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Jun. 14th, 2005 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupHad a not-so-eventful weekend. Watched some TV (namely Into the West and some other shows that I had taped and hadn't gotten around to yet) and didn't do much else.
Wait, I lie, I did do something else. I finally finished up the next part of my little cracktastic Crazy Adventures in the Multiverse (aka the uber self-inserting crossover of dooooom) that I haven't updated since ... January. Wow, when I say I'm as slow as sludge I really mean it. ;-)
Dedicated, as always, to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hlgraban and bookgrl.
Previous parts can be found here.
Heather was not amused. It hadn’t been a particularly amusing day and the last thing she needed on a day that had included waking up on an alien planet, running, being shot at and then mysteriously finding herself transported to a magical school that didn’t exist was having to deal with some sanctimonious prick who walked around acting like he was God, or something.
No, she definitely was not amused.
On top of all of that he had started lecturing her. “I thought you had better sense then that, risking punishment to stay out late hanging around with a Slytherin. You should know better then to trust anyone like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if she kept you out late on purpose. It’s a good thing that I happened upon you, rather then someone like Professor Snape who would most certainly have put all of the blame upon you. You should be grateful ...”
Heather gritted her teeth and fiercely blocked out the remainder of his inanity. She let her eyes wander the halls in an attempt to get a feel for where she was and how to get wherever it was she was going. Portrait upon portrait decorated the passing walls without seeming order or design. The majority of the objects depicted on canvas were moving, whether it was painted people conversing with other painted people or the slow, gloppy flowing of a brilliantly colored river. She startled for a moment when a small dog began yapping at her from the lap of a brightly colored woman. The dog’s mistress glared at her unpleasantly as if it were somehow Heather’s fault that the obnoxious little rat-dog had started jabbering in the first place.
They started up a steep staircase without railings and Percy’s lecturing didn’t abate even as the staircase moved when he was in midstep. Heather stopped dead, her heart racing as air breezed past her face and her stomach shifted with the sudden disorientation. Even though it was hardly moving as fast as a run-of-the-mill elevator, the very fact that it was moving sideways rather then up and down was disconcerting. When no handrail appeared, despite her fervent wishing, she plunged upwards and onwards, her eyes locked squarely onto the back of her unfortunate guide.
He was impatiently waiting when she finally made it to the top of the stairs. With a roll of he eyes and a grumbled ‘fourth-years’ he turned his back on her to face the large painting of a very fat woman dressed in a virulently pink dress that had pride of place in the stone wall in front of them. The woman in the painting was tunelessly humming as she idly worked on embroidering some enormous canvas that was stretched out before her.
“Schnizeroot.” Percy whispered almost too quietly for Heather to hear. The woman in the painting continued sewing contentedly, an absent smile on her face.
“Schnizeroot. Schnizeroot!” Percy repeated, not quite shouting but louder and vehement with impatience.
“Oh, my dear.” the pink lady finally responded. Her face quickly blushing red with either irritation or embarrassment, Heather wasn’t quite sure which it was. “I am quite sorry.” she said, bestowing a distracted smile on both of them. “Come in, come in.” And with that the painting opened to reveal the passageway behind it.
“Move on, move on.” Percy said peevishly, gesturing Heather through the portal. She stepped in and through and before she knew it she had entered a warm, comforting room bedecked in scarlet and gold. There were children, students, spread throughout the entire room, some crouched in circles chatting and playing games, others arranged singularly in small groups with pens in hand, studying. Heather had just sense enough to move out of the doorway and land herself in a strategically placed empty chair.
The room had quieted briefly when the door opened but the noise quickly picked up when the newcomers were noticed and dismissed. It rose to a moderate hum, interspersed with laughter and the occasional muffled explosion. Heather slumped in the chair, her eyes scanning the room, desperately trying to memorize every detail. She noticed the stairs at the back of the room and noted which one girls went up and which one boys were more likely to ascend. She stared at the walls that circled around and above the room and let herself be mesmerized by the way the firelight danced off of the tall glass windowpanes. She did everything in her power to ignore the fact that sitting right over there, laughing on a small couch, were three very distinct and recognizable people, one a girl with bushy brown hair, the other a smiling redheaded boy and the third a boy in round-rimmed glasses with startlingly green eyes.
Heather just wasn’t ready to deal with the fact that Harry Potter was sitting on the other side of the room.
~~~
The corridors were dark, only lit occasionally by strange gas lights that seemed to make the shadows thicker rather then add anything to the ambient illumination. Erin cautiously made her way down the hallway, her bag clutched tightly in her fingers. Her inner pragmatic voice, the one that her friends had, at one point, dubbed Mommy Erin, had urged her to get moving and so she had. She had chosen the hallway that at the time had seemed the least dark and started forward, hoping that at some point she would run into someone who could point her in the right direction.
She could hear her own heart beating as the reality of her situation descended on her. She wasn’t sure what terrified her more, the chance that anything could leap out at her from the shadows or the fact that she was in a fictional world with no idea how she had gotten there or why she had ended up there in the first place. The fact that she had even less of an idea of how to actually return to her own time and place was something that she very consciously was not thinking about. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take without going extremely and instantaneously insane.
“Are you all right, my dear?” A soft, wispy voice asked from behind her. Erin shrieked a little and actually jumped. She whipped around and saw a ghost, a woman in a long flowing dress, floating in the air a few inches above the worn stone floor. She gasped and would have screamed if her throat hadn’t closed itself off involuntarily. She didn’t realize that she was backing away from the softly glimmering figure until her back hit the wall, jostling a picture frame causing a peeved, “Hey, watch it,” to sleepily emanate from the painting.
“Whatever is the matter?” The ghost asked in a concerned tone.”You hadn’t returned to the common room and I was growing rather anxious for you. I know how you loathe being out past curfew, you’ve certainly remonstrated your roommates enough in the past for such reckless behaviour. Is it those new friends of your’s? I’ve always encouraged inter-house friendships but the possibility of greater understanding and fellowship simply isn’t worth developing bad habits and getting yourself into trouble. Scholarly curiosity is only useful when it is employed in moderation just the same as every other good thing.”
It was strange but the longer the ghost before her chided the calmer Erin felt. There was a certain motherly yet detached tone to its voice that caused her breath to slow and her muscles to relax. She wasn’t quite sure why but there was something about it that she trusted, almost as if she really had spent the past three years listening to and following whatever advice it might have.
“Oh good, you look to be regaining some color in your cheeks. I was beginning to think that I should lead you straight way to the Infirmary. You don’t require a visit to Madam Pomfrey, do you?” the ghost asked, concerned.
“No, no. I’m fine.” Erin replied, surprised at how steady her voice was.
“Well, good then.” The ghost replied with a brisk nod. “Come along. I’ll escort you back to the Ayrie and along the way you can explain to me what you were doing wandering around these dark corridors. Really Erin, I do expect so much better from you.”
“Of course, Grey Lady.” Erin responded as meekly as she could, falling into step beside the floating specter. In the chaos of creating an excuse and discovering the Ravenclaw common room it wasn’t until she was in bed and almost asleep that she realized that somehow she had known the ghost’s name.
~~~
“Down, I have to keep going down.” Megan muttered to herself as she descended yet another staircase. “The Slytherin common room is called 'The Dungeons' unless that’s just another piece of uncredited fanon that I’ve picked up and I actually have no idea where I’m going or what I’m supposed to be doing, not that that would be anything new. Well, the more I wander the more likely I’ll be to find something or someone useful and, hey, I might run into Filch or Mrs. Norris and at the very least they’ll deposit me in the right place.”
Megan continued her headlong journey downwards, desperately trying to keep her mind focused on finding the common room. If she could just keep it focused then she would be able to keep her impending multiverse existential crisis in the back of her mind. As attractive as curling up in a corner and rocking might sound she knew that it would solve absolutely nothing so onward she plunged.
“If I had known beforehand that I would end up in a mess like this I would’ve studied those freaking Harry Potter books backwards and forwards.” Megan muttered as she stepped off the final stair in that particular case. She found herself in a large, dark room, the only light a vague flickering from a torch on a stairwell landing about two stories up. With an aggrieved sigh she sat down on the steps and started blindly digging through her bag.
“I would’ve gone to that website and read every little piece of background information, memorized every spell that Rowling ever wrote even though I still think those books are overrated and if it weren’t for Cuaron and some captivating fanfic I wouldn’t have discovered that I give two shakes about the characters or the plot or ... Ah HA!” Megan triumphantly held her wand before her and with a determined stare said “Lumos!”
A white ball of light appeared above the tip of her wand and she grinned ecstatically, giddily pleased by what she had caused. She stood up with a new determination to continue on her possibly fruitless quest when suddenly all of the extinguished lights in the room burst into flame.
“It’s not every day that Hogwarts has five new students simply appear out of thin air.” Dumbledore said as he stepped around a corner. Megan gulped noiselessly as her stomach immediately became one giant knot and her hands went all clammy.
“This is a strange occurrence, even for a place like Hogwarts that embodies what others might call the supernatural and different.” Dumbledore gave Megan a shrewd look, his eyes that had often been described as ‘dancing’ and ‘jolly’ in the books were now coolly calculating. “I’m not particularly fond of unexplained occurrences such as this, particularly during so dangerous a time as the one in which we are currently residing.”
He stared at her, holding her gaze for a long minute. Megan couldn’t move, couldn’t even think about moving. Her heart was racing and it felt like the air around them was crackling with some sort of electricity. Suddenly he blinked and she sagged forward, panting, her wand dropping to the floor with a clatter that echoed loudly in her ears.
She looked up and saw that Dumbledore was smiling at her, his face now warm and sympathetic. “It would seem that you have as little explanation for your presence here as I do.” He kindly said. “Well then, we’ll simply have to make the best of the situation. You and your friends will stay precisely where you are and we’ll use this time to further research and study this phenomenon.”
He waved his hand and Megan jerked as her wand flew up from the floor and into his hand. He handed it to her with a smile. “By some quirk of fate you have already found the hidden passageway to the Slytherin common room.” He said, indicating the wall behind him with a flourish. “But then, you don’t believe in fate do you?”
Before she could respond he had already stepped around her and begun his way up the winding stair. “You might find the phrase, ‘veni, vidi, vici’ to be of some use in gaining entrance.” He said as he stepped around a corner and vanished from her view.
Megan grinned and turned towards the stone wall, only then noticing the gargoyle that was hiding in the shadows near the ceiling. “Well isn’t that an appropriate password.” She said with a sarcastic grin. As she spoke the phrase and the wall opened to let her in she could swear that she heard an appreciative chuckle echo down the stairwell to her.
*****
Wait, I lie, I did do something else. I finally finished up the next part of my little cracktastic Crazy Adventures in the Multiverse (aka the uber self-inserting crossover of dooooom) that I haven't updated since ... January. Wow, when I say I'm as slow as sludge I really mean it. ;-)
Dedicated, as always, to
hlgraban and bookgrl.Previous parts can be found here.
Heather was not amused. It hadn’t been a particularly amusing day and the last thing she needed on a day that had included waking up on an alien planet, running, being shot at and then mysteriously finding herself transported to a magical school that didn’t exist was having to deal with some sanctimonious prick who walked around acting like he was God, or something.
No, she definitely was not amused.
On top of all of that he had started lecturing her. “I thought you had better sense then that, risking punishment to stay out late hanging around with a Slytherin. You should know better then to trust anyone like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if she kept you out late on purpose. It’s a good thing that I happened upon you, rather then someone like Professor Snape who would most certainly have put all of the blame upon you. You should be grateful ...”
Heather gritted her teeth and fiercely blocked out the remainder of his inanity. She let her eyes wander the halls in an attempt to get a feel for where she was and how to get wherever it was she was going. Portrait upon portrait decorated the passing walls without seeming order or design. The majority of the objects depicted on canvas were moving, whether it was painted people conversing with other painted people or the slow, gloppy flowing of a brilliantly colored river. She startled for a moment when a small dog began yapping at her from the lap of a brightly colored woman. The dog’s mistress glared at her unpleasantly as if it were somehow Heather’s fault that the obnoxious little rat-dog had started jabbering in the first place.
They started up a steep staircase without railings and Percy’s lecturing didn’t abate even as the staircase moved when he was in midstep. Heather stopped dead, her heart racing as air breezed past her face and her stomach shifted with the sudden disorientation. Even though it was hardly moving as fast as a run-of-the-mill elevator, the very fact that it was moving sideways rather then up and down was disconcerting. When no handrail appeared, despite her fervent wishing, she plunged upwards and onwards, her eyes locked squarely onto the back of her unfortunate guide.
He was impatiently waiting when she finally made it to the top of the stairs. With a roll of he eyes and a grumbled ‘fourth-years’ he turned his back on her to face the large painting of a very fat woman dressed in a virulently pink dress that had pride of place in the stone wall in front of them. The woman in the painting was tunelessly humming as she idly worked on embroidering some enormous canvas that was stretched out before her.
“Schnizeroot.” Percy whispered almost too quietly for Heather to hear. The woman in the painting continued sewing contentedly, an absent smile on her face.
“Schnizeroot. Schnizeroot!” Percy repeated, not quite shouting but louder and vehement with impatience.
“Oh, my dear.” the pink lady finally responded. Her face quickly blushing red with either irritation or embarrassment, Heather wasn’t quite sure which it was. “I am quite sorry.” she said, bestowing a distracted smile on both of them. “Come in, come in.” And with that the painting opened to reveal the passageway behind it.
“Move on, move on.” Percy said peevishly, gesturing Heather through the portal. She stepped in and through and before she knew it she had entered a warm, comforting room bedecked in scarlet and gold. There were children, students, spread throughout the entire room, some crouched in circles chatting and playing games, others arranged singularly in small groups with pens in hand, studying. Heather had just sense enough to move out of the doorway and land herself in a strategically placed empty chair.
The room had quieted briefly when the door opened but the noise quickly picked up when the newcomers were noticed and dismissed. It rose to a moderate hum, interspersed with laughter and the occasional muffled explosion. Heather slumped in the chair, her eyes scanning the room, desperately trying to memorize every detail. She noticed the stairs at the back of the room and noted which one girls went up and which one boys were more likely to ascend. She stared at the walls that circled around and above the room and let herself be mesmerized by the way the firelight danced off of the tall glass windowpanes. She did everything in her power to ignore the fact that sitting right over there, laughing on a small couch, were three very distinct and recognizable people, one a girl with bushy brown hair, the other a smiling redheaded boy and the third a boy in round-rimmed glasses with startlingly green eyes.
Heather just wasn’t ready to deal with the fact that Harry Potter was sitting on the other side of the room.
~~~
The corridors were dark, only lit occasionally by strange gas lights that seemed to make the shadows thicker rather then add anything to the ambient illumination. Erin cautiously made her way down the hallway, her bag clutched tightly in her fingers. Her inner pragmatic voice, the one that her friends had, at one point, dubbed Mommy Erin, had urged her to get moving and so she had. She had chosen the hallway that at the time had seemed the least dark and started forward, hoping that at some point she would run into someone who could point her in the right direction.
She could hear her own heart beating as the reality of her situation descended on her. She wasn’t sure what terrified her more, the chance that anything could leap out at her from the shadows or the fact that she was in a fictional world with no idea how she had gotten there or why she had ended up there in the first place. The fact that she had even less of an idea of how to actually return to her own time and place was something that she very consciously was not thinking about. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take without going extremely and instantaneously insane.
“Are you all right, my dear?” A soft, wispy voice asked from behind her. Erin shrieked a little and actually jumped. She whipped around and saw a ghost, a woman in a long flowing dress, floating in the air a few inches above the worn stone floor. She gasped and would have screamed if her throat hadn’t closed itself off involuntarily. She didn’t realize that she was backing away from the softly glimmering figure until her back hit the wall, jostling a picture frame causing a peeved, “Hey, watch it,” to sleepily emanate from the painting.
“Whatever is the matter?” The ghost asked in a concerned tone.”You hadn’t returned to the common room and I was growing rather anxious for you. I know how you loathe being out past curfew, you’ve certainly remonstrated your roommates enough in the past for such reckless behaviour. Is it those new friends of your’s? I’ve always encouraged inter-house friendships but the possibility of greater understanding and fellowship simply isn’t worth developing bad habits and getting yourself into trouble. Scholarly curiosity is only useful when it is employed in moderation just the same as every other good thing.”
It was strange but the longer the ghost before her chided the calmer Erin felt. There was a certain motherly yet detached tone to its voice that caused her breath to slow and her muscles to relax. She wasn’t quite sure why but there was something about it that she trusted, almost as if she really had spent the past three years listening to and following whatever advice it might have.
“Oh good, you look to be regaining some color in your cheeks. I was beginning to think that I should lead you straight way to the Infirmary. You don’t require a visit to Madam Pomfrey, do you?” the ghost asked, concerned.
“No, no. I’m fine.” Erin replied, surprised at how steady her voice was.
“Well, good then.” The ghost replied with a brisk nod. “Come along. I’ll escort you back to the Ayrie and along the way you can explain to me what you were doing wandering around these dark corridors. Really Erin, I do expect so much better from you.”
“Of course, Grey Lady.” Erin responded as meekly as she could, falling into step beside the floating specter. In the chaos of creating an excuse and discovering the Ravenclaw common room it wasn’t until she was in bed and almost asleep that she realized that somehow she had known the ghost’s name.
~~~
“Down, I have to keep going down.” Megan muttered to herself as she descended yet another staircase. “The Slytherin common room is called 'The Dungeons' unless that’s just another piece of uncredited fanon that I’ve picked up and I actually have no idea where I’m going or what I’m supposed to be doing, not that that would be anything new. Well, the more I wander the more likely I’ll be to find something or someone useful and, hey, I might run into Filch or Mrs. Norris and at the very least they’ll deposit me in the right place.”
Megan continued her headlong journey downwards, desperately trying to keep her mind focused on finding the common room. If she could just keep it focused then she would be able to keep her impending multiverse existential crisis in the back of her mind. As attractive as curling up in a corner and rocking might sound she knew that it would solve absolutely nothing so onward she plunged.
“If I had known beforehand that I would end up in a mess like this I would’ve studied those freaking Harry Potter books backwards and forwards.” Megan muttered as she stepped off the final stair in that particular case. She found herself in a large, dark room, the only light a vague flickering from a torch on a stairwell landing about two stories up. With an aggrieved sigh she sat down on the steps and started blindly digging through her bag.
“I would’ve gone to that website and read every little piece of background information, memorized every spell that Rowling ever wrote even though I still think those books are overrated and if it weren’t for Cuaron and some captivating fanfic I wouldn’t have discovered that I give two shakes about the characters or the plot or ... Ah HA!” Megan triumphantly held her wand before her and with a determined stare said “Lumos!”
A white ball of light appeared above the tip of her wand and she grinned ecstatically, giddily pleased by what she had caused. She stood up with a new determination to continue on her possibly fruitless quest when suddenly all of the extinguished lights in the room burst into flame.
“It’s not every day that Hogwarts has five new students simply appear out of thin air.” Dumbledore said as he stepped around a corner. Megan gulped noiselessly as her stomach immediately became one giant knot and her hands went all clammy.
“This is a strange occurrence, even for a place like Hogwarts that embodies what others might call the supernatural and different.” Dumbledore gave Megan a shrewd look, his eyes that had often been described as ‘dancing’ and ‘jolly’ in the books were now coolly calculating. “I’m not particularly fond of unexplained occurrences such as this, particularly during so dangerous a time as the one in which we are currently residing.”
He stared at her, holding her gaze for a long minute. Megan couldn’t move, couldn’t even think about moving. Her heart was racing and it felt like the air around them was crackling with some sort of electricity. Suddenly he blinked and she sagged forward, panting, her wand dropping to the floor with a clatter that echoed loudly in her ears.
She looked up and saw that Dumbledore was smiling at her, his face now warm and sympathetic. “It would seem that you have as little explanation for your presence here as I do.” He kindly said. “Well then, we’ll simply have to make the best of the situation. You and your friends will stay precisely where you are and we’ll use this time to further research and study this phenomenon.”
He waved his hand and Megan jerked as her wand flew up from the floor and into his hand. He handed it to her with a smile. “By some quirk of fate you have already found the hidden passageway to the Slytherin common room.” He said, indicating the wall behind him with a flourish. “But then, you don’t believe in fate do you?”
Before she could respond he had already stepped around her and begun his way up the winding stair. “You might find the phrase, ‘veni, vidi, vici’ to be of some use in gaining entrance.” He said as he stepped around a corner and vanished from her view.
Megan grinned and turned towards the stone wall, only then noticing the gargoyle that was hiding in the shadows near the ceiling. “Well isn’t that an appropriate password.” She said with a sarcastic grin. As she spoke the phrase and the wall opened to let her in she could swear that she heard an appreciative chuckle echo down the stairwell to her.
*****
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 04:49 pm (UTC)Cool, I'd thought you'd given up on this story. You know, the new Harry Potter comes out in a month... hmm...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 05:02 pm (UTC)I could never give up on this story, it's way too much fun! And the next Harry Potter book may come out next month but this one is safely situated during Prisoner of Azkaban so that I don't have to worry about pesky things like stories I've never read. ;-) Hee