Grappling with the Rules

The locked door swung open without making a sound. Inside was a familiar, large, dark room.

"Some lights all 'round, yeah?" Milo asked quietly. He'd do it himself, but he had to conserve his magic—even the cantrips—until the final confrontation. With no discernible limit (as far as he could tell) on the number of spells they could cast each day, Milo needed to rely on them to get him to Quirrell.

But that was the proper state of affairs. It felt right to him. All that solo adventuring? That was unnatural. Wizards, while hardly social creatures, do operate best in groups of less-arcane, more-giant-sword-wielding, possessor-of-the-mighty-thews, slayer-of-many-a-fell-beast, meat shields. Or, failing that, friends—Milo still couldn't believe he was using that term and meant it—with magic.

It was like being in a party again. Even if it was a party entirely composed of squishy wizards.

"Lumos," Hermione and Ron muttered, and the tips of their wands began to glow like torches.

"Blimey," Ron said.

"Merlin," Hermione said in a whisper.

"Indeed," Milo agreed, staring into the room. This was most unexpected.

The room was empty.

"Well," Milo said. "That was most unexpected. I suppose they haven't gotten around to replacing the dog, after all. Shall we?" He gestured to the trap door that lay beneath where Fluffy once sat.

"You know," Ron said idly, "I seem to remember this room being, well, bigger last time we were here."

"Now that you mention it," Milo said, "I think you're right. I mean, it is big—"

"—but not that big, you know?" Ron said.

"Yeah. Weird."

"It is not weird," Hermione said. "Honestly, haven't any of you ever read Hogwarts: A History?"

"I have, actually," Milo said. He'd Scholar's Touch'd it a while back, but remembering things read in a flash like that was tricky, much like having a photograph shoved in front of your face, only to be yanked away again a second later. Sure, you saw the picture, but it doesn't quite sink in the same way as if you had carefully perused it.

"Space is somewhat... flexible in the castle, because of the sheer concentrated magic of the place" she explained. "Makes it easy to resize certain rooms with a powerful enough Enlargement Charm. They must have done so to fit the dog in—I mean, there's no earthly reason a school would have a random room big enough to hold a Cerberus, right?"

"Oh, I dunno," Ron said dreamily. "I can think of one or two."

"Let me guess," she asked. "Slytherin disposal chute?"

"Actually, I was thinking, 'know-it-all containment chamber,' but your way works, too." After that, Ron fell silent and stared at the trapdoor. Their unimportant conversation was simply to put off the inevitable, and they all knew it. None of them knew what lay beyond that trap door, but one thing was for certain: there wouldn't be any more freebies like this room had been.

Milo grabbed the heavy wrought-iron ring of the trapdoor and pulled. It opened with an oily squeak which rang through the oversized, silent room. Through the trapdoor lay a deep, dark shaft. Ron reached down with his lit wand, which cast a pale white light on the walls of the shaft.

There was no bottom in sight.

"Light," Milo muttered, fetching a Knut from his pocket. The coin lit up, and with a sigh (Milo hated throwing money away, even other people's money) tossed it into the pit. They all leaned over and watched the bronze coin fall for what seemed like ages, before finally it ceased moving at what looked like miles underground. Of course, it was probably only extremely far down, and not quite as ridiculously far as it appeared, but one never knew when wizards were involved.

A second later the coin went dark.

"Spell doesn't last very long, eh?" Ron asked.

"No," Milo said slowly. "It lasts for hours."

"So, what happened? Some sort of counterspell?" Ron asked, looking meaningfully at Hermione.

"Don't look at me like I know the answer," she huffed indignantly. "If there's one thing we've learned, it's that none of us have any idea what to expect when Milo's magic encounters our own. I don't even know if a counterspell would work."

As she spoke, Milo noticed a brief glimmer of light from the bottom of the pit.

"It's still on down there," he said. "It's just... covered by something."

"Something moving, it would appear," Hermione agreed.

"You don't think... you don't think it might be spiders, do you, mate?" Ron asked shakily.

"Nah," Milo said. "Can't be spiders."

"Well, that's good," Ron said. "But, er, why can't it be?"

"Because we've already fought spiders too many times this campaign. I bet it's scorpions." Milo paused, thinking. He had fifty feet of silk rope (of course), but that hole as far deeper than fifty feet. Maybe, if they all jumped close enough together, he could Feather Fall them before the end? But what if there was something dangerous on the ground? Perhaps if they were Feather Fall-ing, one of them could hammer a piton into the wall near the bottom of the pillar and use it to—

"Right then," Ron said, and jumped in without hesitation.

There was a moment of crystalline silence, where Milo and Hermione stared at each other in absolute shock.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" she asked, her voice sounding somewhat strained. "We have to go after him!"

Milo swallowed, and they jumped in together. They were in complete darkness, save for the light of Hermione's wand and that of Ron's far below them, tumbling down an impressively deep pit. Milo, despite himself, lost track of how many increments of ten feet (and thus, how much damage he'd take upon landing) somewhere distressingly close to terminal velocity. Gritting his teeth, he shook his hands free of his sleeves and readied an action.

"Feather Fall!" he shouted, and the two of them slowed to a gentle drift barely a few feet before touching the ground.

"Ron!" Hermione shouted. "Ron, are you al—all right?" Milo had a sneaking suspicion of what Hermione was going to ask before she caught herself.

"Nah, I'm fine," came his cheerful voice. "There's this soft plant thing I landed on, it's lucky, really." Milo realized embarrassedly that he'd been so distracted thinking about Ron that he hadn't properly taken stock of his surroundings. Ron was lying on the ground nearby on a thick, green carpet of slender vines. The lit Knut was nowhere to be seen. "Dumbledore must have had this thing planted to keep people falling from being hurt. Mind, a mattress would have done, too."

"No..." Milo said, thinking. That seemed wrong to him.

Suddenly, Hermione shrieked. Snaklelike tendrils of vine, moving with deceptive speed, wrapped themselves around her legs to the knee. "It's Devil's Snare!" She shouted.

"Sorry, is that supposed to mean something to me—Merlin's Beard!" Tendrils pounced like a cat, and suddenly Ron was gone.

"Crap, crap crapcrapcrap!" Milo swore, trying to avoid the vines. Despite his efforts, he found his muscles refusing to respond and his feet remained firmly planted (so to speak) to the ground. He fought down a groan. He had no idea what to do or how to move—he'd never understood the Grapple rules. Nobody understood the Grapple rules!

The vines managed to grab hold of Hermione's wand hand, and, while it looked like she was struggling to say something, they were covering her mouth as well. Oddly, they seemed to be largely ignoring Milo, who was still locked up with immobility. He frowned and tried to ignore Hermione and Ron's muffled screams as he focused on what the page(s) describing the rules looked in like in the Rulebook. If he could remember that, maybe he could remember what they said. He remembered a distinct lack of pictures or explanatory illustrations (that would require the initial writers of the Rulebook to understand the Grapple rules, and, of course, they did not). He knew his Grapple bonus was +2, but only because that was on his character sheet. He didn't know how that was calculated or even what it was used for. Maybe if he...

"Ah, screw it. Levitate." He cast the spell, not at himself, but at Hermione. His magic effortlessly pulled her out of the tangled vines (one thing he could remember was that, while grappling, you 'can't move normally,' but being Levitated could hardly be considered normal, now could it?). However, the Snare seemed to have finally taken note of him, and a cluster of twisting tendrils jumped at him. Milo snorted and clubbed one of the approaching vines with his staff. To his surprise, the rest seemed to recoil in what seemed like pain and avoided him — for now. "Hermione!" Milo shouted at his newly liberated friend. "Do something smart—Aaaagh!" The vines jumped him in force, and Milo, for the first time in his life, wished he'd taken the Combat Reflexes feat. He was dimly aware that initiating a Grapple attempt provoked an Attack of Opportunity (AoO) from the defender, which, if it hit, negated the attempt. Evidently, this vine was capable of multiple attacks per round, but Milo could only make one AoO. Still unable to resist (he didn't even know what check to make to begin to do so), the vines effortlessly lifted him from the floor bodily and pinned him up against the wall. Cold, damp darkness coated him, shutting out most of the light.

Somehow, Hermione had managed to maintain a firm grip on her wand while being pinned. Hermione muttered a spell—Milo didn't catch the name of it—and a jet of pale blue fire launched out of her wand in a carefully controlled burst. Milo felt the vines immediately loosen from around him, and with relief he sagged to the ground. They retreated to the sides of the room and remained perfectly still, as if they were a normal, non-animated plant. He heard the ringing clink of a coin dropping, and his lit Knut illuminated the room. Ron was gasping for breath on the floor, but was otherwise all right.

It was only then that Milo got a clear view of the Devil's Snare. Weirdly, the vines were streaked with a sickly, pale yellow and brown. Judging by the thick mat on the ground, they'd been shedding leaves for some time now, and dead tendrils coated the floor.

"Weird," he muttered. Why use a plant-based trap if you weren't going to take proper care of it?

"How did you know?" Hermione asked, looking at him.

"What?"

"That the Devil's Snare is attracted to movement! The harder you struggle, the more it fights. I can't believe I forgot that, I feel like such an idiot."

"Right. Yes, that's exactly why I wasn't moving. The very reason indeed." That must have been why the Devil's Snare only jumped him when he cast a spell—the movement had attracted it. "Why did it run away like that?"

"Fire," Hermione said. "It's scared of fire—we learned that in Herbology, remember? Actually, I'm amazed you forgot that and remembered how it senses prey, because that's far more obscure..."

"Just slipped my mind for a minute," Milo lied. "Let's push ahead, eh? Villain to defeat, hero to save, all that."