terry boot likes food (bootscootboogie) wrote in caged, @ 2013-12-09 20:20:00 |
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Even though they'd been talking about kidnapping Amycus Carrow's giant Buddy Bear from the Dark Arts classroom for a while now, today had been a bit of a breaking point. Between Umbridge, the hours without sleep early in the week the mess with the family trees, and poor Michael having been stuck inside the castle for several days now, it felt like as good a time as ever. Because really, a person had to have reached a particular point of desperation to think that kidnapping a giant stuffed animal from a Death Eater was a great way to stick it to the man. "So what do you guys think? Shrink it, maybe?" he asked Michael and Anthony, his voice hushed as he glanced up and down the hall. The coast seemed clear. Go time. “That will make it easier to carry,” Anthony whispered. He was nervous that they would get caught and nervous that if they did get caught June would kill him but even Anthony had reached his breaking point this week. Umbridge was the breaking point. She was the worst example of a human being that he could come up with. Somewhere in the back of Michael’s mind, he knew that this was a genuinely terrible idea. Great, but also terrible. They were going to get caught and even if they didn’t get caught, someone was going to get the blame for it. Which probably meant learning what the next tier of torture was going to be, but Michael also didn’t care. While he’d been inclined to maybe play along for the last couple of weeks before the holidays, that all went out the window when Umbridge showed up. It was time for bearnapping. “I think so too,” Michael whispered back. “I think it’s probably the first thing we should try, anyway.” He started down the hall towards He-Carrow’s office, glancing about periodically nonetheless. Nobody was around, but would it last? It'd certainly be easier if they could just shrink the damn thing down, shove it into a bag, and walk away like nothing was amiss. Absolutely nothing strange was going on, and the three seventh year Ravenclaws were certainly not kidnapping a stuffed animal from a grown man. "Okay. Someone wait by the door to keep watch," Terry said, coming up with a plan as soon as the door was open -- why he was allowed to come up with plans, the world will never know -- and then we shrink it, bag it, and run for it. Michael, you've got the ransom letter, yeah?" he asked. Before taking another step into the room, though, Terry had a second thought, and shot a blindfold at the giant stuffed bear. You never could be too careful. It could've been a nannycam. Alecto was teaching Muggle Studies, and somehow that seemed like one of the stupid parts of muggle culture that she would've picked up on. “I’ll watch out,” Anthony said, standing in the doorway. His heart was pounding out of his chest and for a moment he thought he was going to throw up, but they were going to do this. They were really stealing an enormous stuffed bear from their Dark Arts professor and somewhere deep down it felt good. He looked out the door frame, with a puking pastille in hand in case he needed to cause a distraction, “You two keep track of the bears.” “Okay,” Michael replied, looking at Anthony, before directing his attention at Terry and nodding. “And yeah, I have the ransom note.” That had been a fun experience full of cut up papers, and had been one of the few times this year that Michael had truly enjoyed himself. Which was really pretty pathetic, now that he thought about it… But he didn’t have time to think about it, because they were kidnapping a bear! “Shrink it, bag it, run for it. Sounds good.” He almost said it sounded easy enough but that felt like jinxing them. “Ready?” "Ready," Terry nodded. He probably should've been more scared than he was. Instead, it was like this surge of adrenaline pushing him forward. Terry briefly wondered if this was how Gryffindors felt all the time. Moving forward into the room, Terry stood in front of the bear, nearly dwarfed by how ridiculously big it was. It almost would've been cool, if he was a four year old and if he didn't know that there were creepy jello brains inside its skull. Hoping his skills with transfiguration would help them out here, Terry removed his wand from his robes and aimed it at the bear, focusing on casting a shrinking spell at it. "Diminuendo." For a moment, nothing happened. And then the bear started spinning in place, pirouetting in place like the little girl from The Exorcist's head. "Um…" was all Terry said, glancing over at Michael. "I don't think this is what's supposed to happen…" “What’s happening?” Anthony hissed from the hallway. Of course shrinking it wouldn’t work. Of course not. “Why the fuck is it doing that?” Michael asked, staring at the bear in disbelief. That wasn’t the least bit close to shrinking in side. He looked at Terry for a moment, half laughing, before pulling out his wand to do a finite incantatem or something so it would stop. But before he could get the spell out, the bear started towards him, gnashing its teeth. "Holy shit!" Terry yelled, tumbling backwards over a chair as he backed away. The bear's jaw kept chomping at the air as it lumbered forward (nearly giving Michael an awkward haircut in the process). "FINITE FINITE FINITE HOLY SHIT!!!" he cried, a girly scream that he would never live down escaping as the bear chased after him and Michael towards the doorway. "EVERYONE FINITE IT AT ONCE!" “Shhhh,” Anthony hissed from the hallway but then came in once he heard what Terry was shouting. “What is - holy moly,” he said once he saw what was happening. “FINITE INCANTATUM!” he shouted holding out his wand. Of course shrinking this bear was 100 times harder than it should have been. Michael shot his own finite at the damn bear, which in addition to everyone elses seemed to finally get it to stop charging at him, at the very least, before running a hand through his hair. It was partially habit and partially a need to make sure it was all there. Kidnapping the bear was great and all, but he didn’t really want to lose his hair in the process. “Well, that worked,” he said, looking at the bear intently. “So we can’t shrink it. Should we just grab it and run? Try to float it?” Michael looked at Terry and Anthony before casting a look at the door. How much noise had they made already? “What if we Disillusion it?” Anthony asked. He only could imagine them getting caught walking down the hallway with a huge bear. Getting caught would be bad enough let alone stealing something from one of the Professor Carrows. That would probably get them locked in Azkaban. “That will work, right?” Terry nodded, still trying to catch his breath from the surprise bear attack. This was ridiculous. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were out fighting You Know Who and escaping Death Eaters, and they'd all just nearly been murdered by a stuffed toy. "Yeah. Maybe... maybe both. Disillusion it and float it. Then we won't have to worry about anyone walking into an invisible plush death machine." “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good,” Michael replied, staring at the bear. If shrinking it got them crazy murderous pirouettes, what would floating do? Or disillusioning it. As much as part of this was to do experiments on the bear, to figure out what the deal really was, he’d been hoping that the experimental phase would happen after they’d kidnapped the damn things. Michael was pretty handy with a disillusionment charm though, so he shrugged and cast it, hoping for the best. When the bear didn’t freak out and try to murder them again, Anthony looked at both of his friends. “Let’s get out of here before someone comes to check it out or see why we were screaming.” They were lucky that they hadn’t gotten caught yet, staying any longer was just playing with fire and asking for either the Carrows or Filch or Mrs Norris to catch them in the act. Anthony held onto the three bottles of Anti-Veritaserum he had in his pocket, well at least there was there. "Agreed," Terry added, casting a charm to lift the bear up in to the air above their heads. Unless they ran into someone significantly taller, they'd probably be okay. "Once we get it to the room, we should probably like... strap it down, or something." Their own personal little Frankenstein's bear. Pulling the ransom note he’d prepared ahead of time out of his pocket, Michael left it in the bear’s place before turning and heading with the rest of them out of the office. Looking carefully about the corridors as they went, Michael occasionally renewed the disillusionment charm on the bear, but somehow they seemed to get it back to the room. He kept expecting the bear to do something, but now that they were just floating it, it seemed to cooperate. Once they were safely in the room Anthony breathed a sigh of relief, well that part was done and now they were in the safety of the room. If all else failed they could fall asleep here tonight, although Stephen would definitely notice the three of them missing, although after his outburst in the play he doubted he would tell on them. “Let’s get to work then.” Terry placed a silencing charm on the door to the room, just in case. He was pretty sure the room naturally had silencing charms on it, seeing how badly the DA required privacy, but he figured after the near bear-attack that it was better to be safe than sorry. Floating the bear down onto a table in the center of the room, he cast an Incarcarous charm at its arms and legs to make sure that it wouldn't get up and start lumbering around threateningly again. "All right. Anything you want to start with?" he asked Michael, figuring he might as well get first go at it, seeing as how the bear had nearly messed up his Perfect Michael Corner Hair. “I kinda want to stab it and see what happens. Is that bad?” Michael asked, canting his head to the side and considering it for a moment. Maybe a little murderous, but honestly it wasn’t like they didn’t have a right to be. “Though part of me is really concerned that it’s a few transfigured first years.” He was kidding. Kind of. He cast a finite on the bear on the off chance that it was, and when nothing happened he walked closer before casting a slicing hex on it. Only to jump back in unpleasant surprise when the bear started screaming. “Oh my GOD, get it to stop!” “SILENCIO!” Anthony shouted at the bear. What had Professor Carrow done to this bear to make it so obnoxious, seriously this was too much. Why couldn’t it have just been a bear? Why did it now have to scream at them. How they had not managed to wake up the entire castle was beyond him right now. “They are so fucking insane!” Michael exclaimed, running a hand through his hair and staring at the bear. “Who even does this?” What kind of grown man had an insane bear that did pirouettes and gnashed its teeth and screamed like a banshee? Even for a Death Eater, this seemed deranged. The silencing charm seemed to help, though Michael felt like he could almost hear the bear still screaming despite it. He wanted to know what was still inside the bear though, so he walked back up to it and looked at where he’d sliced it. “Stuffing.” He looked at Terry and Anthony. “What now?” "It can't JUST be stuffing," Terry frowned, moving around to the other side of the table and digging into the stuffed bear's "guts." It couldn't be JUST a stuffed bear, not with the ways it had reacted. There was charming an inanimate object to have a particular reaction, but then there was something be AMISS, and this absolutely fell into the latter category. "THERE!" he yelled, mushing around more of the stuffing until he found something other than fluff. "It has the same creepy heart thing as the little ones." Maybe it was the source of its ~power~. Wrapping his fingers around it, he tried to pull the heart out of the bear's chest that they could further experiment on it -- there was a brief moment when he had a surge of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom flashback glee --only to find that it was stuck. And the bear kept right on writhing like a maniac. "Well. That's unnerving," Terry said, scratching his nose with the tip of his wand. "It doesn't come out." Anthony made a disgusted face. Why didn’t this bear’s heart come out. There was nothing about this that was not completely and utterly unnerving. “What do you think it’s brain looks like?” he asked, cutting into the bears head. Then the an odor, worse than the one that they’d smelled the day that they had cut their own bears brains out in class wafted into the room. “Terry, do not eat that.” “That’s foul,” Michael said, holding a hand in front of his nose as he looked at the bear. So far it was a deranged giant version of their own bears, which wasn’t quite what he’d hoped. Not that he knew what he’d hoped, but somehow he thought there was going to be an answer somewhere inside the thing. “This is so fucking weird. Should we like...try to cut off a limb or set it on fire or something?” "Ugh, Merlin's nuts; I never want to eat again," Terry grimaced, holding his nose and trying to wave away the smell with his free hand. "Maybe burning it will be like… like lighting a candle. One that'll hopefully smells better than this shit. Or, if nothing else, we'll burn the evidence." Stepping back, he cast an Incendio at the bear's legs, holding the spell for nearly thirty seconds before extinguishing the flames. This time, the bear didn't even react, and its legs were still nearly completely in tact (with the exception of a few patches of charred fur left behind.) "...Or it'll be completely fine. That could happen too. What the hell is up with this thing?" he yelled, punching the bear in its still blindfolded face. “It’s got to be Dark Magic,” Anthony said, shaking his head. “That’s the only thing I can think of.” They couldn’t even burn the damn thing. Michael frowned before walking over to the bear and giving it a solid kick. “Maybe we need to do some research?” "Yeah," Terry agreed. They weren't getting anywhere like this, frustrating as it was that a bloody toy bear was getting the best of three Ravenclaws. "We at least have it now. That was always going to be the tricky part. We can always come back to it once we have some more ideas." And if that didn't work, they could always throw it in the lake under the ice. “Read up in the library now that there isn’t a restricted section,” Anthony said with a nod of his head. “We’ll have all of hols to think it over since I doubt Amycus will get it back before then.” “Let’s not let him get it back before then,” Michael replied with a small smile before giving the bear one final kick. “Sooner or later, we’ll figure out what its deal is.” |