"Just pretend I'm an arsehole," Fauna had told Dion before walking up to the decrepit old mansion that looked like it hid ghosts and maybe a negligent house elf. It stood three stories high, with a garden in front that was more mud than grass, and a wooden door that creaked as she swung it open. She glanced at the sky before she went in. A gray sky, with lights that flickered. Squinting, she could just make out the reflection of the roof in the clouds.

With her luck, Dax was probably up there in the 'observation deck' of the training room, making obscene gestures as he watched her struggle with the dummy under her arm. Fauna gave the sky a warning look and stepped into the house, pulling the dummy by its arm. It got stuck in the doorframe. She cursed and tugged harder.

Now she was beginning to suspect why no one had let her play the villain before. She was still trying to figure out her motive for taking the dummy hostage as she clamored up the three flights of stairs in search of a good hiding spot. Not that she would really be doing much hiding. The goal was for Dion to handle a possibly 'violent situation'. He'd been looking for more practice this week, and Fauna had been looking for a distraction from her worries. Days had passed and they hadn't found Matty yet.

Fauna found the attic room, where kids' toys were scattered around among old trunks, racks of clothes, and boxes. Perfect! She could set up a barricade of sorts. That's what villains did. Moving the train over by the top stair, she charmed it to run around in circles. And then she moved an old mattress by the train in case Dion fell. Villainous indeed.

Standing near the window, she put her wand to the dummy's head and waited.

"Help help!" The dummy sprang to life, flailing for a moment in her arms.

"Shite! Silencio," Fauna gestured her wand at it. If Dion hadn't heard the quiet train, he would have heard that!

Dion had raised an eyebrow, unable to help himself. Pretending Fauna was an arsehole was...well, not possible, really. Certainly not when she was going, at some point, to act like one. Badly. It was more amusing than anything else.

He waited outside the training room's old house for some minutes, to let her set up. They hadn't arranged a signal - which they should have, he supposed - but after 20 minutes, he turned on his heel towards the door. That'd give her enough time to set up, he hoped.

The front door seemed too obvious. Probably trapped, he decided to assume - though Fauna wouldn't have done it, he supposed. Either way, he ended up circling around and letting himself in via the bathroom window as quietly as he could manage. Given his bulk, this wasn't as quiet as he'd been hoping for it to be, and involved a quiet curse as his uniform snagged the latch.

The house inside was quiet - eerily so. He cast a muffling charm on his footsteps, but couldn't help but jump slightly at every creak of the floorboards.

There was a sound from the upstairs, a humming, thumping sound that sounded oddly familiar, but he couldn't place it immediately. He crept to the stairs, darting across their base to the cover of the adjacent wall. When nothing happened, he started up them, wand raised.

The thing was a...toy train? He stared at it for a moment out of sheer confusion, wondering if it was rigged to explode. Then, shaking his head slightly, he stepped over it as lightly as he could.

Fauna frowned. She glanced out the window again. Her arm was getting tired holding up the dummy, and the warm air in the attic clung to her uniform, smelling of old books and mothballs. Whoever had created this simulation room paid attention to details.

Dion hadn’t gone through the front door yet. Sneaky sneaky! As the train whirred and she listened for his footsteps, Fauna put more thought into her plan. If she just stood there and threatened the dummy, he could very well Accio it out of her arms, or do something else simple, and it would be over. No, she couldn’t let the Aurors say that she lacked both a steel stomach and creativity.

Creeping behind a large rack of clothes that acted like a curtain between herself and the rest of the attic, she gestured with her wand at an object slumped in the corner, concentrating on a complicated set of charms. A stair creaked below and she paused, unable to help the smile that flickered on her face. This was like hide and seek but with hostages!

Fauna peeked at the top of the stairs through a hole in the fabric where a button was missing. A tall figure stood there. And then he stepped over the train.

Damn! Time for the second part of her plan.

Fauna flicked her wand. The object in the corner stirred. It lurched up on its feet, shoulders hunched, and floated toward the poor, unsuspecting Auror Trainee who had just narrowly evaded death by train.

It was a stuffed monkey.

The stuffed, flying monkey came to a halt in front of Dion’s face, then threw back its head.

“Buahahaha!”

Though it sounded like Fauna’s voice, and Fauna was behind the rack of clothes miming the cackling, the sound itself came from the animated toy.

“Stop right there, or I’ll… blast this house to smithereens!”

It lurched! It flew! It talked like a pirate! Yes, this was the malevolent force that threatened brave Dion today.

Dion stared, a bit on the dumbfounded side. It was tempting, as much as he wished not to, to laugh - the sheer oddness of the scene was just enough to knock him out of the role playing scenario. It was...well, it was quite silly, really. He hoped real criminals didn't do stuff quite so...Fauna-like.

Wouldn't that be the day.

He cleverly responded to the monkey by taking bold, dynamic action; he stepped around it, looking at the room. Not the room itself, exactly. He looked at its shape - how the walls flowed down the corridor, how the turn changed...

Of course, it'd help if he could really tell the direction of Fauna's voice.

He turned on his heel and, with a low amount of ceremony, he turned his wand on the monkey. A dispelling charm stopped the laugh, at least, though the thing continued to float. Then he darted off down the hall parallel to the room she was hiding in, looking for a corner or turn - or, lacking that, the adjacent room.

Uh oh. What was he doing? She couldn’t see him when he ran away! The silenced, floating monkey followed after Dion and then stopped, his head bobbing lifelessly (or hopelessly, she would say). It wasn’t as if Fauna had time to charm the monkey with her sight.

Or did she?

After some frantic wand waving, Fauna learnt that the spell was too complex for her. She settled for making the monkey wander in the general direction Dion had gone, but once she caused it to float around a corner, Fauna lost sight of both of them. The blind leading the blind! She sighed, and a cloud of dust rose up from the clothing rack, wafting into her face.

Her nose itching, Fauna felt rather than saw the monkey run into a wall (or a piece of furniture. Or Dion). Her wand movements seemed stuck, miming the block. Bump! Bump-bump.

And then she sneezed.

He traced along the wall. The monkey followed him, though much more haphazardly than it had drifted up to him before. He must have passed out of Fauna's ability to see - good. That or she was trying to make him think that.

Sadly, he couldn't quite get out of her ability to hear - the damn house was just too creaky to move silently, even with muffling charms on his feet. But it was hard to tell if she could hear him, as every soft creak of the floorboards sounded like someone smashing cymbals together in his head.

He found there was no corner. Was there was was a small bathroom.

It was also distressingly like the bathroom at his grandmother's house, complete with pictures of puppies on the walls. Whomever had done this setup had taken notes; even the tasteless decor was right. It was somewhat distressing.

Still, the walls were what he'd expected - old, rotting wood and plaster. Hmmm.

He jumped at the sneeze, the sound much closer than he'd been expecting. He nearly fell from his perch on the toilet, steadying himself with a hand on each of the narrow walls. The glass bowl of potpourri on the toilet top rattled and he hoped to Merlin Fauna didn't hear it.

"Expecto patronum," he said, the incantation a whisper. The silver light that burst from his wandtip was whisper, not as formed as it should have been - but it'd serve his purpose, he hoped. The shimmering silver horse reared up and ran back down the hall and past the door of Fauna's room.

Fauna gave up on the monkey, listening closely to the house come alive. Every rustle, creak, and rattle resounded within the room, like nifflers had nested in the walls and were about to swarm over the floorboards. Locating the source of the noise was next to impossible.

Hoping that Dion couldn't see her, she decided to hide the cumbersome dummy. Putting another round of silencing spells on the hostage, and the first round of featherweight charms (she wished she'd thought of that sooner), Fauna slowly pulled the oversize coat off the hanger and buttoned it up around the dummy. She placed a sticking charm on the hanger and the inside of the coat, then hung it back on the clothes rack, cringing at the rustle as it settled between the other clothes. For final touches, she stuck a huge, floppy hat on the dummy's head, and placed a pair of boots in front of its dangling feet.

As Fauna stood back to admire her work, a sudden chill went through her. If this were a real person...

She'd seen something like it before. In front of the Shrieking Shack, when Akiva had been left there like a doll. Had the criminal stopped to congratulate himself, imagined hiding her in plain sight until some poor soul stumbled on her lifeless form?

The sound of hooves interrupted her sober thoughts. Fauna whirled around, wand out, and caught a glimpse of something white rush past the doorway, too quick for her to hex. Dion must have changed into his animagus form. Interesting tactic. Puzzling over it, she casted a charm that allowed her to blend into her surroundings to an extent, and crept out into the hallway. Better to find him and make her demands, rather than let him surprise her, she thought.

The crumbling wall seemed to shift as she flattened her back to it, resembling a distorted figure standing underneath a waterfall. She began stepping sideways down the hall where she'd seen the horse, the floorboards shimmering whenever she set her heel down.

Dion leaned his shoulder against the old crumbling wall, a Super Sensory charm helping...sort of. He'd hoped it'd help him hear what Fauna was doing, but instead it just made the whole house come alive with weird settling creaks and pops, and he was suddenly very very aware that the toilet's lid was working itself loose under his weight.

But he thought he heard...footsteps? That was indeed what it sounded like, but they were so faint and distant he didn't know if it was just the house settling. Was Fauna leaving the room, maybe? Had the patronus worked?

He pressed his wand tip against the wall, whispering the incantation for a cutting charm. He slowly sliced a hole in the wall - a tiny one - and looked though. The room seemed empty.

Moving quickly - and aware on some level, that this wasn't the best choice - he activated the cutting charm and cut a large chunk of wall away. It turned out to be quite thin indeed, thin enough that he could catch and hold the chunk as it fell so it didn't make much noise. There was no way to do this silently, though.

He slipped through the hole into the room, and it was indeed empty. He lowered the shield he'd had up, a tad disappointed.

But - where was the hostage? He looked about and his eyes latched onto the dummy, hidden in the rack. He stared for a moment, then smiled and opened the window, levitating the dummy towards it. Not the best way to save a hostage, he was aware, but it'd do for now...

Fauna heard an odd ripping noise as she edged down the hallway after the horse. She whipped her head to the side, frowning. Either the Aurors had planted ghouls inside the walls, which was possible, or Dion had not actually gone this way. He could be trying to distract her with the noise, but Fauna didn’t want to risk it.

She crept back toward the attic room, still blending into her surroundings. When she poked her head around the doorway, Fauna stifled a gasp. No! Blast it! Her carefully hidden dummy floated toward the window, the floppy hat caught on its foot, the coat dragging on the floor.

Dion stood out in the open. That surprised her. With no time to waste, Fauna silently fired Immobulus at him, and then Accioed the dummy to her[1]. Concentrating on multiple spells at once, the disguise she’d set on herself slowly began to fade away.

1.	Up to you, if either of these spells work!

Stupid! Dion whipped around as Fauna reappeared suddenly, her footsteps having sounded further away than they actually where. He needed to stop forgetting that she was a trainee, too - it was difficult to not just think of her as Fauna, the sort of girl who enchanted monkey toys. He stepped sideways, only barely dodging her first spell (he felt the spell zoom past his shoulder, a hair's breadth from his body) but unable to counter her Accio. Now that - that was just cheating, he felt. Accio didn't work on people! He quickly got into his duelist's stance, though, and raised a shield. "Hands up, Blake," he said. "You're cornered!"

Ye gods, it was hard not to snicker.

He centered his wand on her. "Expelliarmus!"

Fauna, trying not to laugh at his phrase even as she lamented her aim, had completely forgotten that she couldn't Accio an actual person. But she conveniently remembered that the dummy in her arms was supposed to be a human being when Dion fired a spell at her.

She pulled a Brett and hid behind the dummy, letting it take the Expelliarmus.

"Cornered? By you and the, um... rest of the clothing?"

Oh, why could she not think of funny comebacks.

Fauna put up a shield of her own. "Anything you send at me, the dummy- er, hostage! Is going to get it." She paused. "You should ask me what I want."

Right? She glanced over the dummy at him with questioning eyes.

Dion almost looked over his shoulder to see what she meant by her comeback. Ye gods, seeing her face-to-face was so unfocussing. Up until he'd gotten to the upstairs, he'd been on his game. Now, he was finding himself wanting to laugh. He'd probably cry if he got fired over this.

He hoped he didn't. His game was so far gone he doubted he'd get it back, at this point in the simulation. He hated going into situations he didn't know the layout of - kicking down doors and yelling 'Hands up!' was Dax's thing, not his. Dion was better suited to a planning table. If only he could be the sort of Auror who got to move little figures around on a map! Not that those actually existed.

"It seems we are an at an impasse," he said, wand and shield still steady. His Expelliarmus hadn't worked - damn. "State your terms, then, you fiend," he said, tone dark and serious and probably taken from one of those comics Dax always raved on about. "Perhaps we can reach an agreement."

Fiend? Fauna let out a chuckle that she tried to stifle, which ended in a loud snort. She resisted the urge to clap her hand over her mouth. Alright, it was time to be serious. It wasn't as if the stuffed monkey had started this off with the right tone, but she could try now.

She straightened up, letting her expression become irritated.

"I have a name. Not that your sort would care." 

Glaring at the hostage she held in front of her, Fauna gave it a little shake. "This Ministry employee stupidly sends for help, and here you come, barging in, thinking you can take away the one chance I have at saving a life."

She let her gaze settle on Dion, attempting to think of him as someone she didn't live with and work with and care about. It was easier to focus on his uniform. Imagine him faceless.

"It's simple. You leave. Now," she paused. "Or she dies."

Dion straightened up, setting his jaw. At her threat, his laughter vanished, his expression molding into one of deep thought. The threat, though obviously not genuine, was challenging. He couldn't let the hostage die - not matter how funny the situation might have been with Fauna dishing out the threats.

He stood still a long moment, looking at her seriously. Then he drew himself up, nodding. "Very well, Blake," he said, raising his hands - wand still in hand, but exposing his body in a sign of submission. His mind felt slowed, the idea both dangerous and, considering it was Fauna, probably very effective. He hoped.

"Save your life, then," he said, and Disappareated.

The rubber tunnel of mid-Appearation was never pleasant, even if it lasted less than an instant. His eyeballs pressed into his head, his chest tightened; he saw the house turn wild and the walls distort and then reform, the Appearation odd in it suddenness.

He reappeared behind her with a booming crack and stumbled a moment, taking a second to find himself. She was before him, only a few inches away, and he moved quickly. Normally - had he not just Appearated - he'd have put her in a proper hold. Now he just threw his weight against her, large hand locking around her wand-arm's elbow and his leg kicking the back of her knees.

After his strange comment, her brow furrowed for an instant. He disapparated! Her head whipped toward the window, barely believing it, thinking she'd see him standing outside. But then the telltale crack sounded behind her. She only had an instant.

It wasn't enough.

Fauna started to turn around, swinging her wand at him while holding up the dummy, but he grabbed it and knocked her down.

Shite! Fauna buckled under the weight, bringing the hostage down with her. The side of her jaw jabbed into the back of the dummy's head, and the damn thing's coat tripped up around her leg. She groaned, winded but unhurt. Dion had caught her. And now she was an embarrassed human sandwich.

Fauna tilted her head more to the side and wheezed, "You killed Dummy!"