InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Hail the King of Babylon."

"'Bet you've never even seen a quipplepod,'" Maggie mocked in a childish tone, shrugging on her leather jacket. "'I've seen them a hundred times because I'm a fuckin' quantlepede whisperer!'" She turned back to the door to the party long enough to make a rude gesture with her hand and opposite fist, then looked at Meaghan. "You should've let me cast a biting jinx on his cup."

"Biting jinx's too fiddly," Meaghan said with regret, winding her scarf around her neck and imagining the bastard with a cup hanging from his lip. "Hard to do from a distance so it's easy to figger out who it was. Din't say you couldn't do any jinx, though, so if you wanna go back and hex the snot outta that braggadouche I'm all for it, for all he's a world famous quafflepodiatrist."

Maggie continued contorting her face, imitating various choice lines the so-called braggadouche had attempted. "We'll do him one better anyways, bet he's full of hot air and bullshite. Twenty galleons on him never seeing one in his sorry little life. Fuckin' hotshot seekers without a–" She stomped out into the yard and looked around them, suddenly a little confused. "D'you know where we're goin'?"

Meaghan scrunched up her face. "North?" she said. That's all she knew about the Isle of Drear, anyway: north, Scotland, quintapeds. And island, obviously. Godricdammit, it was probably even colder than Skye. She pulled her glove onto her glove hand, then her mitten onto the other, grumbling at bloody Greg Cotton and his bloody fullofhimselfness. Who let that English bastard into Hogmanay anyways, that's what she'd like to know.

"North." Maggie repeated confidently. "Went to a wedding in Bettyhill once. Most boring one I've ever been to, but I looked at that fuckin' countryside for hours." It had, in fact, been a three hour service followed by a dry reception. She'd pledged to never date a MacKay again. She offered Meaghan her arm for a Side-Along, "I can get us that far. Can't be hard from there, right?"

"Reckon not, Scotland ain't big," Meaghan said, taking Maggie's arm. Better Maggie than her anyway. She hardly went up north unless she couldn't help it, and didn't even know what or where Bettyhill was. There was just nothing up there but cold so what was the point?

Eyes closed, location visualized, aaaaand... CRACK!

Maggie looked around. There was nothing. Absolutely... nothing. Well, fine there were some buildings, and some fields, and there was some coast. But really? Nothing. "Welcome to Bettyhill, the centre of Hell. Where next?"

Bettyhill looked about like she expected. This was more or less how she pictured all of Scotland, a whole lotta nothing and maybe some sheep. "There was a wedding here? Merlin, how'd they find enough folks to witness?"

Looking around at all the nothing, she pointed at random. Then she pointed again, in the opposite direction, because she realized she'd been pointing away from the coast and that's probably where any islands would be. "Thattaway, I reckon," she said, and waited for Maggie to apparate them, because clearly that was her role for the night.

Maggie blinked at Meaghan. Both of them knew how apparation worked: you needed to know the destination. Except, how to get to a dreadful, remote, and Unplottable island without ever having been there? They certainly weren't going to ask Gregory MacDouche to be their tour guide. She shrugged and nodded. "Let's go," then closed her eyes and envisioned... what she thought the isle should look like.

There was the tell-tale CRACK of apparation, and then silence.

And then, shrieking. Young shrieking. Ear-splitting teenage girl shrieking -- Meaghan would know that anywhere, having lived with them. She opened her eyes to a knot of girls pointing at them from across the room, and though she was no girl interpreter, in the racket they were making she thought she could hear the words "came out of nowhere," "burglars," and "dad."

"I ain't no quintapedestrian but that looks like just two feet apiece to me," she said to Maggie, ducking behind a table full of drinks and crisps and helping herself to a bowl. "An' only four if you count hands."

Maggie's reaction to showing up, uninvited, to a sitting room was much less blasé. "Shite. We could probably bring their hair back for him, but, nah–" She grabbed Meaghan's arm, called out, "OUR BAD, HAPPY HOGMANAY,TA!" and tried again.

A third CRACK! found them in the middle of a room. No shrieking this time, but hollering? Yes. Shouting? Oh, indeed. Maggie looked around, and then down, and lifted up her boot with a disgusted expression as the room went dead silent. Her heel was in a dish of chocolate frogs, and the fighting around them was nothing but shocked quiet. A family row. How lovely. "Good evening."

In the sudden silence, the sound of crunching was like rolling thunder. "Least they ain't muggles," Meaghan pointed out through a mouthful of crisps. "Last ones mighta been muggles." She tapped the table that they were standing experimentally with her foot. "Good quality that," she added, and offered the bowl to the nearest person, who took it with a dazed expression and gazed into its depths. "They're vinegar."

One final CRACK! and Maggie looked down, again, to find... "Shite." again, except this time it was literal. And then the smell hit her, rancid and putrid and awful and horrid. Sheep. She let out a disgusted noise and made a beeline for the edge of the pen, gasping for air. There were some melodramatics, but sheep were GROSS, ALRIGHT???

"We need–ugh–a fuckin' strategy–ewww–" she pleaded, dragging her boot across the wood of the fence.

"Urghh, fine," Meaghan said, when she was done coughing from the smell. She'd nearly lost a boot to the muck and in trying to climb over the low fence around the pen she'd mostly fallen over it. It was a good thing they weren't wussy girly girls wearing wussy girly heels or they'd've been goners. Okay, they could've still apparated away but their shoes at least would've been goners, and probably them for the night.

She flopped her back onto the (damp, but whatever) grass around the pen and considered the night sky. "You gotta map? I know it's Unplottable but if we gotta map and brooms 'n' looked for a island that ain't on the map that'll be it, yeah?"

Maggie bit on her lip as she considered. "At home, aye, I've got... all those things. One last apparation for supplies?" A moment to consider, "two, to get back to this... bonnie... vista?"

"Sure," Meaghan said, rolling over and pushing herself back up. Thank Godric for apparation, at least to places you already knew. It took about ten minutes for them to get to Maggie's, get their supplies and get back to "north," and only a couple more than that to get in the air. The wind was cold, and colder higher up, and it wasn't easy opening a map up there, but with some shielding charms and a little lumos, they managed to make it work.

Actually finding the island itself wasn't quite so quick and easy. "THERE," Meaghan yelled in Maggie's ear, pointing at a foggy spot to the east. "Izzat on the map?"

Between wind, cold, precarious position, and her wand, the situation should have screamed DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! into Maggie's ears. Except it didn't, because it was fucking exhilarating to do after weeks of juggling her job with Portree and the extra shifts at St. Mungo's. The wind whistling in her ears, yes please!

She balanced her wand used a free finger to trace the other islands they'd already picked out. Eenie, meanie, minie... "Fuckin' MO!" she shouted back a grin breaking out across her face. "YOU'RE A FUCKIN' DAVID ATTENBOROUGH!" Never mind that he wasn't exactly an intrepid explorer. Shoving the map back in her jacket, she took the lead and buzzed down toward the little, Unplottable island: The Isle (Potentially) of Drear.

Meaghan shoved her wand into the depths of her coat and dove after her, whooping. She stopped cheering when they reached the fog, which was clammy and so thick she could scarcely see Maggie. It was cold as a fridge but close as a just-used shower. Was that stuff natural, or was it magic-made like the Exmoor fog? If they were looking for signs they were on the right track, that seemed a pretty good one.

It sure kept things quiet, too. As they finally broke through the fog and caught sight of the island, there wasn't much to see. Trees. Grass. Rocks. Scrubby shite. "Place sure lives up to its name, eh?" If they really were in the right place, anyway.

"Prefer it to sheep shite," Maggie grumbled back, waving her hand in front of her face. The fog didn't move. She held her wand out for lumos and trudged forward with Meaghan. "If they're here, we've got to what, look at them? Do we bring back a trophy?" she looked left and right, as if to expect to see one just hanging out beside them. "Maybe there's a souvenir shop. We'd get matching t-shirts that read 'I saw a Quintuplet on the Isle of Drear'."

"Maybe they got quillapillar-tooth necklaces," Meaghan said. "Or bracelets made o' their fur or some shite." There was supposed to be wizards living here before they all killed each other off, right? Maybe there were still buildings standing somewhere, like Urquhart-castle-size ruins. That'd be something to see.

"We should of brought a camera," she realized. "That's how the sesquipedalians do it I reckon."

"I've got one of those Polar cams in my flat, too." Maggie moaned, kicking a stone into the fog before them; a puttering sound could be heard as it rolled away. "Never could figure out how it works, but it wouldn't've been a burden here." She kicked another, bigger stone, and it followed the first with heavier thuds... for a bounce or two, then went silent. She reached out to brush Meaghan's arm with her fingertips. There was a very obvious question hanging in the air, exactly the way the rock's sound did not.

Meaghan drew slightly closer to Maggie. It was dumb to be nervous now. It wasn't like they'd stumbled into this, they had a whole plan and they came here -- if this was the right place, which she was starting to hope it wasn't -- on purpose, for a reason, to do a thing. A thing that she was suddenly realizing was really fuckin' stupid, since all the late-night scare-the-shit-outta-each-other stories she'd heard about quintapeds at Hogwarts ended with folks getting eaten. They couldn't even blame them getting eaten on being drunk because they weren't all that drunk, though if they didn't get eaten she was sure as hell gonna get drunk.

A growl broke the weird silence of the island -- a strange, stuttering sound, almost gurgling, low and gutteral. The bushes rustled.

Those were about the same thoughts running through Maggie's mind. She extinguished the light spell, but only because her stomach was falling at a rate that told her she'd need to be casting something else very soon.

The bush parted enough to let a hand the size of her face through, grasping through the air until it stepped forward on its wrist—or ankle?—followed by a long, muscled, hair arm... leg. Arm-leg. Thing.

This was decidedly not the best idea they'd ever had.

Maggie grasped at Meaghan's jacket arm again as the body attached to the arm-leg-thing emerged from the foliage and fog, and it was fucking ugly. Every instinct Maggie was capable of screamed at her to run, and she was inclined to agree.

The pictures Meaghan had seen of quintapeds all made them look like weird spider things. She'd never had a problem with spiders, but she did apparently have problems with fangy monkey heads surrounded by five biceps. Maybe it was the foamy drool dripping from its teeth, or its crazy red eyes (she'd never seen anything with a lazy eye look that mad), or the fact that holy fuck there was another one that's it she was done. Making an odd croaking sound, Meaghan grabbed Maggie's arm and swung her around to run back to where they'd -- shit shit shit why had they done that anyway? -- left their brooms.

Not needing any more argument than that, Maggie set off with Meaghan at a sprint in what was absolutely the right direction. They hadn't been walking for that long, after all, and the brooms should be around here– "FUCK!" She was suddenly looking over a precipice that shouldn't be there, but then again, this was a stupid-ass dumbshit island in the middle of fucking nowhere?!

She took one look back at the quintafucks, so close that she could feel the vibrations of their giant spidery walks, before she grabbed Meaghan's other arm, squeezed her eyes tight, and thought of home. No heel-clicking required.

The resulting CRACK! could have been the crack of their skulls but no, it was an apparation, and when she opened her eyes it wasn't the afterlife (as far as she could tell), but her flat — both facts were reassuring. What wasn't reassuring, however, was the amount of red on her carpet, and on her trousers. Well, on some of her trousers, because some of her trousers were gone. ... And some of her leg. Oh, and, hey, the red looked interesting. Like something familiar.

Blood?

"Blood." It sounded relatively normal, but the "OH FUCK CHRIST BAMPOT SHIT FUCK–" that followed it a moment later, ah, did not.

The litany of shit shit shit that'd been running through Meaghan's head had barely had a chance to pause for breath (they were safe, they were fine) before it started up again. "Whoaaaaat the fuck, aw hell, that's -- fuck, can you -- naw I reckon not, but what if…" Shit, what were you supposed to do when the medic got hurt? That's what medics were for, being the ones who took care of that shit!

Maybe Florrie'd been right that apparating too much could wear you out magically. Or maybe they'd just been in a big bloody hurry not to die and that's where the splinching came in. Fuckit, who cared? They had to get it taken care of. "Right then, hang on a mo," she said, and putting her arm around Maggie, apparated them to St. Mungo's.

"HEY GOTTA SPLINCHING HERE," she yelled over the sound of Maggie's cursing, and tried not to slip on the blood they were dripping on the floor.

To their credit, the healers in their eye-burning, lime green robes worked fast. (And to Maggie's credit, she knew she didn't splinch an eye out because of just how bright she found those robes.) The initial shock of 'oh, is that my leg?' was already wearing off, which paved the way for pain — immense, cutting, burning agony.

The healer recognized her halfway through her barking that her name was "MAIGHREAD GOBSHITE MACDOUGAL!" and waved a medic over, instructing them to deliver a pain potion. (Meanwhile, the witch at the reception desk calmly asked, "Doesn't she work this afternoon?") Thank goodness for good medicine, because at least she was able to slump back with relief while the medic was able to temporarily stop the bleeding with some handy spellwork.

"What in Rowena's name were you doing?" The healer demanded, already handing her intake paperwork.

Maggie, evidently not the man's number-one fan, scowled as she snatched the clipboard and quill from his hands. "Partying, Dunkirke. Not that you'd have any idea what that is."

"It was just a accident, splinchin's happen all the time," Meaghan added, with no intention of adding what she'd been splinched coming from, or why they'd gone there, or the fact that this had all happened without them being completely bludgered. "Especially Hogmanay, I reckon." And she glared at the healer as if daring him to say this was their first splinching case of the night and every other wizard in the country was totally responsible. Don't try and shit me laddie, I know better, she seemed to say.

The potion was taking hold, and Maggie called out without looking up from where she was scrawling across the form: "Nearly four times as many." Then she added the final signature and handed it back to Dunkirke, looking him in the eye. "Aye? Nearly four? I can't remember."

She turned to Meaghan with a smile that looked on the surface like she'd been awarded Miss Congeniality, but she was certain friends could tell the difference. "Dunkirke's a right healer. The Gregory Cotton of the medical world, he is. A real professional. I'm in braw hands."

"Miss MacDogual." Dunkirke chose that moment to inverene, take a quick look over her form, and nod. "We'll be with you when we can. As you know, there are plenty of emergencies on Hogmanay. How many was it, almost three times as many? Four?" He shrugged. "We'll see you soon. Don't go anywhere." He glanced at her left leg, which the medic had covered with a spare robe for the time being. "Please." (But, hey, at least she and the medic shared a discreet fist-bump of solidarity before they parted ways.)

Finally, sans healer and medic, Maggie dropped her head onto the back of the chair and rolled it over to look at Meaghan. "Did you hear? Nearly four times."

Meaghan shot one last glare at Healer Dumbarse -- who she'd taken a particular dislike to as soon as he swore to Ravenclaw, the Cotton reference was just a bonus -- and was still back in time to roll her eyes at Maggie. "Oh izzat what three or four means? Fancy." She slumped back in her chair, folding her arms mulishly in front of her, but also letting out a sigh that couldn't be attributed to anything but relief.

"Douche." Maggie muttered, settling into her own chair. Her leg still throbbed despite the potion, and there were a million questions in the back of her mind that she should know the answers to about whether her leg would come back the same, or different, or weaker. Her swimming times would plummet. She'd probably swim in a circle! She'd never do a proper lap again!

There was only one solution right now. She coughed into her jacket sleeve and reached inside, bringing out a little something that she nudged Meaghan with.

The Firewhisky Flask of MacDougal was a beautiful thing to Meaghan just then, not that it wasn't always. She glanced around the room very casually and slipped it out of Maggie's hand, then let her hair fall forward as she took just a nip. She sighed again, started snickering like it was gigglewater in the flask and not firewhisky, and passed it back, shaking her head.

"That," she said, "was fuckin'. Mental."

A little dopey but still mostly together, and definitely not in a state where she should have been drinking, Maggie grinned and cast a furtive look around the room before she knocked back a good drink, not caring about obscuring it with her hair. "We shouldn't be breathin' right now," she admitted, "but there's no fuckin' way that Cotton's ever been to the Isle of Drear. No. Fuckin'. Way."

She took another drink then let the flask settle against the arm of the chair. Then she whined. "We missed Hogmaanaaay."

Meaghan nodded. "Hed've pissed himself at the sight of a quantumpog." She hadn't been that scared herself since… since… well, about the last year or so.

But she frowned at the rest of what Maggie said. "Hogmanay is a fuckin' wossname, state of mind," she insisted, with as much dignity as she could muster at this time of night after nearly fucking dying on a miserable unplottable island where her bones would've never been found. "Give us a toast and then gimme the flask and we're gold."

This all seemed perfectly reasonable to Maggie. She closed her eyes and held the firewhiskey between the two of them. "It's been a fuckin' year, and a fuckin' night, and fuck Cotton, and fuck Dunkirke, but God bless Scotland and God bless us." With a start, she added, "And fuck quipplepings." Aaand shot.

"Fuck quipplepings," Meaghan repeated with gusto, taking the flask and hiding it in her hands in case a healer was watching. "Fuck everyone that tells Scotland and Scots what to do. Fuck everyone that thinks they're better than us. Happy Hogmanay to all and fuck the English!" Her voice had risen by the end, and she took her swig in open defiance, as befitted a Scot.