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Neville did not know why he had been chosen to venture into the lake. But venture, he did. After stripping down and transfiguring his underwear into a set of swimming trunks, he stepped into the water and shivered. With a quick flick of his wand, he cast a warming charm on himself and holstered his wand in a holder attached to his leg.
"Here goes nothing," he said, opening a jar of gillyweed which he had in a little bag attached to his waist. As a newly appointed Professor, Neville had a ready supply of gillyweed, enough for several hours underwater. Hopefully, his task wouldn't take that long.
As he swam further and further into the depths of the lake, it surprised him to see the colours change the more he encroached on the Merpeople's colony. Neville wished he had time to stop and examine the plants that were in various hues of purple. Maybe they had magical properties, just the perfect thing for his studies into aquatic plant life. Another time, maybe.
His task was a simple one – or so it seemed – to find out where the giant squid had disappeared to. How it had disappeared, he did not know. Neville approached a marble archway and paused for a moment to examine the markings. His Mermish was rusty, but he could see clear markings which cautioned against trespassers. But he needed to talk to the head Merman. Hopefully, he knew where the squid was.
Neville swam through the opening, and in an instant, spears and tridents encircled him.
"Stop, Wizard," a large merman said, poking his trident close to Neville's throat. Neville gulped as best he could due to the gillyweed. "You are not welcome here."
"Please, they have sent me from Hogwarts, I need to speak to your leader," Neville pleaded.
The merpeople around him discussed loudly in Mermish. Neville caught the words: spy, danger, and squid. He lifted his head at the last word and looked around. He could not see the squid; surely it wasn't here, was it?
"Please, I am just looking for the Giant Squid, if you let me talk to your leader, then I will leave right away," Neville explained.
The merpeople's discussion continued for several minutes, their voices getting more and more frantic before Neville felt the spines of a trident in his back, poking him forwards.
Neville sighed inwardly in relief. They seemed to take him somewhere, hopefully he could get this over and done with and get out of here. But then he was led into a compact building, constructed on the lake floor. It was covered in seaweed and had small slits for windows. This was not a dwelling for a leader.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked and was met with silence and a hard poke in the back.
Suddenly he was gripped hard by two large mermen and before he knew it, they threw him in a large rusty cell. Neville spun around, reaching for his wand, and met nothing. The first merman grinned menacingly at him, Neville's wand in his hand. "No magic, Wizard."
Then suddenly he was alone, locked in a cell underwater. So much for a simple task. The cell was dark, with only a slight glow through the slits in the walls. He examined the bars. While rusty, they were still solid. He was well and truly stuck there.
"Well, about time I got a roommate," a voice came from the corner of the cell. Neville spun around and gasped. It took him a moment to compute what he was seeing, but he was seeing a squid… a humanoid squid.
It had a human-like torso, but it had two bulky tentacles for legs, two slightly smaller tentacles for arms and six small tentacles flowing from the top of its head like hair. The face had a beak instead of a nose and mouth, but otherwise, it looked vaguely human.
"Hello, Longbottom, it is such a delight to have such an… attractive roommate," it said with a wink, and Neville shuffled uncomfortably out of a tentacle's reach as it tried to caress his bare chest.
"H-how do you know my name?" he stuttered.
"I must say, I am a little disappointed, after all our talks by the lake, you don't recognise me?" the squid-person clicked his beak in disapproval. "It's me… 'The Giant Squid' as you wizards call me, or Quincy to those in the know." The squid-man winked at him again, and Neville took a gulp. He hadn't known that the Giant Squid could be such a big flirt.
The Giant Squid was there… how, why? It made little sense, but maybe this wasn't the pressing matter at the moment.
Looking at the watch on his wrist, Neville quickly took another piece of gillyweed from his small bag. Luckily, they hadn't taken that from him. At least he had thought to bring extra too.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "I was sent to look for you after you disappeared."
"Well, now that you've found me, what are you going to do with me?" Quincy said, cornering Neville as his tentacles explored Neville's face. Neville resisted the urge to flee. If they were to escape, they would need to work together.
"Erm… Quincy… could you… could you stop that?" he asked as one stray tentacle strayed lower.
"Okay, spoilsport," Quincy said with a small huff.
"Why were you captured and… why are you… like this?" Neville asked.
"They are planning something, the merpeople. I overheard them talking. They have found ancient magic. They will walk the earth, not just the seas. But they are missing something," Quincy explained. "And about my form? That is my secret and mine alone."
Neville nodded. "Okay, but what are they missing?"
"Sacrifices."
Sacrifices. That didn't sound good, nor did their plans. He had to stop them. But how? He didn't have his wand and was stuck in a cell with a flirty, touchy-feely squid-man. He could do some wandless magic, but he was by no means an expert at it.
"We need to stop them!" Neville said and moved over to the gate and tugged at it to no avail.
"Only Mermagic can open the gate," Quincy explained.
"Then how are we going to get out of here?" he asked and then looked to Quincy. "What would happen if you were to transform back into your giant form?"
"I would most likely crush you," Quincy said. "And what a shame that would be too, you are such a handsome specimen."
Neville looked around the room and examined the walls of the dwelling. They were sturdy in most places until Neville discovered a small hole between two of the stones. "This could work…" he murmured to himself. He stood back and motioned for Quincy to join him.
He could do this. "Bombarda," he said, concentrating on the hole in the wall. Nothing happened.
"Try again, love," Quincy said, and Neville cringed at the term.
"Bombarda."
Dust filled the water around them and it took Neville a moment to see. Before he could register what was going on, several spongy appendages grabbed Neville and they sped away. He ignored the roars of outrage around him as the squid transformed into its giant form, and they swam away.
He was released from Quincy's grasp once they were well clear of Merpeople colony. Quincy then transformed back into his humanoid form.
"Well, that was a bit more dramatic than I had pictured, but I love a good getaway, besides the embrace was very much enjoyable," Quincy said with a wink.
Neville wanted nothing more than to escape, get away from this randy Squid, but he needed to stop the merpeople, before someone else gets captured, or worse, killed.
He channelled his inner Gryffindor and put the embarrassment behind him. He could deal with the trauma. Neville had enough of it already, anyway. He was already in hell; he might as well keep going.
"So, we need to stop them, we can't let them do this to anyone else."
Quincy nodded. "Yes, true. I suggest that we infiltrate the leader's palace and destroy the magic texts. That way, we stop them for good."
"Infiltrate? How?"
"I have just the thing," Quincy said and started rummaging around. It was then that Neville noticed that they were in a grotto. A well-lived-in grotto. This was Quincy's home.
Quincy appeared with a glass filled with one of the purple plants Neville had seen. "We both eat this, and then we will look just like them, talk like them too."
Neville took the glass and examined it with large, curious eyes. It looked like gillyweed, but it was purple. "I saw this on the way down but have never heard of it before."
"They call it pillyweed," Quincy explained. "Few know about the special properties of it. If you take this, you won't need your gillyweed either."
"Fascinating," Neville murmured as he continued to examine it.
"I can give you some to take back when we are done, my dear, but we must settle the task at hand," Quincy said, taking the jar from Neville's hands, but not before giving him a rather uncomfortable caress with his large arm tentacle.
Neville brought himself back from Herbology brain and nodded. "Yes, of course. So, we both take this, and we pose as guards?"
"Exactly, I saw the room where the text was in when they brought me in." Quincy opened the jar and gave Neville a large piece of pillyweed and one for himself. Neville stared at the weed before looking at Quincy.
"One thing has been bothering me, how did they capture you? You are a lot bigger than them."
"They invited me under the pretence of a lake meeting; we used to have them, you see. I transformed into my humanoid form, and then they cast a spell on me to stop me from transforming back."
"But then how did you transform earlier, when we escaped?" Neville asked.
"The spell only works within their colony," Quincy explained.
Neville nodded; his curiosity satisfied.
Once they had strategized, they swam back to the outskirts of the merpeople colony.
"The palace is there," Quincy pointed at the large building up on an outcrop of coral.
"Okay, let's go," Neville said and fished out the pillyweed.
He felt himself transform, his legs disappeared and a fishtail appeared in its place. His skin took a bluish tone, and he felt his teeth sharpen. He looked over at Quincy and saw an exceptionally large merperson in his place, but he recognised Quincy's eyes.
"Looking good," Quincy said as he wriggled his fingers, trying to get to grips with how to use them. "Especially you, my dear, you look positively scrumptious."
Neville ignored the comment, at least he did not have all the tentacles to worry about right now.
"Let's go, we only have an hour," Neville said as they began to swim through the colony.
They approached the palace; luckily it seemed to be nightfall, so few were around.
The palace looked like something he had seen during his studies on Magical Ancient Greece; it was mainly open with large stone pillars holding up a gigantic roof.
Quincy and Neville hid behind a rock as a guard passed. "Quick, this way," Quincy whispered, and Neville followed him inside the palace once the guard was well out of view.
They appeared to be in a guard room. A weapon-stand stood against the far wall and a lone bed - thankfully empty - filled most of the room. Neville took a spear from the stand, just in case. He could pose as a guard or something, and he saw Quincy do the same. "We should try and find my wand too. while we are here," he suggested.
Quincy looked around the room and under the bed was a little box. Neville swam over and sure enough, inside the box was his wand, his broken wand. So much for that. He would have to rely on wandless magic then. Hopefully, he could get it to work again.
They exited the room and started towards the room Quincy had seen. Neville's heart seemed to beat so loudly he could hear it. "Easy, handsome! We can't get caught," Quincy said, seemingly sensing Neville's nervousness. A hand caressed his back and for once Neville didn't mind, at least it wasn't one of his tentacles.
The room was easy to find and so was the text. However, they weren't alone. Behind the text was the large merman who had captured him. Now he had a large necklace full of shells around his neck. He was their leader.
"Wizard, I see through your trickery, you are here just in time," the merman sneered. "You will be the first of many from whom we will steal the magic! We will enslave you and kill your children" His eyes leered menacingly, and Neville felt his blood boil. He hadn't survived the last wizarding war to be enslaved or to die at the hand of another madman.
The merman started to chant, and Quincy cried out, "Stop him!" Quincy collapsed and Neville noticed that they were both transforming back, and Quincy was in visible pain.
Neville gripped the spear and threw it at the merman who caught it easily. "You will have to do better than that," he sneered and continued chanting.
Neville's head started to pound, and his eyes grew cloudy. He couldn't let this happen, not to himself, not to Quincy, not to his world. With all the strength he had, he cried out—driving his hands forward as he did so.
"BOMBARDA MAXIMA!"
Neville didn't know what happened next. He woke up in Quincy's grotto, his head swimming, and he felt weird as if he was missing something. He sat up and instantly regretted it as it felt like his head had split open.
"Careful, love," Quincy said, now in his humanoid squid form. "You took quite a beating from your spell. But you did it, you stopped them. The text and their leader are both gone. In fact, it destroyed most of the colony."
Neville felt sick. He had wanted to stop their plan but there were also innocents in the colony. He hoped they had survived.
"Don't feel bad, I have already helped the survivors while you slept. They thanked you for saving them from that madman. Apparently, he overthrew the old leader."
Neville nodded and looked over at Quincy, he was for some reason sporting a swollen belly, almost like he was… no… it couldn't be…
"Oh, I hope you don't mind. Mates are so hard to come by and you are so handsome, I helped myself to some of your essence while you were unconscious," Quincy said coquettishly. How was that even possible? He felt violated and confused, he had just been through hell, he was almost done and just had to keep going for now.
"How? Why?" Neville asked, but then he shook his head. "No, never mind, I think it is better that I don't know…"
"Rest, once you are feeling better, I will help you to the surface," Quincy said.
Upon reaching the surface, Professor McGonagall, who looked both concerned and relieved, greeted Neville.
"Professor Longbottom, we were about to send a search party!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, Professor, it took me a while, but I found the Giant Squid and stopped a merpeople uprising… long story. But can you do me a favour, Professor?" Neville asked.
"Oh, of course," she said. "What is it?"
"Remove my memories from the last 12 hours?"
Professor McGonagall looked at him curiously, but did so anyway.
"Obliviate."
She erased the memories of his moments alone with the Giant Squid from his mind, and he felt less violated.
"Thank you," he said with a sigh of relief. "Let's go, I am starving, and I am sure you want to hear all about what happened." With that, Neville and Professor McGonagall entered the castle.
Several months later, Hagrid appeared in the middle of a staff meeting exclaiming, "It's a miracle! I can't believe it! The Giant Squid has had babies!"
Neville chattered curiously with the other professors, blissfully unaware of his role in this supposedly-immaculate conception.