Harry Potter was on his way back to Hogwarts. For one reason or another, he had to make a stop in the lobby of your run of the mill office building before properly heading out. It was lucky for him that he did, for in the lobby sat Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape.
"Ah, Harry," Dumbledore greeted him, "I'd hoped we'd catch you before you reached the train. We've spent the past summer researching ways to get rid of Voldemort, and I believe you'll like what we've come up with. Would you like a chocolate?" He offered an open box of treats to Harry, who selected one filled with chocolate syrup.
"What's the plan, then?"
"Well, the last time we went up against him, we happened to transform him into a candy bar. The effect didn't stick, but..." he snatched the chocolate back before Harry could eat it, "encasing his soul in a piece of candy selected by the chosen one ought to do the trick. We will need some rare crystals to perform the binding though, so you and your friends can do an independent study tracking those down. Bye now!" With a wave, he and the others disappeared.
Fast forward a few months, and Harry, Hermione and Ron had tracked these special crystals to a random street in Illinois. The crystals were not particularly well hidden. In fact, they were lying on the ground in a pile of artificial snow. As Ron and Hermione, who had started to morph in my brain into two of my actual friends, reached for the gems, they found themselves captivated by their shine.
"Issopretty," one mooned over a rod of amethyst.
"The colorzzzzz," buzzed the other as she poked a piece of aquamarine into the fake snow to make it stand upright.
"Hey...guys?" Harry, who had turned into me, muttered, "I don't know if I'm being paranoid here, but I've read lots of stories where people get obsessed with a treasure and...you know...die staring at it?"
No response. With a sigh, I threw the crystals into a bag without looking at them and dragged the dazzled dimwits along with me.
The next thing I knew, I was in a cabin in the middle of the woods surrounded by the Scooby Doo gang. We were sitting down to a nice supper of lobster bisque when the lights went out. 30 seconds of chaos followed, and when the lights came back, our host was gone. Luckily, whoever kidnapped him had left perfect impressions of a foot in the ground. I tried to point out that real footprints don't look like that, but the gang had already gone off to follow them. 200 yards or so away, the tracks disappeared. We started to discuss our next move when a voice called to us.
"Maybe I can help you," rumbled a man sticking his head over some nearby bushes. He had the features of a toad and the voice of Barry White. "I saw the whole thing. Those tracks go underground."
"What do you mean, underground?" Freddy asked. In response, the man's head sank down out of sight, eerily smoothly. The next thing we knew, he was poking up through the ground where the tracks disappeared.
"I told y'all. This place's full of tunnels. Why don't you come on down." He retreated once more into the earth, and we followed through the hole he left behind. We never resurfaced.
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