Pepper is the sword-arm of crazy (pickledpepper) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2009-05-27 16:59:00 |
|
|||
It was getting to the point where Pepper was unconsciously associating leaving camp with fire and explosions. Which wasn't a bad association, provided the fires kept to their current pattern of being restricted to purist homes and businesses, but perhaps still worth noticing in its way. Besides, this was probably the only way he was really going to ever see those hallowed stately homes of Britain's most eminent citizens. To be quite honest, looking at the size of the Notts' mansion, he wasn't entirely sure how a family of five could even use all that space, especially when compared to the narrow two bedroom home he'd grown up in. "You know, we could burn 90% of that and they'd still have enough room to live in," he commented to Kingsley, voicing his thoughts aloud. "Everything I own could probably fit in a single room in that house." "Tell me about it," Kingsley agreed quietly. "Everything I own fits into my room at the camp." He shifted his weight as he peered at the Nott place, hoping that everything would go well that night. "All right," he said, ready to get down to business. "That there's the dining room, and the one with the big window is the parlour. If we get closer you can see a toy horse in the window. Pretty sure all the bedrooms are on the far west end though this one here," he pointed at a window near the back of the house, "might be too. Dunno. Regardless, from what Alice and I saw when we scouted this all out, they've got some nasty wards but we should be able to take down at least the ones that will give us issues flying and the ones that will prevent objects from going in. The ones for people are going to be too complex because they're dark magic and not normal wards." Pepper nodded consideringly, picking out the locations Kingsley had listed in his own mental map of the place. Hard to do when you could only see one side of it, of course, but hopefully once they got on the move he'd figure it out a bit better. "Did you figure out how high up they went?" he asked, peering into the sky, eyes half-closed against the discomfit of it. "Technically just getting the object wards would work, but dropping things from too high up we're just going to miss. I was never any fucking good at Quidditch." He twirled his wand in hand, one full rotation before gripping the handle again, pointing it at the wards in front of them and casting a gentle revealing spell that made the air flicker lightly where the defensive magic was set. The top layer seemed to be made up of different colours, almost opalescent, though even in the couple of seconds they were lit up he could see a darkness beneath that that made him uneasy in the bottom of his stomach. Definitely a good thing they weren't trying to get right in. "Looks like it's about twice the height of the house," Kingsley judged, then smirked, ready to tease Pepper. "Which shouldn't be too hard for a Quidditch star like me, but someone like you might have to enchant the bottles to go where you want. Like down their chimneys." He grinned, excited to try to take down the death eating Minister for bloody Magic's home. "So. Take down the wards, fly over the place like the Wicked Witches of the West, send the Moltov Cocktails through the windows and down the chimneys, a few fireballs, avoid the bedrooms since they've got kids and once the foundation starts burning the whole place is gone anyhow, and get the hell out? Am I forgetting anything?" "Marshmallows," Pepper said promptly. "Possibly sausages." Though he'd had plenty of opportunity for that himself, in the past, so the fact that he hadn't done it yet was really purely his own fault. Maybe next time. Trying to recall the details Alice and Kingsley had gotten about the wards in question, he raised his wand again, prodding cautiously at the spells and hoping they weren't too sensitive - because they were bound to be connected to something inside to tell the inhabitants if they were being breached. With any luck they could get it down without crossing the line that would set it off. "If we focus on a small area it shouldn't take too long to open a gap, then we can get it further down from there." "Gotcha," Kingsley said, joining Pepper. They worked quietly for a while, talking only when they had something to ask about the wards, and after what seemed like forever, Kingsley took a step back, sweat dripping down his brow. "I think that's it," he said, hoping to Helga and anyone else that was listening that the Notts inside were not alerted to their presence - at least not yet. He took a step backward and picked up his broom, swinging one leg over as the broom began to hover slightly off the ground. "We shouldn't have any issues if we get too close to their wards - we'll just bounce off a bit unless we try to break through." He waited for Pepper to get ready as well. "May the Force be with you." He tried not to laugh at that, Kingsley's enthusiasm over the new movie having not yet descended into the realms of irritation and annoyance. Better to pay attention to what he was doing with the broom, anyway - he'd flown them before, of course, countless times, but not with the easy instinctiveness of someone who'd played Quidditch. Chess had always been more his game, and as yet they hadn't come up with a variant that required flight. Once ready he nodded at Kingsley, tilting his broom to lift him further into the air as they made their way carefully over the top of the grounds to their target. It was unlikely that anyone was looking out a window right at that moment, he decided, but still he was glad when they made it to above the building itself, still a bit higher than the wards reached, by his estimation. "Chimneys?" he clarified, shifting slightly awkwardly to pull bottles out of his bag and peering down for an appropriate target. "Chimneys," Kingsley confirmed, pulling a bottle out of his own bag. He tossed it up into the air and wordlessly used a levitating charm, the Moltov now hovering at eye-level to Kingsley. With a flick of his wrist again he lit the fuse on fire and the bomb flew toward the chimney, falling down, down, down until Kingsley heard an explosion at the bottom. He let out a jubilated whoop - "Just like shooting womp rats back home!" he exclaimed using another Star Wars quote. It was really just like Quidditch, except that the Quaffle had always been un-enchantable, so it was actually easier. He took three more out of his bag, tossed them into the air and levitated them. "We can aim for the windows too." Pepper did not have any idea what a womp rat was, but throwing the bottles was oddly satisfying, despite the disconnect of having to use magic to direct them. The good thing about the house being so large was that there were several chimneys, and even more windows, and moving quickly they were able to divest themselves of all their preprepared bombs within a span of just a few minutes. "They'll be starting to notice that, I should think," Pepper called across at Kingsley, feeling faintly gritty somehow, with accelerant on his hands that he was going to have to scrub off later. "Get the fuck out now, or--" He broke off to demonstrate the "or", shooting an incendio at one of the broken windows just because he could. "Not yet," Kingsley said. He knew it was too easy so far, but they needed to make sure the home would burn all the way down, and for a building that size, they would need serious ammunition. It was no Death Star with its one thermal exhaust port that would cause a chain reaction and destroy the battle station. No, they needed lots of fire. "Incendio!" he shouted, aiming into a window of what he was certain was a library. The paper in the books would burn well, he knew, and they wanted this manor flattened. After a few more blasts of fire, he heard a rumble as the ceiling of the room collapsed. "Yes!" Aeneas Nott was with his wife when he first felt rumbles in his home. The explosions from the Moltov Cocktails went unnoticed due to a few silencing charms, but the vibrations in the floor, which, he concluded fairly quickly, did not originate in his bed chamber, were cause for alarm and he quickly was on his feet, wrenching the door to the corridor open. Smoke was beginning to drift into that part of the home and Aeneas could hear sounds he knew should not be in his home. "Take the children," he instructed his wife quickly as he pulled on his robes, "and go to Lestrange Manor. Send assistance." Claudette pulled her robes around her as quickly as she could manage--of all the inconvenient times for something to happen, she half-thought as she did so, but the sight of smoke in the hall between her and Aeneas' room and the children's rooms brought her mind to things other than inconvenience. In all truth, she was terrified, but she managed to keep her voice light and pleasant as she gathered her three, sleepy children (Theodore in her arms, Colette balanced on her hip and Calista holding tightly to her arm). "Children, we are going to visit Uncle Rodolphus. Hold tight to me, Calista, and do not let go. Ready? One, two..." It wasn't until they had arrived at the Lestrange Manor that Claudette realized that Aeneas was still not with them. Heedless of who else might be around the Lestrange Manor or of how it might frighten her children, she began screaming for help as she stumbled up the walkway, the hands that held her children shaking in terror. Aeneas could not bring himself to think about the family heirlooms that were burning, the expensive trinkets and the old china and the countless bottles of wine that were going up in flames as he rushed down the corridor until there was too much smoke to see, casting Aguamenti every few steps, then he made his way into the nearest room and to the window where he jumped out, bouncing softly as he landed two stories down. He heard a yell from somewhere above his head and looked up to see two figures on brooms casting flames into Nott Manor. The damage was worse than he had feared - the entire eastern half of the manor was engulfed in flames. "Sectumpsemra" he shouted, firing the spell rapid-fire into the sky at the intruders. If he, too, was to lose his home like Atticus had, he would at least take one of them with him. Shit. It was hard to duck a spell when it was coming from that distance, Pepper found, as he couldn't tell exactly where it was going to pass him, and hardly wanted to risk dodging only to fly into it anyway. "Back off, back off!" he yelled over at Kingsley, and then the light of the spell was almost at him, and he jerked sideways to avoid it. A flash of pain lanced across his arm and he gritted his teeth, leaning forward into the broom to increase the speed of their flight. At the very least, their assailant - Nott, he assumed - wasn't going to be able to follow them quickly enough, not without a broom. "Land and apparate!" (Though, fleetingly, he wondered if it was ever a good idea to attempt to apparate while on a broom. He suspected not, and he definitely wasn't going to try it now. He had better ways in mind to die, most of them actually having a point to them.) Kingsley couldn't hear what Pepper was saying as the wind whipped past his ears, but he certainly saw the spell connect with his fellow rebel's arm and immediately turned his broom around, pulling off the best Woollongong Shimmy he'd ever been able to manage as he dodged the Death Eater's curses. He zipped away from the manor but halfway to the perimeter of the house he had an idea. Slipping his bag off his shoulder he enchanted it and sent it straight back to the house and through the window - it wouldn't do to waste the last three, after all. With a satisfied smirk he gave the house a rude guesture just as he could hear the front entranceway collapse behind him. He landed his broom (practically jumping off it), grabbed onto it tightly and turned on the spot, Apparating away. He just hoped Pepper was already there to meet him when he got back. Pepper wasn't wasting time - in his experience things always got a lot more messy when the other side were actually present, and as tempting as it was to attempt to throw some force back at Nott... well, he had promised Rufus strictly on-mission hijinks, and it was likely exactly that sort of temptation that had gotten Jo captured. No, it was far better to arrow down to the ground at speed, not the most agile of fliers, but certainly fearless. He hit the ground running, momentum still pushing him forward, and had covered several metres before he'd lost enough velocity to Apparate smoothly. He took in Kingsley just ahead of him as reality lurched back into place around him, and immediately set to checking his arm for damage. "Flesh wound," he declared, though it was rather bloody and would need a go over with some decent spells to close it up, probably fairly soon if he knew that spell (and he did, far too intimately). There was a slight twinge in his side, too, but he ignored it as relatively unimportant. "Better get back to--" and the word was on the tip of his tongue, it really was, but all he could do was gesture frustratedly at the buildings ahead of them. "Need help, mate?" Kingsley asked. He took Pepper's broom and threw both over his shoulder, leaving the other arm available in case Pepper needed it. Things had actually gone rather well, even with Pepper's injury, and so Kingsley couldn't help but smile as they made their way back to camp. "Shiiiiiiit," he exclaimed. "We lit that place up like a bloody birthday cake." |