Interlude: The Cloak: Part 2
NonsensicalRants
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Interlude:
The Cloak: Part 2
Azkaban Prison: November 2006
"Appoline!" Harry called out as Fleur's mother approached with her lovely entourage.
The older Veela, who still looked like she could be Fleur's older sister, smiled graciously and genuinely as she sprinted up to him for an embrace. Ahhhh, warm fuzzies!
"Harry! Meet my very, VERY extended family." Appoline said as she motioned to the nearly oned hundred Veela behind her.
There were French Veela. There were Italian Veela. There were Russian Veela(Dear GOD! How were they SO hot?!). There were African Veela as dark as coal and as beautiful as diamonds. There were chatty American Veela, demure Thai Veela, stoic Aboriginal Veela and even one Ainu Veela who wore lipstick in such a way that it made her look like she had a creepy clown smile. Still pretty though.
"It's on days like these I resent my immunity to you ladies." Harry confessed. "If I were as glassy eyed as these fellas from you, I'd have nothing to fear from Dementors."
Ironically enough, the contingent of Aurors were holding up very well against the allure. Proper training and discipline will do that to men. Of course, they were under specific orders to LET the Veela allure affect them as they approached the island. Let the artificial love-potion-like effects keep them so emotionally preoccupied in their infatuation that the fear and cold of dementors won't reach them. Sadly, this was not an option for Harry.
"That brings up a good question." Susan interrupted, surrounded by here squad of lady Aurors. "What does that leave you and us with dementor resistance? Since Veela don't make us emotionally excited enough to resist the misery."
"Actually, they do, just not in the same way." Harry informed her. "You know that uncontrollable jealousy and resentment bubbling up in your chest by their mere presence? Yeah, that's not you being a petty bitch, that's their magic working on you. And don't discount burning envy and fiery rage, it may be enough to keep the cold and fear at bay."
Susan seemed unconvinced.
"That doesn't seem as pleasant as deep infatuation and giddiness." She complained. "I don't suppose you have male Veela with you, Delacour?"
"No such thing." Said Appoline. "Well, aside from the occasional mutant. But we haven't had one of those in a century and we always used to put them down at birth."
They all stared at her in horror.
"What?! I said it's been over a century!" She defended. "Besides, it's a mercy killing. The allure still only effects males and for some reason male relatives aren't immune as with normal Veela."
Oh god! Yeah, don't let that mutation spread. There are some birth defects worth mercy killing over, and one that makes your biological father feel lust and infatuation with his baby boy at no fault of his own is one of those. Magic was truly terrible sometimes.
"It is moot point. I have friend coming." Viktor told them.
Hermione turned on him.
"And this friend can make us emotionally resistant to dementors?" Susan asked.
"No. But HIS friend can." Viktor explained.
As if his words summoned them, a final entourage of allies portkeyed in. Even without the bright red, yellow and blue quidditch robes they all wore, Harry would have recognized the team of massive, tattooed Kiwis ten miles away. The entirety of the Moutahara Macaws stood before Azkaban, and they had brought with them their mascot, Sparky the phoenix.
"Vik-TOR!" Captain Hongi yelled, carrying Sparky on his leather-gloved arm like a falcon.
Australian phoenixes are big. While Fawkes was tall and slender, Sparky had a body similar to a pelican, but strongly resembling Fawks in the face. He also sported a vibrant blue steak along his back and on his crest feathers to compliment the usual red and gold.
The mystic bird took one look at Harry and pounced from Hongi's gloved hand to glide over at him. Harry would never admit it, but a phoenix charging him was enough to make him freeze. Nothing made Harry freeze, but this did. And it was for nothing, because all Sparky did was take up a perch on Harry's shoulder.
The rest of their contingent stared with a mixture of expressions that all amounted to boredom as Sparky settled in on his neas seat. Was Harry's life so chaotic that every increasingly surprising abnormality seemed more mundane with each new bizarreness? Yes. Yes it was.
"Because Harry Potter?" Viktor suggested.
"Yup. That's pretty much all there is to it at this point, eh?" Draco added.
Kingsley separated them into groups. All women, or individuals immune to the Veela allure, such as Harry, Brain and his highest students form the DOM, were put into one group with Sparky as their guardian. The remainder were all split into teams with their own Veela guard and apportioned Auror's based on their skill with the patronus. Love had their own platoon of members from his/her/its own department. Several of whom had gone through the same procedure to fuse into the Greek ideal of two people merged into an eight limbed, two headed abominations.
"I am afraid to ask." Said Hermione. "But why do you all not have Veela in your group? Or else, why are you not joining Harry's team?"
Despite being cloaked, Harry could sense both faces smiling at the innocent question.
"Because we are all immune to both the powers of the Veela, and the powers of dementors." The male head said.
"Plus, we make Harry uncomfortable, and we need him to focus." Said the female one with a wink at harry that he couldn't see but could somehow feel.
"How... How is that possible?" Dudley dared to ask.
The octopus double shrugged.
"When you are permanently bonded to the love of your life, it's easy to feed off of those most beautiful emotions even in the darkest depths of Azkaban." The male head said underneath their double hood. "And you know as well as we do, Harry, that Love is the most powerful force in the universe."
Harry shuddered, both at the creepy insinuation and the fact that it was true. Of all the departments, Love had the greatest claim on him save for maybe Death. Honestly? they all did. Subject of a prophecy, master of the deathly hollows, only know possessor of a mother's sacrificial protection? There's prophecy, death and love in one go. Add his odd extrasensory ability and Brain could throw his claim over Harry as a potential recruit too.
One by one they were sent off on oversized row boats, several dozen people a piece, with Harry's at the front.
He sat at the head of his team's boat, an oversized rowboat capable of seating all two dozen of then, while wielding his wandless patronus. The stag spirit animal cloaking him in such a way as to make him look like a wendigo of divine light. With Sparky the Phoenix on his shoulder he must have looked like the pure antithesis of evil.
With Sparky's warm comfort on his shoulder and Dudley's strength of character by his side combined made him feel like it too.
"And I thought I was a show off." Brain complained.
"Clearly, you do not spend enough time with our Harry, or else you'd know better." Hermione chided the cloaked man.
Harry strongly disagreed. But then again, and the formidable force of DOM fighters and the absolute harem of gorgeous, badass lady aurors - and Hermione - were also a huge moral boost.
Yeah, he was feeling pretty good about their chances.
Harry could only smirk as the boat propelled itself magically across the deceptively calm sea to the storm of cold and sadness that awaited them.
We are Unspeakables. It is not in our domain to make nor enforce law, nor to be a part of the machinations of politics. It is our domain to know.
Academics learn, but never know. Theory is the best they can achieve, though even then they stop at mere hypotheses or pure conjecture. We are better than them.
We seek to know truths, not facts nor opinions. The truth. What is it? That is the adventure. And it is a lonely journey, for our oath binds us, sows us down, preventing us from sharing with others who would help us on the path.
Do you accept this burden? This duty?
- Speach given by Purgatory, Head Unspeakable of afterlife research, to all new recruits.
Father Time struggled back to his feet after tackling the Delacour woman to the ground.
The infiltration had gone well, with masters of the patronus taking the lead as they advanced.
But the foul creatures had changed in their starvation. Having started out somewhat resembling emaciated corpses, it was surprising to see that years of being cutoff from any food source had made them grown. The scabrous skin on their arms rippled over hidden forms that resembled femurs or tibias or ulnas stacked on top of each other. Like somebody had taken many such vibes from human corpses, made a faggot out of them, and wrapped it in filthy leather.
For a while they advanced unhindered, the patronus keeping them at bay while the other wizards conjured or transfigured methods of restraining them. You couldn't kill them, but you could chain them and cage them. And this method worked perfectly.
Until it didn't.
For dementors to be hungry enough to try and force their way through the protective barrier of light, and nearly succeed, meant they thoroughly misunderstood these creatures and their limits.
So Father Time took his opportunity to show the wizarding world the knowledge and power his department had uncovered, and cast that most devastating spell of his own discovery. The ball of greyish, rampaging mist left his want and straight into the center of the group of dementors.
When it struck he immediately realized something was wrong, and tackled the nearest person to the ground. Most of the rest went down with him.
Bad here he was, his skin tingling with he feeling of a thousand, burning ants. The ambient radiation in the air he could taste it, he recognized metallic taste of the chemo treatment from years ago.
The few other times he used this time altering magic to hyperage had always resulted in such an effect, an easily predictable one with any knowledge of atomic half-lives. Such magic was unpredictable, and he may have overdone it.
He meant to age the dementors and surroundings by a hundred years. He might have gotten it closer to ten thousand. With a half life of one hundred and fifty years, the silicates in the basalt making up the hallway it all decayed to near nonexistence, breaking down into a massive dose of beta radiation and lower elements in an instant. He shuddered to think how much gamma or alpha radiation might have been released by trace elements within the rocks and soil.
"What the hell was that?!" Apolline asked when she ducked back up from cover.
"An experiment." Father time told her. "I had an idea for a way to kill dementors, and that was it. Do you see a dementor anymore? Let alone ten?"
And indeed, the ten or more dementors they had come across were nothing more than a pile of hyper-decayed... stuff, littering the ground before them.
It was either the intense radiation, aging or actual starvation that did it. And because if his blunder with overdoing the spell he had no way of knowing which it was.
"Should we turn back?" Asked A young man in his department. "I don't know of any magic to clear away radioactive material safely."
Father Time did. It amounted to either coating the fallout in material, any material that can block the type of radiation in question such as paper for alpha radiation or cloth for beta. Aluminum would be better, but it is notoriously difficult to conjure or transfigured, nearly as much as copper silver and gold, and like all conductive materials reverted from the transfiguration shockingly fast.
"Yes. Clear out more paths and capture more dementors. The fewer there are to come after us when we descend into the dead zone..." Father Time stopped midspeach.
The piles of dead dementors twitched.
Then they wriggled.
They writhed, and expanded, and contracted and crawled over one another in what Father Time hoped wasn't an act of intimacy, for it was ugly. They the teeth came out. Sharp, jagged, broken teeth amongst a swarm of bony masses hidden beneath the leathery, scabrous skin of dementors. Then there's were the hands, too many fingered, too many jointed hands jutting out of any limb ending there was.
The teeth slid across the appendages to the center mass where they lined up like a zipper, a zipper that then opened to show the inside. Hunger. Ten or more millennia of hunger mutating the creatures in an instant into the monster before them.
So yeah, starvation, aging and intense radiation were not in fact fatal to dementors. Three things to add to the list of ways to not kill them.
"Should we call for..." A young American Veela tried to ask."
"Call for Harry Potter? Yes." Father Time confirmed, with zero damage to his pride.
They just needed to hold out until he got here.
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