A Hogwarts Legend: Chaos Begins [4] (SLOW UPDATES)

Chapter Four

Chapter Four - "What's with all the ones?"

"We're eating out in the garden," Mrs Weasley says when we enter the kitchen. "There's just not room for everyone in here. Could you take the plates outside, girls?" She gestures at Hermione, Elinor and Ginny. "Bill and Charlie are setting up the tables. Knives and forks, please, you three," she says to Ron, Harry and I, pointing her wand a little more vigorously than she intends at a pile of potatoes in the sink, which shoot out of their skins so fast that they ricochet off the walls and ceilings.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she snaps, now directing her wand at a dustpan, which hops off the side and starts skating across the floor, scooping up the potatoes. "Those two!" she bursts out savagely, now pulling pots and pans out of a cupboard, and I know she means Fred and George. "I don't know what's going to happen to them, I really don't. No ambition, unless you count making as much trouble as they possibly can ..."

She slams a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and begins to wave her wand around inside it. A creamy sauce pours from the wand tip as she stirs.

"It's not as though they haven't got brains," she continued irritably, taking the saucepan over to the stove and lighting it with a further poke of her wand, "but they're wasting them, and unless they pull themselves together soon, they'll be in real trouble. I've had more owls from Hogwarts about them than the rest put together. If they carry on the way they're going, they'll end up in front of the Improper Use of Magic Office."

Mrs Weasley jabs her wand at the cutlery drawer, which shoots open. I jump out of the way as several knives soar out of it, fly across the kitchen and begin chopping the potatoes, which has just been tipped back into the sink by the dustpan.

"I don't know where we went wrong with them," says Mrs Weasley, putting down her wand and starting to pull out still more saucepans. "It's been the same for years, one thing after another, and they won't listen to - OH, NOT AGAIN!"

She's picked up her wand from the table, and it emits a loud squeak and turns into a giant rubber mouse.

"One of their fake wands again!" she shouts. "How many times have I told those two not to leave them lying around?"

She grabs her real wand and turns around to find that the sauce on the stove is smoking.

"C'mon," Ron says hurriedly to Harry and I, seizing a handful of cutlery from the open drawer, "let's go and help Bill and Charlie."

We leave Mrs Weasley, and head out of the back door into the yard.

We've only gone a few pages when Hermione's bandy-legged, ginger cat Crookshanks comes pelting out of the garden, bottle-brush tail held high in the air, chasing what looks like a muddy potato on legs. A gnome, barely ten inches high, its horny little feet latter very fast as it sprints across the yard and dives headlong into one of the wellington boots that lie scattered around the door. I can hear the gnome giggling madly as Crookshanks inserts a paw into the boot, trying to reach it. Meanwhile, a very loud crashing noise is coming from the other side of the house. The source of the commotion is revealed as we enter the garden and see that Bill and Charlie both have their wands out, and are making two battered old tables fly high above the lawn, smashing into each other, each attempting to knock the other's out of the air. Fred, George and Elinor are cheering; Ginny is laughing, and Hermione is hovering near the hedge, apparently torn between amusement and anxiety.

Bill's table catches Charlie's with a huge bang, and knocks one of its legs off. There's a clatter from overhead, and we all look up to see Percy's head poking out of a window on the second floor.

"Will you keep it down?" he bellows.

"Sorry, Perce," says Bill, grinning. "How're the cauldron bottoms coming on?"