Thursday 11 November 2010 @1pm

A ruckus echoed down the first floor halls in the castle's November chill.  It was a rattling, metalic, jangling, scraping ruckus.  Branwen Strangely was dragging a vicious looking rusty, sort of, ...trolley.  It had a long dirty handle, and a low riding compartment with vicious contraptions beneath.  The wheels seemed to be no more than decorative considering how useless they were getting the thing up the stairs, but except they couldn't possibly serve an aesthetic purpose.

"Professor! What's that!" Students coming up from lunch passed her in the halls. 

"Hells bells if I know! I'm just tired of it haunting my shed!"

She came at last to the Muggle Studies classroom which she hoped to find inhabited by Professor Callum Asher, a dashing awkward young wizard.  In their limited interactions, she'd decided he seemed friendly enough and knowledgeable on his eclectic topic.  Since this frightful mess clearly lacked any trace of magical ingenuity and reeked of a car park she could only assume that it must be an artefact of Asher's purview.

The rattling finally ceased.  She left the object sitting in the corridor while she knocked on the open doorframe.

"Professor Asher! I don't want to be a bother, but I have to insist on a consultation.  Are you within?"

It had been nearly a week since the explosion at the Leaky Cauldron, and Cal had dark circles under his eyes from the lack of sleep. Every chance he got he went to St. Mungo's to check on Mai who thankfully was healing fine, despite the healer who was taking care of her being someone Cal wanted to hex to the next century due to how he had treated her. Due to his mind being elsewhere, he had only just barely started on the stack of essays on World War II that he still had to grade for his 6th year class.

Due to that, he was grateful for the interruption from his colleague, Professor Strangely, as he felt he was going to develop some sort of facial tic from reading a troubling essay from a clearly bigoted Pureblood whom he wasn't particularly sure why they were even enrolled in his class in the first place. He ran a hand through his hair in hopes that it would make it slightly less mussed, but Cal imagined that it didn't ultimately help much. Though it did remind him that he was in need of a hair cut.

"Yes, yes, come in. Don't worry, you're not a bother at all. I need a distraction anyway," Cal put on his most winning smile, and ushered Branwen to enter. "A consultation?" He quirked an eyebrow, and imagined that it was for the museum-worthy relic she was dragging along.

Professor Asher looked every bit the first year teacher.  Second-year Professor Branwen Strangely knew her colleague's haggard appearance well for a slightly more comely version of it had greeted her in the bathroom each morning every morning from about a year ago. 

"It gets better," she said to him as wrap up to her internal monologue. Teaching, as a profession, was impossible, but that's what magic was for.  Branwen took only  a few steps over through the door and stood aside so there was a clear view out into hallway of the stinking Muggle relic.

"A distraction is exactly what I have to hound you, Professor.  Look at this nonsense.  Even when motionless, it chills all my aesthetic and practical sensibilities as a practical witch to the very bone. I haven't slept a wink knowing it exists."

Professor Strangely was known for her way of speaking which might be described as a deadpan hyperbole. She didn't seem interested in raising any alarm, and she was certainly too mellow for a woman who hadn't slept in over a year, but the truth of her offense the device must have been plain.

"I don't like it, Asher. I think you ought to do something about this.  I'd ask Woodward, but that poor wizard's been through enough."

Felinus Woodward, the castle caretaker and her constant go-to for things like this, had been trapped as a lion in an Animagus magic accident.  It seemed like it was piling on to involve him in this further monstronsity.