Room #4 was the smallest of the labs used by the Committee on Experimental Charms. The walls and the floor were solid white, the only blemish being the small golden handle on the door, which was otherwise undetectable. The ceiling had been enchanted to emit a bright white light, as candlelight was deemed to be too unreliable for the various delicate experiments which took place here. In the center of the room there was a large white workbench which rose up from the ground and seemed to take up most of the room. The room was dauntingly bright.

Veronique entered, hair pulled back tightly into a bun, and set a box of cabbage heads onto the work bench. She had a pair of goggles secured over her eyes and wore her standard issue blast-vest over her burned and tattered work robes; every time she put on her uniform she was grateful for the lack of mirrors in the Department of Mysteries.

She quickly got to work setting up for the days experiment; she grabbed a cabbage head out of the box set it on the opposite end of the work table. With a wave of her wand the middle section sank into the ground and two islands were left on either side of the room. She turned to the single head of cabbage as it lifted into the air, hovering nearly a foot above the island. She raised her wand and outlined a square around the it:

“Pulsos Rerum” her forceful voice echoed in the room.

The outline of a box formed around the cabbage, and suddenly it seemed to become hazy, as if she was looking at it through a heavy fog. She walked over to the opaque cabbage which no longer seemed tobe hovering in the air but was rather frozen there, and reached out to touch it. She felt a cold tingle run up her hand as her hand went straight through the object. The spell had worked, it was now in a reality all of its own, suspended in time. The easy part was over.

She walked over the box on the other side of the lab, rummaging underneath the vegetables for a think manila folder. She lowered the box onto the floor and opened the folder onto the work bench. There were pages of hand written notes, each containing dozens of different incantations and diagrams of wand movements. Somewhere in here she hoped to find a way to bring the cabbage safely back into alignment with our time and reality, but weeks of fruitless experiments had left her discouraged.

Even more discouraging, her superiors had decided that this job was too much for a junior member alone. Of course, she wouldn’t have minded the decision  if one of the Senior members were to join her, but they were all too busy and too important to be bothered to with the development of a counter -charm. Instead they had enlisted Sessel Jowd from the Time Travel Investigation & Regulation Bureau to assist her.

She was not fond of Sessel.

There was a squeak of rubber soles turning on tile.

Sissel Jowd had a song stuck in his head. He couldn't help it sometimes. He'd even turned off his portable wireless upon entering the bowels of the ministry, the high resonance of magic enough to drive it even screwier.

~ It's much too late to find
You think you've changed your mind
You'd better change it back or we will both be sorry ~

He was muttering the lyrics under his breath, then to nonsense noise on the chorus. Sissel entered the lab, reflected in his mirrored sunglasses. Suit today, he'd been tackling a stack of time travel permits, many he could quickly put in the trash after certain protocols. Need: To team up with myself on duel. Need: To attend multiple shopping promotions that occur in small window. Hearth kindling.

"Ello Veronique." He was meeting a lot of french named ladies recently. She was in full lab uniform. A misty looking cabbage was suspended in a cube of wavering blue lines. Fun stuff.

He peered over the notes on one of the work tables. One note stood out. Meeting with Sessel in jagged writing.

"You have got to learn to spell my name properly," Sissel said, pen in hand ready for correction.

She flushed scarlet as a pang of embarrassment hit her stomach. Certainly starting the off on the right foot today. She flashed the man in a suit a grin and, with a newfound enthusiasm, began discussing the work at hand.

“Right, first thing you’ll need is this,” a flick of her wand and a blast-vest appeared in front of him. “You might what to transfigure those glasses of your’s into something more hefty. I’ve already been to St. Mungo’s twice working on this damned charm.”

She walked over to the shimmering cube, not turning to Sissel to speak “We recently developed a charm that traps an object and removes it from our reality; we are still aware of it, but we can no longer interact with it at least not physically.” Her voice became soft, spoken as if she were on the verge of sleep. “It like… It’s like a play within a play: an entire, complete reality existing within the boundaries of our own. “

She turned to face him, her forhead was screwed up in a way that said she was agitated “The problem is, we can’t figure out how to reverse the process. We know that when an item is suspended in these sub realities, time seems to stand still for them. My superiors think that it’s the reassimilation into our own time frame that’s causing all the problems. Moving in time. I believe that’s your expertise” Her voice had dried up, and she stood silent.

Sissel shrugged into the offered blast vest. With a tap of his wand the sunglasses became more fitting and rigid. "Hmm, I've got a new friend at St. Mungo's." And all the deception she must get on Spell Damage, possibly.

He listened to Veronique's briefing. “We recently developed a charm that traps an object and removes it from our reality; we are still aware of it, but we can no longer interact with it at least not physically. It's like… It’s like a play within a play: an entire, complete reality existing within the boundaries of our own.“ Way beyond a Vanishing Spell, he thought. “The problem is, we can’t figure out how to reverse the process. We know that when an item is suspended in these sub realities, time seems to stand still for them. My superiors think that it’s the reassimilation into our own time frame that’s causing all the problems. Moving in time. I believe that’s your expertise.”

"Evanesco Differedeo." Sissel pointed his wand at one of the cabbages. It winked out of existence. "Now that is how you send something into the future. We'll catch up in five minutes."

He walked closer to the cabbage that wasn't really there. "But this...hmm...you're straddling a border here. For all means vanished, but we can still see it. And these things." He waved his wand through the cabbage and blue lines. It was as if he was just waving his wand through the air.

Several possibilities came to mind. "You say it's in it's own reality, where time is stopped compared to ours. Maybe it's still in our reality and time no longer affects it. It could explain why any attempts to bring it out have been," he imagined the kind of injuries she said she received, "hazardous. As if it's forced to catch up all the lost time on super fast forward. As beings of time ourselves, we can't interact with it while it's paused."

He paced around it. "Or, since I'm guessing the intent of this spell is to render something completely inaccessible, you've succeeded in creating just that, leaving this memory of the object to taunt us. So of course your attempts at retrieving it whole out of your box here haven't worked, by principle."

He traced along the blue lines. "Standard testing I'm sure, but does this imaginary reality of yours get affected by a Finite type incantation? And when you try to retrieve the object," he poked the blues lines, "do these disappear?"

"Now that is how you send something into the future. We'll catch up in five minutes." She grimaced at him. Moving through time is one thing, but moving out of and into it were a totally different affair. But she bit her tongue, as much as it pained her to say, she needed his help.

"Standard testing I'm sure, but does this imaginary reality of yours get affected by a Finite type incantation?” The look on her face was more than enough to tell him it didn’t.

“And when you try to retrieve the object, do these disappear?"

“When we try to retrieve it,” She traced the blue lights with her wand and said “Accio in Rerum.” The cabbage spun quickly in place and then,

BOOM.

There was a large explosion; Sissel, who was standing only inches away from the epicenter was engulfed in bright blue flames which, in one fraction of a second seemed to fill the room, then vanish in the next, blue lines and all.

Veronique smirked as she looked at Sissel, who stood unharmed. “Of course, not all of our countercharms are this unsuccessful, sometimes the explosions happens in our reality.

She walked over to the folder, grabbed a few pages of note and handed them to Sissel. “You might not think it, but this spell is based on the banishing charm. We reconjugated the latin and added the Rerum, meaning in this case context.  So naturally we thought using Accio as a foundation would help with the countercharm. So far we have been wrong."

Veronique began the counter charm. “When we try to retrieve it...Accio in Rerum.”

BOOM

A flash of blue. Sissel had one reaction nearly started and then it was gone. "That felt interesting."

Veronique continued. "...sometimes the explosions happens in our reality."

"Sub-dimensional implosion," Sissel said. He thought a moment. "That's sound cool, actually. I should see if it's in the dictionary."

Veronique handed him some notes. He took them and started reading for a bit. Hmm, so a banishment...out of reality. Rooting from that, he could see why the cabbage impression would remain. Banishment was not vanishment. Overall the translations made sense. The one thing snagging at his layman's view was...

3, 2, 1-

Absentmindedly he stuck his hand over the crate of cabbages, catching a head that jumped from five minutes to now, reappearing in a familiar flash of blue. He spun it in his hand.

"Context?" he asked. "That's the answer to placement, mass, and the passage of time, context? I mean, if you talk half the things I say out of context out of context, you'd have no clue what I was talking about." He dropped the cabbage back into the crate. "It just seems...subjective. Like, it's fine to leave our context, but taking the out of context out of context does not necessarily reverse it back to our context, it could always mean something else...I'm guessing." He shrugged.

Her head was spinning. Sissel wasn’t talking in circles, he was doing verbal pirouettes. Michelle Kwan would be dizzy after the number of triple axel jumps that had just performed by this man.

“I simply meant that words have many contexts - many meanings. And there are many words for a single meaning. It isn’t some grand revelation, Mr. Jowd” She hoped all of his pontificating would prove useful; her bosses were growing impatient and she was eager to move on. “Besides, I’ve never known a spell to get caught up in semantics”

She turned her attention to the box on the floor. A head of cabbage lifted into the air and flew across the room, taking the place of it’s predecessor. She drew up her wand, tracing a box into the air and again spoke: “Pulsos Rerum.” Just like before the cabbage became an opaque shadow of it’s former self.

“Shall we begin,” she said, turning to him and directing his attention to one specific page. “This is the list of incantations we have tried. All of them failed… with varying degrees of pyrotechnics…”  she cringed as the memories surged forward.

Accio Rem - no effect
Accio in Rerum - Other reality explosion
Accio Temporalis -  Introduced time into alternate reality, accelerated decay
Accio in Veritate - Explosion
Finite Incantatem - no effect
In Rem dico - no effect
In Rerum dico - no effect…

“What we need from you, Mr. Jowd, is to tell us what we missed. What aren’t we seeing.”

Less than a moment after Veronique said she'd never seen a spell get hung up on semantics, she showed him a list of the tried and failed counter incantations. He had to giggle. Okay, not really the conceptual semantic she was worried about, but the experimenters had done a good job playing with lexical semantics to get their right words for that counter spell.

She had that 'pleading look but not wanting to admit that had to plead look'. “What we need from you, Mr. Jowd, is to tell us what we missed. What aren’t we seeing.”

"You know how this bit works?" He cast the Time-Skip Spell again on another cabbage. "You can tell by the root incantation, but I'm vanishing it to nothingness but imagining when I want it to reconjure. So from the cabbage's perspective it's jumped time, when it's actually been through that phantom of magical dimensions counter to our transfigurations, nothingness. And you aren't sending this," he waved his hand through the cabbage again, "into nothingness, you got another kettle of fish entirely."

"So I think your team is hung up with wanting this to be an easy spell, a simple matter of finding the right words. It might even mean reworking your starting spell, I don't know. The greatest of magical arts are not just pointing a stick with the right swishiness and mumbo jumbo, sometimes they need more. You're chucking these cabbages down bottomless pits then wondering why you can't get them back with no way of knowing "how" it actually is down there. So how would you stop that?"

He paused to let her think. "Some type of lifeline, marker, back door. Something transitive to guide it back to our reality...what if you linked it to something before you chuck it out? Maybe magic from before would still linger if magic after the fact is failing."

Veronique was not fond of Sissel, the conjecture, the self importance, the showboating, and she was quite sure all of it had something to do with his height. And so it killed her to say it was a brilliant idea. Incorporate the countercharm into the spell its self.

You can’t get into a house without leaving a window open.

Of course, this would mean hours if not days of research and possibly even redrafting the charm. She should head to the library immediately, see if she could find any precedent of charm and it’s counter simultaneously. The papers flew out of Sissels hands into the folder and into Veronique’s outstretched hands.

Put a keyhole on the door if you ever wish to open it.
 
“Thank you Mr. Jowd, you have helped me a great deal,” she flashed him a weak smile. “I will inform you whenever I begin my next batch of trials.” She walked over to the cabbage box and picked it up. The door ahead flew open as she scuttled out of the room and up the hall to the committee storage room.

“I am sure you can see yourself out,” she sounded behind her.

She was a woman processed. This could be her breakthrough.



OOC: I think they have accomplished enough for one day, don't you. Especially because it is a very dense subject, so I'll leave it to you to wrap things up? I do think this should be carried on after she’s had time to do some serious research and recrafting

The change in Veronique was abrupt after Sissel's suggestion. A look of slight annoyace melted into pondering, quizical features. At once the papers left his hands. She began filing the work away, then turned to him with a small grin. “Thank you Mr. Jowd, you have helped me a great deal, I will inform you whenever I begin my next batch of trials.”

"No problem, glad to help." He untransfigured his sunglasses back to normal.

“I am sure you can see yourself out,” she said, swiftly walking out the door. Sissel started but stopped, remembering the blast vest he was stuffed in. He eased himself out, then found the closet where they were hung. As he readjusted his suit he felt a crunch of paper. He grinned and took it out again to read. A rushed calculation that showed a multi-digit number of minutes, divisible by 5, with a memo from the future.

[Don't deter her too much]

Returning the note to a pocket, he whistled his way out. He could cut through the Space Chamber to get back to his desk.