A Piece of Mind

Chapter [2]

"Incoming call: Butler."

Foaly looked up from his keyboard, fingers finishing his last thought as his eyes moved to the alert on one of his other monitors.

He pinged Holly; if she wasn't busy, she would come upstairs for a second. Though, given the last time she had been pinged had been a prank constructed by their very own Mulch Diggums, chances were she wouldn't be too pleased.

"Butler. Where's our favorite little mud-man? Get himself into trouble recently? More trouble, I should say," Foaly chuckled at his own joke as he accepted the call.

Butler's face hardened on the screen, and Foaly grimaced.

"That bad, huh?"

"Worse. Is Holly there?" The Eurasian asked.

"Not yet," Foaly said, checking the hall monitors. "Oh, never mind. She's on her way."

Holly burst into the control room, neutrino in hand as she scanned the room for signs of their dwarf friend. When she saw Butler on the screen her shoulders dropped and she pulled over a swivel chair.

"It's good to see you, old friend. What has he done this time?" Holly asked, glancing at Foaly.

"Is this line secure?" Butler asked in a low voice.

Foaly raised a bushy eyebrow. "Of course."

"Artemis did magic today," Butler said evenly as if ripping off a particularly sticky band-aid. Holly banged her fist on the side of the table.

"Di Arvit! Every time I start to think..." She puffed out a sigh. "Doesn't matter now. Why are you calling and not him?"

Butler seemed to age five years from that question alone. "He's talking to his parents. For once, I can say in confidence that this is not his fault, and was a surprise to us both."

"Now why do I find that so hard to believe?" Holly asked. Butler scratched his arm, the only sign that he was uncomfortable. Talking with The People sometimes felt akin to disarming a bio bomb under pressure.

"He caused a chandelier to explode," Butler said, lips thin. "Less than 20 minutes after the incident he called me up to his room. There was an owl on his mattress, with a letter tied to its leg. It claimed to have come from a Ministry for Magic, and that he will soon be attending a school of magic because he is a... wizard," Butler hesitated on that last word. It felt foreign and too inaccurate a word to describe Artemis.

The boy was a genius, stubborn, unathletic, arrogant even. But a wizard? It simply did not make sense. Butler would have to allow his mind to expand once more to fit the new absurdity into his already obscure world.

"You mean there's more of them!?" Foaly asked as Butler's words registered with the centaur. He jumped in his seat as his fingers kicked into gear, flying across scanners as he grabbed his tinfoil hat and stuffed it hurriedly on his head. Huh, Artemis had been right.

"How could I not have known... a whole society of wizards... right under my nose!" Folly muttered to himself, eyes nearly touching the screen as he tried to find anything he might have missed before.

"He's right," Holly admitted, surprisingly calm. "If there were a whole ministry of magic mud men running around I think we'd know."

Butler looked grimly back at the captain. "You've hidden from the surface world to protect yourselves and your magic, with none the wiser about what goes on underneath them. Is it so impossible that others have managed to do the same?"

The silence was deafening.

Folly sighed, running a hand across his face. "One day... Frond, just tell him to be careful. And to wear the iris lenses I'm sending over now. They're both blue, which may be a bit uncomfortable but it will avert their attention. Not that the rest of him won't manage to get into trouble anyway but it's one less thing to explain."

"Good," Butler said, tilting his head a fraction of an inch as if listening to something on his end. "I'd better go. I can hear his parent's through the door." Despite his words, the man paused before ending the call.

Holly, eyebrows pinched in worry, took the opportunity to ask if Artemis would be okay.

Butler didn't answer her. He couldn't. He didn't know himself.