Monday, October 23, 2017 - Federal Building, Salem WHO: Ben McMullen and Max Rivera WHAT: Max was assigned to help Ben track down the missing animated pirate head. Ben is a dragon. WHERE: Auror offices, Federal Building WHEN: Monday, October 23 around 3pm WHY: Because “headless” is a bad word in New England... RATING: 4+ for occasional mild language STATUS: complete
Max reached out for the older auror’s hand. “Hey, nice to meet you. Max Rivera, Mysteries. They sent me up from The City to work with you.” Max looked down at the sparsely typed piece of paper. “My instructions were kind of brief, and they didn’t have a case file for me, so I’ll need your help getting useful here.”
He looked down at his orders again. “It says something about you… losing your head?”
Ben looked up from the papers and maps on the table in front of him. “And not even bagels or coffee?” There was a smile there, just occluded by the cartoon dragon face mask he had been asked to put on while in the office -- okay technically he added the dragon part, but still. He would have rather been in bed, would have loved to crawl back to sleep after his meeting this morning, but here he was, trying to some success to be an adult.
“Also still have my head. Although you might run into some debate on that. Ignore it.” Ben was quickly coming around. Fresh blood. This meant people who didn’t hate or be otherwise annoyed with him. First impressions mattered. He stood up. “But air high five in place to greeting because,” he motioned his face.
Max smiled and put his hands together and nodded his head. “If you want coffee and 12 hour old bagels from the Department of Mysteries kitchen back in The City, you’re not just sick, you’re delirious. Mysteries coffee isn’t good even when it’s fresh.” Max looked at the mask more closely. “I’d say it should be breathing smoke, but that might defeat the purpose, so well done.”
Max put his backpack/suitcase down beside him. “Now, whose head is it you’ve lost, and what have you done to find it so far?”
Ben certainly did not mean Department food. He would never wish that on his enemies. However, visitors from NYC should come bearing food for him, especially as Salem really lacked in quality bagels. He was pretty sure there was a rule about this. “You’re not really from the NYC office,” said Ben slowly. Max might have made a good point about the dragon mask he would take under advisement, there was something else going.
Plus While he didn’t personally know everyone in the NYC office, he certainly bothered Molly enough, to know who else worked in Mysteries. “Where did they actually bring you in from?”
Max shrugged. “Thirty-seven hours ago, I was wrapping up a case in Pointe à la Hache, in Plaquemines Parish, where some joker was trying to summon a hurricane. Turned out it was all a ruse to sell fake hurricane insurance, but that’s what it’s like down there. Anyway, that’s when I got my orders for New York. I’d just about figured where to put my briefcase down in the Woolworth Building when I got sent here.” As Max spoke, he gestured with his hands, ending up pointing to Ben’s desk at the end. “I don’t mind. I get to see a lot of places. But don’t ask me anything about the New York Mysteries folks. All they know is that my name is on a folder on an otherwise empty desk.” Max smiled and looked around. “Speaking of desks, there sure are a lot of Aurors in Salem, aren’t there? What’s going on?”
Pointe à la Hache, hurricane summoning. Ben didn’t recognize the name. It sounded French, Creole maybe. “Louisiana.” Which meant Southeast region, and really she was already on his mind, so it wasn’t that big of a jump to wonder if his mom was somehow involved. Ben paused his whole body taking on an unnatural stillness for a few seconds. Certainly the thirty-seven timetable fit. This would been an appropriate moment for his dragon mask to breathe smoke.
“Wait, wait, wait, so you don’t know anything? You just grabbed a bag and showed up. Nothing to deliver, no knowledge of what you are doing - especially going by the head comment. Just here to help?”
Max nodded and smiled. He was certainly going to want to think about how this whole introduction had gone later, because something interesting was clearly going on. He wanted to reassure Ben, though. “That’s right. One more hand sent from New York, this one out of Mysteries. To the best of my knowledge, I’m not nefarious at all.” Ben grinned, hoping the joke didn’t set off the other Auror. “What’s up with the head, anyway?”
“As long as it still leaves the door open for dastardly,” came the quick response. Reassured wasn’t the right word, but he would proceed. Ben was expected to collaborate with his colleagues. “The head is a missing head of a wax pirate that was animated during an attack at the New England Pirate Museum on Friday. Myself and Auror O’Brian were attacked by the tour guide, Frank, who we believe is linked to the Sons of September.”
“I’ll see what I can do about ‘dastardly’. I am completely on-point for ‘latin’, and that may be the closest I get.” Max jotted down a quick note. “So, we’re looking for an animated or formerly animated wax head. Do we want to find out where it is, bring it to us, or find out where it went? Each of those is a slightly different problem. Which of them is our problem?”
“The bread on that sandwich - where it was, where it is.” As amusing at the thought of a pirate head zipping around the streets of Salem might be, Ben really couldn’t afford more toward attached to his name right now. He was lucky to not have been suspended - although the anti-apparation bracelet certainly did feel like house arrest, even if it was for his protection. “Which I would actually be pretty good at, if not for the … well, that doesn’t really matter.” Although his stomach turned at the remembrance of the cheeseburger. Such an idiot.
Max jottted down more notes. “Got it. All bagel, no schmear. That gives us two ends to pick up the string from, that’s good. So, what I do, generally, is create what the department calls ‘improvised impermanent thaumic tools’, and I call ‘making shit up’. It’s mostly a matter of writing down 1, what we know or have, 2, a blank, and 3, an outcome, and then all we have to do is fill in the blank.”
Max looked down at his notes. “One obvious approach is sympathetic magic. Do we have the rest of the wax pirate, or can we get it? The other requires me to know a little bit more about how the wax pirate got animated in the first place, because there may be some sort of power signature or trace to a wand we can do. What do we know about the animating power? Was that part of the attack on you and Auror O’Brian?”
Now Ben was really upset about the very distinct lack of bagels today. Although one did have to be winning to earn a bagel on Monday morning. Especially when the question he wasn’t going to answer unless directly asked was spoken. “I did it. I animated the wax pirate. Two actually, and no, we didn’t intentionally behead anything that was how we found them. I mean, Frank was throwing lightning bolts at me,” he paused, noting he was getting too excited.
“The suspect began attacking, Auror O’Brian literally disappeared, and I was left to defend myself, so … magic.” Magic he couldn’t recreate at the moment, but magic all the same. “Not quite a golem, but vaguely in that realm.”
“Huh. I’ve never run across that kind of magic before, outside of textbooks. Piertotum Locomotor is the closest spell I know, and it’s not very ‘golem’ like. I’m still leaning towards Sympathetic Magic, but how do you spell up a golem? Maybe we can use that to help with the tracing.”
“Well it’s not taught, not outside of the bloodlines.” Once upon a time, Ben received in depth education about what can and cannot be shared about his magic. There was protocol and security clearance checks required - his own security clearance was far higher than it should be because he had access to the guard statues. Somewhere he remembered, but to be safe he usually kept to what was in the history books or just gave a demonstration.
Unable to show, not tell. Yeah this was how this day could get worse, because it once more brought the specific lack of Guardian to focus. “A golem is a mix of transfiguration, ancient runes, and unique Judaic sorcery. It could become the perfect soldier, assuming the creator knew what he or she was doing. The use was instrumental in keeping the inferi at bay against Grindelwald.” He had actually done a few shows on this, so it would have been easy to just keep talking. Also, he doubted that Max wanted a history lesson.
“This specific golem-adjacent magic used some dirt and sand.” Even without access to the magic, Ben still kept the vials on his person, just like the snacks. “Specifically this mix,” he said pulling out the earth in question and placing it on the table. It was harmless on its own, but it may help with the tracking piece.
Max looked at the earth in question, looked to Ben for permission, and picked up some of the earth. He rubbed it between his fingers, sniffed it, and eventually put a tiny amount on his tongue. “So, you cast this spell wandless, I’d bet. Wands allow modern mages to do things all out of proportion to our natural magical abilities, without draining ourselves to empty husks. But they’re new. They’re not how ancient tribal level magic is powered. One of the things we learned about pre-columbian and pre-contact cultures in South America is how hard it is to do wandless magic, and what the ways are to make something with significant power anyway.
“The most popular way is, of course, ritual magic. This takes time, often a full coven of witches, maybe quite a bit of blood. That doesn’t seem like this. You didn’t take any time to prepare the wax man for animation. Same goes for sacrifice, stone circles, calendar. You are sick, and there are plenty of ancient magics that use the power of the shaman to power the creation, but the wizarding flu is much more normal in nature, so I don’t think you’re the battery. It’s not like that little vial has a frozen pixie in it or anything, so you’re not stealing life from there for your creation.
“So, there’s still a number of possibilities. But let me try to take the easy way out, and I assure you this is for the investigation. What is the source of the thaumic energy that keeps the creature going from moment to moment?”
Ben watched, curious as to what Max would do with the earth. And of all things eating some really didn’t surprise him that much, weird as it might be. “No,” he said slowly, “it’s literally just a mix of dirt and sand.” Of course he collected it the land on his grandparent’s home - but that was more preference than actual need.
He sighed trying to find the words to explain how he did what he did. It was harder now, when that connection wasn’t there, leaving instead this emptiness. “It’s like I can feel this energy in the ground, that I pull into me, or into something else. It’s usually something that’s just there like a pulse the back of my head.” Ben had never bothered to study the theory, he just wanted the application. His cousin, Amelia, had endless opinions about it, but there was a reason he was operations and she was mysteries.
Max wrote down a few notes, probably more words than Ben had said. “OK, a few more questions. Does this external power source that you pull from ever change? I mean is it stronger sometimes and weaker others? And is that tied to places, or for instance, time of day?” He looked up and smiled. “Oh, and can you feel it now, even without trying to make a golem?”
“I’m usually aware of it, and I guess it can change based on location.” It was definitely one of those things that Ben didn’t really think about until it was gone. He certainly hated thinking about it now. “Also, it makes apparating a solid bitch pretty much all of the time.” Which was probably too much and not helpful information. “Amelia thinks it’s … fae lines?”
“Amelia?” Max asked, but changed the subject rather than wait to discover who she was. “She’s probably right. There’s a phenomenon called “ley lines”, which is really just an observation of the linear nature of the connectivity of magical potentials. The Chinese call it Feng Shui, but the English noticed that it could be discovered by seeing where people did magic, because people who need that extra juice naturally gravitate to places where it exists. There’s supposedly a really permanent magical line between Stonehenge and the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, and it goes right over Salem.
“Which is great for us, because it’s like a river, or if you’re a city boy it’s like a sewer. The act of taking something out from it creates a sort of bulge that pulls the line closer to it. Not much, and we can’t really re-align a two-thousand year old ley line just by making a gingerbread man, but, if we play our cards right, we can find him.
Max looked over his notes. “All we have to do is make some sort of Ley Line disturbance detector, which I think we can do. Do you know if there are any maps of the Ley Lines of Essex County that we can get copies of?”
Those were a whole lot of words. Words that Ben was really sure he had heard before in some variation and then promptly placed right in the discard bin of thoughts. All Ben ever wanted to do was to make weird little creatures from the earth -- who needed the academia behind it?
“Weiss sent all this stuff over,” said Ben, motioning to the mix of papers and books on the desk in front of him. He had done a good job of moving them around looking like he was working. “I don’t think anything in there would be above your security level.” She had not been happy with him, which meant boring facts and essays. She had even instructed him to ‘learn something.’ It still counted if he was learning by proxy, right? “But help yourself.”
Max looked at the box. “Thanks, I think.” Max dug through the box and the papers quickly, making two neat piles. One was tentatively classified as ‘relevant’ and the other was ‘Why the hell did they give him this?’.
“Good, I’ll want to look at some of this later, but for now, we have this.” Max pulled the map from the book carefully, since it was not new. Soon, someone would need to copy or update it. He hoped that wasn’t going to be him.
”Three smaller lines, consistent with the overarching great circle which is why the home of American Magic is in Massachusetts, and not en La Florida. I wouldn’t be surprised if it headed off to Mount Greylock from here. The Gallows Hill/Essex Street line is primary, according to this, which makes sense since Essex Street is where everyone of note lived in the seventeenth century, or so say the oldest maps. That’ll give us a baseline for determining an isothaumic noise floor. We’ll need to be able to detect both abnormally heightened levels of magic and disturbances caused by recent magical activity, which should show up as sporadic high-energy particles without being statistically significant.”
Max looked over his notes, the papers, and Ben’s sand and dirt one last time. “I think I’m almost ready to start. What we’re trying to make is a very specifically tuned magical version of a Contador de centelleo, which is an updated Geiger Counter. I’m pretty sure we can use Rankine’s Method to get started, at least. I’ll also need to put a charm on it, so that people who see it think we’re hunting rare Pokemon.” It’s not clear if Max is kidding or if he means that last bit.
“I’m going to need some of your mix, something from the pirate body, a theodolite, and a Seismometer, if possible. Was this building ever an atomic bomb shelter? There’s probably things we can nick from the basement if it was.”
“Oh, and if there’s a written report from either you or Auror O’Brian, I’d like to read it, to make sure I haven’t missed something.”
Whether or not Max was kidding, Ben became momentarily fixated on his Pokemon collection. “I totally have an Onix and a Sudowoodo.” And there was definitely a little smirk there, although hidden behind the mask.
However, there was now a mission at hand. A mission that if he didn’t want to actually be suspended he might have to take seriously. “I’m pretty sure I have been told in very exact words that I should not even think about entering or getting too close to the Pirate Museum at this point, but I’ll see what I can do.”
Max kept sketching and making minor corrections to his design. “Of course you do. They’re ground types. You know that Geodude evolves into Golem, right?” Max had lost track of the game at the Academy, but Ilvermorny had been full of players. He knew of at least two couples who met on late-night pokemon hunts. He’d heard that playing the game was banned on the grounds at Castelobruxo, because the caipora were setting up gyms to play pranks on the students, like digging pit traps. Caipora had odd ideas about “protecting” students. Max was glad they had never come stateside.
“So, I can do most of what I need here, if I get a lab bench or even a desk that will act as a lab bench. But I do need something from the pirate. I’m not gonna ask you to think, but I may want to ask you to help me arrange some backup so I can do a nice, quiet crime scene investigation and you can sleep off the wizarding flu.”
“But if I’m gonna do that, I’d love to get a rundown on who’s working out of this office these days. Not everyone can be on the missing pirate head case. Oh, and probably dinner as well. Railway food is only slightly better than federal building food.”
Ben looked up at Max and then down at the desk he had be assigned to this morning. “Consider this desk, your desk now.” This probably was not what he was supposed to be doing, but at least it was probably, partially within the parameters.
“Ahh, the missing pirate head is one part in the case we’re working on - Sierra Alpha 95. I can get you a copy of the case file, get you up to speed.” Because right, flesh blood - didn’t know anything about what was going on, other than he was tasked to help Ben. “You may also want to check in with someone from communications for further insight on the case - that would be Sal or Kit.” Ben paused. He was supposed to be going for formality, except totally didn’t work for him with those two. “Or ahh Staunton-Perksmoore or Ghezzi. For operations support O’Brian or Knight are probably your best options right now. Although I think Knight is back in NYC today, not sure when she’ll be back. So O’Brian then. But we’re all on the network.”
Max nodded. SA95 was on his orders, but they’d been too rushed, and probably too disorganized to get him the casefile before he left New York. “I’d like that. I’ll head down to the basement to look for things I can use.” Max looked at Ben, in his mask. “And you should head home and get some sleep. Not much more you can do today, and you’ll feel better for it in the morning.”