Absit Omen RPG

Ever since Zeta had told him about the protest[1], Grimwold had been excited to go. Not really for the cause, but because he had never before attended a protest and he wanted to experience it. That, and he had a small hope that maybe a real werewolf would show up. Now, how cool would that be?

Going with Allura however had him feeling a certain kind of way. Sure, he was the one that had asked her to come with him, and they were going as friends, but there was something weird happening inside Grim when he was around her. Like he wanted to please her. And when her behaviour suddenly changed when they had reached Zonko’s, with wrapping her arms around his and putting her head on her shoulder, he had given into it with a small feeling of joy, that he was unsure where it came from.

As they arrived, Grim had excitedly greeted Zeta, but she had seemed too busy with organising the protest, so he had let her go. Together with Allura they had moved to the side, and when the chanting started, Grim had happily joined in. As the minutes went on he started to understand what exactly this protest was about, as he hadn’t made the connection between Zonko’s and werewolves before he got there.

“Pull the pops! Pull the pops!” The excitement made Grim chant just as loud as everyone else.

Then the smoke came. Green and thick, the billowing smoke escaped from the store with wafts of a horrible stench. And with it came commotion. Someone fell; another person let out a scream; elbows and shoving were everywhere; the Zonko’s manager in a screaming match with Zeta. All this, and Grim couldn’t help but feel excited. So this was what a protest was like, huh? It was perfect!

That’s when he saw a brown haired woman[2] run past Zeta and the manager, and straight into the shop. He didn't recognise her, and she seemed older than a student, but she looked as if she knew what she was doing, and in that moment Grim couldn’t stop himself.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to Allura with a grin, before pulling his scarf up to cover his mouth and nose. Fishing his wand out of his pocket he ran through the crowd, past Zeta, and into the store after the woman. This was turning out to be the most exciting Hogsmeade weekend he had been on!

1.	(Mar 3) Always Leaving it to the Last Minute
2.	Fauna

     "Hey Grimwold, how about we go for some butterbeers during the Hogsmeade weekend?"

Grim’s attention swung back at Allura, and an eagerness to say yes seemed to appear out of nowhere. He still wasn’t sure just what the reason for it being, and he was just about to give her a resounding yes as a response when he realised what Zeta and the Professor were talking about.

Werewolves.

He had never seen a werewolf, apart from in pictures. They had sounded interesting in the Defence Against the Dark Arts class that had covered them a couple of years back, and the arc in his favourite cartoon that involved them had made them sound even more exciting. Maybe this was a chance to meet one?

He turned to Allura and gave her an awkward smile.

“Yeah, sure,” he began. “We could grab a butterbeer. But wouldn’t it be more interesting to go to the protest? It seems really interesting.”

“Professor Onuris!”

This was exactly the person he wanted to see. The professor, if anyone, would know how to best approach bugbears, and Grim needed all the information he could get for his next adventure. But he had to be smart about it, he thought to himself, as Allura was exchanging pleasantries. The Forbidden Forest wasn’t called that just for nothing, and he knew if his teacher would get wind of what he was planning, it would all go down the drain.

“How do you go about finding bugbears?” he asked, his thoughts about caution apparently not reaching his mouth quick enough. Silently he bit his tongue, hoping that Onuris hadn’t caught on.

Luckily, Zeta jumped in, mentioning something about graffiti. He had seen it, but hadn’t paid it much mind. It had obviously been done by a fellow student, and there had been nothing about it that jumped out to him as something a future Curse-Breaker needed to pay any attention to. He turned his attention back to the professor, and just started to ask another question related to bugbears, when Zeta cut him off. There’s loads to do? What did that mean?

“Loads to do — of what?” he asked, intrigued. Had he missed yet another thing?

His quick white lie didn’t seem to have convinced the two witches, to Grim’s big disappointment. At least the younger witch’s caring tone made it seem that she was at least wanting to know if he was okay. Some reassurance in the awkward situation, and for a moment he thought he could move past it. But then Zeta asked if it was for Defense class, and Grim could feel his heart drop.

“For Defense?” he asked, giving Zeta a look of bewilderment and fear. “Did Professor Storm give us homework on it?”

He thought he had missed something important. Defense Against the Dark Arts was one of Grim’s favourite classes at the school (and the one he considered most important for his future career as a Curse-Breaker), and it was usually the only homework that he remembered to do.

“I was going to use it for my next attempt to find the blood-sucking Bugbears in the Forbidden Forest, but now I feel like I’ve missed something.”

He looked back and forth between the two girls.

“What are you guys up to, anyway?”

“Need some help there?”

Grim had thought he was alone. After all, it was a foggy, early, Sunday morning, and usually the courtyard would be empty at this time. Which is why he was surprised when suddenly a girl addressed him, flicking her hair around. He didn’t recognise her, so she wasn’t in his year or in Gryffindor, but there was something about her that made him want to impress her. He quickly scrambled up from the cobblestone, brushing off his now wet backside.

“I was just practicing the Spell-harvesting spell,” Grim said hurriedly. “I’m going to use it on my next attempt to—”

But he didn’t get to finish the sentence, as Zeta Pepper appeared in a doorway, calling him out on his fall. A slight flush started working his way up his neck, but with his focus now on Zeta, it quickly went away.

“Saw what?” he asked, trying to look as nonchalant as possible, as he bent down to pick up his wand from the floor. The book he had been reading he closed and put on the bench, any thought of homework now completely vanished from his mind. He knew Zeta, being in the same year and all, and was sure that something fun would happen with her around. As for this new younger girl, there was something about her that made Grim want to keep her around. But he wasn’t sure what that was just yet.

Grimwold had been ecstatic to return to Hogwarts after the yule holidays - it had been the most boring Christmas he had experienced ever. Both his father and his younger sister Griselda had somehow contracted the magic measles, and his mother, being who she was, had ordered the whole family to quarantine in separate rooms. Grim, who was used to exploring and adventuring, had soon found that there were only so many times he could re-read The Nightwood Pack or re-arrange the posters on his wall. He had wished he had stayed at Hogwarts. The only thing that got him through the two weeks-that-felt-like-years was the yule special of Jasper Warlock that had been on air every other day.

But he was back now, and thanks to his mother’s strict ‘stay in your room, stay safe’ policy, he was measle free and had the whole castle to continue to explore. Over the last two months he had quickly fallen back into his normal routines; staying out in the corridors as late as he could without getting caught; sneaking food from breakfast to try and catch some strange creature at the edge of the Forbidden Forest; or trying to master the bubble charm to be able to converse with the merfolk at the bottom of the lake. And, of course, leaving his homework to the last minute.

Currently he was sitting in the foggy courtyard, wrapped up in his large Gryffindor scarf, and trying to focus on the arithmancy textbook in front of him. He knew he should’ve started his assignment last week, but had forgotten all about it until Rhys had mentioned it this morning. And now he only had a day and a half to write a two foot paper on the importance of the number 9 for the witches of medieval Wales. Not how he wanted to spend a Sunday.

As he was reading (without registering much of anything) his wand slowly slid out of his sleeve. Grim, being too focused on trying to understand a specific part of the text, didn’t notice, until it fell and hit the cobbled floor, sending sparks into his face. With a surprised yelp he fell backwards and off the bench, landing on the damp ground.

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake!”

“Don’t be such a glumbumble, Winnie,” Grim said as they reached the armoury. “We’ll never know if it fits, or even works, if we don’t try it!”

The armour gallery was a long room, almost like a corridor, with numerous suits of armour lining the walls. They came in all size and shapes - some missing a leg; some shining in colours metal usually shouldn’t be; and there was even one that had plates sticking out of the back that seemed to be for some kind of wings. Grim could barely hide his excitement as he let go of Winifred and started walking around the room.

“We’re looking for a viridian one,” he said as he went around, studying the metal bodies. “I’m pretty sure that’s a shade of green. Some of them seems to have a plaque underneath. Help me look! You’re a ‘Puff, you should be able to find it.”

He winked at Winnie and started from the left hand side of the room, looking intently at every plaque and trying to discern what was written. Some of the writings were so old that they had almost gone, and the dusk outside didn’t help much. Also, exactly what shade of green was viridian?

The mention of Da Vinci by Blake and Paracelsus by Kelvin jogged something in Grimwold’s memory, and he once again scrambled with his notes trying to find what he was looking for. He knew there was something related to Da Vinci, something he had come across in a book he had randomly opened about Italian wizards. When he finally found it, he glanced over at Kelvin, making sure the Ravenclaw had finished, before he spoke again.

“There’s also this witch named Cecilia Gallerani,” he began, trying to sound as convincing as he could. “She apparently used to bring loads of high-up muggles in Milan together to discuss philosophy, amongst other things.”

He felt he started to get a hang of where this class was going, and was kind of surprised by how he managed to keep up. Going into a class with two well-read Ravenclaws discussing research they’ve done wasn’t really a situation that he had hoped to find himself in, but he would try his best to be on (if not exactly, then something close to) the same level.

“She supposedly helped the muggles change their philosophical view of death from her discussing it with ghost that she’d met. But, see, here’s what I don’t understand,” Grim continued. “If this Cecilia lady had ghosts to speak to, why would she discuss this with Muggles? Surely, death would be more a more interesting subject to discuss with them? Also, how much does ghosts know about death? Do they remember dying?”

Without him noticing that it was happening, Grim had done what he usually did - float away from the subject. To him, discussing what and what not ghosts knew was a far more interesting topic to him, and all thoughts of muggle relations slowly trickled away from his mind. This was textbook Grim.

He had felt that he might have been going out on a limb when he asked Winifred to join him to the armoury, but Grimwold had still not been that surprised when she had said yes. After all, she seemed to get tangled up in as many messes as he did, so she had been his ideal candidate. He wasn’t sure if she had fully grasped why they were going, as he had been so excited when he was trying to explain that most of it had just come out in a jumbled mess. But she had said yes nonetheless, and here they were.

          ”You know I’m not very good at magic. Everybody knows that.”

Grim stopped for a second and turned around to face the Hufflepuff.

“It’s all about wanting it to shine,” he said, holding his wand between the two. “Look. And then remember to move your wrist, just so.”

He did a movement with his hand to illustrate. Lumos was one of the spells he was best at - mostly because he used it so often whilst he was out on his nightly adventures, and he had perfected it. At this point he could even perform it nonverbally. He shot the girl a smile, hoping he hadn’t offended her with his explanation, and turned around to continue down the hallway.

          ”You’re not going to try to put the armor on, are you Grimwold?”

Grim gave a short, happy laugh.

“Well, of course I am, Winnie,” he said, now tugging her along again. “Do you realise what we could do with it if it actually works? There’s this place behind a mirror on the fourth floor that seems to be caved in[1]. With the help of the armour we could actually move the stones and see what’s behind it!”

1.	Second one out of the known 7 secret passages out of Hogwarts

Grimwold knew that high marks in History of Magic was needed to pursue what he wanted to do - become a Cursebreaker - but sometimes he had a hard time focusing. This terms curriculum however, with reading into how muggles were affected by magic, was something he had a hard time concentrating on, and he often found his mind wandering towards the lives of the witches and wizards who had produced amazing feats, rather than the muggles who saw it. He tried hard, he really did, but something about it just didn’t suck him in as much as he wanted to.

But he was there, books prepped up on his desk in a chaotic manner, and his quill hovering over the piece of parchment in front of him. He glanced over at Blake’s desk next to him, and gave a silent sigh of how neat and organised it seemed. They had only been there for less than ten minutes, but Grim’s desk was already looking like a battlefield.

Blake went into an explanation and re-reading of something he had found, and Grim instantly felt overwhelmingly underprepared. He had a sinking feeling that he might have misunderstood the subject, or that he had, per usual, gone down a rabbit hole and ended up with a load of information that wasn’t applicable to the situation. As Professor Greyfriar handed out five points to Ravenclaw, and went on to ask questions to the class, Grim quickly rumbled through his papers, trying to find something that might seem relevant.

There.

With a sigh of relief, Grimwold withdrew a paper from the bottom of his messy pile and hesitantly raised his hand.

“So, there was this woman. I think it might’ve been in Shropshire…” Grim began, trying do discern his own scribblings.  “Yes, that says Shropshire. Anyway, there was this woman who had been given a pendant by a wizard who was in love with her. And he had done some kind of charm on it. Like a lucky charm!”

Grim looked up from his papers for a second, trying to see on the Professor’s face if he was on the right path. When he realised that he couldn’t, he turned back to his papers and continued.

“So, this woman’s family was always the healthiest, and her cattle never fell ill, and when a harsh winter came her crops were the only one to survive the winter. So the muggles in the town, well, they burned her and called her a witch...” Grim ended feebly and put his papers down. Hopefully he wasn’t completely off track.

It was after hours in the Hogwarts castle, and the heavy rain was whipping against the castle’s windows. Most of the candlelit corridors lay deserted, the students that regularly frequented it now spending time in their respective common rooms. That’s where the students were supposed to be, either studying, sleeping, or just hanging out, but that small rule had never really bothered Grimwold. He was currently sneaking quietly through the corridors, making sure he avoided both ghosts and professors potentially out for an evening stroll.

It had only been two weeks since Grimwold had returned for his penultimate year at Hogwarts, and he was already out on a new adventure. His mother had asked him to stay out of trouble[1], which is why he had planned his little excursion after dark. Surely, fewer people would be out and about, so there was a smaller chance of getting interrupted. Yes, executing his plans at this hour would definitely abide to his mother’s request.

The reason for this little trip had taken root during a History of Magic class two days earlier when Professor Greyfriar had mentioned a Sir Bredbeddle Greene. Turns out, Sir Greene had owned an enchanted viridian suit of armour that made its wearer gain superhuman strength. Wearing that armour he had successfully killed the Dragon of Overton-on-Dee, and gained the trust of the local muggle farmers. Of course, they didn’t know Sir Greene had been a wizard. Grimwold wouldn’t have thought much more of the story if Professor Greyfriar had not mentioned that the suit of armour was currently on display in the Hogwarts Armoury. That’s when a plan started to emerge.

So that was why Grimwold was currently sneaking through the third floor corridors, tugging along his reluctant partner in crime. His wand held up in front of him, lit with the lumos charm, he could barely conceal his excitement.

“Come on then,” Grim said, a twinkle of adventure clearly visible in his eyes. “We’re almost there. It’s just through the next corridor”

1.	[Sept. 1] Trying to collect all the pieces....

Grimwold was just about to launch into explaining the plan that was concocting in his head (he had completely forgotten about Blake’s twin in Slytherin, but with this information everything seemed to come into place nicely) when a girl turned up in the door to the compartment, and started to ramble on about herself. For a second he didn’t recognise her, and thought she was speaking about someone else, until he realised that it was her. Winifred from Gryffindor. The knut dropped when she started speaking about her bangs. So that’s why he hadn’t recognised her.

Ayla flew up from her seat and embraced her fellow Hufflepuff, and Grim realised they must be quite close. As Ayla ushered Winifred to sit down, Grim’s face broke into a smile.

“Hey, Winifred,” he said. “How was your summer?”

He cursed himself under his breath. ‘How was your summer’? Was he his mother? No, what a stupid thing to say. An attractive witch his age enters the compartment where he is sitting, and his first words are ‘how was your summer’? Grimwold would have to think of better commentary next time. If there ever would be a next time...

“Well,” Grimwold said, now floating just a few inches off the seats. “I think there’s about a dozen in a package?”

He gave Ayla an excusing smile. Luckily for him she assured him he hadn’t interrupted anything. He had been scared there for a second that he had walked (erhm, floated) in on something he shouldn’t have, but his fears seemed to be nothing to worry about.

“Oh yes,” he responded with a nod. “They were all boasting a bit too much about winning last year. Did you all hear Argyros boasting after it? It was crazy!”

As Ayla held out the tin Grimwold eagerly accepted the cookies offered to him. She had been right - his mouth was filled with a citric taste that didn’t seem to want to leave. He usually loved Fizzing Whizbees, but he could already feel that it would be a while before he had some again. Luckily the cookie was delicious and he closed his eyes without realising, taking in the flavor.

“Wanna stay for the rest of the ride? Maybe we can concoct a plan to use your Fizzing Whizbees or some of Ayla’s treats to prank some of the Slytherins.”

Grimwold’s eyes popped open, glistening with ideas, and as he looked towards Blake his face turned into a wide grin.

“Actually,” he said, his eagerness very evident in his tone. “Have you guys heard of Bulbadox powder?”

Having Ayla wrapped around his and dangling from the middle of his body made Grimwold weirdly tingly inside. It wasn’t that he had thought of her in that way before, but just the fact that he had a girl the same age as him currently wrapped around his waist was an exciting one. Or, rather, it would have been exciting for real if the reason for the witch to cling to him so tightly wasn’t only because she was trying to get him down out of the ceiling.

And when Blake ran over to help as well, any fleeting thought that might have ran through Grimwold’s mind disappeared.

“What are you on?”

At Blake's question Grimwold started chewing at the sweets in his mouth, but they were too many and still to hard, and it did nothing but make his teeth hurt and his mouth to tingle. Instead he opted for a second option, however undignified it might be. He opened his mouth and spat, getting the dozen or so yellow sweets leave his mouth and gather on the floor beneath him. With a small cough he could finally feel the effect waning.

“Sorry,” he said with a goofy smile. “I was just trying an idea I had. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything?”

He looked between the Ravenclaw and the Slytherin (which was somewhat awkward given his current position floating above them) as he felt the Whizzbees’ effect leave his body, very slowly lowering him towards the floor.