InsaneJournal

Current mood:

grateful

A Ravenclaw slave is always a bit distracted....
The huge dramatic gratitiude vases were finished and lining the hallway, adorning the study and dining rooms. Yellow agrimony spikes, blue Canterbury Bells, and dark pink roses everywhere. Satisfied that Pucey would be happy with them, Roger settled in for a good bout of studying his father's writings. Pucey wouldn't be back till late afternoon.

Gaelic pig Latin it is, Roger decided about his own notes concerning the clues he'd found in his father's work journal. Interspersed with ancient runes, alchemical symbols and other glyphs that made up Roger's personal shorthand, it would look like nonsense, even to someone fluent in Gaelic. He couldn't be bothered with a complicated cypher that would take time to decode himself. This way, he could read over his notes on the fly. It had come to the point where he needed his sort of notes to reread and mull over before he could synthesize his father's clues. There were too many of them. They were too strange. Apparently disjointed, but Roger knew it in his bones that there was a message in them for him. And he also began to suspect that there was a chance that his father had died to protect that message.

Roger stared at the wall, distracted. Why on earth would someone murder his father over some new spell development? It had to do with brooms... but the ramifications... the applications to other magic... Roger sighed and forcibly pulled hismelf back from that specualtion. It was too painful to think his father had been murdered. And it didn't help figure out the spell he was convinced his father had invented and laboriously recorded.He had to get to Hogwarts and he had to visit his home on Lewis to see the clues his father had felt too important to leave in writing in his journal. Those two places he could handle. But "50 paces from the door of the PolyJuice Palace" could only refer to Knockturn Alley, and Roger had never in his life set foot on that street. Things happened to people who went down there, innocently window shipping or whatnot.

He sighed and finished reading his father's journal for the second time.

He was stuck. So he wrote out a few simple facts.

1. Robert Davies was a very talented broom maker.
2. He augmented several of the spells used to make racing brooms faster, safer, more comfortable, and more maneuverable.
3. The project he mentions several times in the last year of his life is the special edition anniversary broom.

Roger's eyes narrowed. Was it something about that particular broom? It was an honor to be the one to craft it. His signature would have been on it for all time. It was the sort of exhibition piece that found pride of place in a rich pureblood's house... like Pucey's... or ended up in the Ministry's Magical Sports Museum. They were impractical for actual flying though, so heavy with ornamentation and specia visual effects.

He read over his own notes again, but without those three missing clues, he was at a standstill. He went back to stating the simple and obvious.

4. He worked almost exclusively with wood his entire career.
5. That is, until this special edition which was to be gold... and needed to fly a short distance.
6. Robert was a spell inventer... who'd never had cause to work with gold before.

Robert was a master spell inventer, improving on spells used for centuries in racing broom making... and he'd just begun turning his talents to understanding the properties of gold...

A shiver ran down his spine. Roger felt like he was on the edge of something important... when his door opened with a crash. He looked up into Pucey's angry face and realized he'd completely forgotten the time.