...and the Root of All Evil XII

[subplotkudzu]

Chap. 12: Ragunk's Helpmoot

Despite being nearly certain that Peri has constructed a homunculus of Juliet the second years are stymied about being able to prove it (especially if Peri has no qualms about memory charming her own sister). They suspect that Peri is trying to help Robbie Mardling win the part in the movie, and is using the homunculus to do so. But the cloaked monster was also attacking the people trying out for the part: everyone except Robbie. So is Peri also controlling the monster? And if getting Robbie the part is the goal, why did the monster attack the Grey Lady? And what the heck is it anyway? Their continuous trolling of magical creature and dark arts books still has turned up no clue. Pollux had even shown the picture to the portrait of Professor Fogherty to no result.

Castor, Pollux & Jasmyn are thrashing this out in the library (surrounded by said Magical Creatures and DADA books) while Juliet is trying to get antidotes from the ever-prickly Professor Snape. Rowan joins them during the latter half of this discussion, looking pensive and guilty. She is just beginning to speak when Juliet returns, and the diminutive Ravenclaw immediately lays into the Hufflepuff girl, chiding her for being naïve in dreaming that anyone would ever care for her insipid, un-educated, half-baked, half-breed ideas. Rowan sobs and flees the room.

“What’s the magic word?” Pollux queries Juliet as Castor chases after Rowan. Juliet looks confused then turns to run. “Get her!” Jasmyn leaps to tackle the homunculi, and is backhanded for her trouble. Pollux hears her arm snap as she slams into one of the stacks. “I meant with your wand,” he mutters to the impulsive girl as he checks to make sure she’s OK. He helps Jasmyn to her feet just as the actual Juliet arrives from Professor Snape’s. The Not Juliet is gone, but he has a good idea of where she’s going. Pollux hands Jasmyn to her roommate then heads for Slytherin’s front door. The creature is probably heading home….

Castor lost sight of Rowan, but based on past experience he heads for the greenhouse. There he finds the half-dryad crying and dirt covered, having collapsed into the half turned earth. After helping her get cleaned up he explains again about the not Juliet, and how they have identified it as a homunculus, and how Peri is responsible for it. Rowan nods, understanding dawning, and then reveals her own bombshell. She was the one controlling the monster. With that out of the way it all came out in a rush: how she had found a mandrake root as she helped clean the greenhouse at the end of last year, buried it in the gardens to save its life, and built a controlling talisman to keep it from hurting anyone. How she so coveted the part in the movie that she had set the now adult mandrake on the other applicants.

Castor remembers the look of the dirt-covered, pale skinned thing and realizes that the tendrils were roots and shoots of a tuber. He isn’t surprised to hear that the assaults on the other candidates were the whispers of the mandrake in their ear, for if its cry could kill, its voice would therefore just be exhausting. How the roots on the mandrake’s chin would scratch and irritate the victim’s neck even as its mouth was at their ear. The muddy footprints of garden dirt dragged around from its resting spot. The creature’s roots finding purchase in the stone walls of the school to climb into Ravenclaw & Gryffindor towers, and how it could burrow into the Hufflepuff warrens but not the windowless stone dungeon of the Slytherin, protecting Robbie Mardling. Why it wasn’t in any of the magical creatures books.

She confesses that her friendship with Jasmyn had kept Rowan from targeting her, convinced that Jasmyn would step aside rather than take the part. When Jasmyn instead joined the auditions in earnest her anger bubbled over and she sent the mandrake after her. Blessedly it didn’t work, and Rowan has been living with that betrayal ever since, hating herself. After that night she threw the controlling talisman into the air vents, never wanting to be tempted ever again.

“But someone found it,” Castor tells her. “And now we have to stop it. Let’s go find its resting place.”

“Should we tell the professors?” She wonders. Castor shakes his head. “No time. Most of the other profs are all in a board meeting with my mum.”

Pollux arrives at Slytherin dungeons to find them in chaos: Peri lies unconscious and battered just inside the dorm, Theo & Regan are trying to restore order. Pollux is able to question a highly distraught Roberta. The Slytherin girl saw Peri run into the dorm and slam the door shut before collapsing. She dared a peek outside to witness Juliet slugging it out with the vampire! It ended when the vampire got a grip on Juliet, “bit her neck” and dragged her off into the air vents.

With a calm voice he convinces her that she needs to go to Professor Snape right now and tell him everything that was going on, including the homunculus. Roberta, incredulous, nods and runs off to find her house professor. Seeing that Theo was bringing Peri up to Madam Pomfrey’s he decided on the same course of action as his twin – it was time to track this thing to the garden. After all, the other professors are all in that meeting with mum.

Daisy, meanwhile, was with Professor Night. She had been doing more research on Manny Mommenshanz, and spoken with Owen Mardling and Alyssa Aerie just this morning – the two were on campus with part of the Gringott’s coalition for a Board of Governors meeting. Their digging has revealed that Manny is deeply in debt to the bank, having used a generous loan from them to consolidate his other debt. This corresponds with the time that he started pushing Night to put his name and money behind the Gringott’s project. “I don’t know what’s going on exactly,” she tells him, “But the goblins, the school’s founding, our financial woes and the Crypt Raider production are all tied up together. And Mr. Mommenshanz has dragged you into it.”

Professor Night goes from having a wearied look in his eye concerning the need to break method to think about this to a steely one when she intimates that the school, his school, is being threatened. Before they can go any farther a student runs into them and tells Daisy that her sister is in the infirmary and asking for her. “Again?” she thinks, but begs Night’s pardon to go; He opts instead to go with her.

In the infirmary they find Juliet and the just healed Jasmyn, who give a scattershot account of recent events with enough back-story for Night to follow. The tale is interrupted by the appearance of Theo Trindle, levitating the unconscious Peri Undulata. Madam Pomfrey takes control of the levitation and deposits the girl on a bed as Theo, focused approaches Night. “Sir…a student, Juliet Moore…has been taken…by the plant elemental…stalking the…grounds.”

“Ahem!” snorts Juliet. Theo spends a few seconds cogitating while Daisy looks oh so slightly smug.

“My Error… A homunculus of… Miss Moore did battle…with the plant…elemental at the door… to Slytherin dungeon.”

“I told you there was a duplicate of Juliet!” Daisy exults, and the head boy admits to his error in assessing all the facts.

“Plant elemental?” Night asks. Theo nods, adding “There was…sap at the…fight scene. I suspect…it has a soporific aroma, to account for…the victim’s fatigue.”

Night nods decisively, ushering the students out of the infirmary. “Right. As of now you are all deputized to help take this thing down. Where do you think it is?”

“It sleeps in the gardens,” Jasmyn & Juliet chime together, “We have a map!”

Night reaches the door to his office, “I’m not even going to ask how. Get it, meet us there.” He steps inside his office and straps a second wand into his leg. “Right. Let’s go.”

The trio strides purposefully out of the school: Night first, then the prefects. In less than a dozen paces the Ravenclaw girls fall in place behind them, forming a phalanx. Halfway to the garden the Dee twins approach from opposite directions, falling into position, Rowan at Castor’s side. (Professor Night is coming, and hell is riding with him.) They pause at the the garden and he looks at the newcomers. “What do you know that we don’t?”

“It’s wounded from the fight with the Homunculus,” Pollux starts. “Roberta saw it take a couple good hits.”

“And it’s a Mandrake root, grown to adult size,” Castor adds. Theo nods happily, as if this explains everything, and prepares to pontificate on it when Night holds up his hand to stop him.

“Mandrake root. Right.” It takes him three paces to reach the greenhouse and seconds to kick the door in. “Earmuffs. Everyone gets a pair.” Theo enchants them so that the wearers can still hear each other, if not the outside world. The map indicates that it had been sleeping in the garden, but the fresh turned earth at its resting sight is empty.

“It might have moved. Haven’t time to search on foot,” the DADA professor states, then looks at the Dee boys. “You’re Lippershy wargamers, right?” They smile, and the battle mat terraforming spells writ large tear through Pomona Sprout’s gardens, dirt roiling over dirt in waves, creating clouds of dust… and not locating anything. “So where is it?” they wonder. “How can we find it?”

“Maybe we just have to find the homunculus?” Jasmyn suggests. “Can we make the map to track that?”

Pollux shakes his head, “We’d need something connected to the homunculus, like the dirt was to this spot.”

“What about Juliet? It’s connected to Juliet, isn’t it? It needed her hair, right?” The Ravenclaws quickly modify the tracking/mapping spell combination to work with hair rather than dirt and to ignore the actual Juliet. The wind snatches the trimmings and blows away into the school returning a few seconds later to produce a map to a sub basement room below Astronomy tower.

They approach the door, and Night warns them to not be surprised by what they find behind the door, no matter what it might be. He strikes the heavy door with a spell, blowing it open with his left hand wand and revealing… an army of goblins and house elves! Night instinctively casts Richio with his right hand to reflect elfshot, and Daisy sees one of the goblins drop stone dead with the glowing rock that had been aimed at Night imbedded in its head. Her nockenumnogginum stuns a mass of them, and Theo creates a cloud of aetheric nightmares as they fall back, slamming the door.

“Ok, so I wasn’t expecting that,” Night admits. “Those are goblin warrior, redcaps. How….”

“The movie crew,” Daisy states with certainty. “The school has been crawling with goblins.”

“Quickly, Miss Fontaine, teach that spell to anyone who doesn’t know it. Everyone needs a richio on them before we re-open the door. The goal is to clear a path through the room to the door on the other side – that’s where the mandrake is.” With that they bang the door open and charge through the wisps of nightmare.

Night blasts away with the anti-goblin enchantment in one wand and a variety of other spells on the other, freezing redcaps to the floor or incasing them with golden chains. Rowan casts a plant growth spell that creates a bridge over the battle, which the Fontaine girls sprint over. Theo turns the far door into a horse that rampages through the goblins. Juliet hits a high C to stun the goblins and house elves. The Dee twins – remembering what they knew about Goblin senses and ghosts, summon the ghosts of Hogwarts as another force in the battle. The Fat Friar is eager to teach those who harmed the Grey Lady a lesson.

Jasmyn & Daisy cross the bridge through the open doorway as the others provide cover. They skid to a halt as the villain is revealed: Knarlhump! The decaying homunculus corpse is there, along with the mandrake, which is swaying in time to the talisman dangling from the house elf’s hand.

It’s clear that Knarlhump is giving some sort of villainous explanation – including a floating name showing how Knarlhump Scotog anagrams to Ragnuck’s Helpmoot and thus he and the house elves outside are still bound to the late Goblin king – but the earmuffed sisters can’t hear a word of it. Daisy takes aim and hits him with a nockenumnogginum. “I’ve wanted to this since I first saw that wretched creature”.

The talisman drops from his hand and skitters across the floor. The mandrake and Jasmyn both leap for it, swatting it around for a few seconds before Jasmyn stabs the thing’s hand with her wand and snatches the talisman from it. Once in control she decides to end the battle, sending it out into the other room to scream.

The cry kills all the goblins & house elves, incapacitates all the ghosts, littering the floor with corpses. “Oops” she whispers, having not thought that through. Night has her order the mandrake into the back room and, out of sight, dispatches it. In the main room Castor is down, having taken a cleaver to the leg, and Rowan holds his hand for dear life.