fatal love

Chapter 53

It took James two weeks to figure out how to actually cast the Transportation Spell. When he did, he started screaming in excitement, just before the textbook he'd been using to experiment promptly fell from the air and bashed him on the head.

"It worked!" he yelled, "it bloody worked!"

"Tell us how then," Remus said impatiently, but he was grinning.

"Okay, okay, it's complicated, everyone come over here."

The three of them gathered around James, who was sat at the one desk in their dorm. He was using two textbooks, one to represent the plate, and one to be the food.

"Right, the pronunciation is the easy part," James started off, "with the emphasis on the - iter. The wand movement is the finicky bit, because we need the food to be moved up and a little backwards, so it lands on people's heads. So we need to draw an L-shape. Moving the wand North will move the food up, and then you lift your wand off the plate for the bottom of the L, and that'll move the food sideways."

He demonstrated once more, and got hit on the head with a textbook once more, when it appeared three feet above him and then instantly dropped down.

Remus stared at the book in amazement. "I can't believe we did it," he whispered, still grinning. "We actually made a bloody spell. We're fucking geniuses."

"And it's so much better than Snivelly's bollocks," Sirius murmured in agreement.

"So when can we use it?" Peter asked eagerly.

"Sunday night," Remus said immediately. "Dinner is best because everyone is already in the Hall before the food appears, and that gives us two days to figure out how to actually gain access to the plates."

"Where would we be without you, Moony?" Sirius smirked.

Remus rolled his eyes. "You'd still be law-abiding students, for one."

"And what a great sadness that would be!" Sirius declared dramatically, just to see Remus smile.

The next two days involved a heavy amount of planning and logistics. The first thing they realised was that the House Elves probably wouldn't help them with this prank, given that it involved the ruining of a lot of the food they had cooked. That meant they needed to find some way to charm all the plates in the kitchens without being seen.

In the end, it was decided that James would sneak into the kitchens first, under the Invisibility Cloak, and set off a dungbomb. At this point, the Elves would hopefully evacuate, and Sirius, Remus and Peter would come in, and the four of them would charm about three hundred plates in about ten minutes, leaving before they were caught.

So Sirius was hanging around on the corridor with the portrait of the pear, with Remus and Pete, when the portrait swung open, and James' head peaked out.

"They all just Disapparated! Now!"

They hurried into the kitchens. The first thing Sirius noticed was the stench - it smelled bloody foul.

"Jesus Christ," Remus muttered, pulling a face, "no wonder they Elves got the hell out."

"What did you expect?" James snorted. "Come on, we don't have long."

The plates were all in piles next to the sinks, stacked high.

"Alright," Remus said, taking charge, "Sirius, you take those piles, Potter, you the ones over there, and Pete and I will do these."

They nodded, and Sirius rushed over to his pile. They estimated they only had a few seconds per plate, so there was no time for messing around. He muttered the incantation, drawing the L-shape he'd been practicing non-stop for the last forty-eight hours.