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Triskelion, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America

Wednesday, 2009 March 10th, 22:30 UTC-4

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"Magic!" with a side of spirit fingers was Mama's favourite reply to almost all questions asked to her. It made summer homework damn fun growing up or figuring out what to eat as a family.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," was Papa's reflexive response to that particular answer. It got unsettling when it mattered not if he were asleep. All he had to be was within hearing distance to retort or maybe he had developed some sort of sixth sense for this one thing.

Researching magic was how my parents fell in love. A passion for understanding the hows and whys of magic. A passion they passed on down to me.

I learned about magic through the whimsical eyes of my mother, a Pureblood witch with her generations worth of hoarded pieces of magics long forgotten. And through the scientific lens of my stepfather, a Muggle-born's brother with his thirst to science out magic.

Damn lucky that the Ministry never caught winds of our mad quest. Sciencing out magic. They'd have come up with some fucking nonsense about Muggles stealing their precious magic, again.

At some point, I had to step back from sciencing out magic. Especially when I found myself knee-deep in the madness that was contemplating how the weather three countries away may or may not be affecting the piece of magic I was working on.

I gave the fuck up.

Wholeheartedly embraced "Magic!" with a side of spirit fingers!

Papa's dream of being able to do magic via science drowned in a deep, deep sea of madness.

It really didn't help that magic could be boiled down to Magicals bending reality to our favour. Want it badly enough, and magic would find a way to make it happen.

Wish magic.

The only bit of magical theory I found that was consistent in all my travels. The rest was a massive mess. More often than not, the magical theories thought up and studied contradicted some other theory from another branch or school of magic in another part of the world.

And with all I knew about magic, none of that explained this fucking drop of bloody insanity I found myself in.

In a depressing ass room of metal and concrete.

With a bunch of blokes.

A good half of who were in those Muggle white lab coats.

And I?

I had nothing but a fucking fluffy towel wrapped around me.

A second ago, I was too busy stopping my face from breaking against the bathtub's edge. Barely managed to catch my footing. Then... here I was.

There was no wishing involved.

None whatsoever.

I was too exhausted to think anything else besides, 'Hand out. Face to the side,' and maybe an 'AHHH!' or two. I couldn't remember ever wanting any of this. I wanted the opposite of this.

I was on vacation.

On a beautiful tropical atoll.

How did this even happen?

"Magic!" with a side of spirit fingers!

"What the fuck?" one of the blokes screeched, and on a second look, the bloke was a bird.

So not in a room of only men with a towel for modesty. Small mercies.

'God fucking damn it. You've got to be shitting me.'

My gift of Legilimency had better be fucking hallucinating....

It probably wasn't.

Fuck.

The gift allowed me the ability to observe what I was pretty sure was the ego of anything with enough sentience to them. To see some amalgamation of their self-image warped by their personality floating about. To hear the egos nattering on about their inner dialogue. And if I focused on or their emotions were strong enough, they would translate to my other senses: smell, taste and touch.

It made avoiding iffy people easier than not. It also made crowded areas doubly crowded. An absolute nightmare of a headache on a good day.

The confusion coming off of everybody in the room made the world wobble like a boat on the water. Or ending up here exacerbated my case of magical exhaustion... which wasn't... good.

The dizziness of both things was far too similar to tell apart. Though magical exhaustion came with other symptoms: cold numbness, loss of vision and maybe death if one kept ignoring all the body's signals to not.

Or maybe this place was on a boat.... Could definitely hope so.

And the worst bit of all this? These guys were English thinking, and none of their egos had a stick clutched in their wand hand or had a stick for a hand.

The one who came closest to such a thing was the ego of the bloke by the wall. Had a damn realistic gun for a hand. Probably knew his favourite gun better than the hand he used it with. That it was an extension of himself. And its physical counterpart was currently held in his real hands, pointed right at me.

Bad sign number one.

Muggles.

And they fucking couldn't be the run-of-the-mill Muggles, could they?

Nooooo.

All of them had at least one wriggling, suckered octopus tentacle shoved up in the various holes on the heads of their egos. Whoever they followed to wasn't in the room. Most of those tentacles faded off to who knows where.

Except for one.

That tentacle's source was visible, trailing out of the monstrously wide mouth belonging to the woman's ego. Shoved up the nose hole of a bloke's ego who had a screen for a face. A screen with a nose. Probably paid in snorting drugs to be here.

Half of the egos sported deformed mouths filled with them tentacles flapping about. Wouldn't be surprised if there were eight tentacles each. What with them being octopus tentacles.

And one of these egos was shuffling her way toward me. Octopus tentacles reaching out. A warm, greasy feel and smell of rancid animal fat that was her attention smeared itself into my face. Took too much not to gag.

Bad sign number two.

Fanatic face.

Contagious as fuck.

Then there was the sweat-drenched, shirtless Muggle seated on some sort of creepy ass, Muggle sci-fi torture chair probably inspired by the Spanish Inquisition.

His body and ego were... not well.

He was covered in multicoloured bruises. Old and new. Had to be a prisoner going through a round of torture or something. He wasn't even bound to the chair, and yet, he made no attempt to escape. Or maybe he was a guinea pig with that shiny metal arm.

His ego, for an adult, had an utterly blurry face. Blurry like somebody who had been freshly Obliviated to the point that they had no sense of self.

Not all that different from the ego of one Gilderoy Lockhart at the end of First Year. At least the peacock's ego no longer smelled and tasted like a bottle of perfume missing its bottle. Also fixed the size of his ego's head that used to take up half a room with a smile so bright that I had multicoloured blotches blinding me for hours on end whenever he popped up like a demented Jack-in-a-Box.

The shirtless Muggle's ego had octopus tentacles as thick as my legs all over him. One wrapped around his torso and each limb, including one spiralling down empty space as if his metal arm was there. The last was thinner and had a stranglehold on the poor ego's neck. The end of which was shoved in his earhole.

The placement of the tentacles so eerily similar to the generally silky ribbons wrapped around the egos of those under the Imperious Curse. A cruder and more brutal version. Likely without the peaceful high of that particular Unforgivable.

And to top off that mess, his poor ego was shattered.

The fractured pieces floated in a vaguely three-limbed, humanoid shape. Damaged in a way that I've only ever seen the Cruciatus Curse have people doing to themselves in a mad bid to tear out the ability to feel pain.

I have yet to see anybody succeed in escaping the pain that way, but it also seemed to be one's natural response when placed under that much pain. More likely to fracture themselves into insanity than stopping anything. Haven't come across anybody able to recover from that state either.

And this damned bloke was surrounded by fucking Muggles.

Bad sign number three.

A Muggle facility.

Of some sort.

My hand dropped to the side of my thigh, and my fingers closed on nothing but air.

"Oh, dear."

I, a witch, was Merlin damned wandless in this bloody fucking mess.

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