(( The next post will be the attack. I'm splitting this up into two parts both because it's long and so that ya'll can establish what your characters are doing before if you like. ))


"Are we clear?" Landis asked. His three thralls stood in a line like schoolchildren, two smiling faintly, the third blank-faced. Nods all around. They watched him patiently as he made last-minute checks on the potion combinations filling all their pockets and ran paranoid fingers over the extra flasks of polyjuice potion hidden in his cloak. An impromptu work station had been set up in this stripped Muggle office, just down the street from St. Mungo's London entrance. With Imperturbable charms on the windows and doors Landis paired vials with their explosive counterparts and bottled Garrotting Gas base from a portable cauldron.[1] Each paired set promised reactions ranging from the very loud to the very bright to the very painful; each bottle was only waiting for a cracking spell to set its contents free.

Behind them, immobilized on the floor, lay a fourth woman. After his initial three castings Landis hadn't been able to control her - too strong-willed apparently, or his fourth curse was just too weak. No sense in letting her go to waste; he'd thought of another part for her to play. Still, he'd never held this many under Imperius before - he'd have to release one once this was all underway in order to concentrate fully on his own job.

He ignored the unfamiliar rumble of his new voice in a stolen chest as he issued orders, the lack of hair brushing his shoulders, and the change in height that left him looking up at the tallest of the wizards rather than on the same level, instead busying himself with stripping the potions table of everything useful. He left the dregs in the cauldron, the half-corroded old spoon, a note in winking black script that read "Compliments of the WBA" and the bluebell flames as hot as he could make them. Then he turned and threw off a hex at the closest thrall, a middle-aged salary man with threadbare robes whom Landis had caught on his way home from the Ministry the afternoon before. The man's expression went peculiar as a thin trail of smoke curled out from his lips; he hiccupped, and a blast of flame blackened the concrete floor.

Next Landis released the witch in the bodybind, not giving her time to scramble up before he Stunned her. A sharp gesture had the second wizard hoisting her up into his arms, where Landis dribbled the contents of a vial that wasn't going with them past her slack lips. He counted two and a half minutes until red gleamed under her closed lashes and bubbled at her mouth. The threads of sticky blood dripping from her nose would be enough to promote concern in any attentive Healer; the leaking orifices, hysteria, and tendency to violently expel bitter-smelling bile on anyone in a three-meter radius would keep a good many occupied when she awoke.

Another witch was still waiting, youngish, smartly dressed, a shopper he'd caught coming out of Diagon and headed for Oxford street. It wasn't necessary to curse her into ill health - she and the man holding the Stunned woman would be helping him plant potions and cause mayhem on the upper floors. He'd be quite pleased with them if they managed to soak up all the retaliatory curses.

"Go," he told the first man, who immediately turned and made his way to the door. In the breath between reaching the door and opening it, he let out a lick of fire that managed to melt the cheap plastic frame and fill the air with the sharp chemical stench of Muggle rot. Landis grimaced. "And for Merlin's sake, cover your mouth until you get inside!"

1.	Garrotting Gas

((a post of what Casey is doing before the attack will come later. I'd rather keep his and Ligeia's posts separate, but I won't double post with them one after the other))


Slowly, Ligeia was getting used to coming to St. Mungo's four hours a day, weekends negoiatable. Buzzard was left at home. Besides being a harbinger of death, the carrion eating bird wasn't the cleanest creature for that reason. Her parasol was kept in a spare employee locker not that she needed it with the simple lighting the hospital used. She wore one of her most simple white dresses, a color good for catching stains like the mint green and peacock of the hospital staff. But what irked Ligeia the most was being told that she couldn't knit anything for the patients while she kept vigil. Too easy for the scrofungus to carry on the coarse yarns she used. Apparently this wasn't like the times she had spent in the school's hospital wing or Madam Tulo Nadge's shack. Upon first being told off about the knitting, Ligeia had jammed the needles back into bundle of yarn so quickly that the yarn had quivered!

During shifts on the third floor, Plant & Potion Poisonings, Ligeia was paired with a remarkable healer, a wizened roly-poly tough old bird named Maude Oggwax, who during slow periods out of earshot of the patients like to tell hunting tales. Like the time she had to fend off a rabid badger with her bare hands. Maude's alma mater:  Hufflepuff house. Ligeia invited her along for one of Papa Argyle's hunting trips.

"And here's Mr. Flint, jus' came in last night," Maude said through a mouth with few remaining teeth. "Git doesn't know the first thing about keeping his cauldron cleaned. Said he was rushing a Strengthning Soultion, I wouldn't trust him with a swizzle stick."

Mr. Flint was a well tanned man in the bed. The curious thing about him was what looked white patches of paint on his hands, around his mouth, and dribbling from his nose. The sheets on his bed looked to have been washed improperly as well. He looked in their direction, coughed, and his eyes nearly popped out of his skull with surprise. "I ain't having her touch me! She's got it too!" He pointed at Ligeia with a splattered white finger.

Maude explained. "Whatever he drunk, all of his bodily fluids bleach anything they touch. None have wanted to give him our antidotes to see which works."

"Dear Mr. Flint, I was born this way." Ligeia gave him a smile with gleaming teeth. "So I think I can handle anything you would hack at me." A well time glob of phlegm from Mr. Flint stained his bed sheet. He didn't look rest assured.

Ligeia took the first of potential antidotes from Maude, an inky viscous liquid. "Ooh, this stuff is very effective. We could leave you blacker than an elder Norweigan Ridgeback. Now drink up, Mr. Flint."

Six drops of the elixir was sufficient, only six and not any more. Un... deux... tois... quatre... cinq...

"Healer Thorpe."

Vivienne glanced up from the potions trolley of the Janus Thickey ward, a tiny pair of magnifying spectacles balanced insecurely on the tip of her nose as a pair of serious grey eyes discerned the mediwitch standing across. The tiny woman looked back at her with a worried expression and a clipboard in her hands. They were in a corner of the ward by one of the empty beds-- Viv held a glass pipette in one hand, a clear bottle of amber liquid in the other. An upright vial was centered on the trolley.

How many drops had she done... five or six? Merde. "What is it?" she asked her colleague, setting down the tools with delicacy: "I'm not on call for incoming patients today." In fact, she was on rounds for their long-term patients all week and didn't even enjoy coming off her shift. That meant leaving them alone; Viv was becoming rather attached.

"Of course, of course. It's about Mrs.Rose on the bed across. She seems to have gotten rather frantic and hasn't eaten any of her meals today," the mediwitch explained nervously.

Mrs. Rose was one of their older patients; caught somewhere between a damaged mind and general senility. Vivienne took off her eyewear and pressed her lips together into a frown: "I'll go deal with her. Fetch her a mug of hot tea, we'll use it to administer the sedative."

The two witches went their separate ways and Viv crossed over to the other end of the long room, towards where her patient's bed would be. She walked past the main entrance into the ward, a fluttery figure of lime green, and glanced outwards into the corridor as some Healers pushed the doors open to leave. It seemed like a quiet shift today. As quiet as St.Mungo's ever was, anyway.

When a visitor to St. Mungo's entered from the London the side, the Welcome Witch about clawed her way from the receptionist desk before freezing in horror.

Hello, hello again. "For pity's sake, I'm just visiting today," said Casey. "No more demands or stretched limbs to deal with."

There was a tug on his pant leg from Dingy. Casey rolled his eyes. "And, err...fine work. Going to the fourth floor, I know the way."

After the fiftieth time the elf suggested it, Casey had decided that demoralizing someone for just doing her job wasn't always called for. He'd been seeing enough of this witch over the summer. Only because of Dingy's worth as a valued servant meant that Casey would hear him out on occasion. After the lengthy time it took to sink in.

Master and house elf entered a lift to the fourth floor. Darla[1], Casey's mother, had started out on level one for the creature induced 'Glumbumble bite' that 'explained' her enhanced melancholy that topped her poor health. Her recovery was glacier slow. Maybe because she was a muggle so not every magical remedy would work. Or maybe because she had given up. She'd only been awake a handful of times since her arrival to St. Mungo's.

The donation to the hospital more than covered moving her to a private room off of one of the long term wards on the fourth floor. Darla's memory had been spotty the times she was awake, still delirious. Upon entering the room Dingy vanished the dead flowers in a vase on the beside table. Casey put in fresh irises bought from a florist in Diagon Alley and sterilized to avoid any contaminants. Little of anything Darla had owned before marrying Martin[2] remained but Dingy had managed to find a worn photograph stuck in the floorboards of a cupboard in the attic room Darla had been left in, forgotten. Casey had thought is was a muggle still but the picture was magical. He sat in a chair. He removed the photograph, folded three times, from an inner jacket pocket. Darla, young yet still frail looking, sitting at a table in a conservatory backed by a glass wall. There was a vase of irises on the table and Darla held a single stem in her hand to smell. This was how Casey had deduced irises to be her favorite flower. Hit bit his lip. The other feature of this old photograph was what looked like a strawberry blonde doll on Darla's lap. A little girl. Casey felt the lump of his hidden amulet before folding up the photograph and returning it to his pocket.

The discovery of the photograph didn't make any sense. It must have been taken at a time after she gave birth but before she was bedridden. But why was the photograph taken in the first place? Why the flowers? None of the O'Doherty family would give Darla such 'extravagance.' It must have been taken at the other manor Martin and Darla were said to have inhabited. The only other known person there to take the picture, then, would be Martin. Had he actually loved Darla once before? He sure as well didn't any more. Dingy couldn't remember much of those days, no solutions to the puzzle.

Casey couldn't explain it, not that he would ever tell the words to another human being, but being with his mother brought him a sort of peace. Even if she still wasn't awake. It was the afternoons getting to know her, learning the features of her face, seeing her body strengthen to a healthier form than the state she had been in during the other end of the summer.

Dingy, instead of sitting, slightly leaned against the wall, the handle of the pot on his head forming a triangle against the surface. There was a sound, and Dingy straightened. "Master, mistress Darla!"

Darla was stirring on the bed. Elf and the teen charge watched her carefully. Perhaps this would be a day where Darla woke up.

1.	NPC
2.	NPC

“Mungo’s. Wednesday. Fourth floor. Bring your notes.”

That had been the message that Darius received on the 26th, written in plain black ink on a simple strip of parchment, delivered via floo powder rather than any sort of bird. It had been unsigned, but he knew who it must have come from – only the W.B.A. would contact him that way.

Darius didn’t pretend to understand the inner workings of the Blood Alliance. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t his job to understand. His job, for the time being at least, was to follow orders, whether that meant stealing, threatening, or any other odd job that the actual members didn’t care to do themselves. And today, it meant scooping the Daily Prophet on behalf of the Azeri Wizarding Times, while making sure that nobody of consequence got caught doing whatever it was they were planning on.

Darius wandered the fourth-floor corridor, flipping through the battered Muggle notebook he used to record his notes and interviews. The yellow pages fluttered lazily in his grip, a brief bloodstain flashing among the black ink before disappearing again as he snapped the cover closed. He checked a wall clock as he passed the long-term wing and growled. An hour. It’d been a blasted hour, and he’d not seen a thing.

The welcome witch hadn’t questioned him much when he entered – rather, she’d seemed merely pleased that someone knew how to read the lobby signs – but he was having more trouble avoiding the nurses who minded the floor. He’d lingered for a while at the bedside of a comatose man, but the figure stirred in his sleep and Darius cleared out before he could wake up altogether. Now he paced the corridors, telling any nurse he saw that he was looking for the tearoom and turning down their offers to help him find it. Apparently, some of them took his disproportionate legs as a sign that he was a patient himself. As if he’d ever come to humans for health care.

Snorting, Darius leaned against the wall in an empty side corridor, flipped open his notebook to a blank page, and licked his quill to get the ink started. “Whatever you’re up to,” he thought, “you better get it started soon…”

What followed was a peaceful quarter of an hour as they each got into place. The fire-belcher sat quietly in a chair in the lobby, both hands clapped over his mouth as he waited with a myriad of other steaming, color-changing, bickering, bespelled witches and wizards. Occasionally, his eyes strayed to the clock above the nurse's station, his heavy gaze equal parts patient and placid. The second wizard hustled the unconscious woman up towards the forth floor after a minute to shrug at the welcome witch, to say she'd been fooling around with her wand. Thrall #3, the sharply-dressed young woman, planned to take a meandering route looking for a mediwitch friend of hers, a path that involved visiting several floors and making several covert stops. Landis himself strolled along the corriders of the fourth floor looking purposeful with a spray of flowers tucked under his arm, and no one bothered him. "Worse luck to you," he murmured to a comatose man in the second darkened room he ducked into, uncorking one vial, dumping it into another half-full, and sliding the whole thing under the patient's bed.

In the passageway a man loitered with a reporter's pad; Landis flicked his gaze over and then away once he'd recognized that face. Gabor. So he'd come. Either he'd help once this started or he'd get the hell out. Neither option harmed Landis or what he was doing here. It'd be pretty obvious what Gabor was meant to do once the others started hurling curses. Another deliberate glance over to catch the man's eyes, a stare bereft of the idle curiosity Darius would see from the normal hospital visitor, then Landis strode off on his way to other business.

His people spread out and lightened their load, dumping vials in garbage cans, under beds, and into cabinets stocked with other potions. Some contained liquids, quickly and very recently bottled, that would eventually melt their glass and then whatever else was around them, mingling, reacting, distracting. Others, mixed and distributed minutes ago in the abandoned Muggle shop, slowly bubbled up pressure under corks that wouldn't hold. Some were mixed now by the sharply-dressed witch, who shut each door behind her, dripped one vial on top of the other in a corner or a potted plant, and scurried out before the spills began to simmer. She hovered near stairwell doors and checked the time when she saw it, waiting for the moment to uncork the Garrotting Gas on the third floor's busiest stretch of hall.

After a while when the floor nurses began to notice Landis' presence as it passed the desk once, twice, thrice, he stopped, apologized, and asked for directions to the tearoom. In his fumbling for a quill to sign a get-well card the bumbling but very nice gentleman managed to break a bottle of ink in his pocket and threw it away in the waste bin next to the nurse's station, the glass contained by a paper bag now blooming with dark liquid. He excused himself to the loo to wash the ink off, soaping his hands meticulously until every trace of potion was gone. He waited, watching his stranger's skin in the mirror, for the expected, muffled whump.

When he stepped back out into the hall navy noxious smoke shrouded the nurses' desk, accompanied by a chorus of coughing from within. Voices pitched high chattered in surprise, only to jump into shrieks when Landis fired off a volley of curses into the cloud. Then he stepped to an earlier-visited doorway and sent a cracking spell under the bed, ducking back behind the doorway as the vials shattered and burst into flame. Fire leapt from bed to curtains to bookshelf, dancing along the floor like it was coated in oil and darting out after him into the hall. Landis backtracked, firing spells indiscriminately at hiding places and people, cracking glass and bones alike. He caught sight of one wizard thrall doing the same near the long-term ward. Clocks chimed the hour accompanied by ear-splitting pops and cracks and booms, a cacophony of reactions just beginning in different parts of the hospital but already raising hell on the fourth floor. Downstairs the young woman pinched her nose, held her breath, dropped the Garrotting Gas and ran. The man in the lobby stood up and stumbled around the waiting area, long licks of flame caressing the chairs and the other patients. And Landis as he ran with his wand out and flashing cut through the initial cluster of healers who burst from patient rooms, caught sight of dozens more emerging at the end of the corridor, pulled an envelope from his pocket and upended it on the floor. Glittering black powder swirled out, hitting the tiles and instantly expanding to fill the hallway with impenetrable Peruvian darkness. 

The day had been normal so far - as normal as spell damage ever was, anyway. Heads and hands got reattached, spleens got re-spleened and things got turned back to their right color, transparency or other general descriptive term. Normal, for the 4th floor, never meant boring - which was why he wouldn't trade the job for the world.

Simon was, currently, hard at work - the patient laid out before him was currently unconscious, the Auror's face rendered nearly unrecognizable via a nasty spell backfire. Simon's task was one of the ones he thought of as simple; with the subject unconscious, it was a matter of delicately removing spell effects with a mix of magic and potions. It was careful, measured and something Simon quite enjoyed.

The Auror's face was halfway back to normal, his eyes fully functional (as far as one could tell by looking, anyway) and his nose straightening back out. Simon paused to refill his small vials of potions when he sniffed - the room was filling with an odd smell, and through the thick walls came the sounds of ...well, chaos, since all he could hear was noise.

He put down the potions for a moment, heading for the door, when his patient groaned - he was waking up. Frowning, Simon returned to the man's side, sliding a sleeping drought from his healer's apron. He was standing by the Auror, potion uncorked, when the door opened.

"There we are, Mr. Flint," Ligeia held a glass for water above the wizard's lips. "That's some color back."

"B-But's ish orange!" he spluttered through the drink.

"Well what would you rather look like, a carrot or a parsnip?" Ligeia noticed a stain down her white dress, from the orange colored remedy that did the trick of restoring some color to his skin. "Though before that all takes effect, could you spit at this for me? It would save time on the washing."

There was a crashing sound outside and a hissing. Maude crossed to door of the ward to peer into the hall. "You lost, Missy?" came the echo.

A worse crashing. Maude Oggwax staggered into the room, coughing as if she was a young owl managing its first pellet.

"Hold that phlegm," Ligeia said, turning. "Are you alright, Ms--"

"No time--dear," came the choked words between bouts of hacking. "Garrotting--Gas--No, don't worry about--me, get the--paitients--protected."

Ligeia moved swiftly. Mr. Flint looked all the more nervous. "Is that Garrotting Gas?! Inna hospital--?

"Oh do be quiet Mr. Flint!" Ligeia said in a voice that still matched her serene tones but much more severe then what usually came out of the Ravenclaw's mouth. "Yes, that's garrotting gas! And since you're sick it could be much worse for you so if you don't want to cough up blood with the consistency of mayonnaise you'll let me get you sealed up!"

A flick of her wand at the beside curtains and suddenly the bed was tented with a white canopy. It sealed against garrotting gas or anything worse but the patient could still breathe clean air. A lockdown procedure when there was contamination. The other patients in the ward were also sealed in quick moments. Ligeia started routing through a cupboard containing healer's herbs.

One thing about brewing up poisons and caustic mixtures for fun: you learned quick and effective antidotes. Already Ligeia felt the sneezing come on, some coughing of her own as her throat threatened to clamp shut. She found what she was looking for, taking a bottle and dipping two of her handkerchiefs in it, then spreading a paste and dried leaves on the inside. After covering her mouth and noise with one prepped handkerchief, she trotted over to her fallen healer mentor with the other.

"This will counter the gas so you can breathe. What happened?"

Maude's voice steadied. "There was this woman, looked like no patient, dumping things in the hall. Then she tossed the gas when I confronted her."

"I'll see how the rest of the hospital is handling," Ligeia said, raising. her solution against the gas protected her breathing but her eyes were starting to well up with tears from the stinging. One decent Bubble Head Charm might be helpful, if she had the calm nerves to cast it properly. She had a pair of goggles in the locker with her parasol. Her next destination.

That would take a moment, when she walked into the hall and found that the floor was melting away.

Just when things seemed to be going for the better, there were the sounds of commotion outside. Casey reacted immediately, wand drawn and approached the door to the room. He opened it to find the blackest impenetrable smoke creeping into the room. He slammed the door shut. "Dingy, get the kit!"

The house elf disappeared without hesitation. The small selection of Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder that seeped into the room blacked the wall and obscured the door. Casey performed a shield to keep the black on the other side of the room. It would hold for a while. He turned to see his mother in the bed, shifting a little.

"Sorry mother." With a pang of guilt he cast a simple sleeping spell on her. It wouldn't do to have her awake to a hospital in a state of chaos.

"Master Casey!" Dingy reappeared. "Dingy has brought the kit!"

The 'kit' was only in its prototype state at the moment. He removed two items from bag the elf had brought: his Hand of Glory, which would be the only thing that could pierce through the darkness in the hallway; and a crude shield from a metal plate that tested Alvis Norling's cartouche ward idea. It had withstood a few spells, but whatever faced him outside could be more extreme. Once he had that invisibility cloak bought, it would be a major upgrade to his battle kit.

He lit the candle mounted in the Hand of Glory. After all, if Instant Darkness Powder was being tossed about, he considered the use of it was justified given the circumstances. "I'm also lighting a finger to keep mother under," he told the elf. This little function is what made Hands of Glory so suspect these days. Originally a thief with a Hand of Glory[1][2] could light the candle and fingers of the Hand, charming the household to remain in their sleep, while robbing the place with no signs of their candlelight visible from the street. Casey transferred the flame from the candle to the thumb. It flickered once in Darla's direction and she remained asleep. He contemplated lighting more, but it would be more condemning and hazardous to try to have other patients sleep through this attack.

"Watch over mother," Casey ordered. "Don't let anybody but a Healer come in. In fact, nobody, Healers included, touches her unless they show you their credentials and can list her full medical history."

"D-D-Dingy is on it, Master Casey," the elf said in a wavering voice.

Casey turned to leave. Already the Hand of Glory was in effect, the the door visible through the blackness. The shield was around his arm that held the Hand. With the magical torch aloft he opened the door with his wand, sealing it behind him.

It was as if the Instant Darkness Powder was not there, given the light from the Hand of Glory. Casey could see the hallway as if the lights were normal, but there was an unnatural sheen around the people. The chaos was as much as he had expected, nurses and visitors fumbling in the darkness that blinded there eyes. There was fire in one of the rooms, spell fire booming from down the hall. Casey began to hack. Poisonous fumes, no doubt. At a handicap to his vision, Casey performed a Bubble Head Charm around his head. His breathing steadied from the supply of clean air.

Casey dodged someone running blindly, a wizard that ran into a wall. He was going to have to stay on his toes, to remained unnoticed to the people fumbling in the Dark. He set off down the floor, looking to see how far the darkness lingered.

1.	HP Wiki
2.	more legends

Darius raised an eyebrow when the man made eye contact, but that was the only indication he made. He didn't recognize the man, but that was only to be expected. Polyjuice potion and all. Still, he was much too purposeful about Darius's presence to be a stranger. So whatever went down today, it would be his doing.

After a brief second the man moved on. Darius noted down the presence of an unknown suspicious man - who looked nothing like any of the WBA members he could think of off the top of his head - seen skulking about 'at the scene' before tucking his notebook away and loitering purposefully in the opposite direction.

After long moments, he heard a muffled whump in the distance, followed by screams and the unmistakable scent of burning air as curses were thrown and Garrotting Gas began to invisibly fill the halls. "If they'd only warned me, I'd have worn a coat," Darius thought, and tugged a ragged bit of cloth from his pocket to tie around his face. A wave of his mended wand formed a bubbled of clean air trapped with the mask, keeping out. Then he turned his wand on the nearest panicked civilian.

Wand-work and curses were not Darius's specialty, even without a broken wand. The best he could do without calling attention to himself was a few trip-jinxes and lighting a healer's robe on fire. But it was enough. One person tripping in a crowd could be a casualty without any further effort on his part, and the effect was compounded as more people fell over them and panic took hold.

Somewhere deeper in the wards, something or someone was on fire. Thick smoke tinged with the slight color of burning potions filtered out into the halls, mixing with the gas. Darius continued to move through the halls, occasionally firing off another casual jinx when he wouldn't be seen and already composing the story in his head. "The infamous Wizarding Blood Alliance has claimed responsibility for yesterday's attack on Saint Mungo's wizarding hospital in London..."

The floor appeared to be melting. Darius felt the shift in his weight and pulled back before he could sink through. Luckily, it had been his shorter leg. He crouched beneath the smoke for a better look at what he was dealing with. The melting of the floor seemed to be potion-based - it was spreading outward like a puddle, giving the stones a consistency like thick pudding with a day-old skin. Like quicksand, it was not impossible to cross, but it could be dangerous. More importantly, it was a waste of time. He would have to go around.

As he straightened, a brilliant whiteness appeared through at the corner of his eye. Darius's hand shot out on instinct - what was Faigel doing here? - only to grasp not a bird, but the wrist of an extremely pale young witch who'd stumbled into the dissolving floor. Darius cursed himself beneath his breath and dragged her up onto the solid stone. Being seen here would not be to his advantage. "Watch where you are going," he snapped to the girl.

Ligeia's shoes disappeared into the floor and she nearly stumbled but a sharp pressure closed like a vice on her wrist. It was another man that pulled her to steady ground.

"Watch where you are going," he growled.

"Why thank you sir, I'm rather grateful." She didn't recognize him from the hospital staff and he had a foreign air about him. But he was a staunch responder, already having his own method to breathe in the air like her handkerchief of herbs. "Though we both have to watch where we are going, given the current state of pandemonium." Her voice had an excited, shimmering quality when describing the chaos.

The the hall in front of them the melting floor finally sunk into a small hole open to the floor below. A spare gurney propped up against the wall fell back into the quagmire floor, towards the hole. Ligeia felt compelled to narrate these events. "I think it's eating through the floor down to Level Two! Is there anybody sick with spattergoit down there, because they are about to have a gurney land on them."

She could do nothing until she felt herself fully equipped. Crossing to a part of the hall not turning into mush, Ligeia waved her wand into the floor's locker room, unlocking the cubby where her parasol was located. Nimbly she clipped in her wand, freeing a hand to open a case along the shaft that held a pair of goggles she used in potions. That brought relief to her stinging eyes although she missed the sensation.

"Very well," she said to tall, dark, and stumpy, "do you have any ideas as to what caused all this? I shan't believe it was from a patient sneezing into the medicine room."

The hallway now black as pitch, Landis reached out and slipped inside the door directly to his left, one of the many patient rooms on the floor. It was one of the few no one had burst from during the initial burst of screams, and Landis had been limited to only the potions he could carry in. From visits to Rhys he knew each room contained small cabinets of healing potions under a lock a semi-talented child could spell open, and while other floor's stocks might not be so helpful he was certain this one could provide some quickly-mixed ammunition.

Unfortunately this one was not quite as empty as he hoped. Landis slammed the door shut behind him to cut off the invasive trek of the darkness powder from outside, training his wand on the Healer standing behind the bed with his other hand. No need for a quick curse. The man was unarmed. The patient on the bed groaned and stirred - quickly Landis tossed off a stunning spell to make him slump quiet again, hard gaze scrutinizing the Healer's features. He looked familiar - Landis had seen him in the paper - yes, he looked exactly like the head Healer of the floor. Landis smiled, distant and chilly as a winter coastline. Well, wouldn't he make a fine example.

"Cruxifilius!" The spell blasted Simon off his feet and crushed him against the wall. Invisible hands tightened around the healer's throat and wrists, squeezing like a vice. "Extredo ossalimens!" Landis didn't necessarily mean to kill the man, but the crippling pain of his skeletal system attempting to subvert itself should keep him nice and busy while Landis raided the potions stash. He ended the spell holding the man to the wall, letting him drop; he wouldn't be able to stand anyways. Landis blasted the lock off the potions cabinet while the bones under Simon's skin flexed, throbbed, and splintered.[1]

He worked fast, reading labels, snitching vials. Outside the door he could hear the pop pop pop of the fires getting to another batch. He kept an eye on Simon, too - it wouldn't do to underestimate the man's capacity for pain.


The wizard thrall Landis had brought up with him on the fourth floor was as blind as everyone else, but he didn't stop casting off spells into the darkness. When choosing his victims Landis had gone for convenience rather than competence - how could he know the skill set of those he singled out in Diagon, sliding close with his wand at their back? This man was a Ministry worker who'd always wanted to be an Auror, but his big strong arms didn't make up for his lack of knowledge. He'd never learned any dark curses, didn't know anything but what he used in his day-to-day subduing of enchanted toasters, toilets, and the like. But the Imperious drove him ever onward, and he cast again and again - stunning and disarming charms, confundis, incendio - and a half-remembered jumble of schoolboy jinxes spilling from his lips.

He hadn't been directed for subtlety once the attack began. He moved irrepressibly onward, the slash and flick of his wand mechanical, eyes blindly seeking out targets in the enveloping black.

1.	Permission granted by Armiece.