Absit Omen RPG

“Ravindar! How blessed,” Nadine exclaimed, recognising her old school friend, who now taught her youngest. Gosh he was always so impeccably turned out, even for breakfast at The Leaky Cauldron. She had robe envy.

“You look well. How is your summer? Is it time for school shopping?”
“I got my letter with the list for second year.”

Aoide was keenly unfolding her letter, as if a Hogwarts professor wouldn’t know what was on it. Ravindar was so good with her. He’d been gracious at the Spectre wedding back at Easter too. They’d fallen so out of touch through all the years, but had spent time regaling stories of adventures abroad.

“Thank you, you look wonderful. I must have the details of your tailor.” Nadine clasped his forearm in both hands. “I’ve the day off so we are on school shopping before the crowds. Are you doing similar, before the term begins?”

“You’re going to tell me he’s ‘different once you get to know him’,” Nadine persisted. “I did not see that coming. Oh my days. You got to be prepared for this to get out. He’s the bloody Minister!”

Nadine put her head in her hands. Hester had decided to play a delicate game here. What with the wizard’s reputation and his power. He could as easily make Hester, and get her seen for a brilliant job somewhere else in the world as destroy her if he decided to. As much as Nadine had agreed with his decisions since taking office he was still a man in power. He was no Zephyr Persepolis or Kingsley Shacklebolt.

“Hex me sideways Hester.” Nadine exclaimed. “If this gets out it won’t be me. I promise you. No way I am telling anyone that… But if you marry him, I’m going to tell everyone I heard it first…!”


End

Nadine mirrored Hester’s cringe, but wrote down the details all the same. Would it really be such a loss?

“If there is, then they won’t be missed,” she said with confidence, smirking. One less near immortal being on the planet was a good thing. Nadine tucked away her quill and notebook, considering the details adequate, or adequate enough for the time it was in the morning.

“I don’t care what Penny Pickler patronises, or Vaillancourt tries to convince Ceph, they should not have the freedoms they have." Nadine waved a finger back and forth. “Hmph. I’ll write this up as a statement, Hes, ta, but it probably won’t come to anything... But I’d wear a garlic scarf next time you’re travelling on the sleeper train if I were you.”

End

“Hester!!” Nadine clean left her chair. Swiped her friend with the nearest thing to hand, a copy of a magazine. It passed purely through air rather than meeting any part of her visitor, but conveyed her incredulity at this news.

“Merlin save me! Am I hearing things?” She threw the magazine down. Gestured about her head with both hands, suddenly animated. “Why did you let yourself be one of his conquests!”

Edwin Glass had a reputation amongst the witches of the Ministry. He had chased skirt for decades and never married or even got engaged as far as Nadine knew. He had always been a flirt, only overshadowed by the outrageous Lockhart who headed up Seven. When he flirted with you, the whole floor knew as he was incapable of speaking in a tone quieter than shouting. When Glass had tried to flirt you increasingly wanted to wash yourself. Nadine and Rex had become a thing early enough that Glass had not tried anything too far.

Nadine made a note. Sounded like the stereotypical vampire out of a text book, apart from being female and the tattoos. Those were a bit more unique. Something that would be recognisable if she was seen again.

The comparison to the WCU made Nadine chuckle. You could hear Bagnold and his team coming because of the way their silver jangled. He was just missing the eyeliner to complete the look they were both coincidentally visualising.

“… That’s how she was found, someone said. In someone’s compartment and they tried to banish it.”

“So maybe she was just fare dodging,” Nadine reasoned. Plenty of wix tried to do it, and if the vampire was holed up as a bat, it was laying low. “Unless it was just creeping and waiting for the person to go to sleep so they could strike...?” Nadine pondered aloud, a little more relaxed on her questioning because it was Hester and they were eating breakfast. “No claims anyone was bitten though? And do you think they went out this side of the Channel?”

Nadine twisted her head, looked at Hester out of the side of her eye. Her friend was all of a sudden a bit lost for words. Was Hester expecting Nadine to fill in the gaps?

“He gets you?” Nadine questioned quietly, prompting Hester’s hand wave at her scepticism. That was like Nadine saying Solomon Carstairs ‘got’ her. He respected her professionally as far as she read but she wouldn’t be sharing her personal concerns unless they were about a colleague who needed ‘intervention’ by someone higher than Pratt.

“Hester, what are you saying?” Nadine asked, turning to look at her with the other side of her eyes. “You moving up to Level One?”

“You can trust me.”
“I know I can, girl.”

She really ought to spend more time with Hester. They were often far too fleeting due to their professional lives. As Nadine rested at home after leaving St Mungo’s she’d wondered why she hadn’t made time. Aoide was away at school and Ariadne had moved out of the house so there were no children to soak up her time these days.

Despite the fact Nadine hadn’t told Hester all of how it had gone down, she knew that they would circle back onto the subject during her visit. It was inevitable and how their conversations went. Instead, it seemed Hester had something to share herself which needed to be said in person.

“Spill,” Nadine encouraged, the background tension of speaking about her ordeal slipping from her shoulders as she became intrigued. Had Hester got a new job? Was Gabrielle Pepper pregnant again?

“How has that been going?” Nadine asked. She was generally in favour of Edwin Glass’ policies and thought he was no-nonsense. Yes he’d been the occasional pain in the backside while head of Accidents and Catastrophes, but that was just the Department’s function, and Nadine could see past it. “The way you say it implies you met more than once?”

“You were up close then?” Nadine asked. Hester was sat opposite her. Making slower progress through the food than Nadine purely because Hester was doing all the talking. The auror had shed her crimson robe as they were sat so close to the fire. It might be the end of March but spring still felt a long way away. “You and the guard both called her female. What did she look like?”

Vampires didn’t change their appearance too easily, apart from through clothes and employing disguises. If this one had been fighting so physically like Hester described, she wouldn’t have easily held a disguise without proper magic. It sounded like it had snuck on hoping for a passage to England without having to pay from what Hester had already described. The train had travelled overnight from across Europe with mostly sleeping passengers. Or maybe the bloodsucker had got on board for some terrible advent calendar of fresh necks to suck. Nadine had rubbed her own neck at the thought.

“Yeh, that’s why I’m here, Hes.” Nadine felt free to explain.

It was clear the vampire was no secret on the train, and had caused enough of a ruckus to wake the likes of Hester up. That particular train guard wasn’t keen on sticking around to explain, just like Nadine’s fellow auror. Still, she would kick herself if this turned up to be significant later. There had been a number of recent cases that had started out with something small and shrugged off like this. If she had to write something up about the call, then at least she could get the detail out of one of her best friends.

“Guard said it left the train before the station. Do you know if that was still in France, or did it get into the country?” Admittedly this was a long shot that Hester knew. It would have been dark and the train hurtled through at a magical pace on a track that defied Muggle physics. Nadine was fuzzy on the magic that allowed the locomotive to cross water. Perhaps Rex would fill her in if she asked. It sounded like something he would have obscure knowledge in, or have a friend in Transport who’d feel inclined to draw a diagram…

“You going home?” Nadine asked, feeling somewhat deflated for the lack of action. “Want to get breakfast? A bite to eat since you escaped one on the neck?”

Nadine liked the thought of using a staff. She had seen photographs of family ancestors with them back in Nigeria. When they immigrated to Britain in the 1950s, twenty or more years before Nadine was even a thought, the family had switched with new generations admitted to Hogwarts where wands were required, and through an expectation of cultural assimilation.

Nadine’s mother had married an Englishman, and they had taken his name instead of hers. Despite the fact that side of the family had squibs and muggles, his relationship to Nadine's mother had not been received smoothly by everyone. She had neglected in her younger days, but more and more she felt compelled to look back through her family tree and embrace it, rather than feeling she had to fit in. Omari had tried to, with his sabbatical to South Africa.

“If two old white wixes can,” Nadine retorted sharply, “but I think Morgenthau will keep whatever he finds close to his chest.” She huffed, legitimately frustrated with the restriction on knowledge. “I have told you more than I should, no doubt.”

Hester had leaned forward, intrigued. Nadine paused to consider her words, suddenly worried she was sharing too much. If Morgenthau and Glass did not bury her through some other means, Lyra Gamp would have to face the wizengamot some day soon, and if they could figure out how to interview an umbrella…

“No wands.” Nadine drew her hands apart. Her mind’s eye pictured Lyra throwing her hands at them all from the new doorway. A wicked look on her face. Not her true face, but one more recognisably her beside the lean, cragged madman that was her husband. “I could have been standing on ice for all I could hold my ground,” Nadine blinked slowly, “she only had to gesture,” she demonstrated, “and it threw us back. It was like fighting blind, no indication of the spells, no tells, nothing. Something new, but nothing’s ever truly new is it? Our kind don’t all use wands, do they?”

“What was with the umbrellas?”
“I’m not sure…”

Nadine shook her head. That had been puzzling her too. Enough to consider asking her former sister and brother in law, but she preferred keeping her distance now. Every time she had brushed with the Gamps in the last year it had turned out for the worse. Even Rex, who was entirely reasonable and often the more rational of the couple, had discouraged further contact. Then again, it was her ex-husband’s family, so more understandable on balance.

“They got out.” Nadine continued the story. “There was nowhere for them to go, they’d boxed themselves in. Well, I guess her plan was to get him out without anyone realising it was her. While she pretended to be the healer. If Andie had been half an hour later… then they might have got away.” Nadine shook her head some more, disbelieving that the nightmare could have continued with their escape.

“Instead they threw magic at us that I have never known, Hes. It was like something new, but I think it was actually something very old.”

Saturday 31st March
5:55am
Platform 7½, Kings Cross, London



“Do you know how to kill a French vampire?”
“Hmm…”
“You have to drive a baguette through its heart. Sounds easy, but the process is painstaking.”
“Merlin that’s awful. Thank my wand that’s the train.”

It was the end of Auror Pinn’s Friday to Saturday nightshift, and she had been almost home and dry before the report had come in. A train travelling to London’s platform seven and a half from across Europe had sent an emergency message ahead from northern France before negotiating the English Channel. It had been short, but surprisingly used the word ‘please’, albeit in another language.

URGENT: Vampire dangereux. Arrivée 5h55 Platform 7 ½. Assistance s.v.p.

The message had then hurtled to the Ministry, in more colloquial English. The wizarding government in turn ejected the decidedly weary Nadine onto the scene. Nothing about the incident was bearable so far. Not the time, the terrible jokes from the platform porters, and especially not the mention of vampire.

Nadine disliked vampires. They should have their teeth removed, in her opinion, though she was wise not to share such views out loud. Last time[1] she had suggested anything contrary to Penny Pickler’s Perfect Perceptions of these beings, she had ended up on one of Pickler’s courses[2] learning said alliterative list of essentials. The only pleasant part of this particular platform was the lack of pesky Tristan Vaillancourt, the ‘vampire consultant’ who had made a complaint to cause Nadine and Head Auror Pratt to sit the remedial course.

She and Bailey readied themselves as the train pulled in, hissing and clunking along the platform edge. Several windows were down, faces peering out already. None of them looked panicked, just curious to see two red robed aurors with the porters.

Then with a sigh, the train came to a stop, and there was a terrific rattling as the doors sprung open of their own magical accord. Passengers with trunks and bags began to step out in all manner of fashions and states. Many of them were still rubbing sleep out of their eyes from the early start. Nadine scanned the crowd, but everyone just seemed sleepy.

The porter with the terrible jokes whistled out. He was busy unloading a stack of trunks but pointed his arm without a wand to a tall, brunette witch in similar navy blue uniform with red epaulets and hat, alighting the platform. She acknowledged the aurors with a raise of both hands and a visible Oh! as if she’d forgotten to post a letter, rather than just remembered they’d summoned aurors in an urgent message.

“Thank you, thank you fo’ coming. Ih’ was qui’e the ‘larm[3]. But we …” She wave a hand, lost for the word, “…with her.” The witch had a strong French accent to her English. Nadine’s French wasn’t quite up to conversing about vampires either, and she doubted Bailey’s was any better.

“You contained it?” Nadine asked, then tried another way, “caught it?”

“Oh non, non, non,” more hand gestures from the witch on the train. “Flew away! Off le train.” She mimed a bat, interlocking her thumbs, and waving her fingers as wings. “Désolé!”

“Think you’ve got this one Pinn.” Bailey announced, shrugging, pulling seniority to dump her just before shift change. He gave her a double thumbs up and popped neatly out of sight. Nadine didn’t know whether to curse him or the witch before her. Perhaps she ought to instead thank her lucky stars she wouldn’t have to deal with a vampire after all.

“You could have told us sooner,” Nadine scolded, only to make herself feel better, as the witch curled her top lip, sucked air through her teeth and alighted the train again shaking her head, and a job to do. But the next passenger off seemed likely to make Nadine’s morning all the better.

“Hester!” She exclaimed, and threw open her arms to greet her friend.

1.	18th March 2011 Drink Them Dry
2.	28th March 2011 Penelope Pickler’s Positively Pathetic Programme of Platitudes
3.	Apologies for the mangling "Thank you for coming, it was quite the alarm."

"... word of some new magic. Or if not new some old, old stuff maybe." Nadine nodded. It had certainly felt like that. Being blown backwards by curses that had blasted into the space like an apparating elephant. The lack of wand, a magic Nadine had only seen demonstration of but never fought.

Hester continued to tick her off for not appreciating how lucky she was. She was right, of course she was right. Hester was a good friend and Nadine very much appreciated having her here.

"... why you an auror I do not know. But I cannot argue. You are good at it. So tell me. How did it go down. What did she say to you?"

"Thanks, love." Nadine replied, feeling briefly like an impostor. She shoved the thought aside, buoyed by the attention of a close friend. "I know I'm good but this just showed me I need to be better."

Nadine's stubborn determination shone through her words. She had set a new goal while resting, to find someone who would train against her in such wandless combat. As a witch who kept an eye on her success rate by shovelling dead-end cases to trainees or those without ambition, the outcome of Gamp-related encounters was getting under her skin.

"She didn't say much to me at St Mungo's," Nadine admitted. "She'd taken the face of one of the healers treating her husband. Andie and Ceph were already there and she had sealed herself into the room with him. I got there with a trainee, one of the more capable ones, Almasy." Nadine gestured to her hair vaguely with one hand, picturing Raine's bright red hair. She'd held her own in the situation, and Nadine would favour her in future as a result.

"There were just these umbrellas all over the place, Hes, I thought for a moment it was all a joke until Morgenthau proved himself useful, working on the door. I guess one unspeakable to another, they have their methods." She shrugged, hand upturned now. "He's a 'funny' man isn't he?" She asked, not implying the Head Unspeakable was a stand-up comedian by a long stretch.

Nadine appreciated her friend coming over to visit. She and Hester seemed to only meet when they made the specific effort to go to lunch, and they really ought to see each other more often. Invariably one or the other of them was tied up with their professional lives. Rex, Nadine’s long term, good as husband, saw Hester most often as they worked on the same floor.

“Gosh, where to begin,” Nadine waved a hand, having already thanked Hester for the flowers and for bringing over something specially cooked. “I should be going back tomorrow if I feel up to it. No lasting damage, thank Merlin.” She was reclined in a comfortable feature armchair of their front room, legs up on a matching stool. Relaxing under healer’s orders[1].

“You’ve seen what they reported[2]. She’s not been dead all this past year, so she came to break him out. It was honestly like nothing I’ve ever seen, Hester. I thought we might not all get out alive for a brief minute.” She looked pointedly to the nearby side table where there were framed family photos, her and Rex, one of them with Aoide, Ariadne looking grown up.

“To think she was walking around for, what, a month without any of us realising she wasn’t Ri. I could have said anything, Hester.”

1.	14th Feb 2012 Dashed to Pieces
2.	15th Feb 2012 Attempted Breakout at St Mungo’s