My Pen-Pal Voldemort

Summary:
Ascending to claim his rightful place as the cruelest, wickedest Dark wizard in Britain had been, as the Muggles say, easy-peasy. Clawing his way to the top of Brockton Bay's seedy underbelly might finally prove a challenge worthy of Lord Voldemort... But why, oh why, do his most vexing adversaries always turn out to be reckless children with unstylish glasses?

Glossary 1.1

Emma, please don't set fire to the gophers with your toenail-lasers. The poor things haven't done anything to you.

"...Mione, this plan just seems... Too easy, someho..."

Oh, there goes the whole gopher village, up in flames. What about King Arpher and the Gopher Knights of the Round? From now on, they're gonna have to start jousting on foot, Emma. On foot. You monster.

"...Best solutions usually... Less you want to try to use the Ki..."

I gradually drifted from a restless slumber to a half-awake state, when the sound of whispering voices intruded on my dreams. Grmnf. Go 'way, voices. All your disemembebodied murmuring is ruining a perfectly good nightmare, y'know.

"...Would have expected you to warn us not to... Risks of mucking about with the Veil of De..."

"...Sperate times call for desperate meas..."

I levered the pillow off of my head. Clearly, my strategy of hiding under the covers wasn't going to stop the damn intrusive night-time conversationalists - just muffle them slightly. Maybe I should put a sign on my door? Something along the lines of: "TAYLOR HEBERT'S ROOM - NOISY INSOMNIAC MUMBLERS KEEP OUT". Honestly, couldn't they ta-

...Wait. Waaait a frick-frack paddywhackin' minute. I forced one of my eyes open. It didn't make much difference - my bedroom was mostly dark, with just a sliver of moonlight entering through the gap between the window drapes. But there was something... Something important about the voices, some annoying little detail that was nagging at my sleep-addled mind...

There was a heavy thump, followed by a metallic tinkling noise, and then the rapid gadush-gadush-gadush of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, as a spike of adrenaline kicked my body into high alert.

I sat bolt upright in my bed, staring blindly around my room.

As an afterthought, I fumbled for my glasses; a long few seconds of clumsy searching eventually yielded results, when I managed to locate my glasses, and get them pushed on my face in roughly the right position. My frantic scrambling had also knocked over my alarm clock, but I really didn't have time to worry about clocks, right now.

I didn't have to time to groan at my own unintentional puns, either, so that one would have to pass unlamented.

There were no hints of movement, no strange shapes lurking in the darkness that were roughly the same size and shape as a person. Nothing seemed to be amiss, from what little I could see in the gloom. This reassured me not at all.

Those mumbling voices probably hadn't been part of my dreams; they hadn't sounded like Emma, or Sophia, or anyone familiar at all. And the other noises - the thump, and the metallic tinkling; most likely sounds of things hitting the floor - had definitely not come from my subconscious. Which meant that there was somebody in my room, right now, in the middle of the night, and they were-

Flutter, flutter, flumph.

...Tossing notebooks at me? What the...? That had almost certainly been the sound of paper, like a thin booklet of some sort, dropping to the ground. Had I gotten a visit from some kind of reverse burglar? Could the teachers at Winslow possibly have stooped so low that they'd started breaking into random teenagers' bedrooms under cover of night, so they could dump piles of surprise homework on the heads of unsuspecting victims?

I knew that at least half the student body were gang members, or aspiring to join one of the local criminal organizations, but the situation was getting dangerously out of hand, if even the teachers had begun assigning our required reading by means of B&E.

PLINGGG, kling, pik-pik-prrring.

Okay, that one wasn't paper. Something metallic, maybe? If my unseen assailant was aiming at me, they were doing a terrible job. It sounded like all the whatever-they-were, the things that had landed on my floor, had... Well, landed on my floor, and not on me. None of the invisible missiles had even hit my bed.

"...You sure this is gonna work? He might..."

I kept as still as I could, straining my ears and holding my breath. The voices were whispering again - that might let me work out where they were coming from, and where the burglar-teachers were hiding. At least, I might pick up a clue as to why they were here in the first place.

"...Even if this isn't a gateway to the afterli... End up someplace so bleak and dismal, so utterly... Bereft of hope, that no-one has ever... Back from there alive..."

I frowned. It was difficult to make out where the voices were coming from, but the things they were saying... That was just rude. My bedroom wasn't that bad. I'd tidied up only last week - and besides, I wasn't the one chucking random bric-a-brac into strange people's very-nearly-clean bedrooms!

Unless they meant Brockton Bay, or perhaps Earth Bet in general, in which case... Yeah, "bleak and dismal" was likely an accurate description. Still kinda rude, though.

The tone of their voices didn't really match what I'd expect from hardened criminals - or from a roving pack of sadistic teenagers playing a prank, for that matter. Okay, sure, they sounded young - possibly my age, or a little older - but the urgency in their hushed whispers didn't strike me as the kind of tension you heard in the voices of teenage yahoos, sniggering like idiots, who'd worked themselves up with excitement over their latest brilliant idea for making other people miserable, eager to pull off their stunt so they could slink away and laugh about it... And yeah, let's just say that I had plenty of personal experience with bullying. I knew what they sounded like.

These whispers had a different kind of anxiousness to them - the sort you heard from characters in a slasher movie, when they were frantically arguing how to escape from their secluded cottage in the middle of the wilderness, without being hacked in half by the serial killer with the blood-stained machete, who was stalking them from the shadows.

On second thought - just because the unseen whisperers might not be professional criminals - or worse, amateur teenage bullies - that didn't mean I should get too relaxed.

Hesitantly, I climbed out of bed and rose to my feet, and hissed out a muted: "...Hello?"

No response.

"Who's there?" I whispered. "A-are you on the run from somebody? A gang? T-the police? A villainous cape? ...A bloodthirsty madman in a hockey mask and armed with a large farming implement?"

When the silence had stretched out for an eternity - probably only eight or nine seconds, if you asked the rest of the universe, but it felt like a lot longer; besides, my alarm clock had been the first to bite the dust - I took a cautious step forward, hands flailing in front of me to search for hidden obstacles.

Firstly, the reason that I hadn't been struck by any of the thrown debris, was that they'd all landed in the middle of the floor.

Secondly, that I was now standing, albeit slightly wobbly, in the middle of the floor.

My legs turned quite a bit more wobbly, when a rather heavy and distressingly solid object bonked me on the head.