction of the next few chapters of The Magic Quill, visit the Discussion Forum, or send Robbie feedback. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest entry (or entries) Robbie likes best, will be featured in the chapter after next. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Is Harvey really in the Lewis Ball Ward? (A) Yes, and he has been there all along. (B) Yes, but only after living backward through history and forward again. (C) No, it's somebody else claiming to be Harvey.
CONTEST: What kind of New Year's resolution might a witch or wizard make?
[Originally posted 12/22/07]
123. The Care and Feeding of MIADs
Contest winner (tie): jatibbal and TWZRD
Honorable mention: ralucacoldea
It was raining in the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
This wasn't the kind of rain that students had often seen there over the thousand-year history of the school. It wasn't simply an illusion of rain, playing across the enchanted ceiling, resembling the weather outside. It was a good, honest, wet rain that drenched the floor cobbles, tables, and draperies, and caused the levitating candles to fizz and smoke. Joe Albuquerque would have suspected a leak, except the ceiling displayed a rare image of a bright, sunny day outside the castle. The effect of this sunlight shining through the rain was dazzling to the eyes.
Joe looked round at the caretaker, the headmistress, and the groundskeeper - he had already forgotten their names; the staff at schools other than his own never really interested him. The sour-looking caretaker fidgeted with his hands, keeping his eyes respectfully downcast. The half-giant groundskeeper stood at attention, which looked ridiculous given his unkempt hair and clothes. The headmistress simply looked impatient and disapproving. Joe sighed. He knew he shouldn't have worn his Prince of Wales disguise, but the only other one not being cleaned was his Pope outfit.
"This is a MIAD," he said finally. "No question."
"If you're telling us this is a Magic-Induced Atmospheric Disturbance," crabbed the headmistress, "we might have guessed that without retaining your services."
"Type 2," Joe added pointedly. The headmistress's jaw snapped shut. Joe continued: "There are three major categories of MIADs. Type 1 is the result of magical emissions mixing with ordinary rain. Everything it falls on develops magical side effects. It happens rarely, but when it does happen, it's a disaster for magical secrecy."
"But it also happens outdoors," the headmistress pointed out.
"Usually," Joe conceded mysteriously. "This, however, is Type 2, magical weather created by the residual ionization from a major magical battle, particularly one fought in an enclosed space."
"You said there were three types," the caretaker grumbled.
Joe shrugged. "Any MIAD that isn't Type 1 or Type 2 is classed as Atypical. For example, a rain of frogs, especially with bechamel sauce, would be an Atypical MIAD. Such things are generally caused by a large-scale magical accident."
"All right, Mr. Albuquerque," said the headmistress coldly. "You've narrowed this indoor rainfall down to a type of magical weather that happens indoors. How this is worth such a high fee remains to appear..."
"If you had listened," Joe said with royal brusqueness, "you would have noted more than the location of the weather. Each type of MIAD has a different cause, and therefore a different cure. The difference between accidental magic, magical pollution, and the fallout of a massive battle is very significant. The only cure for Type 1 and Atypical MIADs is to wait for them to end, then do a thorough cleanup and try to prevent them happening again. Type 2 is different. It can become a chronic problem, breaking out from time to time for centuries after the battle that caused it. It's like a ghost - not of a person, but of an event."
The headmistress looked crestfallen. "Then we shall have to close the school after all..."
"On the contrary," said Joe. "Something must be done to cancel out the residual ionization. There are two things that could work, but it's probably too late for one of them - taking all the wands that were used in the battle and subjecting them to Prior Incantato. This is something like erasing the last spell each combatant cast, and it would break up the energy pattern that holds the MIAD together."
"We'll never get all those wands together, headmistress," said the half-giant.
"No, too many of them were buried with their owners," the headmistress agreed, "or were destroyed when their owners were captured, or..."
Joe broke in with an air of royal prerogative. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but there is another option. I once saw a large, jeweled watch that was said to belong to the previous headmaster here. I noticed that one of the dials on the watch had a duckbilled platypus on it. I did a lot of work in the Southern Hemisphere, earlier in my career, and I happen to know that the platypus can absorb virtually any amount of magic without being effected."
"I think I see where this is going," said the half-giant, who, Joe realized, might be cleverer than he looked. "You mean to sacrifice a platypus to calm this storm, and I won't have it...er, that is to say, I wouldn't have it even if I did know where a platypus could be found..." The groundskeeper ended up nervously shuffling his feet.
Joe stared at him for a moment, then said, "I wasn't going to suggest anything like that. No platypus sacrifices will be necessary. If my guess is correct, we could use the platypus dial on Dumbledore's watch to absorb the residual magic from the Battle of Hogwarts. Headmistress, do you know what became of the watch?"
Now the old lady looked very distressed. "It hasn't been seen since Dumbledore's death," she said.
"Where was it last seen?" said Joe.
"Let's see..." The headmistress wrung her hands. "Dumbledore gave it to his brother...Someone stole it and got away on a thestramule...It was recaptured and returned...but it wasn't in the head's office when I took over, and it was never mentioned in Dumbledore's will. Do you know, the only time I saw that watch outside Dumbledore's office was when we went down to the station to see about that murder on the Hogwarts Express. Dumbledore kept taking it out and fiddling with it. Something about the way he held it made me afraid. But that was years ago..."
Joe's insides jumped, jumped again, and turned somersaults as he heard this speech. It brought back more than one memory...a certain afternoon outside the Bogley Squint Ward at St. Mungo's...the heroics of his friend Merlin, the deft fingers of Sadie, the mysterious behavior of Harvey...and the story of an unidentified corpse that somehow connected Spanky Spankison's hunt for a werewolf with Merlin's escape from Gringotts...Joe gulped as he realized one of his friends might be in possession of a very dangerous magical device.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To help choose the direction of the next few chapters of The Magic Quill, visit the Discussion Forum, or send Robbie feedback. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest entry (or entries) Robbie likes best, will be featured in the chapter after next. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Which of Joe's friends has Dumbledore's watch now? (A) Spanky. (B) Sadie. (C) Merlin. (D) Harvey. (E) None of the above - just surprise us!
CONTEST: Describe Joe Albuquerque's next disguise.
[Originally posted 8/31/07]
Honorable mention: ralucacoldea
It was raining in the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
This wasn't the kind of rain that students had often seen there over the thousand-year history of the school. It wasn't simply an illusion of rain, playing across the enchanted ceiling, resembling the weather outside. It was a good, honest, wet rain that drenched the floor cobbles, tables, and draperies, and caused the levitating candles to fizz and smoke. Joe Albuquerque would have suspected a leak, except the ceiling displayed a rare image of a bright, sunny day outside the castle. The effect of this sunlight shining through the rain was dazzling to the eyes.
Joe looked round at the caretaker, the headmistress, and the groundskeeper - he had already forgotten their names; the staff at schools other than his own never really interested him. The sour-looking caretaker fidgeted with his hands, keeping his eyes respectfully downcast. The half-giant groundskeeper stood at attention, which looked ridiculous given his unkempt hair and clothes. The headmistress simply looked impatient and disapproving. Joe sighed. He knew he shouldn't have worn his Prince of Wales disguise, but the only other one not being cleaned was his Pope outfit.
"This is a MIAD," he said finally. "No question."
"If you're telling us this is a Magic-Induced Atmospheric Disturbance," crabbed the headmistress, "we might have guessed that without retaining your services."
"Type 2," Joe added pointedly. The headmistress's jaw snapped shut. Joe continued: "There are three major categories of MIADs. Type 1 is the result of magical emissions mixing with ordinary rain. Everything it falls on develops magical side effects. It happens rarely, but when it does happen, it's a disaster for magical secrecy."
"But it also happens outdoors," the headmistress pointed out.
"Usually," Joe conceded mysteriously. "This, however, is Type 2, magical weather created by the residual ionization from a major magical battle, particularly one fought in an enclosed space."
"You said there were three types," the caretaker grumbled.
Joe shrugged. "Any MIAD that isn't Type 1 or Type 2 is classed as Atypical. For example, a rain of frogs, especially with bechamel sauce, would be an Atypical MIAD. Such things are generally caused by a large-scale magical accident."
"All right, Mr. Albuquerque," said the headmistress coldly. "You've narrowed this indoor rainfall down to a type of magical weather that happens indoors. How this is worth such a high fee remains to appear..."
"If you had listened," Joe said with royal brusqueness, "you would have noted more than the location of the weather. Each type of MIAD has a different cause, and therefore a different cure. The difference between accidental magic, magical pollution, and the fallout of a massive battle is very significant. The only cure for Type 1 and Atypical MIADs is to wait for them to end, then do a thorough cleanup and try to prevent them happening again. Type 2 is different. It can become a chronic problem, breaking out from time to time for centuries after the battle that caused it. It's like a ghost - not of a person, but of an event."
The headmistress looked crestfallen. "Then we shall have to close the school after all..."
"On the contrary," said Joe. "Something must be done to cancel out the residual ionization. There are two things that could work, but it's probably too late for one of them - taking all the wands that were used in the battle and subjecting them to Prior Incantato. This is something like erasing the last spell each combatant cast, and it would break up the energy pattern that holds the MIAD together."
"We'll never get all those wands together, headmistress," said the half-giant.
"No, too many of them were buried with their owners," the headmistress agreed, "or were destroyed when their owners were captured, or..."
Joe broke in with an air of royal prerogative. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but there is another option. I once saw a large, jeweled watch that was said to belong to the previous headmaster here. I noticed that one of the dials on the watch had a duckbilled platypus on it. I did a lot of work in the Southern Hemisphere, earlier in my career, and I happen to know that the platypus can absorb virtually any amount of magic without being effected."
"I think I see where this is going," said the half-giant, who, Joe realized, might be cleverer than he looked. "You mean to sacrifice a platypus to calm this storm, and I won't have it...er, that is to say, I wouldn't have it even if I did know where a platypus could be found..." The groundskeeper ended up nervously shuffling his feet.
Joe stared at him for a moment, then said, "I wasn't going to suggest anything like that. No platypus sacrifices will be necessary. If my guess is correct, we could use the platypus dial on Dumbledore's watch to absorb the residual magic from the Battle of Hogwarts. Headmistress, do you know what became of the watch?"
Now the old lady looked very distressed. "It hasn't been seen since Dumbledore's death," she said.
"Where was it last seen?" said Joe.
"Let's see..." The headmistress wrung her hands. "Dumbledore gave it to his brother...Someone stole it and got away on a thestramule...It was recaptured and returned...but it wasn't in the head's office when I took over, and it was never mentioned in Dumbledore's will. Do you know, the only time I saw that watch outside Dumbledore's office was when we went down to the station to see about that murder on the Hogwarts Express. Dumbledore kept taking it out and fiddling with it. Something about the way he held it made me afraid. But that was years ago..."
Joe's insides jumped, jumped again, and turned somersaults as he heard this speech. It brought back more than one memory...a certain afternoon outside the Bogley Squint Ward at St. Mungo's...the heroics of his friend Merlin, the deft fingers of Sadie, the mysterious behavior of Harvey...and the story of an unidentified corpse that somehow connected Spanky Spankison's hunt for a werewolf with Merlin's escape from Gringotts...Joe gulped as he realized one of his friends might be in possession of a very dangerous magical device.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE +++
To help choose the direction of the next few chapters of The Magic Quill, visit the Discussion Forum, or send Robbie feedback. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest entry (or entries) Robbie likes best, will be featured in the chapter after next. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Which of Joe's friends has Dumbledore's watch now? (A) Spanky. (B) Sadie. (C) Merlin. (D) Harvey. (E) None of the above - just surprise us!
CONTEST: Describe Joe Albuquerque's next disguise.
[Originally posted 8/31/07]
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
86. The Literalis Curse
Contest Winners: TWZRD, Linda Carrig, and HPMN_Tom
When the breathless group of friends and accomplices arrived at the Bogley Squint ward, they beheld a scene that would haunt their memory for years afterward.
“Blimey,” gasped Sadie. “That must be all the food in the entire hospital!”
“It is,” groaned the Assistant Healer. “And apart from one live chicken that’s running around here somewhere, all of it is encased in some kind of magical bubble.”
The ward was unrecognizable. Where there had been tables and chairs, beds, groups of patients, and a table-tennis set, now the only thing to be seen was food. Pots of it, platters of it, great spherical globs of it, from Salisbury steak to rice pudding, from steamed snap beans to mashed potato, and every chunk individually wrapped in a gleaming sphere of pure energy. The food-balls spilled out the door into the hallway, pouring round the ankles of the rescuers the Assistant Healer had led from the waiting room. Nevertheless, the spheres of hospital food remained piled up nearly to the ceiling, a rolling, tumbling, seething mass of culinary debris.
“It’s funny,” said Endora, sniffing the air. “But I don’t smell food at all.”
“The bubbles are air-tight,” Harvey deduced instantly. “God help anyone who may be stuck inside one.”
“I hear voices begging for help,” said Joe Albuquerque, tearing the round white collar off his black vicar’s shirt and wading into the bumpy, slippery disaster area. Meanwhile, those behind him began scooping spheres of food out into the hallway. There Spanky and his wife Ilona (invisible to all but him) vanished them before they could roll away and bury somebody else.
The first person to be rescued from the food avalanche was a fat wizard who immediately complained that he was hungry. “Food, food everywhere, and not a bite to eat,” he moaned, as the shell-shocked Assistant Healer supported him out into the corridor. “I was chewing on a tough piece of chop when it suddenly felt like a rubber ball in my mouth. I tried to chew on it, but the thing just shot out of my mouth and bounced off the wall. I tried to stick my fork into another piece of chop, but something wouldn’t let me get near my plate – I tried harder and harder to reach the food, until the plate shot off the table. Next thing I knew, I was sinking into this flood of gorgeous food, but I couldn’t hold on to anything – couldn’t stay on top of the pile – went under, thought I was a goner – I swear I’ll never look at food again...You wouldn’t happen to have a biscuit, now?”
Several more shells-and-cheese-shocked patients emerged from the rubble, looking remarkably fresh and chipper for spell-damage victims who had been nearly crushed or smothered under a mountain of inedible food. The quiet headaches, the omnipedritis cases, even the eternal stench victim seemed to have been cured. The rescuers dug faster, risking the collapse of precarious piles of food-balls; Endora had to be dug out of two separate avalanches. The patients they rescued did not seem regretful when they saw Spanky destroying whole piles of hospital food.
Finally they reached the bottom of the ward, from which by all accounts the trouble had come. At first, on seeing the empty bed, Endora cried out in alarm. But then they heard laughing voices from under the bed, and the group kept digging until they unearthed (or unfooded) Merlin and Rigel. They had taken refuge under the bed, and had passed the time until their rescue by playing marbles, using sphere-encased crumbs to shoot at a larger sphere that contained a suspicious-looking muffin. The moment daylight reached their refuge, the muffin-ball shot out from under the bed and Merlin began gathering up the marbles.
“Hey, no keepsies,” Rigel whined.
“Tough luck, kid,” said Merlin, pocketing the crumbs. He crawled out from under the bed and straightened up, beaming at his friends. “What took you so long?”
“Just as I expected,” Harvey marveled. “The fox pox is gone!”
“Is it?” said Merlin, touching his cheek. Before he had more than a split second to confirm the purity of his skin, Endora bowled herself at him and nearly knocked him down, sobbing into his arms. “There, there,” he said, patting her head while she embraced him. “You see? We’re all right.”
Her response was made indistinct by a congested nose, a constricted throat, and a mouth muffled by Merlin’s hospital robes.
Rigel came out from under the bed, looking daggers at Endora and shying away from his father’s outstretched hand.
“Well, that’s all sorted then,” said Joe Albuquerque, who had transformed himself from a vicar into a healer. “I’m sure the patient will be discharged in a few moments, and we can all get back to...”
“But why did all this happen?” Harvey demanded, and the other members of the rescue party murmured that they wanted to know this too.
Merlin, with Endora still clinging to him, managed somehow to explain how the Food Tasters’ Friend had summoned all the bad food in the hospital – how, in effect, every plate in every ward, and all the pots and pans in the kitchens, had materialized around him and Rigel – and how, if he didn’t get something into his stomach very soon, he would consider eating the live chicken that was now pecking at a nearby kernel of magically-shielded corn, fox pox or no.
“Let’s go, then,” said Joe. “By the powers vested in me as a healer, I pronounce you discharged. Shall we go by portkey or Floo powder?”
“If you’re going back to the Hog’s Head, you might want to get rid of that amulet,” Orion Oldmanson suggested.
Merlin was digging in his pockets for the stone when another Assistant Healer approached, breathless, pushing a wheeled chair that stopped just short of running Sadie down. In it was what at first looked like a scarecrow made out of woven reeds, with an assortment of flowers, fruits, and vegetables attached to it in a parody of human facial features and clothing. Endora almost screamed when the scarecrow moved. Sadie, who had somehow caught the chicken, covered the bird’s eyes. What kind of spell was this? Was it an animated scarecrow? Or had someone been hexed so that his flesh turned into vegetable matter?
“Is it too late to cure this man?” the attendant panted. “He’s just arrived at St. Mungo’s. Everyone else has been cured – can you do to him whatever you did to them?”
Merlin hesitated, holding the amulet in his hand.
“Don’t do it,” Harvey warned. “This man is at least partly made of food. The least that could happen is that he would be trapped inside an airtight bubble until he died. At worst, he could be torn to pieces!”
With an audible gulp, Merlin returned the stone to his pocket.
“But the man is desperate,” the attendant cried. “He could begin rotting any minute. Birds keep trying to peck his eyes out. What is he going to do?”
“How did this happen to him?” Harvey asked.
“It was the Literalis Curse,” said the patient himself, in a rustly, leafy voice that made several of the bystanders shudder. “I write for Broomstick and Wand, travel section. A reader from Italy wrote to me about an article I had done about that country. The letter said it was so full of uninformed clichés, that he was enclosing a Literalis Curse in the letter – it said that by the time I had read that far, it was already too late for me – that the next cliché I uttered would become my fate...”
“Let me guess,” said Spanky. “'You are what you eat.'”
“A statement that is only literally true for cannibals,” Joe pointed out, causing Sadie to try to cover the chicken’s ears. “And for Mr. Walking-Market here.”
“The name is Regianini,” said the poor man.
“What we need to know is the name of the wizard who cursed you,” said Harvey. “Then, if we find him, perhaps we can persuade him to lift the curse.”
“Oh, that’s a simple matter,” said Mr. Regianini. “The letter was written on letterhead stationery. I’ve got it right here, tucked behind my left turnip.”
Sadie returned to covering the chicken’s eyes, while a cornstalk hand held out a neatly folded piece of thick, creamy, linen paper. Harvey took it gingerly, unfolded it, and almost dropped the letter.
“It can’t be,” he said, handing it to Merlin, who immediately had to sit down.
“Signor Maledicto di Bestemmia,” Merlin read aloud in a strangled voice.
“Impossible,” said Rigel, reading over Merlin’s shoulder. “How can he be back? He should still have about ten years’ worth of Lilly Grate in his system. No one could recover that fast.”
“I don’t know how,” said Merlin, dully. “But I know what this means. He will come after us next. You, me, the Durmstrang lot, and the Clown Wizards.”
“We have to warn them,” Rigel exclaimed.
“He’ll have to go through the lot of us to reach you,” Endora said, looking fiercely round at all the companions.
Catching their urgency, Harvey said, “We need to make some plans. There isn’t a moment to be lost. Let’s meet in our customary place in one hour...”
“But what about me?” rustled Mr. Regianini as the group began to hasten toward the exit. “How am I going to get turned back into flesh and blood?”
Harvey replied with a bit of parting advice: “I’d ask the healers about food preservatives, if I were you.”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #88 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Which Magic Quill character’s mysterious or interesting past do you want to hear more about?
The CONTEST: Invent a brief “nursery rhyme” that would be taught to wizarding children.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #88. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 4/2/06]
When the breathless group of friends and accomplices arrived at the Bogley Squint ward, they beheld a scene that would haunt their memory for years afterward.
“Blimey,” gasped Sadie. “That must be all the food in the entire hospital!”
“It is,” groaned the Assistant Healer. “And apart from one live chicken that’s running around here somewhere, all of it is encased in some kind of magical bubble.”
The ward was unrecognizable. Where there had been tables and chairs, beds, groups of patients, and a table-tennis set, now the only thing to be seen was food. Pots of it, platters of it, great spherical globs of it, from Salisbury steak to rice pudding, from steamed snap beans to mashed potato, and every chunk individually wrapped in a gleaming sphere of pure energy. The food-balls spilled out the door into the hallway, pouring round the ankles of the rescuers the Assistant Healer had led from the waiting room. Nevertheless, the spheres of hospital food remained piled up nearly to the ceiling, a rolling, tumbling, seething mass of culinary debris.
“It’s funny,” said Endora, sniffing the air. “But I don’t smell food at all.”
“The bubbles are air-tight,” Harvey deduced instantly. “God help anyone who may be stuck inside one.”
“I hear voices begging for help,” said Joe Albuquerque, tearing the round white collar off his black vicar’s shirt and wading into the bumpy, slippery disaster area. Meanwhile, those behind him began scooping spheres of food out into the hallway. There Spanky and his wife Ilona (invisible to all but him) vanished them before they could roll away and bury somebody else.
The first person to be rescued from the food avalanche was a fat wizard who immediately complained that he was hungry. “Food, food everywhere, and not a bite to eat,” he moaned, as the shell-shocked Assistant Healer supported him out into the corridor. “I was chewing on a tough piece of chop when it suddenly felt like a rubber ball in my mouth. I tried to chew on it, but the thing just shot out of my mouth and bounced off the wall. I tried to stick my fork into another piece of chop, but something wouldn’t let me get near my plate – I tried harder and harder to reach the food, until the plate shot off the table. Next thing I knew, I was sinking into this flood of gorgeous food, but I couldn’t hold on to anything – couldn’t stay on top of the pile – went under, thought I was a goner – I swear I’ll never look at food again...You wouldn’t happen to have a biscuit, now?”
Several more shells-and-cheese-shocked patients emerged from the rubble, looking remarkably fresh and chipper for spell-damage victims who had been nearly crushed or smothered under a mountain of inedible food. The quiet headaches, the omnipedritis cases, even the eternal stench victim seemed to have been cured. The rescuers dug faster, risking the collapse of precarious piles of food-balls; Endora had to be dug out of two separate avalanches. The patients they rescued did not seem regretful when they saw Spanky destroying whole piles of hospital food.
Finally they reached the bottom of the ward, from which by all accounts the trouble had come. At first, on seeing the empty bed, Endora cried out in alarm. But then they heard laughing voices from under the bed, and the group kept digging until they unearthed (or unfooded) Merlin and Rigel. They had taken refuge under the bed, and had passed the time until their rescue by playing marbles, using sphere-encased crumbs to shoot at a larger sphere that contained a suspicious-looking muffin. The moment daylight reached their refuge, the muffin-ball shot out from under the bed and Merlin began gathering up the marbles.
“Hey, no keepsies,” Rigel whined.
“Tough luck, kid,” said Merlin, pocketing the crumbs. He crawled out from under the bed and straightened up, beaming at his friends. “What took you so long?”
“Just as I expected,” Harvey marveled. “The fox pox is gone!”
“Is it?” said Merlin, touching his cheek. Before he had more than a split second to confirm the purity of his skin, Endora bowled herself at him and nearly knocked him down, sobbing into his arms. “There, there,” he said, patting her head while she embraced him. “You see? We’re all right.”
Her response was made indistinct by a congested nose, a constricted throat, and a mouth muffled by Merlin’s hospital robes.
Rigel came out from under the bed, looking daggers at Endora and shying away from his father’s outstretched hand.
“Well, that’s all sorted then,” said Joe Albuquerque, who had transformed himself from a vicar into a healer. “I’m sure the patient will be discharged in a few moments, and we can all get back to...”
“But why did all this happen?” Harvey demanded, and the other members of the rescue party murmured that they wanted to know this too.
Merlin, with Endora still clinging to him, managed somehow to explain how the Food Tasters’ Friend had summoned all the bad food in the hospital – how, in effect, every plate in every ward, and all the pots and pans in the kitchens, had materialized around him and Rigel – and how, if he didn’t get something into his stomach very soon, he would consider eating the live chicken that was now pecking at a nearby kernel of magically-shielded corn, fox pox or no.
“Let’s go, then,” said Joe. “By the powers vested in me as a healer, I pronounce you discharged. Shall we go by portkey or Floo powder?”
“If you’re going back to the Hog’s Head, you might want to get rid of that amulet,” Orion Oldmanson suggested.
Merlin was digging in his pockets for the stone when another Assistant Healer approached, breathless, pushing a wheeled chair that stopped just short of running Sadie down. In it was what at first looked like a scarecrow made out of woven reeds, with an assortment of flowers, fruits, and vegetables attached to it in a parody of human facial features and clothing. Endora almost screamed when the scarecrow moved. Sadie, who had somehow caught the chicken, covered the bird’s eyes. What kind of spell was this? Was it an animated scarecrow? Or had someone been hexed so that his flesh turned into vegetable matter?
“Is it too late to cure this man?” the attendant panted. “He’s just arrived at St. Mungo’s. Everyone else has been cured – can you do to him whatever you did to them?”
Merlin hesitated, holding the amulet in his hand.
“Don’t do it,” Harvey warned. “This man is at least partly made of food. The least that could happen is that he would be trapped inside an airtight bubble until he died. At worst, he could be torn to pieces!”
With an audible gulp, Merlin returned the stone to his pocket.
“But the man is desperate,” the attendant cried. “He could begin rotting any minute. Birds keep trying to peck his eyes out. What is he going to do?”
“How did this happen to him?” Harvey asked.
“It was the Literalis Curse,” said the patient himself, in a rustly, leafy voice that made several of the bystanders shudder. “I write for Broomstick and Wand, travel section. A reader from Italy wrote to me about an article I had done about that country. The letter said it was so full of uninformed clichés, that he was enclosing a Literalis Curse in the letter – it said that by the time I had read that far, it was already too late for me – that the next cliché I uttered would become my fate...”
“Let me guess,” said Spanky. “'You are what you eat.'”
“A statement that is only literally true for cannibals,” Joe pointed out, causing Sadie to try to cover the chicken’s ears. “And for Mr. Walking-Market here.”
“The name is Regianini,” said the poor man.
“What we need to know is the name of the wizard who cursed you,” said Harvey. “Then, if we find him, perhaps we can persuade him to lift the curse.”
“Oh, that’s a simple matter,” said Mr. Regianini. “The letter was written on letterhead stationery. I’ve got it right here, tucked behind my left turnip.”
Sadie returned to covering the chicken’s eyes, while a cornstalk hand held out a neatly folded piece of thick, creamy, linen paper. Harvey took it gingerly, unfolded it, and almost dropped the letter.
“It can’t be,” he said, handing it to Merlin, who immediately had to sit down.
“Signor Maledicto di Bestemmia,” Merlin read aloud in a strangled voice.
“Impossible,” said Rigel, reading over Merlin’s shoulder. “How can he be back? He should still have about ten years’ worth of Lilly Grate in his system. No one could recover that fast.”
“I don’t know how,” said Merlin, dully. “But I know what this means. He will come after us next. You, me, the Durmstrang lot, and the Clown Wizards.”
“We have to warn them,” Rigel exclaimed.
“He’ll have to go through the lot of us to reach you,” Endora said, looking fiercely round at all the companions.
Catching their urgency, Harvey said, “We need to make some plans. There isn’t a moment to be lost. Let’s meet in our customary place in one hour...”
“But what about me?” rustled Mr. Regianini as the group began to hasten toward the exit. “How am I going to get turned back into flesh and blood?”
Harvey replied with a bit of parting advice: “I’d ask the healers about food preservatives, if I were you.”
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #88 +++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: Which Magic Quill character’s mysterious or interesting past do you want to hear more about?
The CONTEST: Invent a brief “nursery rhyme” that would be taught to wizarding children.
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #88. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 4/2/06]
85. Head Quidditch
Contest Winner: voldymortus
The waiting room at St. Mungo’s allowed coffee, and a bottle concealed in the vicar’s cassock made the coffee Irish, and so a convivial atmosphere prevailed while Spanky and Harvey delivered the somber news about Merlin’s condition. When the speakers reached the point in their tale where Rigel arrived at the patient’s bedside, they faltered with a nervous look toward Orion Oldmanson, who was the first to finish his coffee.
Vicar Joe Albuquerque poured him another and said, in the benignly knowing way suited to his appearance, “I would guess that raising Rigel for the second time must be easier than the first time. To be sure, he knows all your tricks; but so do you know his.”
Orion chuckled affectionately, yet not altogether happily. “The day that I know all of that lad’s tricks will be the day muggles learn to do magic. And it isn’t as if he has to learn them all over again. He has better than thirty-five years of experience at making mischief and avoiding the consequences, all packed into that eleven-year-old brain. He could be more dangerous now than ever before, because no one would suspect a child his age of having the skills and ideas he has.”
“I’ve only looked at him that once,” Sadie shuddered, “and I wouldn’t put anything beyond him.”
“The only help, this time around, is the fact that all his old cronies got captured or killed while he was in Gringotts, and they wouldn’t care for him if they knew he was alive and free. Which, until the lad’s book came out, they didn’t know. None of them could have suspected that the young man who had vanished from their midst, all those years ago, is now a little boy.”
“So the book puts Rigel in danger,” Harvey observed, with a shrewd look.
“It advertises his presence,” old man Oldmanson agreed. “Which could endanger his life, yes. Or it could endanger him in another way.”
“It could get him back in with those Vold-Mart people,” Endora whispered. “He could join the Dark side again.”
“My guess is that he never left the Dark side,” Spanky said grimly.
“You must undertand,” said Oldmanson. “Rigel isn’t really wicked. But he craves adventure, and danger, and thrills. He likes loud noises and fast brooms, and he enjoys shocking people. But above all, he likes to possess things – precious things, powerful things, important things. Even to hold them for a moment, even merely to scheme to get them, is enough to make him happy...”
Joe topped off Oldmanson’s mug once again, with an understanding look.
Endora sighed and shook her head. “But certainly,” she said, “you must have had some good times with your son.”
“No doubt,” said Oldmanson, between steaming sips. “But the best fun we had together was when he didn’t realize that I was there. Perhaps I should begin by saying that, every year that I was married to Rigel’s mother, the quality of my Disillusionment Charm grew. Then she...er...left us, when Rigel was very little; but every year with him improved my Disillusionment skills even more. So by the time, say, when Rigel invented Head Quidditch –"
“Hang on!” Sadie cried. “He never invented that! Only, I’ve had a flutter on every World Cup game for the last...”
“Twenty years,” Oldmanson agreed. “They don’t go back farther than that. And though you probably lost money on some of those games, Rigel earns a fortune at every one – royalties. And I’m not just talking about ghost money; some of those ghosts still have vaults at Gringotts, and they have very little trouble persuading their heirs or trustees to transfer a few galleons into Rigel’s vault whenever they play Head Quidditch. The boy doesn’t know it, but he’s worth more than I am.”
Joe blinked, amazed. “And to think he gets all that for saying, ‘Wait, I have an idea. Why don’t ghosts play Quidditch?’”
Orion grinned sheepishly. “But, you see, ghosts have never been particularly good at sports. All right, there is the Headless Hunt, but many ghosts aren’t headless. More importantly, very little athletic equipment crosses over into the spirit world. It makes you wonder why a sporting wizard or witch would bother becoming a ghost, when they have so little to do except glide around and ooze ectoplasm. In fact, the first haunting I ever witnessed was when a dead cricketer moved into the scullery and drove all the servants to desperation, moaning about not being able to hold a bat.
“The cricketer was still there when Rigel came along, and he started scheming up a sport that ghosts could play. Naturally, the sport he considered most suitable was Quidditch. So at age ten, Rigel began collecting ghost twigs and sticks – mainly from wand trees that had been killed by lightning or floods. In a year’s time he had found enough bits of ghost wood to assemble fourteen ghost brooms. Then, when he was eleven years old – the first time, I mean – he started hunting for some Ghost Snidges, to take the place of a Golden Snitch. The birds were very rare to begin with, and it was very hard for him to find a single one that had become a ghost. I think he was planning to assassinate one of the mating pair that lives in the Really Unplottable Bird Sanctuary, but on his twelfth birthday a pair of ghost snidges flew out of his Godfather Clock, so that was all right.
“During the next year, Rigel combed the countryside for ghost owls. He found quite a few of them, and managed to train several to act as ghost bludgers. I didn’t know what he was about at the time, but now I see what a clever idea that was; for nothing but a formerly living thing could possibly effect a ghost Quidditch player the way a bludger effects a live player. The quaffle remained a problem for him, until he decided to allow a headless ghost to furnish the quaffle – essentially creating a fifteenth player who would only be involved from the neck up.
“After that, it was only a matter of deciding on the rules, and testing them out. I enjoyed watching this part, from under my really quite admirable Disillusionment Charm. Rigel was very determined, and creative, and such a natural leader. At different stages in the process, the quaffle was supposed to be a neutral combatant who merely suffered his or her head to be chucked to and fro, and carried about under some other ghost’s elbow. Later, it grew evident that the quaffle had either to be an independent force that could act equally against both sides, or a supporter of one side contributing to what the muggles call a ‘home field advantage.’ Finally, Rigel decided to let the quaffle serve in a perpetually defensive character, trying to wriggle out of the grasp of whoever held it, and biting them when necessary.
“Being dead, of course, the players were able to put up with a great deal more brutality than regular Quidditch players could, so the number of possible fouls was reduced to only seventeen – and twelve of those had to do with name-calling. Any authority in ghost athletics will tell you – and really, there weren’t any authorities in ghost athletics until twenty years ago, so they owe Rigel too – will tell you that when sticks and stones can no longer break your bones, words can REALLY hurt you. So, although the players can fly right through each other, and commit any atrocity on each other’s ectoplasm they see fit, they are required to restrict their vocalizations to, ‘Well played,’ ‘I’m wide open over here,’ and, ‘I say, old fellow, that’s my spleen you’ve got there.’”
“I could swear I heard references to a pancreas at the last World Cup,” Sadie mused.
“Or words to that effect,” Orion corrected himself. “So at age fourteen, Rigel began recruiting teams, starting at the Tower of London near our home, and also searching abroad during our holiday trips together in France, Uganda, Austria, Serbia, and other such places where there were high ghost populations. Most of the really good quaffles come from France. After teaching each group the basic rules, and having some demonstration games, Rigel registered a patent on the game and began organizing the first world cup...”
“What did they do for beaters’ bats?” Endora asked, risking a scornful glance from those around her who now knew she had never seen a game of Head Quidditch.
“Carved out of more pieces of undeadwood,” Sadie said, adding, “Hush.”
“The rest is history,” said Orion. “It was a revolution in ghostly entertainment. Now headless ghosts aren’t the only ones who can have fun; though, of course, the number of teams that can play at any time is limited by the number of trained owl ghosts, Ghost Snidges, and properly constructed undeadwood brooms and bats. Spectators, living and dead, have flocked to the games in ever larger numbers, and ghosts have become an increasingly significant group of consumers in today’s wizarding economy. Plus, others have followed similar procedures to invent ghost versions of their sports – severed football, severed handball, basketcaseball, and ouija hockey being only a few of the more popular examples – and every one of them has to pay a small share of their royalties to Rigel, who pioneered the process. It really will be interesting to see what he does with all that...”
Orion trailed off as the assistant healer ran into the waiting room, wild-eyed and red in the face. “Merlin and the boy,” he panted, before having to bend over to catch his breath.
Endora surged to her feet, clutching the collar of her robes. “What’s happened?” she demanded.
+++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: How rapidly should we wrap up the storyline about the Gringotts break-in that Harvey is planning? (A) Before episode 100. (B) As soon as possible after episode 100. (C) Eventually, but there’s no big hurry. (D) Who cares?
The CONTEST: Describe a powerful or important illusion, deception, glamor, or disguise.
The survey answer that gets the most votes, and the contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #87. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/26/06]
The waiting room at St. Mungo’s allowed coffee, and a bottle concealed in the vicar’s cassock made the coffee Irish, and so a convivial atmosphere prevailed while Spanky and Harvey delivered the somber news about Merlin’s condition. When the speakers reached the point in their tale where Rigel arrived at the patient’s bedside, they faltered with a nervous look toward Orion Oldmanson, who was the first to finish his coffee.
Vicar Joe Albuquerque poured him another and said, in the benignly knowing way suited to his appearance, “I would guess that raising Rigel for the second time must be easier than the first time. To be sure, he knows all your tricks; but so do you know his.”
Orion chuckled affectionately, yet not altogether happily. “The day that I know all of that lad’s tricks will be the day muggles learn to do magic. And it isn’t as if he has to learn them all over again. He has better than thirty-five years of experience at making mischief and avoiding the consequences, all packed into that eleven-year-old brain. He could be more dangerous now than ever before, because no one would suspect a child his age of having the skills and ideas he has.”
“I’ve only looked at him that once,” Sadie shuddered, “and I wouldn’t put anything beyond him.”
“The only help, this time around, is the fact that all his old cronies got captured or killed while he was in Gringotts, and they wouldn’t care for him if they knew he was alive and free. Which, until the lad’s book came out, they didn’t know. None of them could have suspected that the young man who had vanished from their midst, all those years ago, is now a little boy.”
“So the book puts Rigel in danger,” Harvey observed, with a shrewd look.
“It advertises his presence,” old man Oldmanson agreed. “Which could endanger his life, yes. Or it could endanger him in another way.”
“It could get him back in with those Vold-Mart people,” Endora whispered. “He could join the Dark side again.”
“My guess is that he never left the Dark side,” Spanky said grimly.
“You must undertand,” said Oldmanson. “Rigel isn’t really wicked. But he craves adventure, and danger, and thrills. He likes loud noises and fast brooms, and he enjoys shocking people. But above all, he likes to possess things – precious things, powerful things, important things. Even to hold them for a moment, even merely to scheme to get them, is enough to make him happy...”
Joe topped off Oldmanson’s mug once again, with an understanding look.
Endora sighed and shook her head. “But certainly,” she said, “you must have had some good times with your son.”
“No doubt,” said Oldmanson, between steaming sips. “But the best fun we had together was when he didn’t realize that I was there. Perhaps I should begin by saying that, every year that I was married to Rigel’s mother, the quality of my Disillusionment Charm grew. Then she...er...left us, when Rigel was very little; but every year with him improved my Disillusionment skills even more. So by the time, say, when Rigel invented Head Quidditch –"
“Hang on!” Sadie cried. “He never invented that! Only, I’ve had a flutter on every World Cup game for the last...”
“Twenty years,” Oldmanson agreed. “They don’t go back farther than that. And though you probably lost money on some of those games, Rigel earns a fortune at every one – royalties. And I’m not just talking about ghost money; some of those ghosts still have vaults at Gringotts, and they have very little trouble persuading their heirs or trustees to transfer a few galleons into Rigel’s vault whenever they play Head Quidditch. The boy doesn’t know it, but he’s worth more than I am.”
Joe blinked, amazed. “And to think he gets all that for saying, ‘Wait, I have an idea. Why don’t ghosts play Quidditch?’”
Orion grinned sheepishly. “But, you see, ghosts have never been particularly good at sports. All right, there is the Headless Hunt, but many ghosts aren’t headless. More importantly, very little athletic equipment crosses over into the spirit world. It makes you wonder why a sporting wizard or witch would bother becoming a ghost, when they have so little to do except glide around and ooze ectoplasm. In fact, the first haunting I ever witnessed was when a dead cricketer moved into the scullery and drove all the servants to desperation, moaning about not being able to hold a bat.
“The cricketer was still there when Rigel came along, and he started scheming up a sport that ghosts could play. Naturally, the sport he considered most suitable was Quidditch. So at age ten, Rigel began collecting ghost twigs and sticks – mainly from wand trees that had been killed by lightning or floods. In a year’s time he had found enough bits of ghost wood to assemble fourteen ghost brooms. Then, when he was eleven years old – the first time, I mean – he started hunting for some Ghost Snidges, to take the place of a Golden Snitch. The birds were very rare to begin with, and it was very hard for him to find a single one that had become a ghost. I think he was planning to assassinate one of the mating pair that lives in the Really Unplottable Bird Sanctuary, but on his twelfth birthday a pair of ghost snidges flew out of his Godfather Clock, so that was all right.
“During the next year, Rigel combed the countryside for ghost owls. He found quite a few of them, and managed to train several to act as ghost bludgers. I didn’t know what he was about at the time, but now I see what a clever idea that was; for nothing but a formerly living thing could possibly effect a ghost Quidditch player the way a bludger effects a live player. The quaffle remained a problem for him, until he decided to allow a headless ghost to furnish the quaffle – essentially creating a fifteenth player who would only be involved from the neck up.
“After that, it was only a matter of deciding on the rules, and testing them out. I enjoyed watching this part, from under my really quite admirable Disillusionment Charm. Rigel was very determined, and creative, and such a natural leader. At different stages in the process, the quaffle was supposed to be a neutral combatant who merely suffered his or her head to be chucked to and fro, and carried about under some other ghost’s elbow. Later, it grew evident that the quaffle had either to be an independent force that could act equally against both sides, or a supporter of one side contributing to what the muggles call a ‘home field advantage.’ Finally, Rigel decided to let the quaffle serve in a perpetually defensive character, trying to wriggle out of the grasp of whoever held it, and biting them when necessary.
“Being dead, of course, the players were able to put up with a great deal more brutality than regular Quidditch players could, so the number of possible fouls was reduced to only seventeen – and twelve of those had to do with name-calling. Any authority in ghost athletics will tell you – and really, there weren’t any authorities in ghost athletics until twenty years ago, so they owe Rigel too – will tell you that when sticks and stones can no longer break your bones, words can REALLY hurt you. So, although the players can fly right through each other, and commit any atrocity on each other’s ectoplasm they see fit, they are required to restrict their vocalizations to, ‘Well played,’ ‘I’m wide open over here,’ and, ‘I say, old fellow, that’s my spleen you’ve got there.’”
“I could swear I heard references to a pancreas at the last World Cup,” Sadie mused.
“Or words to that effect,” Orion corrected himself. “So at age fourteen, Rigel began recruiting teams, starting at the Tower of London near our home, and also searching abroad during our holiday trips together in France, Uganda, Austria, Serbia, and other such places where there were high ghost populations. Most of the really good quaffles come from France. After teaching each group the basic rules, and having some demonstration games, Rigel registered a patent on the game and began organizing the first world cup...”
“What did they do for beaters’ bats?” Endora asked, risking a scornful glance from those around her who now knew she had never seen a game of Head Quidditch.
“Carved out of more pieces of undeadwood,” Sadie said, adding, “Hush.”
“The rest is history,” said Orion. “It was a revolution in ghostly entertainment. Now headless ghosts aren’t the only ones who can have fun; though, of course, the number of teams that can play at any time is limited by the number of trained owl ghosts, Ghost Snidges, and properly constructed undeadwood brooms and bats. Spectators, living and dead, have flocked to the games in ever larger numbers, and ghosts have become an increasingly significant group of consumers in today’s wizarding economy. Plus, others have followed similar procedures to invent ghost versions of their sports – severed football, severed handball, basketcaseball, and ouija hockey being only a few of the more popular examples – and every one of them has to pay a small share of their royalties to Rigel, who pioneered the process. It really will be interesting to see what he does with all that...”
Orion trailed off as the assistant healer ran into the waiting room, wild-eyed and red in the face. “Merlin and the boy,” he panted, before having to bend over to catch his breath.
Endora surged to her feet, clutching the collar of her robes. “What’s happened?” she demanded.
+++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed].
The SURVEY: How rapidly should we wrap up the storyline about the Gringotts break-in that Harvey is planning? (A) Before episode 100. (B) As soon as possible after episode 100. (C) Eventually, but there’s no big hurry. (D) Who cares?
The CONTEST: Describe a powerful or important illusion, deception, glamor, or disguise.
The survey answer that gets the most votes, and the contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #87. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/26/06]
84. The Godfather Clock
Contest Winner: _houdini
“Where did you get this?” Merlin asked, turning the amulet over in his hands. It was hard, smooth, and heavy like a lump of crystal, but its surface swam and swirled with colors, like quicksilver. It was large as Rigel’s ten-year-old fist, shaped like an egg, but flattened on one side.
“My Godfather Clock gave it to me,” said the boy, with no consciousness of the oddness of his words.
“Your what?”
“My Godfather Clock. You see, my godfather was Tim Cogwith.”
“Oh, yes? The one who used to own that amazing timepiece shop in Diagon Alley?”
“The very. He was an old school chum of Orion’s—”
“Dad, you mean?”
Rigel favored Merlin with a dry look, then continued: “Cogwith grew very rich, sold some of the most amazing clocks and watches. Some even said he had a secret contract with the Ministry, though no one could say what for. When I was born, he was made my godfather. But he never made it to my first birthday. Vanished into thin air. It was a great mystery; you must remember it.”
“Of course I do,” said Merlin. “Read about it in the Daily Prophet, didn’t I? I was very interested, because some of the people who taught me my line were involved in the search.”
“The old fool,” said Rigel, referring again to his father, “spent a good deal of my legacy on that search. Pointless. The only clue they ever turned up was the fact that, the day Cogwith vanished, a six-foot floor clock was found in his shop that none of his shop assistants had seen before. They never found any record of it on the shop’s books, and those were the self-auditing, uncookable kind of books.
“The clock was exactly Cogwith’s height and weight, and the wood – pear wood, wouldn’t you know – was the very color of his mustache. The full moon on the moon dial looked a bit like him, and the chimes sounded like his voice, so they said. There was a finial on top that Orion says reminds him of the hairpiece Cogwith always wore – it was made of ash, so it has never looked quite right.
“The search went on for several months before the Ministry finally declared old Cogwith dead. Orion and I inherited everything. The old fool didn’t fancy owning a clock shop, so he auctioned off all the contents and sold the premises to some crackpot who wanted to sell seven-league boots.”
Merlin winced. As one who had once owned a pair of seven-league boots, he knew from dreadful experience how uncomfortable they were, and how difficult to keep shined.
“Poor fellow went bankrupt in six weeks,” Rigel added, with malicious pleasure. “Shoplifters walked off with all his merchandise, and they were devilish hard to catch. But I’ve strayed off my point. The one clock the old fool kept – Orion, I mean – was the pear one with the hairpiece finial, because it reminded him of his old friend. Sentimental sap. Odd thing was, no matter how they wound it, oiled it, spell-stripped it, and restored all the spells, the house-elves could never get that clock to chime the hour but for one day every year: my birthday.”
Merlin grunted contemplatively.
Rigel went on, “Also, every year at the stroke of whatever hour was my number of years-old, the clock would stop. When the house-elves would open it to wind it up, they would find a gift inside. Until I was twenty-four, that is....and interestingly, the gifts started coming again when I went back to being a baby. Well, today is my second eleventh birthday.”
“Is it?” said Merlin, his foxy nose twitching. “How lovely. I didn’t know you were so old before your accident.”
“I had found that evil was good for the complexion,” Rigel said, though to judge by his ghastly pallor and the dark circles under his eyes, he must have become considerably more virtuous than he seemed. “What I’ve been trying to tell you is that this amulet thing came out of my Godfather Clock today.”
“Have the presents your Godfather Clock gave you usually been needed or helpful at the time?”
“I don’t know,” said Rigel. “There was a door-knob cozy once that screamed when I tried to sneak out at night. And another time it was a piece of tooth-pulling gum that came when I had a toothache, but it nearly broke my jaw and I bled for six hours. I can’t remember the other things.”
“Hmmm,” said Merlin, a little doubtfully. “And was there a card with this?”
Rigel fumbled in the pockets of his mugglish clothing and dragged out a crumpled slip of paper. “‘Food Tasters’ Friend,’ it says. ‘Also good against snake venom, insect bites, plant poisons, and nundu breath. Not guaranteed to protect against werewolf bite or McKnickers’ Firewhisky. For a full disclosure of permitted and prohibited uses, send an owl to the First Wizard of Fiananarantsoa.’”
“It doesn’t say what to do with this,” Merlin observed ruefully, “and anyway, I wasn’t poisoned or infected by a bite. This is spell damage,” he added with a general wave to indicate his face, bristling with fox pox. “I appreciate your concern, though.” Contemplating the look of anger that suddenly crossed Rigel’s face, Merlin thought (not for the first time) that he had very little likelihood of influencing Rigel as he grew up for the second time, while he gave the flat side of the amulet a gentle rub –
-- and the whole end of the ward was filled with a blinding flash of light –
+++ Double Challenge for TMQ #86+++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment.] To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed.]
The SURVEY: Will Endora and Merlin ever get together? (A) They already have. (B) Any day now. (C) Eventually, but not very soon. (D) Not going to happen.
The CONTEST: What happens to Merlin and/or Rigel as a result of this "blinding flash of light"?
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #86. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/17/06]
“Where did you get this?” Merlin asked, turning the amulet over in his hands. It was hard, smooth, and heavy like a lump of crystal, but its surface swam and swirled with colors, like quicksilver. It was large as Rigel’s ten-year-old fist, shaped like an egg, but flattened on one side.
“My Godfather Clock gave it to me,” said the boy, with no consciousness of the oddness of his words.
“Your what?”
“My Godfather Clock. You see, my godfather was Tim Cogwith.”
“Oh, yes? The one who used to own that amazing timepiece shop in Diagon Alley?”
“The very. He was an old school chum of Orion’s—”
“Dad, you mean?”
Rigel favored Merlin with a dry look, then continued: “Cogwith grew very rich, sold some of the most amazing clocks and watches. Some even said he had a secret contract with the Ministry, though no one could say what for. When I was born, he was made my godfather. But he never made it to my first birthday. Vanished into thin air. It was a great mystery; you must remember it.”
“Of course I do,” said Merlin. “Read about it in the Daily Prophet, didn’t I? I was very interested, because some of the people who taught me my line were involved in the search.”
“The old fool,” said Rigel, referring again to his father, “spent a good deal of my legacy on that search. Pointless. The only clue they ever turned up was the fact that, the day Cogwith vanished, a six-foot floor clock was found in his shop that none of his shop assistants had seen before. They never found any record of it on the shop’s books, and those were the self-auditing, uncookable kind of books.
“The clock was exactly Cogwith’s height and weight, and the wood – pear wood, wouldn’t you know – was the very color of his mustache. The full moon on the moon dial looked a bit like him, and the chimes sounded like his voice, so they said. There was a finial on top that Orion says reminds him of the hairpiece Cogwith always wore – it was made of ash, so it has never looked quite right.
“The search went on for several months before the Ministry finally declared old Cogwith dead. Orion and I inherited everything. The old fool didn’t fancy owning a clock shop, so he auctioned off all the contents and sold the premises to some crackpot who wanted to sell seven-league boots.”
Merlin winced. As one who had once owned a pair of seven-league boots, he knew from dreadful experience how uncomfortable they were, and how difficult to keep shined.
“Poor fellow went bankrupt in six weeks,” Rigel added, with malicious pleasure. “Shoplifters walked off with all his merchandise, and they were devilish hard to catch. But I’ve strayed off my point. The one clock the old fool kept – Orion, I mean – was the pear one with the hairpiece finial, because it reminded him of his old friend. Sentimental sap. Odd thing was, no matter how they wound it, oiled it, spell-stripped it, and restored all the spells, the house-elves could never get that clock to chime the hour but for one day every year: my birthday.”
Merlin grunted contemplatively.
Rigel went on, “Also, every year at the stroke of whatever hour was my number of years-old, the clock would stop. When the house-elves would open it to wind it up, they would find a gift inside. Until I was twenty-four, that is....and interestingly, the gifts started coming again when I went back to being a baby. Well, today is my second eleventh birthday.”
“Is it?” said Merlin, his foxy nose twitching. “How lovely. I didn’t know you were so old before your accident.”
“I had found that evil was good for the complexion,” Rigel said, though to judge by his ghastly pallor and the dark circles under his eyes, he must have become considerably more virtuous than he seemed. “What I’ve been trying to tell you is that this amulet thing came out of my Godfather Clock today.”
“Have the presents your Godfather Clock gave you usually been needed or helpful at the time?”
“I don’t know,” said Rigel. “There was a door-knob cozy once that screamed when I tried to sneak out at night. And another time it was a piece of tooth-pulling gum that came when I had a toothache, but it nearly broke my jaw and I bled for six hours. I can’t remember the other things.”
“Hmmm,” said Merlin, a little doubtfully. “And was there a card with this?”
Rigel fumbled in the pockets of his mugglish clothing and dragged out a crumpled slip of paper. “‘Food Tasters’ Friend,’ it says. ‘Also good against snake venom, insect bites, plant poisons, and nundu breath. Not guaranteed to protect against werewolf bite or McKnickers’ Firewhisky. For a full disclosure of permitted and prohibited uses, send an owl to the First Wizard of Fiananarantsoa.’”
“It doesn’t say what to do with this,” Merlin observed ruefully, “and anyway, I wasn’t poisoned or infected by a bite. This is spell damage,” he added with a general wave to indicate his face, bristling with fox pox. “I appreciate your concern, though.” Contemplating the look of anger that suddenly crossed Rigel’s face, Merlin thought (not for the first time) that he had very little likelihood of influencing Rigel as he grew up for the second time, while he gave the flat side of the amulet a gentle rub –
-- and the whole end of the ward was filled with a blinding flash of light –
+++ Double Challenge for TMQ #86+++
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment.] To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed.]
The SURVEY: Will Endora and Merlin ever get together? (A) They already have. (B) Any day now. (C) Eventually, but not very soon. (D) Not going to happen.
The CONTEST: What happens to Merlin and/or Rigel as a result of this "blinding flash of light"?
The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #86. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/17/06]
83. The Bogley Squint Ward
Contest Winners: Morweniris, voldymortus, Linda Carrig, Lightshade, swing667, amylynn91403, TWZRD
Rigel followed the meek assistant healer down a long corridor, lined with heavily locked, warded, and soundproofed doors. Near the very end they turned toward a door next to a plaque that said:
Rigel took the assistant healer's advice with bad grace, and tugged the earmuffs over his ears. It was a good thing, for when the door opened even the earmuffs did not completely banish the sound of the wind-up gramophone playing a record called "Banshees I Have Known." Hammers were battering a half-dozen hovering, cast-iron saucepans. Directly beneath all this clamor, four pale, frail-looking wizards sat round a small table, playing cards. They were the only people in sight not wearing earmuffs; and when, a moment after Rigel entered, the recording came to an end, the four men suddenly clutched their heads in agony. One of them even fell out of his chair.
"Quiet headaches, the poor souls," said the assistant healer, as he hurried to set the needle back to the beginning of the record. "The quieter it is, the worse their agony."
The men resumed their game, panting with relief. Rigel's veneer of sullen indifference was chipped; he almost stared at the men for a moment, before shuffling off behind his guide.
The next stretch of the ward was given over to a group of three witches and two wizards, who were arguing very anxiously over a large book of jokes.
"For all sakes, Elphaba," one of the witches exclaimed, with a shudder, "don't read another elephant joke. You know they give me nightmares."
"Everything gives you nightmares," retorted Elphaba, though she herself looked a bit green.
"Stop saying 'nightmares,'" moaned a wizard, rocking to and fro in a cold sweat.
"Let me guess," Rigel muttered to the assistant healer, feeling the return of a bit of his smugness. "The curse of the Heebie Jeebies?"
"These jokes aren't funny enough," wailed the third witch. "We'll never be cured!"
The assistant healer, after giving Rigel a sharp look, patted the witch's shoulder, causing her to give a small scream and to drop the stuffed rabbit she was clutching. "Don't give up just yet," he said reassuringly. "You just have to be in the right frame of mind."
"Well, it's hard to be in the frame of mind to enjoy a good joke," the second wizard whinged, "when you're bloody--"
"Aargh! Don't say that word!"
"--jolly terrified of the sound of laughter."
"Eurgh! What is that?" said one of the witches, taking notice of Rigel's rough appearance. "Take it away!"
Unfortunately, the others noticed Rigel at the same time, and they all began to shiver, cowering. One of the witches burst into tears.
"We'll be going, then," said the assistant healer briskly, tugging Rigel out of their way by an elbow. Rigel shook him off and followed with a dangerous expression, rather suspecting that he had been insulted.
A moment later, this turned into a look of disgust. A wave of nauseating odor came at him, straight from a niche where a grimy-looking man was furtively pouring a few drops of eau de cologne into a basin of water.
"My heavens!" the assistant healer cried, hastening toward the man and wrestling not only the bottle, but also a small towel and a sliver of soap out of the man's struggling fingers.
"I only fancied a bit of a bath," the wizard sniffed rebelliously.
The assistant healer shook the sliver of soap in front of the offender's face. "I've told you a thousand times, Gerald," he scolded. "You must not, under any circumstances, wash or perfume yourself until Healer Conkmyer says otherwise. This little splash could delay your cure by weeks!"
"It'll make no odds, I reckon," said Gerald. "It is called the Curse of the Eternal Stench, isn't it? Not much chance of curing that, is there?"
"Why, as to that," said the healer, clearly treading on uncertain ground, "I really cannot say a word without consulting Mr. Conkmyer. But consider the rest of us. Have you no concern for the fact that your smell grows worse the more you try to cleanse and deodorize yourself? Could you not consider other people?"
"I'm very sorry, I'm sure," Gerald said, "but you see, I itch all over."
"Apology accepted," the assistant healer said briskly. Then he waved his wand and vanished soap, towel, perfume, and water basin all at once. "Excuse us."
Rigel was amazed at how the ward kept stretching on and on. He had no real concept of how large it was, even when they encountered the gravel-strewn region where a circle of patients surrounded a table where two wizards were playing table tennis, using their wands to control hovering paddles. One of them reached up to clear his forehead of what, at first, looked like beads of sweat...but which, on landing with a crunch on the floor, turned out to be the same kind of small crystal that appeared everywhere. Another wizard, standing by with a small sack of sunflower seeds, spat out a bunch of small diamonds along with some husks.
"Omnipedritis," Rigel whispered, almost in awe.
"There was a bit of an epidemic in Brinestow last week," the assistant healer confided. "Some fool of a wizard tried to use a spell to whip up a batch of rock cakes, and this is what happens. The rockapeller potion, to cure them, is almost done brewing, so that's all right."
"What's with that fellow's wand?" Rigel said, angling his head toward one of the table tennis players. Sparks of magical energy seemed to collect along the leading surface of the wand, sticking in globs to the wizard's sleeves and the folds of his robes, and causing his hair to bristle in an odd, glowy way.
"Wandruff," the assistant healer said sadly. "Some people just don't trouble with wand conditioner.
Suddenly they were confronted with a wild-eyed witch who grasped the front of the assistant healer's robes and said, in a pleading tone of voice, "What is the worst vegetable to have on a ship?"
"A leek. Do you want a leek, Madam Kiljoy?"
The witch shook her head, but looked relieved. With a meek, apologetic look, she handed over a large knife that had been concealed behind her back.
"You have to be on your toes with these sphinxitis cases," said the assistant healer, as Madam Kiljoy hurried away. "When they start talking in riddles, you'd better know the right answer because it usually means they have found a weapon lying around. They can't help themselves, bless them."
At last they found themselves at the very end of the ward, where Harvey and Spanky were just taking leave of the patient. Both wizards gave Rigel discomfitingly frank looks as they walked by. This was fortunate, because it boosted Rigel's contrary nature and prepared him for the shock of seeing Merlin's condition, without appearing to be shocked or even interested at all.
"The coward hit me with a fox pox curse," Merlin said cheerfully, waving a hand at his face. It was covered in tufts of red-brown fur, and there was something distinctly canine about his mouth and nose. "Don't worry. I'm only a danger to chickens. I could murder one right now, actually. Is it nearly suppertime?"
"I'll ask Cook when it may be ready," said the assistant healer. Before hurrying away he added, "She is not quite used to serving live fowl."
Rigel stood next to Merlin for a while, acting like a chance passer-by. Neither spoke nor looked at the other, until Rigel found a suitably sneering opening. "So those are your mates, sitting out there in the waiting room?"
Instead of making the sort of reply Rigel expected, like "you should try having mates some time," Merlin twitched his wet-looking nose and said with evident pleasure, "I suppose so. Who did you see?"
"Besides the dodgy copper and the well-bred pirate who were just in here," Rigel observed, "there were a manifestly phony vicar, a woman with a fake nose and mustache, and another woman who must have a real mustache and probably a wonky nose as well, considering the care she took not to remove her veil even when smoking."
"Oh, no," said Merlin. "That's only Sadie. You remember old Dung Fletcher, eh? They're cousins."
"That lot of low-grade looters and small-time, half-baked grifters," observed Rigel. "No wonder she hides her face."
"Not at all. It's only that she was the best-looking witch of our whole generation. Her family wouldn't let her have anything to do with their business--couldn't believe she had the nerve for it, looking like that; or maybe they thought her looks would give her away. So she went free-lance, and uses the veil to cover up the disadvantage. Merely a device of the profession."
"Some profession," Rigel said, with a nasty chuckle.
Merlin sobered him instantly with the reply, "I seem to recall you once meant to go into the same profession."
There passed another stretch of neither speaking nor looking at each other. Then...
"Is there a cure?" Rigel asked quietly.
+++ Double Challenge for TMQ #85 +++
Before I give you the next Survey and Contest questions, I want to express my gratitude to everyone who has been sending their answers. As you can see from this week's long list of credits, it is often hard to choose, and more fun to use multiple contest answers. It's a pity there wasn't room to use more of them! Honorable mention goes particularly to _houdini, whose "senile squib syndrome" I couldn't work into this story, but I hope I can find a slot for it later on. And now to business...
SURVEY: Should the chapter after next return to the making and breaking of Sadie's many fortunes? Or, should Mr. Oldmanson tell a story about raising Rigel?
CONTEST: Describe a sport to be played by ghosts.
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed]. The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #85. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/5/06]
Rigel followed the meek assistant healer down a long corridor, lined with heavily locked, warded, and soundproofed doors. Near the very end they turned toward a door next to a plaque that said:
THE BOGLEY SQUINT WARD"You'd best put these on," said the assistant healer, offering Rigel a pair of earmuffs from a basket hovering nearby. "They filter out the screams and banging, but you can still hear when someone talks to you."
for Spell Damage Causing One to Become a Public Nuisance
Rigel took the assistant healer's advice with bad grace, and tugged the earmuffs over his ears. It was a good thing, for when the door opened even the earmuffs did not completely banish the sound of the wind-up gramophone playing a record called "Banshees I Have Known." Hammers were battering a half-dozen hovering, cast-iron saucepans. Directly beneath all this clamor, four pale, frail-looking wizards sat round a small table, playing cards. They were the only people in sight not wearing earmuffs; and when, a moment after Rigel entered, the recording came to an end, the four men suddenly clutched their heads in agony. One of them even fell out of his chair.
"Quiet headaches, the poor souls," said the assistant healer, as he hurried to set the needle back to the beginning of the record. "The quieter it is, the worse their agony."
The men resumed their game, panting with relief. Rigel's veneer of sullen indifference was chipped; he almost stared at the men for a moment, before shuffling off behind his guide.
The next stretch of the ward was given over to a group of three witches and two wizards, who were arguing very anxiously over a large book of jokes.
"For all sakes, Elphaba," one of the witches exclaimed, with a shudder, "don't read another elephant joke. You know they give me nightmares."
"Everything gives you nightmares," retorted Elphaba, though she herself looked a bit green.
"Stop saying 'nightmares,'" moaned a wizard, rocking to and fro in a cold sweat.
"Let me guess," Rigel muttered to the assistant healer, feeling the return of a bit of his smugness. "The curse of the Heebie Jeebies?"
"These jokes aren't funny enough," wailed the third witch. "We'll never be cured!"
The assistant healer, after giving Rigel a sharp look, patted the witch's shoulder, causing her to give a small scream and to drop the stuffed rabbit she was clutching. "Don't give up just yet," he said reassuringly. "You just have to be in the right frame of mind."
"Well, it's hard to be in the frame of mind to enjoy a good joke," the second wizard whinged, "when you're bloody--"
"Aargh! Don't say that word!"
"--jolly terrified of the sound of laughter."
"Eurgh! What is that?" said one of the witches, taking notice of Rigel's rough appearance. "Take it away!"
Unfortunately, the others noticed Rigel at the same time, and they all began to shiver, cowering. One of the witches burst into tears.
"We'll be going, then," said the assistant healer briskly, tugging Rigel out of their way by an elbow. Rigel shook him off and followed with a dangerous expression, rather suspecting that he had been insulted.
A moment later, this turned into a look of disgust. A wave of nauseating odor came at him, straight from a niche where a grimy-looking man was furtively pouring a few drops of eau de cologne into a basin of water.
"My heavens!" the assistant healer cried, hastening toward the man and wrestling not only the bottle, but also a small towel and a sliver of soap out of the man's struggling fingers.
"I only fancied a bit of a bath," the wizard sniffed rebelliously.
The assistant healer shook the sliver of soap in front of the offender's face. "I've told you a thousand times, Gerald," he scolded. "You must not, under any circumstances, wash or perfume yourself until Healer Conkmyer says otherwise. This little splash could delay your cure by weeks!"
"It'll make no odds, I reckon," said Gerald. "It is called the Curse of the Eternal Stench, isn't it? Not much chance of curing that, is there?"
"Why, as to that," said the healer, clearly treading on uncertain ground, "I really cannot say a word without consulting Mr. Conkmyer. But consider the rest of us. Have you no concern for the fact that your smell grows worse the more you try to cleanse and deodorize yourself? Could you not consider other people?"
"I'm very sorry, I'm sure," Gerald said, "but you see, I itch all over."
"Apology accepted," the assistant healer said briskly. Then he waved his wand and vanished soap, towel, perfume, and water basin all at once. "Excuse us."
Rigel was amazed at how the ward kept stretching on and on. He had no real concept of how large it was, even when they encountered the gravel-strewn region where a circle of patients surrounded a table where two wizards were playing table tennis, using their wands to control hovering paddles. One of them reached up to clear his forehead of what, at first, looked like beads of sweat...but which, on landing with a crunch on the floor, turned out to be the same kind of small crystal that appeared everywhere. Another wizard, standing by with a small sack of sunflower seeds, spat out a bunch of small diamonds along with some husks.
"Omnipedritis," Rigel whispered, almost in awe.
"There was a bit of an epidemic in Brinestow last week," the assistant healer confided. "Some fool of a wizard tried to use a spell to whip up a batch of rock cakes, and this is what happens. The rockapeller potion, to cure them, is almost done brewing, so that's all right."
"What's with that fellow's wand?" Rigel said, angling his head toward one of the table tennis players. Sparks of magical energy seemed to collect along the leading surface of the wand, sticking in globs to the wizard's sleeves and the folds of his robes, and causing his hair to bristle in an odd, glowy way.
"Wandruff," the assistant healer said sadly. "Some people just don't trouble with wand conditioner.
Suddenly they were confronted with a wild-eyed witch who grasped the front of the assistant healer's robes and said, in a pleading tone of voice, "What is the worst vegetable to have on a ship?"
"A leek. Do you want a leek, Madam Kiljoy?"
The witch shook her head, but looked relieved. With a meek, apologetic look, she handed over a large knife that had been concealed behind her back.
"You have to be on your toes with these sphinxitis cases," said the assistant healer, as Madam Kiljoy hurried away. "When they start talking in riddles, you'd better know the right answer because it usually means they have found a weapon lying around. They can't help themselves, bless them."
At last they found themselves at the very end of the ward, where Harvey and Spanky were just taking leave of the patient. Both wizards gave Rigel discomfitingly frank looks as they walked by. This was fortunate, because it boosted Rigel's contrary nature and prepared him for the shock of seeing Merlin's condition, without appearing to be shocked or even interested at all.
"The coward hit me with a fox pox curse," Merlin said cheerfully, waving a hand at his face. It was covered in tufts of red-brown fur, and there was something distinctly canine about his mouth and nose. "Don't worry. I'm only a danger to chickens. I could murder one right now, actually. Is it nearly suppertime?"
"I'll ask Cook when it may be ready," said the assistant healer. Before hurrying away he added, "She is not quite used to serving live fowl."
Rigel stood next to Merlin for a while, acting like a chance passer-by. Neither spoke nor looked at the other, until Rigel found a suitably sneering opening. "So those are your mates, sitting out there in the waiting room?"
Instead of making the sort of reply Rigel expected, like "you should try having mates some time," Merlin twitched his wet-looking nose and said with evident pleasure, "I suppose so. Who did you see?"
"Besides the dodgy copper and the well-bred pirate who were just in here," Rigel observed, "there were a manifestly phony vicar, a woman with a fake nose and mustache, and another woman who must have a real mustache and probably a wonky nose as well, considering the care she took not to remove her veil even when smoking."
"Oh, no," said Merlin. "That's only Sadie. You remember old Dung Fletcher, eh? They're cousins."
"That lot of low-grade looters and small-time, half-baked grifters," observed Rigel. "No wonder she hides her face."
"Not at all. It's only that she was the best-looking witch of our whole generation. Her family wouldn't let her have anything to do with their business--couldn't believe she had the nerve for it, looking like that; or maybe they thought her looks would give her away. So she went free-lance, and uses the veil to cover up the disadvantage. Merely a device of the profession."
"Some profession," Rigel said, with a nasty chuckle.
Merlin sobered him instantly with the reply, "I seem to recall you once meant to go into the same profession."
There passed another stretch of neither speaking nor looking at each other. Then...
"Is there a cure?" Rigel asked quietly.
+++ Double Challenge for TMQ #85 +++
Before I give you the next Survey and Contest questions, I want to express my gratitude to everyone who has been sending their answers. As you can see from this week's long list of credits, it is often hard to choose, and more fun to use multiple contest answers. It's a pity there wasn't room to use more of them! Honorable mention goes particularly to _houdini, whose "senile squib syndrome" I couldn't work into this story, but I hope I can find a slot for it later on. And now to business...
SURVEY: Should the chapter after next return to the making and breaking of Sadie's many fortunes? Or, should Mr. Oldmanson tell a story about raising Rigel?
CONTEST: Describe a sport to be played by ghosts.
To send Robbie your personal feedback or original ideas, visit the Feedback Form [EDIT: Rather, leave a Comment]. To vote in the Survey and Contest to determine what happens in the Chapter-After-Next, visit the Discussion Forum [EDIT: This discussion is closed]. The Survey Answer that gets the most votes, and the Contest entry that Robbie likes the most, will be featured in Magic Quill #85. So be sure to visit our Discussion Thread – and if you aren’t a member of COS Forums, join today!
[Originally posted 3/5/06]
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