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Fraser had left the project to the elves for a while. Between work, Ainsley's playing in the charity match, and finding time on Mel's schedule, they hadn't all been able to get together for days that became weeks. They'd closed the passage, which was the interesting area, and they had worked for days removing debris. Since the roof was now on, it was possible to see progress, although it was also possible to see just how far there was to go. It would've been impossible without the elves, even if he'd known the magic to use. They somehow could replace things that shouldn't be replaceable in the house.

And they were fanatical about getting the place clean. The last time they were there, there was dirt, dust, and the accumulation of years of the place not being weathertight. Now it wasn't livable, but it wasn't untidy. The house-elves had removed everything that was broken or untidy and now it just looked like it needed a million years of hard work. It was a great improvement and he made sure to tell Ualraig what a fine job he'd done.

When Fraser was ready, he could furnish a few more rooms and move in. Of course, now that he was in a hurry, he was also less interested in merely camping out in the garçonnière as in building something he'd be happy to live in as long as his parents were in the Park.

He paused at the front door. The roof and the boarded up windows meant they needed to light the place themselves, but they were Wizards after all. "Welcome to the once and future Macmillan Priory, again for those of you returnees…"

Mel had his wand ready to cast a Lumos to make up for the lack of light the moment they got inside. "It looks like the elves have done an excellent job with the place from what I can see." He lowered his voice a little to add, "But the boarded up doors and windows are still a bit Gothic for my taste. Looking forward to seeing it when the work is actually finished."

“Considering what we’re here to do, it’s exceptional ambience,” Ernie chuckled as he looked at the floor and didn’t see a speck of the years and years of dust that must have accumulated over the many years. With his old Hufflepuff prefect pin on his shirt, a recently calibrated sneakoscope looped on his belt, and his father’s pith helmet, Ernie looked both exceedingly goofy and prepared for adventure.

"Glad to see Lex got your ancestral Pith helmet back in one piece," said Fraser. "It was, um, quite a feature of the party I took it to." Fraser smiled at Ainsley. It had been quite a night.

Ainsley felt her face heat at the insinuation, and she shot a brief, private smile in Fraser’s direction. She had already decided to at least attempt to be on her best behavior, now that she had to contend not only with Mel, but with Ernie as well. No sense in making all of Fraser’s relatives any more uncomfortable than was strictly necessary. (Something told her that with a group like this a certain degree of discomfort was bound to be an inevitability.)

Peering around the space, she allowed that she was very impressed by the work the house elves had put in, but still she couldn’t help but tease a little. “I don’t know. I sort of miss the ever-present layer of dust and grime around the place. How else are we going to track our movements? Or to tell when something has been following us?”

“Sneakoscope,” Ernie said brightly, lifting up the small red globe as he completely missed the joke. “And trust me, this one is a gem. But it’ll help, of course, if we stay together. If we’re going to be lost in the labyrinth, might as well have company.”

"I'm hoping there's not a whole labyrinth down there, but who knows? I didn't expect even one secret chamber." Mel's light was shining ahead of them in the gloom of the shuttered and freshly-roofed Priory. "Which reminds me, Fraser, what happened to that book? And Ainsley, how did that turn out with your finger? No homicidal urges or any such? I mean we don't have to look for the monster if it turns out she's one of our party, right?"

It was perhaps telling that Ainsley paused a little too long at Mel's question. She hadn't yet told Fraser about her weird training mishap with the team's new reserve Beater, mostly because she was pretty sure there was no correlation. If there was, she knew she'd probably never hear the end of it. “It's fine. Mostly healed up now. You can barely see it anymore. And no urges, per se... maybe a little ‘any such’.”

She was glad of the relative gloom, as it hid her awkward shrug, but she couldn't leave off the nervous little titter of laughter that left her. “Better the monster you know, than the one you never see coming.”

"Why can't it be both?" Fraser asked. "Ualraig tells me they built this priory over the ruins of a previously burned-out priory, and that that one was built with stones from a medieval priory. Because apparently you used to name your buildings after the the older building you vandalized for construction material. If our ancestors had lived in Egypt, this would've been Macmillan Pyramid.

"But the secret passage hidden by the bookshelf and the spells says that it was at least known to somebody who locked it to our family. The book should be on the desk downstairs. Whatever cut Ainsley didn't show up as magic when we scanned the book, so it's either a creature or it was something like a tack or other bit of metal. We ought to find out. Ualraig doesn't recognize the book, but he's at least got the cobwebs out of there." Fraser paused. "Everybody ready?"

Ernie looked over at Fraser, nodded and held his wand up aloft, a shielding charm hung up on his tongue, ready for use.

Ainsley fell back a bit to talk to Ernie, smiling over at him in the wand light, her own simply at her side. “Fraser tells me you're a bit of an inventor. Can you tell me about what you've been working on, or are there non-disclosure agreements at play here?”

Ernie blinked at the question, eyes flickering to Fraser before looking back over to Ainsley, looking a little surprised. “Oh… aye, I am. And, ha, I mean, do I have to worry about you telling everyone?” he joked weakly, eyes flickering back to Fraser, mentally reframing his position on how close these two might be.

“It's not the world's greatest secret, but I am trying to keep it quiet since… well… it's a picture broadcast system. A moving picture broadcast system,” he clarified, not knowing what her experience with television was. “It's quite a shoot-for-the-moon effort.”

It was Ainsley’s turn to look a little surprised, and she nearly missed a step, but recovered beautifully. “Wizard equivalent to television? Or are you trying to make the current broadcast carrier compatible to magic, or vice-versa? That’s brilliant! Have you been able to pinpoint if its an analog compatibility issue, or something to do with the wavelength of the picture broadcast to that of however magic works?”

She paused in her barrage of questions, clearly embarrassed. “Sorry. I’ve always rather wondered about all of that, but never really had the drive to try to figure it out for myself. Greater minds, and such.” She offered Ernie an apologetic smile. “My grandparents are Muggles. I used to spend a lot of time at theirs before starting school, so I have some exposure to the non-magical world. Mind if I ask what made you take up this herculean task?”

Ernie brightened a little. “It's the transmission that kills you - muggle signal through wires can't get through basic warding. You don't get the kind of fidelity needed to display a picture, let alone a string of them. And no one is going without warding on their houses, that's for sure,” he said broadly. “But I think what's stymied a lot of people is that you can't do it like muggles do. Can't fit that square peg into a round hole.”

“Do you ever watch it now?”

Ainsley shook her head ‘no’. “Afraid I have the same warding issues, though my current place has the set up for it if I was brave enough to live without them. I did see a bit when I was over at my grandparents’ over Christmas. We watched the Queen’s speech, and something called Robbie the Reindeer. For your idea, were you thinking of bringing in the muggle content, or were you aiming more for original content, something more geared for the magical set?”

Ernie took a look down at his sneakoscope and found it was still lowly-lit with a soft red light. “I don’t have it designed for muggle programming, no, but that’s purely a function of the technology. They don’t produce recordings in three dimensions,” he remarked off-handedly. “And it doesn’t quite work the same way that Muggle video broadcast works. But that I can’t really go into.” Ernie looked apologetic, then brightened. “I’ll have to invite you out for one of my tests -- Quidditch is sort of my testing ground since I’m gifted with a ridiculous amount of access.”

“Yeah? I’d love that, really!” She glanced over at Fraser and Mel, aware now that they had been ignoring the two men, and yet the topic was so fascinating that she only felt a little bad. “Is it like, um, what’s it called”- Ainsley snapped her fingers three times in rapid succession, until the word came to her- “motion capture?” She gasped, suddenly getting an idea of what Ernie meant by ‘producing a recording in three dimensions.’ “So you could watch a game, but move freely around the pitch! Like you’re there in person, flying with the players or watching from the stands.”

She shook her head at herself, and shot him a contrite smile. “Sorry, I get sort of excited about these sorts of things. No doubt we’re boring your cousins half to death.”

Mel was not, in fact, bored to death, and this conversation was a sight more interesting than being a third wheel where Ainsley and Fraser were concerned. "I hadn't thought about this until just now," Mel offered, "but you could also try working with the Aethonans if that would help with other angles of the problem."

He looked over at Mel, then looked over at Ainsley.

“It’s not a problem, per se… I just keep adding more and more data points to track to adjust the matrixes. I’ve got to get to 15 to do Quidditch, but in order to do something cluttered like a radio drama taking place on a city street… it’ll be considerably more. There is only so wide a range you’ve got with wizard transmission before it won’t pick up on a wireless.” Then, Ernie laughed. “But I try to remind myself that I don’t need to create the end-all be-all the first model out.”

Fraser nodded. "You could commercialize a very small set. For example, imagine a version of this that can record and play back matches. Every coach on the planet wants one of these, and will pay a lot for it. And the leagues, and the federation, and the ministries. It doesn't even have to show the actual images, just the position and heading. 14 players, 4 balls, 3 dimensions…

'"So, there's a lot to track, but I don't need to see if Lex is smiling as she hits the bludger to use it as a coach. That would give you the experience and production to take it to a consumer level." Fraser smiles. "And yes, the BIQL is definitely interested in backing this."

A smirk tugged at the edges of Ainsley’s lips, but she fought against it. “I dunno, I can see the professional appeal of being able to see a player’s expression during matches. Learning their tells, if you will. It could be very advantageous to rival teams.” She glanced around at the three men, adopting an innocent expression. “None of you have a vested interest in a professional Quidditch team, do you?”

"Vested? No, not vested. And from what I've seen, not always all that professional." Fraser looked at the bookcase, searching for the knot in the wood. He wanted to be able to find it without casting a detection spell every time. "See that knot? That's the opening switch. I'm hoping we find the spell that's on in downstairs, because it's both complicated and interesting. I think it will react to any Macmillan, but not people from other families." He reached forward with his wand and pressed in on the knot. The door slid back, revealing again the stone steps down beneath the priory. "Before we go down, I already told Uilraig to bring help if we didn't come back up in an hour."

Mel snorted at the use of vested and professional but the next thing he would have said was forestalled by Fraser's instruction to the house elves. "I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks someone checking on us is a good idea. Especially after what happened last time." He glanced at Ainsley's hand as if expecting to see some large and obvious injury there, which of course there wasn't. "If you take the lead, Fraser, I'll hold up the rear again. Just all of you promise me you'll be careful about touching things bare-handed."

“And here’s me without my dragonhide gloves,” Ainsley said dryly. “You touch one possibly cursed item, and this one just won’t let it go!” She flashed Mel a grin to show him she was clearly kidding, and then turned back to Ernie and stage whispered, “Touch everything. How else are we going to find something else awesome?”

Fraser led the way down the stairs, grinning to himself at Ainsley's jokes. He was happy she was being her normal outgoing self with his cousins, if a little concerned in case she actually ever implemented one of her 'plans'. Fraser lit the stairwell and then the bolt-hole well; there was no use anyone actually just tripping in the dark when they could find serious trouble downstairs.

He played the light from his wand over the room, taking in the previous dust-and-cobweb covered corners and nooks. The elves had at least tidied well. Fraser was relieved that there hadn't been a skeleton hiding beneath all the webs. Ainsley's biting book was on the table, and the room looked, if not welcoming, at least cozy enough for someone who wanted a private study. It seemed a better bet than Ernie's shed, in any case. He waited for the others to descend.

Ainsley was entirely unconcerned as they opened the door to the secret room and began the descent. She stepped unerringly on the stairs, like she'd been there hundreds of times before, instead of just the once, which she had been in her dreams. (Not that she was going to tell them that either. Maybe a rational person might be concerned, but the desire not to be a bother to anyone is hardly a rational one.)

Mel waited for Ernie to descend ahead of him and made his way to the bottom of the stairs behind them, keeping a close eye on Ainsley just in case. He didn't think anything was wrong with her, but the more Fraser paid attention to her, the more inclined Mel was to make sure she was all right after the injury she'd taken from the book. "Ualraig did a great job on the place. Are we going to try to work on the book here, or poke around some more and take the book for examination when we leave?"

Fraser looked undecided. "Not sure it's safe to take it out. Let's find out why it bit Ainsley and then we can see if we want to move it. Ernie, want to try your scope?"

Pushing out a sigh, Ainsley muttered under her breath, “Modo liber erat. Quid est hoc vobis nescio periculosum est. Omnia est bonum.*” (*It was just a book. I don't know why you think there's anything dangerous about it. Everything is fine.)

To her credit, she didn’t even crack a smile, just continued to look slightly put out.

Ernie’s eyebrows peaked up, both at the murmuring from Ainsley and Fraser’s direction. He pulled the sneakoscope from the chain at his hip and his brows went up even higher.

“Interestingly… I didn’t spell in blue,” Ernie said. The light of the sneakoscope pulsed a slow but methodical bluebell color as he set it in the palm of his hand. “Not quite sure what this might indicate but it’s definitely indicating something.”

"Somebody needs to write an instruction manual for it," Mel said, because someone needed to say something. "Let's look to see if there are any other secret doors or passages, since it doesn't look like there's an immediate danger."

Mel gave the book on its table another glare, as if he could somehow punish it for biting Ainsley the last time they'd been there, before turning his full attention back to Ernie. "See if you can get it to--see if getting it closer to something makes it more intense, or faster, and we'll spend more effort if it does." He figured Fraser had the revealing spells down and Ainsley would probably work with Ernie, with whom she already clearly was developing a rapport. That left him to keep an eye on trouble, which seemed to be his job.

Fraser cast a revelio!. It was weaker, but more general than the one he'd cast before. He didn't want to miss something because it wasn't actually a spell. He was happy with the results, since it make a crest come clear on the cover of the book. He'd seen the creature it depicted, but not since ancient magics classes. It was an egyptian symbol, or perhaps older. Assyrian, perhaps. The book had a cat with the head of serpent on it. Did that, he wondered, bite Ainsley. Fraser brought his wand closer to the cat, and as he thought it might, it swiped at the end of his wand. "Do you speak?," he asked it.

A sound came from the book, low, sibilant. If Ainsley had to put her finger on it, she’d say it sounded annoyed. She took a step back out of reflex, only to realize that some of that sound was coming from her own throat. She coughed once, and it stopped. It was so stupid, but she really hoped none of the others had noticed. It had just been some kind of weird sympathetic, automatic response to the sound, right?

“Not something you see every day,” she tried for off-hand.

Fraser tapped the book with his wand, twice. It certainly would get the attention of whatever-it-was. "Do you speak English? Gàidhlig? Francés? Lingua Latina? Anyone else have something they can speak with it?"

Ernie gave Ainsley a strange look; not at the sound he couldn’t hear, but at the way she stepped back and looked somewhat off-set. He held out the sneakoscope towards her and watched the color as it slipped a little, the blue sliding towards purple.

“Would you mind holding this, Ainsley?” he asked rather than answer Fraser; he knew a couple of languages he could add, but this seemed equally important.

As distracted as she was by the book and the weird cat-snake-crest-thing, Ainsley doesn’t even think twice about reaching out for whatever it was that Ernie was asking her to take. It didn’t even dawn on her until the top-like device was nestled in her palm, at which point it gave a sudden jerk, flared a bright, almost blinding blue for a second, and then promptly cracked down the middle and fell to pieces. She stared at it, confusion etched in the line between her brows. “Okay, that was weird, right?”

She reached out to hand the pieces back to Ernie with a shrug. “Must be defective.”

“Must be defective,” the book said in something like her voice, but did not shrug. Ainsley looked at it, horrified.

Mel swore quietly in the background.

Ernie shook his head slowly, looking from the woman to the book curiously, then back to the woman; he hadn’t read anything coming from the book across his lenses. “I’m not saying that’s not possible, but that’s not generally what happens with a sneakoscope, Ainsley.” He paused a beat, trying to dig through his memories for what this might be. “Particularly when you hold it.”

“Omnia est bonum,” she said again, but with uncertainty, and stared at the book, willing it not to respond.

“Everything is fine,” said the book. “Everything is fiiiiiiiine.”

Fraser looked at it, wand out. The revelio was still active, and there was some sort of connection to Ainsley. He really wished he’d taken that self-paced elective in creepy ancient books at Hogwarts. "Quid est nomen tibi? Quod tu es?"

“aaaaaaainsleeeeeey” the book whispered its reply, and the aforementioned witch swayed a little on her feet.

Ernie let the pieces of the sneakoscope fall from his fingers and he withdrew his wand. While it was pointed in Ainsley’s direction, the only thing that came out of it was a gust of swirling air to catch her swaying body.

“Why is everyone yelling at the book?” he asked, knowing he was missing something.

Mel, whose wand had been in his hand the whole time, had had enough. "Ernie, Fraser, out. I'm going to see if this thing will eat me and unless it does, I'm bringing that and Ainsley to Mungo's and we're going to get this solved. Or" he told the book "you and I are going to have an ugly talk. I don't want to burn this place down with fiendfyre after we spent all this effort fixing it, but I will if I have to."

Fraser shook his head at Mel. "You're not going to do this alone, I'll back you up. Ernie, up the stairs. Make sure our escape route is clear."

"Ross Fraser Macmillan," Mel said flatly, in the sure knowledge he was in the process of annoying the hell out of one of his favourite cousins, "you are not dispensable to clan Macmillan. Take Ernie up the stairs, make sure it's clear, and Ainsley and I will follow behind."

"Ainsley? You're going to go with Mel, okay?"

A laugh bubbled out of Ainsley, something bright and terrible in it. “There’s a power-”

“-in names,” the book finished with a giggle of its own. Ainsley looked between the three men, a little lost, a little helpless, but finally settled on Ernie. Her wand was practically useless at her side.

“Ernie, I’m sorry. This isn’t how-”

“-I wanted this to go,” said the book.

“Will you two idiots stop arguing and leave it here - it’s a book, it’s not going to fly away,” Ernie snapped as he reached out with his free hand to take Ainsley’s to pull her up to the stairs.

Since getting Ernie, who was going to be the one with the most trouble gathering information about what was going on, out of the room was Mel's primary objective, he offered no objection. Instead he moved to the book, which brought him between the straight line connecting Ainsley and the book.

Which seemed to result in the book trying to wiggle out from behind Mel so it could get away from him and toward Ainsley, or at least line back up with her without Mel's form in the way. "Doesn't fly my arse," he muttered and picked the thing up with both hands, leaving his hands and wrists vulnerable to the thing on the cover of the book, which was not as much in the book as it had been before. Mel, who could see it more clearly than any of the others, grimaced.

The snake head bit down on Mel's wrist and Mel dropped the book to the ground, swearing louder and no longer to himself. Fraser jumped in "Oh, no, not any more of that." His boot came down on the fallen book, and he pinned it to the stone floor. "Ualraig!," Fraser shouted. "I need an empty sack! And a metal box with a lid, down here as soo-- Thank you, Ualraig. Give them to Master Mel."

Mel bagged the book, ignoring the blood seeping from his arm, and, with Fraser's help, got it into the box and closed the lid. By the time they finished, Ualraig had reappeared with bandages for Mel's wrist.

The thing was, Ainsley wanted to go with Ernie, wanted to sprint up the stairs, away from the nightmare book that had stolen her voice, her words, her thoughts, yet she had all but resisted him the moment he took her hand and started tugging her toward the stairs. She had barely put her foot on the first step when she heard Mel swear, heard it echoed- no, heard it in stereo from the book- and she turned back just in time to see Fraser wrestle the thing to the floor. Within seconds, it was secure in a bag, but Ainsley couldn’t move, still felt its pull.

In that last instant before the book disappeared, that pull shifted and her eyes widened a fraction as she stared at Mel. And then she felt nothing at all as she dropped to the floor very suddenly in a dead faint.

Ernie’s eyes widened in shock as the woman who had been acting as counterbalance to his pulling on the stairs suddenly went slack. He came down the two steps and crouched down; it wasn’t hard to remember the basic ABC spell from his unfortunate time at school, and he moved carefully to check Ainsley over, a small circle of light beating over her heart and smaller lights beating at a couple of places, most importantly at her neck and head to indicate there was still blood flowing.

“Just passed out, I think. I can apparate from here, can’t I?” Ernie asked, looking up at his two elder cousins. “I think St Mungo’s is our likely next stop.”