RP Log; Rodolphus, Severus, Alecto Who: Dolph, Alecto, Severus When: 28 May, night Where: Dalby Moor What: Planting bombs
Rating: PGish Status: Complete
Rodolphus waited silently at the inner gates of his manor for the two to arrive. They hadn't much time and he hadn't much patience; it was to be a swift mission, carried out with efficiency for maximum effect. If Rodolphus was capable of expressing emotion like a normal human being, he would have smiled vaguely to himself - Severus and Alecto were perfect volunteers. They'd already proven themselves with the Trimble mission, and though he thought Alecto to be a bit headstrong, they both did their jobs and did them well.
Shifting his weight to one foot, he let the bag of magical explosives pool at his feet as he leaned into the gate - all but invisible in the shadows with his dark cloak and dark mask. The hags continued to be valuable contributors to the death eaters - Rodolphus wondered if the Dark Lord would soon allow them to join the Dark Army as true followers of the Cause.
It wasn't so much the Apparating as the sudden change of plans and the rush to make sure she had everything she needed in leaving the house beforehand that had Alecto momentarily puffed and disoriented when she appeared. She tugged her cloak straight, lifting the hood quickly as she looked around the dark yard. Was she too early? No sign of-- no, wait, there was a taller shadow amongst the others. Alecto looked down to put on her mask, fastening it swiftly but securely.
Severus had been contemplating Rookwood's information and - in truth - worrying a bit about how he was going to carry out those orders, when Rodolphus' note had appeared in the journals. Severus was relieved at the opportunity to do something so he would not have to think about the other project. He'd quickly put on a traveling cloak and his wand, and Apparated to the Lestrange Manor almost exactly twenty minutes from when Rodolphus had requested him. He arrived and glanced around quickly, looking for whom else might be there. He saw the two shadows and walked towards them, his face completely calm and unreadable. He had no idea what Rodolphus was going to ask them to do, but Severus was still pleased that the last project Rodolphus had asked him to participate in had gone well, and he planned on not breaking that trend.
"We will be apparating to Dalby Moor and lining certain sections of the stadium with explosives." Well, Rodolphus certainly didn't beat about the bush, did he? With a somber expression - at least one assumed it was such since the mask covered most of his 'expressiveness' - he reached into the bag curled lazily around his feet and slung over a bag for each of them. "You are to avoid the high rise seats. Lumos - " and the light glowed around his black-gloved hand, which held in it a map of the stadium with certain sections highlighted. "Here and here. These are pureblood seats." Alecto's face was already sealed behind her mask, so Rodolphus looked to Severus for his reaction.
Severus reached for his bag, and nodded, his face betraying no emotion. He understood why the pureblood seats in particular were to be separated out, but there were times he didn't quite feel comfortable knowing that had he not been with the Death Eaters, he wouldn't have been safe because he wasn't pureblooded. It wasn't as if he could do anything about who his father had been, and he was here with the Death Eaters, so in reality, it was a moot point. He placed the thought away and studied the map that Rodolphus held out memorizing the sections that were marked. "Avoid these sections," Severus nodded curtly. He placed his mask on, thinking that he ought to have arrived with it on, but next time he would remember to do so.
Alecto nodded as well, noting the areas in question, their relation to the landmarks of the stadium, picturing it in her head from the last time she'd been there. It'd been a while ago, but she doubted it had changed much. She smiled behind the mask, exhiliration and anticipation already kicking her pulse up a notch. "No problem," she added, as Severus fastened his mask beside her.
Had Rodolphus had the capacity to read minds (if one could compare legilimency to so crass a concept), he might have suggested to Severus that his own doubts spoke to the very goals they meant to accomplish. Join us or die. It was a very simple sort of endpoint, but effective, nonetheless. Rodolphus didn't care about fair or 'what if' - he cared about the cause, and if Severus hadn't been a death eater, he wouldn't hesitate to kill him if he got in the way. It was How Things Were, and he'd been far too narrow-minded for far too long to ever question it.
Not that he had any doubts as to their apparition abilities, but Rodolphus did not take chances unnecessarily - especially if neither had been to the place in question before - and so gripped hold of a shoulder on either side of him (a rather intimidating gesture without any form of warning), and winked them out of existence. They were shoved back into the mortal plane on a rather chilly expanse of moorland, and Rodolphus took a glance around before releasing his companions. "You two take the Western block." And with that, he turned away.
Alecto glanced off in the direction Rodolphus had indicated, and then turned back to make sure Severus was with her. (Only problem with the masks; peripheral vision, or lack thereof.) There was mist crawling across the moor, a chill in the air even at this time of year, with the hulking masses of the stands lurching against the cloudy sky. Alecto was glad she'd already had her boots on this evening, but thankfully the ground was fairly even. Creeping around in the dark was always made more difficult by swearing over stubbed toes, and she didn't dare too strong a lumos in these circumstances.
She craned her neck back, holding her hood down on her head with one hand as she looked up at the stands, fitting reality to the map Rodolphus had shown them. "Over here," she said, half a suggestion as she gestured with her dimly-lit wand.
Severus followed Alecto, towards the stands, keeping good time with her. As she gestured, he took a look at where she was pointing to make certain that it looked like the map Rodolphus had shown them both. He nodded, a bit more awkwardly than usual because of his mask. "That looks right," he said quietly, stepping up so that he was even with her. His eyes took in the stands, mentally taking them apart in his mind so that he could best consider how to plant the explosives Rodolphus had given them. Blocking from his mind the idea of the people, adult, children, or otherwise, that would be in the Quidditch stadium when they would be exploded, he instead thought about how best to plant them. He pointed with his wand towards the top most seats that they would be planting.
"I think if one of us starts at the top, and one at the bottom, that will be the quickest and the way we'll be least likely to miss anything," he looked at Alecto to see if she agreed.
Far from blocking it from her mind, Alecto had been indulging in a little imaginative wander on the theme of chaos, panic and bringing the place down around the muggle-loving ears of the general public. Beautiful.
"Sure," she agreed, blinking her vision back to the dark here and now. She rummaged (carefully!) in the explosives bag, divvying up the goodies. "You wanna go up?" she offered. "I figure around the edges'll be--" She stopped, huffed a bit of a laugh, and said, "You know what you're doing." Hey, she might've had her issue-type-reservations about Severus Snape but... well, maybe he was all right after all. "I'll handle the support structure stuff down here," she finished.
Severus couldn't help a small smirk under his mask. Alecto could drive him insane. She was too ready to embrace everything he wanted to run away from, but she could handle her tasks well enough. He nodded. "I do know what I'm doing," he said simply and he reached for his portion of the explosives. "I'll go up," he added. Severus didn't mind. He could plant them in places where they'd block walkways, and cause minimum death, and lots of chaos. The latter might cause death as well, but only because people were largely idiots and didn't know what was best for them. He sat his jaw slightly and with a nod at Alecto, he took the explosives and headed up towards the top. He carefully avoided the places that Rodolphus had marked as for purebloods. With his wand, he moved and attached explosives under the edges of seats near the walk ways.
Funnily enough, it was weirdly silent in the middle of Dalby Moor in the middle of the night. Alecto hadn't noticed it so much when she was with the others, but now... there were faint noises of small furry things or insects or her fellow Death Eaters but probably not a lurking troop of Aurors, so Alecto shouldered her third of the explosives and made her way between the pillars supporting the stands, counting them off as she went. Not there, which meant she should start over here. She ringed a hefty support pillar with explosives - "boom," she whispered, and grinned - and moved on to the next one, starting to hum quietly and not entirely tunefully.
Severus lined every other seat edge with an explosive, alternating them up and down the edges. He made certain they were in key places so that it would make it difficult for people to leave via the normal exits - you'd have people then try to Apparate, and would likely splinch themselves in the process, where if they would just be calm, they would have been fine. Attaching the last explosive to the edge he glanced out over the moor. You could see quite a distance from the top of the stands, and he realised that however dark the night and the shadows, if someone was watching, they might notice the shadows. With that thought, he moved back down towards the bottom of the stands, back into the darker areas of shadows around the stands. At the bottom, he wrapped up the bag, and glanced around to look for Lestrange and Alecto.
Rodolphus spent the majority of his time setting up his explosives in small junctions where the stands and support beams joined. He cast permanent sticking charms and disillusionments on each - a feat that took longer than he would have liked but kept him well assured they would be all but undetectable to the unwashed masses. Three, five, eight. The stands would crumble into themselves, causing mass panic and probably multiple injuries, if not deaths. But he avoided key weaknesses - there were easier ways to kill hoards of people - something that very well might be necessary at some point, but this was not their mission.
After a wearied half hour, he moved from beneath the stadium seats, a dark shadow against the grass that mingled with the fog like some insinuation of a person. His approach was quiet and steady, and it seemed a voice came from the shadows as he finally spoke. "Finished?"
The voice emanating from the depths of the night made Alecto flinch - scared the tune she hadn't quite been humming right out of her head, but fortunately, cloaks covered a multitude of sins and she managed to catch the final explosive before she'd done more than barely fumble it. Fixing it firmly to the back side of a corner pillar, where a cross-support plummeted down to meet it, she stepped out from under the stands. "All done," she reported quietly, crossing the grass to the Lestrange-shadow. Couldn't keep a slight bounce out of her step, nor the smirk off her fact. "Should be a blast," she added.
Severus was more reserved as he stepped away from the stands and joined the other two. "Yes, sir," he said quietly, glancing back up at the dark, shadowy stands. He turned back to Rodolphus, watching him. Severus truly was impressed by the older man, and appreciated the way he said little and was articulate in what he said. Although instructions could sometimes be rather vague, it had the effect of giving Severus the feeling that Rodolphus trusted them to do the work and do it properly. Whether the feeling was accurate or not, it was a good feeling for Severus to have. He knew that in this case he'd done a good job of placing explosives in places where they would cause a great deal of panic. He waited to see if there were other instructions.
A glance at a pocketwatch made it clear it was time to be leaving. Not that midnight had any special bearing on the stadium, but with a game this week, it was unwise to linger in an area of interest. "We're done here. I trust the pair of you can find your way home well enough." And he was finished, and gone with a sharp crack that resonated into the night.