Dudley's Dilemma

Dudley's Dilemma

Chapter 1

It was a dark and quiet evening in the still night air of the quaint London countryside Dudley Dursley and his family lived in. At the time, Dudley himself had his head stuck out of his upper window, scanning the skies for some way of contacting his oddball of a cousin. After all, he didn't have a stupid bird. Of coarse, after a few weeks, he would be probably be helper in keeping a bloody fowl in his own house.

What has happened to my perfectly respectable family? Dudley Dursley thought as he wrinkled his forehead, a vein throbbing in his temple at the action of thinking. Why did this happen to me?

At that exact moment, while Dudley was bent over thinking, a large snowy owl dove from the night sky right above his head and swooped gracefully through Dudley's bulky fat and the window and into the room he was standing in. After landing on a wooden chair, the owl turned her head and blinked warily at Dudley. Dudley turned around and stared, almost pathetically, at the elderly owl. Some of the feathers were a bit limp, as though they had been gripping the owl for years, and the bird's yellow eyes were a little more dull these days, but stil....

It couldn't be the same one, could it? Dudley thought as the owl gently flapped her ruffled wing, straightening her soft white feathers.

As the owl shifted her position, Dudley Dursley's eyes widened in realization. It was the same owl. He hurried forward as fast as his weight would let him and stared back into the owl's amber eyes.

"It's like you knew I needed you," he said in amazement.

The owl snapped her beak at Dudley as respectfully as she could and hooted softly.

"Well, let's get to it then," replied Dudley. "If my wife walked in here right now, she'd go nuts at seeing a bird in the house, just like my mum. I wonder what she'll say when I tell her....when I tell her...." Dudley gulped and gave up on the attempt of finishing his sentence.

Dudley waddled over to a large wooden desk and opened one of its drawers. He ruffled and searched through its contents and withdrew a neat and clean sheet of white, lined paper. He closed the drawer and nipped an ink pen out of a container sitting on the desk

"I guess this isn't what your used to, is it, bird?" he asked the owl gruffily. She hooted back at him with a small reproachful look in her eyes at his referring to her as "bird." She had a name, after all.

Dudley Dursley lowered his eyes to the paper and touched the tip of the pen to it. He took one last breath and began to write.

Dear Harry, he began, but then almost immediately stopped. That sounded much too formal for the letter to be sent to him. Dudley scratched this out and pulled another sheet of clean and crisp paper out of the drawer and began again.

Cousin,

After fifteen years of no conversation, I find I need to contact you now. I will skip all the regular "how are you" beginnings I send respectable people, and just get down to the point before my wife finds me tying a letter to an owl's leg.

It seems your, ah, abnormality, has creeped its way into my respectable family of apparently perfectly normal people. My daughter, Priscilla, received a letter from "the school" which you used to attend informing her of her...abilities. I was, frankly, overwhelmingly surprised, as she has shown no abnormal "powers" in her life. I do know that this cannot be prevented, and I have now found that your world of freaks has come crashing into my orderly one. I am terrified that my two other children, Dudley Jr. and Constance, will receive these letters when they are eleven, too.

Dudley paused at this. He was just coming to realize the sweat slowly dripping down his face at the simple statement of this last sentence. He shook his head and began to write again, his hand ever so slightly shaking.

I desperately need you to come to my house on the 2^nd of August - one week from this day - and have dinner with my family at 6 P.M. You will NOT need to use the fireplace, as your little group of weirdos demonstrated the summer of your 14^th birthday. The door will be just fine. Also, you need to wear respectable clothes. I will not tolerate people wearing "robes" and "cloaks" into my house.

Since Priscilla is obviously new to this whole -

Dudley stopped and took a deep shaking sigh and returned to the paper.

"witch" thing, I do not want her entering the freak school alone and nervous without any friends in the world whatsoever, as I'm sure you did. I also want you to reassure her that she will be fine in the school and that she will make new friends soon enough, as I'm sure you did not. I'm trying to accept your world, but for my children's sake alone. My mum and dad were - not too understanding. I know that we were never close - you could say as far apart as we possibly could be - but think of this as a temporary peace offering for my children..

Mr. Dudley Dursley

P.S. - You may also bring your family to the dinner, if you have one by now.

Dudleydid not bother to read the letter over in fear of some one discovering what he was up to, and hastily folded the paper up and tied it to the owl's leg. He then grabbed the owl a little too hastily and practically threw it out of the window and into the now pitch-black sky filled with twinkling stars. The owl gave a last shriek of disapproval and soared into the night air.

The door opened behind Dudley and a tall, pallid woman with a sharp nose, grey eyes, and tightly styled black hair came in, dressed in a thin white sweater, a green plaid skirt, black hose, and pointy black boots. She had her arms folded, and her long, black nails were tapping her arm.

"Dinner's ready," she said simply. "Come on down."

"Alright honey," said Dudley, relief spreading through his heart that his wife had not come in before. "I'm coming."

Chapter 2

Harry Potter was sitting at his dinner table, leafing through some untidy parchments and running his fingers through his untidy black hair. He sighed, grabbed a long, phoenix tail-feather quill, dipped it into a container of scarlet ink, and began to fill out an important-looking form. Just as he reached the second line of the form, a young girl with jet-black hair, just like his, came dashing into the room, her green night-robe flowing behind her madly. She had an enormous grin on her face.

"Dad! Dad!" she said gleefully. "Dad, guess what?!"

"What?" asked Harry, looking down at his eleven-year-old daughter, a smile forming on his own face.

"I'm in!" the young girl shrieked with glee. "I just got my Hogwarts letter!"

The smile erupted in Harry's face, and he bent down and hugged his daughter tightly. The loose sleeve of his scarlet robe hit the parchments and they fluttered to the floor, while the ink bottle shot down and rained the parchments with scarlet ink.

"Oops, well- Scourgify!", uttered Harry. The ink disappeared and Harry bent down, retrieved the parchments, and laid them back on the table. He turned his head towards his daughter. "Anyway, that's great Isabella! I'm so proud of you!" he said to her. "Well, where is it? I want to see it!"

"I'll get it," said a gloomy voice from the doorway through which Harry's daughter had come through.

A young boy, probably around six or seven by the looks of him, was standing looking at the floor in a sullen state, his slightly untidy blonde-brown hair hanging limply. He shuffled off and returned in a few moments, a neat envelope in his hands. Harry reached out to take it, but the small boy seemed reluctant to let go of it. He finally let it go and walked off to sit across from his father.

"Why so glum, Gordon?" Harry asked, staring concernedly at his young son. Gordon lifted his large, round, green eyes to his father's face.

"Because-because," he began. "Now don't you laugh at me! Because I want to go to Hogwarts, too!"

Harry sighed a light breath of relief. "It's alright, Gordon. We've talked about this before. You have to wait until your eleven, just like your sister had to. That's the rules at Hogwarts."

"But why?" Gordon whined. "Why can't I go now? I can do all the things grown-up wizards can do!"

"Oh really?" said Harry slyly.

"Yeah! I-I can duel!" said Gordon, leaping of the wooden chair and onto the newly polished floor. He began to pretend to be waving a wand in the air, jumping to and fro, and once nearly tripping over his own clumsy feet. "I can fly!" He grabbed a nearby broomstick, stuck it between his legs, jerked it upwards, and hovered for about 2 seconds before crashing down to the floor again to his sister's hysterical laughter. "I can even make a Forgenfullertes Potion, just as good as Mummy!"

At that, Gordon ran across the floor and grabbed a newly-bought cauldron off a shelf. He swung it over his head, and it landed with a deafening BANG! on the table where his father and sister sat.

"Don't you mean Forgetfulness Potion, Gordon?" asked Isabella arrogantly. At this, Harry jumped to his feet and cast an immobile spell over his son. Gordon froze in the middle of grabbing a handful of Floo powder by the fireplace, completely immobile except for his eyes, which were darting every direction they could go.

"Now Gordon!" said Harry angrily. " There is no need for you to throw this tantrum. You know you're not supposed to touch Mummy's potion supplies! And you," said Harry, turning his head to his daughter, who abruptly stopped laughing. "Don't make fun of your brother, just because he hasn't entered school yet. I seem to remember a young girl who was always getting into mischief when she was younger, stealing her father's broom out of the closet, going for midnight rides while setting fire to the field with her mother's wand!"

"Dad!" said Isabella, her blue eyes wide in shock and annoyance. "I told you never to mention that around Gordon!"

"Mention what?" said a cool female voice. A woman, who happened to be just a year younger than Harry, stepped through the front door, a broom clutched in one hand that was covered in a leather glover, and a very strange, disgusting blob trying to ooze its way from her firm grip in the other. She was tall and fairly skinny, with wavy blonde-brown hair, just like Gordon's, and was wearing a magenta robe, giant, half-moon earrings, numerous bracelets and bands, a red bandana, a necklace of rusty Butterbeer caps, and purple cloak, which had a smoking hole through the left side of it. Tall, lop-sided boots covered her feet, and her hair was tied up unceremoniously into a bun.

"Mum!" Isabella screeched as she jumped from her chair and skidded down the hall to her mother. "Oh Mum, you'll never guess what, my letter! My letter from-"

Isabella stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the malignant pustule in her mother's left arm. It was moving slightly, and a large, rolling, bloodshot yellow eye was looking at her, drooping from the weight of disgusting bearing down upon it. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts to move the gross from the top of its eye, it gave up and the ooze of sickness lolled over and completely covered the eye once more.

"What is THAT?!" asked Isabella, stepping backwards, a huge grimace spreading across her face.

"Oh, the usual," said Isabella's mother exhasperatedley. "It's a crossbreed. A crossbreed of seven spells, if you can believe it."

"Spells?" asked Harry, who had gotten up from the table to greet his wife and examine the sick. "What do you mean spells? How can spells, er," he looked from the green blob to his wife, "crossbreed?"

"Well, seven of us at the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes were sent out to test combining spells," Luna started to explain as she tossed the broom aside. It landed with a clatter next to an extremely large vase holding what looked like an overgrown grey cactus with boils instead of spines. "You know," she said, looking back at her family, who were continuing to stare at the postulating ooze, "spells that either meet in the air after being conjured or effects of many spells put on something at one time."

"Yeah, I don't think any of us will ever forget that Bone-Gnawing Trash Bin you brought home last year," said Isabella grimly. "I've still got the scars." She gripped a place on her left leg while Luna and Harry eyed each other while Harry rubbed his forehead....

"Anyway," Luna continued, "we got together and were given our instructions. We were supposed to find out what would happen if different Transfiguration spells were combined in mid-air. We didn't really know what to expect, so we all congregated and started mapping out which spells each of us would use. We decided to firstly use spells that materialize animals. I chose the Avian Conjorus, a spell that conjures a bird, while the remaining chose to conjure a lizard, a monkey, a frog, a hare, a Pixie, and a gnome."

"I don't like where this is going," said Gordon sickeningly. Luna looked down at him and smiled in enjoyment at her younger brother's obvious disgust.

"Oh, it gets worse," answered Luna with a sly smile. "We went into the Testing Room and formed our circle. We each pointed our wands at the very center of the room, on the floor. We counted to three and shouted our spells as one. There were so many colors and sounds that I was forcefully reminded of traveling by a Portkey. After a few moments of the magic swirling and banging, the light cleared away and we were left with this."

Luna grabbed the blob and slammed it onto the table, where it oozed and blobbed as everyone bent in for closer inspection.

"We think we created a whole new animal. The magic from our wands got mixed up, see, and each separate animal fused together in the combined spells. Of coarse, we'll have to go to the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to make certain it is an animal, and make certain that we didn't purposely create a new species. It's nothing special, really," said Luna glancing at everyone, who were clearly ignoring her talk on laws and staring avidly at the creature. "It's as useless as a flobberworm. It can't even fly, but I'm not surprised. Those sparrow wings could hardly support something as droopy and heavy as this."

"What wings?" said Isabella at once, her curiosity flowing through her veins. "I can't see them."

"Well, they're underneath all this scailey, hairy blobiness over here." Luna dug her hands underneath some of the spell-animal's oozing body and shifted it to the other side, where it flowed disgustingly over a pair of green-tinged rabbit ears. Small wings, covered in heavy muck, were flapping hopelessly as the creature shifted.

"Oh, those wings," said Isabella simply, as though she normally came across green oozes with mismatched animal parts covering its body.

Suddenly, a white owl soared through an open window to the left of the group and landed right on the creature of muck. After realizing what it was perched on, it let out a loud, reproachful shriek, fluttered its wings, and soared to a silver perch in the corner of the room.

"Sorry, Hedwig," said Harry as he walked over to her as the owl stared at him as though he might have more ooze in his sleeve and was preparing to throw it at her face. "What's this?" he said as he took the letter from Dudley into his hands. "A letter? I didn't even know you were out."

Hedwig hooted happily, but fell silent as she watched, in amazement, the green ooze of sick blobbing on the table.

Harry returned to the table where everyone stood and flipped the envelope over to the other side. His eyes widened in disbelief as he read who it was from.

"What?" asked his wife, Luna, as she clamped his shoulder. "Is something the matter? Who sent it to you?"

Harry looked from the letter to each of his family members, his mouth now hanging open, his green eyes wide in amazement.

"It's from my cousin, Dudley."