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Natasha blinked in the bright sunlight, pulling a pair of sunglasses out of her jacket pocket, as her feet touched the soft, white sand. It had taken a few tries, but she finally had gotten used to traveling by Portkey. It was often the fastest way to get wherever she and her partner needed to go for their assignments. Theo could only take them via Disapparation if it was a location he had been to before.
“Well, where do you think we should start, Romanoff?” Theo asked, dusting himself off.
“With the harbormaster,” she said evenly.
“But first, food,” he replied, grinning.
Natasha rolled her eyes but smiled in return.
They made their way down to a fresh food market near the port, where Theo discovered a delightful fruit salad made with native pawpaw fruit. He liked it so much, he had 2 bowls. Natasha could have sworn she saw him with a large plastic container of it, but when they left the market, it was nowhere to be seen, so she shrugged it off.
Next was their visit with the harbormaster, which yielded quite a bit of information. In fact, they’d be hard-pressed to find any locals in the area who weren't aware of what was currently happening out in the Triangle. This strange occurrence was the reason that Natasha and Theo had been sent to Bermuda. They were there to investigate the claims that an alleged “ghost ship,” drifting at sea, was responsible for the disappearance of a growing number of people.
There was a team of salvagers that had gone out on a search for the ship the prior week, and only a few of them had returned. With the arrival of Natasha and Theo, another boat would need to go out in search of the missing people and the ship, this time with the SHIELD reinforcements aboard.
No one was to know about Theo’s magical abilities; as far as everyone else was concerned, he was simply another agent of SHIELD. Whatever magic he might have to use when they were at sea, he could easily erase from their minds with a good memory charm.
Armed with information, now Natasha and Theo had to find a captain willing to take them to sea to track down this ghost ship. Many people had gone missing from several different crews when their ships or boats had encountered it, and so the locals were rightfully spooked. After many refusals, they finally found a rough-hewn older captain who was willing to take on the challenge, with the condition that he remain safely aboard his own boat when they did finally find the ghost ship. Natasha assured him that he and his crew would also be compensated generously for their time and trouble.
They were several miles offshore, heading into the heart of the Triangle, when a dense, misty fog set in.
“Because that’s not creepy at all,” Natasha mused.
“Sonar indicates that we should be coming up on the ship now,” said the captain.
The fog made it difficult to see beyond the bow of the fishing boat they were on. Theo was just thinking that perhaps this Muggle sonar was incorrect, when all of a sudden, the ship appeared, a dark and ghostly presence, looming out of the mist.
They pulled the boat up a short distance away from the side of the large ship. As the captain and his men were occupied with readying the dinghy and some rope for them to use to board the ship, Theo cast a spell, to search for signs of life, and signs of magic.
“ Homenum revelio! ”
He stood for a moment, waiting for whatever answer the spell might give him. He looked at Natasha.
“There’s no one aboard… no life forms, that is. I’ll try another variation. Revelio! ”
Again, he waited. This time, it seemed that his magic had indeed revealed something to him.
“What is it, Nott? God, I hope it’s not robots…”
Natasha cringed. After all that business with Ultron, she’d be more than happy never to see another robot ever again.
“No, it’s not robots… this is something ancient, very ancient. ...We will have to board the ship to find out exactly what it is. Its signature is strange, not something I have encountered before.”
The ship was eerily quiet when they boarded. Unsurprising, yet still unsettling. Everything aboard appeared as if the passengers had been in the midst of their day-to-day activities and simply left everything behind, vanishing without a trace. Their charter captain and his 2-man crew had remained aboard their own vessel, as was their agreed-upon arrangement. They would not leave Natasha and Theo behind unless the situation became dire.
Theo performed his revealing spell again to pinpoint the source, and he and Natasha made their way below decks, descending until they reached the cargo hold. Again, everything appeared left as it was, but they pressed on, finally coming to a door towards the back of the ship that was left ajar.
Theo confirmed that the source of the magical signature was behind the door. Natasha drew her weapon and Theo kept his wand raised, as Natasha kicked the door fully open and they flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it. The redhead was the first to peer around the open door frame before flattening against the wall again.
“No one’s in there, just a tall glass enclosure holding a gigantic black rock,” she relayed to Theo.
He frowned. A large black rock encased in glass… his eyes widened.
“I think I know what it is,” he said. He made a hand motion that gestured going inside. “Stay behind me. Oh, don’t look at me that way Romanoff, it’s not because I think you’re a delicate flower, it’s because you don’t have magical abilities, and in this case, you will need the protection of mine.”
An unamused Natasha begrudgingly did as he asked and got behind him as he cautiously stepped into the room. Before them was indeed an ominous-looking black rock, rectangular in shape and massive in size, with several square shaped holes punched into its surface. The glass enclosure had a door, which was hanging wide open.
“Merlin’s beard…I read about this in SHIELD’s files, everyone believed it to be lost forever… it’s a Kree monolith, the Space Di’Alla, to be more specific. It’s a gateway to space. Don’t get too close to it… it’s very…”
Theo was cut off by the great black monolith suddenly dissolving into a liquid-like state. Theo was quick to cast a defensive spell, so that he and Natasha were not swallowed up by it. As quickly as it changed to a liquid state, it receded back into itself, becoming solid stone once more. Theo sent a spell through the air that shut the glass door behind it.
“…Unpredictable,” he finished. “I will need to set up wards around it so that it doesn’t do exactly what it surely did to everyone else who boarded this ship before us. I don’t fancy a trip to space today; I’m sure you don’t either.”
“Definitely not,” she replied.
They stepped out of the room momentarily and closed the metal door, just in case. They didn’t know if the enclosure door had been opened by a person, or if the monolith itself had forced the door open.
“We’ll have to get this back to HQ in order to see about restoring all the people that it’s transported… since this ship has been drifting out here for months, maybe even years, I’d wager that it’s quite a lot, who would be eager to return home. I believe what happened was that somehow that enclosure door got open, and the monolith seized everyone who came through the door. People were disappearing, and with no one left behind to warn the others aboard, no one knew that the monolith was the source of the problem until it was too late. It will need to be stored properly, and very carefully, so it can’t continue with occurrences like this,” said Theo.
“I’ll radio the captain. Looks like we’ll need a tugboat to get this ship into port, if the locals will send one... Fury will have to send air support to extract the monolith. He will be very interested to know that that’s what caused all this trouble. And people have been calling this a ghost ship…” she shook her head. “They really love a good ghost story don’t they… what is that?”
She pointed at the container that was now in his hand, which he’d just opened and stuck a plastic fork in.
“What does it look like?” he replied innocently.
Natasha crossed her arms and gave him a withering look.
“Again with the fruit?? How do you even have that? Wait no, don’t tell me… Your magic pocket spell, right?”
“Undetectable Extension Charm,” he said with a grin, spearing a piece of fruit with his fork. “It’s brain food, Romanoff. All that vitamin C. You want me to execute these wards to perfection, don’t you?”
“Obviously, Nott. I just fail to see how you really need the fruit to do it.”
Theo shrugged.
“I suppose I don’t need it,” he said. “But it definitely will make this task more enjoyable.”
Natasha snorted.
“Well, hurry up and finish your fruit so you can take care of that monolith and we can go home.”
Suddenly there was a loud banging followed by a faint whistling sound. Theo dropped his container of fruit in his haste to brandish his wand in a defensive position.
“Bloody hell, what was that?”
Natasha was completely unfazed by the sounds. She smirked at him.
“Pipes, Nott. You haven’t been aboard a ship like this before, have you?”
“No, I suppose not,” he admitted, letting his wand arm relax.
“Ah, what did you think it was, a ghost? I thought you would be used to that… you went to a school full of ghosts.”
Theo cut his eyes at her.
“Very funny. Hogwarts was home to several ghosts, but it wasn’t ‘full’ of them, as you say. Some of them were quite pleasant. Others… not so much.”
He shuddered just a bit, thinking of the Bloody Baron, the ghost of Slytherin house, and one he’d never been too keen on crossing paths with. He looked at the floor and sighed.
“Damn. A waste of a perfectly good fruit salad.”
He waved his wand and the ruined fruit and the plasticware disappeared.
“I’m going topside to get a clearer radio signal,” Natasha said, and turned to walk away.
“Have those wards done by the time I come back down and we’ll go back to the market before we leave and you can get yourself another container,” she said over her shoulder.
Theo smiled and got to work on the wards. As far as partners went, he felt very lucky to have been assigned as Natasha’s. Very lucky, indeed.