From the Ashes

Who: Jon, Gerard, William
When: Last Wednesday, following this and this
Where: Inside questionably fine art
What: A magical menagerie

William wasn't sure what had happened. One minute he'd been with Pete, and the next he...hadn't. He'd fallen, his legs getting tangled up in something as he passed through the door of the temple ruins they'd discovered, and he'd registered grass and nearby running water before he hit the ground hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs. It could have been worse, he thought, pushing himself up on slightly shaky hands. He could have fallen headfirst into a rock and split his skull open, or into the water itself and drowned.

There was no temple in sight, and no curious rabbit-eared equine, and no Pete. There was, however, a garden gnome, sitting on a nearby rock sunning itself without apparent alarm at his abrupt arrival. And a gargoyle carved out of the rock, William noticed a second later. A bat-winged gargoyle funneling water from the stream, upon whose bank William appeared to be resting. A low growl caused him to spin around, flailing for balance on the ground, where he saw a griffin lounging on the grass between two towering trees, its beak stretched wide in a gaping yawn and leonine tail lashing lazily behind it. There was a pegasus not far from it, and a winged creature the size of a cockatrice that William almost mistook for a dragon until it stretched its wings and he recognized it as a wyvern. A wyvern, so close to a pegasus? With a gnome undistressed by the proximity of a griffin?

He tried to stand up, only to find that his legs weren't cooperating. More than not cooperating; bound and weighted. He struggled in blind panic for a second before looking down to try to free himself from whatever was holding him prisoner, and registered with shock the presence of gleaming green scales and delicate webbed fins.

"Oh bollocks," he said faintly in surprise.

Who: Gerard & Jon
When: Wednesday afternoon
Where: Some random countryside?
What: Now there's a question that needs answering...


It took Jon about twenty minutes to realize that he wasn't supposed to be on this particular road. Actually, he wasn't supposed to be anywhere near a road at all. It's a little fuzzy, but he recalled being a bit worried that he hadn't seen hide nor hair (ha!) of his damned dog all day. When he'd gotten around to seeing if anyone had, most of the adults had been notoriously unavailable.

That, Jon realized, should have been his first clue.

He winced as a rock dug into the bottom of his flip-flop. The road, unpaved, was deeply rutted and definitely not conducive to his chosen footwear. Digging the offensive item out, Jon nearly tipped over when a sudden burst of muted music sounded from up ahead. A second later, he noticed a small cave buried into the hillside. Already wary, Jon crept closer until he was standing right at its mouth.

Silence.

He was about to turn away when the noise came again. Definitely music. Cautiously, Jon stuck his head into the cave a little.

"Hello?"

Who: Pete and William
When: Wednesday, midday
Where: That is an excellent question.
What: ...the hell happened?

There had been an alarming number of staff disappearances over the past day. Not deaths, not that anyone knew, but it was enough to make even the most optimistic of Hufflepuffs look solemn over their morning porridge. The headmaster had assigned substitutes to hastily rescheduled classes and declared that every spare minute be spent in finding out exactly what was going on.

William had been buried in books for most of the morning, but so far the only plausible explanation he had come up with was 'Portkey', and both Headmaster Schechter and the Defence experts had sworn the possibly-Cursed painting currently locked away behind wards in an unused classroom wasn't a Portkey. Presumably everyone had also been careful not to touch it, which was further evidence against the Portkey hypothesis, but William hadn't been able to come up with a better suggestion.

There was a spell called a 'compleat bauble' listed in one of the Elizabethan-era texts which seemed to detail the containment of a person or persons within a small glass sphere, but the foundation of the spell seemed far-fetched to begin with, and William hadn't heard mention of anything resembling a glass ornament being discovered in the castle. Surely something would have had to set such a spell in motion, and ostensibly they would have heard about the event.

( William was on his way to investigate the suspected instigator of the disappearances now. )

WHO: Adam and Spencer
WHERE: A warded room in the castle, and then...
WHAT: Strapped in a closetpainting.
WHEN: Wednesday Afternoon (12/2)

Adam was not, in fact, a connoisseur of art. He wouldn't ever be hired on the basis of his art knowledge. Sure, he could draw, and sure, he liked looking at comics and cartoons and things like that, but art? Not so much.

What Adam was, was an expert in dark arts. That's what they'd hired him for, anyway. Well, he supposed. And he had unique experience, so maybe that counted for something. Which was why he was spending his second free hour in two days examining the damn painting that had been found and then locked away from the students because it pretty much oozed dark magic.

In fact, the longer Adam stood there looking at it, so close to the magical residue, the more nauseated he felt. That was fun. And it was worse because not only was there the whole "icky dark magic" feeling, but, well, the painting was boring as hell. It was some terrible Muggle-style job of angels with ridiculously large wings that only very occasionally flapped lethargically. Adam was not impressed. He was even less impressed that this happened to be what he saw, as opposed to what anyone else saw. Which he supposed had something to do with the dark magic. Whatever.

Then Adam realized two things. One, that one of the angels, well, looked a little different from the day before. By the time he realized the second one - that that particular angel looked like him - well, he had wings and was wearing a toga.

Adam was not pleased by this development. The first thing he did was reach for his wand, and - shit, where was his wand? Clearly it was going to be that kind of day. Sucked into an evil painting, wand missing, pants missing. Big, feathery wings.

Actually, the wings were kind of cool.

Who: Bob and Brendon
When: Tuesday morning, December 1st
Where: Mysterious warded room and various works of art.
What: Lost! Lost in lala painting (and tapestry) land!

Having spent the majority the the past two weeks cooped up in the hospital wing and avoiding the wrath of Lazzara (though honestly, Bob didn't know why the man had been so upset about Bob's solution to get him out of Bob's hair), Bob had decided that it was high time to venture out into the world. Also, Betsy had gone out wandering the day before and had yet to return and, alright, Bob worried a bit too much about his cat sometimes. He felt completely justified about this, however—there weren't many cats that could play chess quite so well as Betsy, and she was especially nice company on cold winter nights, such as the sort that were fast approaching.

Still, Bob wasn't about to let on to anyone know just how attached he was to his cat. Thus the reason why he was doing his searching at a time when everyone should either be in class or, well, in class. Ah, the advantages of being a member of the support staff.

Bob started checking the rooms in the hall he was in, opening doors and quickly poking his head in to do a quick search. While he didn't expect to find Betsy in any of these, since clever as she was, she had yet to acquire opposable thumbs, but there was still the possibility that she'd accidentally been trapped after following someone in. He was about to declare this hall a wash when a flash of color in an otherwise dark room caught his eye. Hesitating slightly, Bob cautiously entered, raising his wand and lighting it with a weak Lumos.

At first he couldn't figure out what in the room had caught his attention in the first place, but as he went further in, he noticed a large painting on the wall opposite the door. The subject was, oddly enough, of a dairy maid pouring milk from a pail into a canister, while a cat danced around her feet, no doubt trying to trip her up and cause her to spill some milk for it. A somewhat odd subject for a painting in Hogwarts, but not unheard of. The thing that caught Bob's attention and caused him to freeze up with dread, was that the cat looked just like Betsy from its tortoiseshell markings to its tufted tail and ears. Could Betsy have gotten caught in the painting? This was Hogwarts, after all, and stranger things had happened in the past.

Feeling sick, Bob moved closer, examining the painting with a keener eye, now, noticing other details now. A discarded shoe under a stack of hay, a pink ribbon caught on a splintered post, a man in the distance on the verge of entering the forest. It was the man that drew Bob's attention now, looking vaguely familiar in a way that worried and niggled at his mind. Moving closer still, Bob saw that the man was glancing back over his shoulder, back and straight out through the frame of the painting, with a worried look and a gaze so intense Bob would have glanced over his own, had he not at that moment finally recognized and placed the face. It was his own.

And suddenly there were trees all around him and he was stumbling backwards in shock and dismay.