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Another day of recklessly messing around with the mysterious objects in the Department of Mysteries, another day of causing chaos in not only Hermione's own world, but those of others too. So far the transdimensional accidents she's gotten into have been pretty chill, pretty normal. Pretty understandable. People do people things, whether or not they have horns, horrific radiation burns, guns or whatever.
But today she wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and in a bad mood to boot (thank you, Ronald, you great clot!), and instead of lightly tapping the strange spinning globe which typically causes her to be sent into another world nicely, respectfully, she whacks it with her wand. It reacts badly, aggressively, exploding in a shockwave of rusty red light and filthy darkness.
“Oh no, Hermione Granger, what have you gone and done now?” she asks herself, as sirens wail and the undulating red and black portal swallows her whole. Thank God dimensional hopping earns double pay.
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Fog. Fog comes later. First comes the awareness of absolute silence and a weight of death hanging over an unnatural half-world. When Hermione finishes blinking after being sucked through a portal, she finds herself confronted by her own image, reflected back at her from a dirt encrusted mirror stuck loosely on a dirt encrusted wall, in a dirt, graffiti and redacted encrusted public loo so narrow it immediately sets off her flight, fight, and freeze instincts.
“Aaaaah!!” a shrill voice ricochets around the vile toilet. “Aaaaah!!! Ew! Ew! Ewwww!!!” Although nothing has touched her and she has touched nothing, she begins flapping her hands at herself like she's crawling with cockroaches before whipping her wand out and attempting to blow the entire world up, consume it with fire as the only antidote to this greatest of all horrors.
Sadly, magic does not work in Silent Hill.
Outside the waste collecting concrete block is a sign declaring the town's name, a sign shrouded by the infamous fog. Fog shrouding a desolate car park with only one car in it. Mist shrouding a pine clad hillside leading down to a gloomy lake. Leaving the gloomy view for now, Hermione approaches the Ford Angelica looking car sitting with its driver's door open. Is Ron here? Has she come to this place to search for her on-again, off-again boyfriend? To search for his spine and sense of responsibility? It's been three years since they talked about getting engaged and they still haven't married. It's like being on a dirty, frayed leash and everyday expecting to be let off it, only to be disappointed.
No, never mind, at the end of the car park is a white van, the sort children are warned to avoid, and a blocked off tunnel. Great. Unable to proceed that way, Hermione follows the sign saying ‘Toluca Lake' with a crude hand pointing down some stone steps towards the titular body of water. Even the steps are dirty, blackened, damp, and crawling with the sort of moss and lichen that looks like bug guts.
Bad vibes, bad vibes increase as she steps onto a fog wreathed path in a fog wreathed wood. Immediately things go from bad to catastrophic when her sharp ears pick up the sound of…something. Something running around in the undergrowth. Something four legged perhaps, and canine. Lacking magic and reduced to the state of the majority of mankind, Hermione begins reciting the ‘Introduction to Unspeakability’, the first page of the Unspeakable’s Handbook.
Step one: Do not freak out.
Step two: If you must freak out, don't do it where normies can see.
She repeats these two commandments over and over again. They have saved the reputation of the department and its employees too many times to count.
Finally, still accompanied by weird growling running sounds, she makes it to a creepy iron gate which edges out of the fog with all the suddenness of a divorce summons. The gate releases her onto a more or less tree-free path, where the creepy sounds cease. She's still being choked by the low lying cloud, and is so annoyed by that and the coughing it generates, that she almost trips over a gravestone.
“How dare you!” she screeches, at the grave. It's not a reasonable thing to say to a hunk of inanimate rock marking the spot where a dead person lies a few feet under the soft soil, but she's scared, okay? And she's afraid to admit it. Admitting to fear not only makes you look bad, but it legitimizes the horror attempting to play a nasty trick on you.
Just to show that she's not scared, she walks up and down the field of graves, dating them to show her a familiar name, or even her own, but none do, and she ends up in front of another creepy gate. This she uses to exit the cemetery, emerging into another road, where a sound of footsteps not her own begin shadowing her - heavy, male footsteps.
“Oh stop playing silly buggers and come out now!” she calls into the fog. The ever moving fog, which flies past like it has a train to catch. No voice responds to her and no human shape solidifies in the grey vapour. “...Fine, but this is your last warning!” Hermione shouts. After waiting a moment to listen to the groaning of the earth and the trees, she takes off at a sprint into the sea of fog. Another set of footsteps immediately strike the ground behind her own.
Crashing up against a gate across the road that says ‘Stay out!’ she doesn't hesitate to rip it open and run through, sprinting at full speed down an asphalt road hugging the side of the hill. Halfway down this seemingly endless grey scaled snake she realises the other footsteps are no longer chasing her. Coming to a gasping stop, she looks back, but nothing but damnable fog meets her gaze. Onwards, because she's not going back that way.
The road becomes a route between farms, slithering into the town proper. Pick up trucks sit on the side of the road, all empty of human life. Trash bags stink in a corner. Something, the footsteps part, prevents Hermione from calling out. Eventually she arrives on the main street of the town, her attention attracted by a flower shop to her tight, the ugliest flower shop, or shop in general, she's ever seen. Not even Knockturn Alley is this decrepit. The shop is like the public toilet - aggressively, maliciously dirty and disgusting. The kind of dirty and disgusting impossible to Nature without deliberation from a third, sentient party.
“What's going on here?” Hermione asks herself, in a faltering whisper.
Beside the flower shop, on a plant stand, sits a first aid kit. The nosy Ministry employee takes this like her life depends on it. Which it might. Further down the road is blocked, forcing her back.
“I hate having no magic. This is the worst,” Hermione says, moments before coming upon the real worst - wide streaks of what is unmistakably blood on the road. A sound forces her gaze up from the globs of red disfiguring the asphalt, just in time to catch a shadow shuffling past a car. The fog prevents her seeing anything more than a vaguely humanoid shape disappearing into it. Annoyance driven by fear, and the old curiosity prompts her to call out. “Hey! You there! I command you to stop and tell me what's going on here!”
But the shambler is unaccountably rude, and does not stop for a poor lost woman.
Five minutes later and Hermione finds herself once again upon country roads, country roads which refuse to take her home. What if this is it? What if she’s run out of luck and she’s stuck here in this limbo? With no one and nothing she knows. Barrels of gasoline emerge from the grey outside a falling apart ranch house that looks as if it’s never seen a human. Which looks like it wasn't built by Humanity, but simply emerged out of the sodden ground whole and already falling apart. While she’s staring at it, attempting to remember the Intro to Unspeakability, a buzzing fills her ears. Buzzing. Crackling.
“A radio? Here?” the young woman pivots on her sensible heels and approaches the bordered up mouth of a tunnel running under a set of traintracks. Bordered up by junk, which she carefully climbs through, chasing the noise that represents connection with the outside world.
Amongst a pile of crap, she finds the radio, a tiny little black plastic thing lying on a sticky box. A muggle radio. She also finds the shadowy shape. Sadly, it's not Ron.
“AAAAAAAI!” The amniotic sac monster shrieks as Hermione bludgeons it to death with a stick she spotted lying in front of the radio.
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Onwards, to wherever the road and the fog (and the static) shall lead. Heralded by the evil crackling of the radio, more monsters shamble out of the thick mist, greatly increasing the bloodiness of Hermione's footsteps. Greatly increasing her exhaustion. She cannot keep smashing monsters with sticks, her arms will not let her. Already they feel like they're made of lead and she's only bludgeoned five grotesque beasts to what she hopes is death.
Just as a pet store (just as viciously decrepit as its flowery counterpart) emerges into sight, another creature lurches out of the fog. This time Hermione chooses flight rather than fight, her arms moving so slowly that the thing will be able to knock her down before she even raises her stick over her head for the downswing.
But flight has its downsides. The groans of the first beast fade into the swirling fog, to be replaced by her pounding but muted footsteps, and the radio ceases shrieking. Only for it to begin again ten feet down the road. At the same time as a street corner pieces the veil of grey-white, so does the rotting, slimy brown ‘head’ of another shambler.
“Aaah!” Even Hermione’s screams are softened by the relentless fog. She doesn't think about it, her body simply turns of its own accord and takes her down a side street, into a more residential area, down a street flanked by old bungalows and new apartment buildings. The tension in the air grows with every one of her cautious steps. She senses something.
“Hello?” her tongue flaps without her consent. Her voice is folded up into the enveloping mist. Sounds reply, a bright, metallic noise and a huff. A haughty huff. That sound, in so much opposition to the situation and the evil town surrounding the woman as a hostile army, pushing into her personal space and taking her out of her comfort zone, shocks her, takes her away from the terror and horror molesting her soul. At least for one brief, glorious moment. “Hello?” she calls again. “Who's there? Identify yourself before I, before I hit you with a stick!”
Another, louder snort greets this demand, and the metallic zing noise plays again, but backwards, followed by a voice, a real, human voice and not agonised groaning from a monster. “There isn't anyone on earth who can do that, sweetheart.” It says, arrogant as a sunflower standing tall and bold above all the other plants in the field.
Pushing through the fog, Hermione steps into a dead end square littered with the gruesomely diced up bodies of what remind her horribly of shriveled old men, all naked and fleshy and malformed like the things haunting her, but what grabs her attention with just as much force is the person standing in the centre of the red ring of destruction. A man of average size, but not at all of average looks. Japanese, his race is able to be pinpointed with such precision because he's dressed like a samurai, complete with a pair of katanas hanging from his waist. He has just finished replacing the longest one in its beautiful lacquered scabbard.
“You!” Hermione gasps, although she's never seen him before, his appearance and its contrast with the environment simply shocks her into nonsensical utterances.
The man smirks and flips a toothpick he's chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other, his eyes containing a good natured joie de vivre that immediately sets Hermione at ease, the man's whole feeling being one of simple goodness. “Heard of me, lady? Course you have," he drawls in a vaguely Old West fashion. "I'm the Atomic Samurai.”
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Things immediately become much better, much more hopeful once Hermione has a professional sword swinger at her side. At her side and on her side.
“I don't know what happened. One second I was cutting up alien monsters, the next I was here, being attacked by ugly flesh bags. That's life, but it's nothing a blade can't deal with.” The man calling himself Atomic Samurai grins at his newfound companion, wisps of fog plucking almost fondly at his high ponytail and many layers of clothing. It occurs to Hermione -whose nerves are admittingly close to shattering- that the strange stranger is extremely handsome in an ascetic, rugged way, his cheekbones sharp but not too sharp, his cheeks gaunt but not too gaunt. He's only about ten years older than her, but looks older thanks to his wiry cragginess.
“I, on the other hand, know how I got here. However, I don't know how to reverse course, before you ask.” the witch replies, as she and the odd samurai come to a stop before a pizza place, a pizza place which is as unlikeable to look at as all the other buildings in the horrible little town of Silent Hill. Night is falling fast, black fingers of darkness creep through the fog. The pair need a shelter with food. Gentlemanly, the smirking stranger who she has warmed up to with the speed common in disastrous situations, opens the decrepit door for her, the pizza parlour belching a gust of foetid air in their faces.
“Wow. Nice place.” Drawls the warrior.
The rotten state of the air and the decor itself instantly cures Hermione of her hunger, but not so ‘Atomic Samurai', who, after checking the coast is clear, approaches a lone pizza box suiting on a grimy picnic table, flips up the oil spotted lid, and, after studying the pizza inside for a second, begins eating.
Hermione’s prim priorities take over, her screeches bouncing off the peeling walls, her body anxiously flapping around the table where the man continues to munch his way through the found pizza, and now and then grunting in appreciation of its cheesy goodness. “What are you doing?! That could be poisoned! It could be a monster! It's definitely unhygienic!”
“Eating. Mmm!”
“Why?!”
A slice pauses on the way to a mouth quirked in some slight annoyance. “Listen, lady, a working man needs his food.”
And that's that, he can't be nagged out of it, and Hermione has no magic with which to spell the pizza out of his grip or else transfigure it into a hedgehog or something.
“I used to be a witch, you know.” she says, when he's sat down and she's followed suit, the pale grey light of the room deepening steadily to a steely blue.
“What, like you pulled rabbits out of a hat? Nice.”
“No, like I shot spells from a wand.”
“Mmkay. So why haven't you been doing that every time monsters have attempted to eat us? I don’t need the help, but it's rude not to at least offer.”
The young woman hangs her bushy haired head, staring down at her clasped hands, now dirty and featuring nails she can't remember breaking. “I lost the ability to do magic as soon as I entered this town.”
“Hmpf,” Atomic Samurai cocks an already arched eyebrow. “Could never be me.”
With the night falling heavily on the town, the damp cold that already exists intensifies, and Hermione edges closer to the powerhouse warrior sitting beside her. She's not proud to have to leach off his nuclear heat, but there are no other options, and it's better than shivering like she's being constantly electrocuted. And she still does shiver like that, up until the man offers her his voluminous, warm, epic crimson cloak. The atom symbol on the back by itself cheers her up significantly. Silent Hill must also be made of atoms, like everything, therefore it can be defeated, and as the one and only Atomic Samurai says (frequently), cut.
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Weird noises surround the pair all of the very short night. Barks, growls, grinding. The unnaturally short ‘night’. Hermione must sleep, trying her best not to end up propped against her companion, but he merely dozes, sharp chin resting on the pommel of his sword, half lidded gaze pointed at the doors. Nothing attempts to break through, and in the ‘morning’ the parlour produces another Silent Hill pizza for the one person who appreciates its efforts.
“I can't believe you. I really can't,” Hermione says, with a grudgingly admiring smile. “You remind me so much of Ron and Harry.”
“Who are they? Monsters? Heroes? Villains?”
“My friends.”
“A bit of each then.”
Thus fueled up, on pizza and an excess of caution, the pair resume their journey to nowhere. Nowhere other than a way out, hopefully.
“This town reminds me of Z City.” says Atomic Samurai, flipping his toothpick from one corner of his lips to the other, his eyes travelling in the opposite direction as they scan the ever present fog, his hand ever ready to pull a sword free from its scabbard.
“Z City? What's that?”
“The worst city in the world.”
A…thing…chooses that moment to shamble out of the fog, moaning and muttering. Reacting infinitely faster than Hermione ever could, the samurai pulls his sword free and wraps both hands round its handle, bringing it down on the creature's head in one move.
“Begone!”
Split in two, the thing falls to the tarmac, where it continues to mutter.
“Hurry it up. Let's get out of here.” The man jerks his thumb down the road, then takes off at a fast trot, his wooden sandals clacking, Hermione forced to jog to keep up with him.
“Did you hear that? It sounded like that monster was muttering about the good old-”
“I didn't hear anything, and I guarantee I have better ears than you.”
“Hmpf! I very much doubt that!”
Their footsteps fade away into the distance, swallowed by the fog. Behind them, the monster continues to mumble about past glories.
“Stay behind me, lady.”
“Pardon? You don't know where we are any better than I do.”
“It's not about that.”
Although neither person has got a hold of a map of the area they persist in following the road and soon find themselves in front of a school building the size of a skyscraper slash Gothic castle, black and monolithic, completely dwarfing the broken down swing set plopped in front as an afterthought.
“I've never seen a high school with a play set.” says Hermione, pulling out her wand before remembering that she can't cast any magic.
Atomic Samurai, meanwhile, begins to sweat. “I've never seen a high school.”
Taking this for a joke, the intrepid multiversal traveller approaches the weeping door, following the unworldly instincts produced by the town, instincts which cause its inmates to become immensely distracted and investigate random places for no reason. She needs her companion's help to open the door, because for some reason it's made of solid iron.
“Hah. So you're not a heroine then, girly?”
“Pardon me? Yes I am.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Why? Because I'm not Mr Olympus?”
“Hey, now. I like opening doors for the ladies. I was just wondering if I'd somehow missed you in the endless corridors of the Hero Association HQ.” The man, heedless of the unearthly wailing of the doors slowly swinging shut behind him and cutting out most of the light, gives Hermione a hard-boiled grin full of great charm. She has to admit, once again, that he's very handsome.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she says. “But I'm sure it's fun.”
“Not at all. Killing monsters? Yes. Sitting in meetings? No.”
“We all have our crosses to hear.” But Hermione begins to put together an image of the stranger's background. It's a simple one. He's some sort of monster slayer employed by an association of such people because his world is infested with fiends. No wonder he's so blasé.
Even Silent Hill cannot stop Hermione Granger from heading to the library, no matter how many walking blood sacs, crawling book centipedes, and conjoined twin mannequins come bumbling out of the dark. But before she and her partner in psycho-emotional torture can reach the sanctum of knowledge, air raid sirens begin sounding, the world descends into pitch blackness, and broken, shattered swords jut from the filthy floor, impaling her foot, but not that of the man behind her, who nimbly leaps out of the way.
“This is why I told you to stick behind me. But did you listen? Noooo.” Shoving Hermione out of the way as gently as he can when a host of moaning monsters have begun slithering down a set of bloody stairs, Atomic Samurai slices and dices, without any explosive blue or faster than light travel. No, much like Hermione, here he is just a regular man, a regular, very fit man, but regular nonetheless. Not that he'd ever let on about that. Cutting up bags of rotting meat quickly tires him, and he steps back, huffing and puffing, before the last conjoined twin thing has fallen.
“Heargh!” Hermione, leaning against a gore encrusted wall, flings the corpse of a meaty book at the twin, knocking it off its mutilated feet. Once it's on its back, Atomic Samurai upends his katana and plunges it into first one neck and then another. The monster writhes, and then stops, twitching only.
“Help me with this first aid kit, please.”
“I'm a warrior not a healer, girly, but alright. Keep watch.” Atomic Samurai kicks down a couple broken swords and kneels down to open the jammed case of the first aid kit, utilising his ordinary man’s strength, which is still more than good enough for the job. From there Hermione disinfects and binds her wound, using the pragmatism she showed during her seventh year, but matured.
“Now, let me lead. Onwards, to the book palace.”
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The book palace proves to be Atomic Samurai’s undoing. Temporarily. The library is fully industrialised when he and Hermione enter, being full of familiar faces stitched onto shrunken heads which spout insults from their disgusting shelves, sending Hermione into a panic attack. The lack of actual books allows the samurai to relax a little, but the library holds a severe trial for him too.
Grinding, screeching, scratching meets his ears through the dead air, setting even his stoic and generally serene nerves on edge. The sound is nails on a chalkboard, in hell.
An averagely sized, wiry figure dressed only in a stained loincloth and a rusty, bloodstained dunce's cap made of iron, shambles around an evilly leaning shelving unit, shuffling across the rusty, bloodstained floor towards the duo. Its appearance is bad enough, but it's also holding a giant, rusty, bloodstained blade. A giant blade it adjusts its blistered grip on as soon as it catches ‘sight’ of the duo. It can't truly be seeing them with its eyes, if it possesses any, because its cap comes down to its chin.
“Finally, a good freaking opponent.” says Atomic Samurai, adjusting his grip on his fancy, curved sword. Fancy, curved, thin and delicate sword because Japan lacks iron. Unlike whoever made Dunce Head’s massive steel blade.
“Watch out! That thing looks super dangerous. Maybe we should run.” counsels the girl who could have been Head Girl AND Head Boy.
“I've never run from anything in my life.” replies the samurai, before making a dash at the monster.
The man wearing the hellish dunce cap leans back in order to provide power to the arm wielding the knife. It looks as if Atomic Samurai should be able to cut the thing in twain but the beast moves much more swiftly than expected, and Atomic no longer explodes across the battlefield like an atomic blast. The massive blade of the knife heaves up and into the air before he expects it too, forcing him to change tact and pose and block it with his own blade. The crash and screech of steel forces a scream from the watching woman, and a bark from her companion, his precious sword taking the blow, only to shatter when the monster lifts its weapon off for another go.
“Run!” the samurai barks at the girl, to no avail, as she rooted with fear to the spot. Dropping his broken katana and pulling his wakizashi from its scabbard, he proceeds to plan B, which is to dance around the creature and stab and slash at it with the shorter but more agile sword. With a civilian to protect, he has that extra initiative to tap into his human potential, and he still possesses all his battle experience. With an enormous knife as his only weapon, Dunce Head cannot move nearly so agily, and continuously misses his attacks, his knife slamming into the ground with a boom that sends Hermione into quieter and quieter hysterics each time while Atomic focuses on wearing him down by delivering massive gashes to his naked torso, arms and legs. All the while the shrunken heads hiss insults at the woman, tempting her to leap into the fray and hit Dunce Head with her stick.
“Useless!”
“Mudblood!”
“Know-it-all!”
When blood soaks an already bloody floor and Dunce Head's knife arm is hanging on by a thread, he roars and begins staggering away down a spiral staircase in the middle of a circular arrangement of shelving units. His stomps continue far into the distance, before cutting out suddenly.
“Oh my gosh…” Just in time, is the part the hero leaves out, his eyes smarting with the sweat pouring into them, his chest heaving. His katana lies in silver pieces, a sad casualty.
“Are you okay?” Hermione carefully limps over to the slowly recovering man, her stick clutched tight in her hands. She's not useless, no, she rights a sturdy looking, mostly blood-free table for them to sit on, shutting up the decapitated heads for a brief, beautiful moment.
“Atomic Samurai isn't your real name, is it? It's a hero designation." she asks, once they've both perched on the table for a time, wishing they had some water.
“What gave it away, lady?”
“Hermione, if you please.”
“Hmpf. Fine. Hermy-own.”
Triggered. Silent Hill wins again as the Japanese man for some reason channels Bulgaria, bringing back all Hermione's mistakes and regrets.
Atomic Samurai ignores her existential crisis, pulling a dagger from under his cloak. “Here. Take this. For when a monster gets past stick range.”
Hermione, after recovering slightly, takes it. “Thanks, Sam. I really wish I had a gun though.”
Sam’s brow furrows, as it clearly often has in the past. “It's Kamikaze. Kamikaze-no-Mikoto. That's my name. And I’d rather die than touch a gun. It goes against Bushido and the Path of the Sword.”
“Okay, well, I'd rather not die, Bushido or not.”
Air raid sirens woooooo again, and the darkness and overwhelming sense of evil lifts somewhat, even to the extent that the pair come across a bathroom under the library, where Atomic Samurai lives up to his real name by attaching his lips to a tap and drinking the vile rust red water which emerges from the trembling pipes. However, thirst is a greater horror than even Silent Hill.
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Why are they walking through the endless basement of a school? Because normal schools do not possess endless basements, so, because it's unnatural, there might be a way out down here. Down down down they go, with Atomic Samurai leading the way, down to his side arm only. Still, the monsters they meet fall just the same as their confreres did, all that has changed is that he has to partake of the first aid box the same as Hermione.
“Here, let me.”
“It's just a scratch.”
“A nasty scratch.”
The lost boy and girl are taking another break in a bathroom (accompanied by a corpse in a stall, but that's neither here nor there) and leaning on the sinks while Hermione dashes antiseptic on the four nasty cuts on her companion's cheek. He could do it himself, but there's something uniquely comforting about having a pretty woman do it for him, and vice versa for Hermione. It feels like contributing to the war effort to patch him up. In a film they'd probably go for a kiss at this point, to judge by the soft looks in their eyes, only to be interrupted by the corpse in the stall, but this is not a film, and soft looks and soft words are all that pass between them. The corpse doesn't get up either.
“You’re very brave. I like how you cut things to ribbons.” whispers Hermione.
“So are you. I like how you cut things too.” replies Kamikaze.
“You're very handsome.”
“You're very pretty.”
“I hate this place.”
“Me too. Let's blow this joint, Herm-own-ninny.”
AAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Silent Hill seems to resent this lovely dovey turn of events, and sirens honk, producing a basement inhabited by not one, but two Dunce Heads. The pair of monsters stand average and strong on the other side of a square room, looming over a rusty grated floor through which there is nothing but a bottomless void of darkness. However, by now Hermione has discovered the magic of the humble shotgun (fishing one out of a hole in the floor of a shower room) and brandishes it menacingly. If Kamikaze won't lower himself to blackpowder projectiles, then she will have to.
Luckily, he makes no fuss, striking a pose with his short sword. “Ready to die, villains? Think you've got what it takes? You're not so strong.”
The Dunce Heads breathe hoarsely, lifting their blades.
“... Don't these things look familiar to you, Kamikaze?” Hermione asks, blasting one in the chest. It fails to fall, only staggering back. The hairy calves are very telling, and her eyes fix on them.
“Yeah. They're the same monsters as before. But there’s two now.” Atomic begins his dance around the other beast, which swings its knife but misses and hits the wall behind where the samurai just was, sending sparks arcing across the metal.
“Yes, but aren't you feeling any, um, pertinent realisations coming on?”
“Yeah, I realise I hate them. They're stupid.”
Good enough. The monsters kill themselves by thrusting their own blades through their throats, remaining standing upright and impaled.
Hermione lowers her gun, and attempts to catch her breath. “This is my worst day at work yet.”
It's also a great day, or couple of days. The basement opens up onto the graveyard near the overlook, because why not, the pair emerging from a crypt back into the ever present fog. As unburdened psychologically as always, Atomic Samurai whistles, his clothes torn, his face scratched, an Otherworld splinter for a toothpick rolling around his smiling lips.
“I'm sure we could leave now, if we walked down the road that leads here.” says Hermione, somewhat reluctantly. The samurai really is very handsome and amusingly blunt, both would make sure he'd be great at Ministry parties.
“Yeah,” the man looks down at her from his perfect height of five foot nine. “Keep that dagger-”
“Aww. That's very sweet-”
“-its a huge mission to purify weapons after a woman touches them.”
The couple stare at each other, grins on their faces. Visions of Ron Weasley float before Hermione's mind. She smiles wider. “Wow, you're a jerk. What's your number?”