#burying treasure in your garden but it backfire

[moonsworndandelion]

My dad played a similar trick on my cousin ! But with a bit more ... bones.

Let's back up a bit. My cousin wanted to be an archeologist since he was a kid (he was around 8 or 10 at this time I think ?). Like he had all those books about Egypt and stuff in his room.

My dad knew this. My dad is a bit of a goblin sometimes and has weird (but mostly funny) ideas. So when he saw one of those "suscribe to T-rex Magazine and builds a full T-rex skeleton, and recieve a new piece each month" he got one of those ideas. Obviously he didn't suscribe to the thing (because it's usually a big waste of money and another subject completely), but he got the first magazine... and the "T-rex Skull" going with it.

The next time we visited my cousin (usually every other month or so), he hide the skull in his luggage without telling anyone. We stayed a few days, and nobody is aware of the fake skull my dad is smuggling.

The last evening, after everyone has gone to bed, he sneak out with his skull (I think mom might have caught him at this point, but I'm not sure). In the dead of the night, he goes to the sandbox (basically a mount of sand that my uncle left there after some renovation so that the kids could play with it) and bury the skull in the middle of it. Not very deep, but enough that you couldn't see anything.

The next morning we went back home as usual, and think nothing of it because no one knows.

Except a few days later, my cousin went to play in the sand as usual, and find... something. Excited, he dig around, until he unearth the whole thing. It clearly look like bones, so as any aspiring scientific, he tries to figure out how this bones could have arrived here, and what bones they were. Then he came to the only logical conclusion : a chicken somehow escaped from the pen and was buried alive in the sand. And screamed bloody murder.

My aunt arrived in a panic, and immediately saw that this was not chicken bones. After having reassured my cousin that the chicken were okay and everything, she brought the thing to my grandma, because she didn't have any idea of how this fake skull of something appeared in the sandpit. Grandma obviously was as baffled as everyone.

It wasn't until the next Sunday, during my mother weekly call to grandma, that the mystery was fully uncovered. It included half-joking curses at my father, a lot of exclamation, and a lot off laughter. My dad was officially banned from doing this ever again, and my cousin still maintain that it was one of the scariest thing he ever saw at this point.

He didn't end up archaeologist in the end, but it's still a funny bit of the familial lore.

(and he's an histograph/geograph or somethin if I'm not mistaken, still pretty close)

When I was a very small child, my mom used to bury coins in my sandbox, leave huge boot prints in the sand, and tell me pirates had come in the night and buried treasure. I would be out there happily for hours, with my little sieve, and my mom got a quiet morning to herself for the price of a handful of pennies.

I was always kind of skeptical about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, because visiting every kid in the world did not seem reasonable. But the pirates only visited me, so they were probably real.

So that’s the story of how I ended up being an archaeologist. How about you?

[theaurorfileshq]

C A S S A N D R A   A S T O R - R E Y E S  /  A U R O R   S E R G E A N T

AGE: Thirty

BADGE NUMBER: S01B24

BLOODSTATUS: Pureblood

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Cis Woman, She/Her

IDENTIFYING FEATURES: Eyebrow scar, walks with a slight limp and aided by a cane.

STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES:

(+): Excels in Defence Against The Dark Arts/Uncomfortable knowledge of the Dark Arts in general, can resist the imperious curse, strong moral compass and a heart of gold.

(-): A tendency to hold back from using destructive spells even if doing so puts her at risk, legitimately desperate for approval from authority figures, inability to produce a patronus.

BACKGROUND:

–– In her younger years she feels like a shadow incarnate. A ghostly slip of a thing in a family of ghoulish, graceful monsters. Cassandra is the youngest of four, and the only girl in the family. There is not a day that goes by where she doesn’t know her place. The Astor-Reyes family are traditionalists to the core. Her mother teaches her the rules with a deceitful gentleness. Little girls should be seen and not heard. Little girls should stay out of the way. Little girls need to do whatever their father and brothers tell them. Even when she was small, she knew the foolishness of it. Cassandra was far too hungry a thing to sit still and pretty while her brothers worked. Like all shadows, she longed to come into the light and swallow it whole.

–– She proves herself a prodigy from a young age. Her magic comes out early, unbound and unrestrained. It’s clear to all that little Cassandra is a power-house. A forest fire in a pretty dress, a scorching blaze with very polite table manners. In the early days, before she learns how to focus herself, her magic almost sparks and crackles with its fury. She still remembers the day her father leans down to kiss her forehead and whispers “you’re going to burn the world down, aren’t you, Cass?”

–– Despite it all, she still feels like a shadow. Her power, her raw talent, only get her so far in her father’s eyes. She is allowed to study from his books, secret and forbidden to so many others. He practices spells on her so that she will build a natural defence, so that she will know how to protect herself with magic and muscle memory. When she takes any real interest in his work, she is shut down. Business isn’t for little girls. When she tries to engage with her brothers on an equal playing field, she is pushed away. Experimental magic isn’t for little girls. They look at her with sharp eyes, predators in the making. They’re how Cassandra knows what monsters look like, she’ll reflect, a decade later.

–– Her grandfather never leaves the house. He is a reclusive soul, she thinks, with an edge of longing. Oh, how she would love to stay at home forever with books for company. He has an edge in his eyes, and he stares out the window for long hours at a time. Cassandra is his favourite, she knows, in the way children often do. He is more gentle with her than the others, he humours her more than anyone else, and drives her brothers away when they bother her or tease her. She asks him why he never ventures outside the gates of their garden, and he tells her that he is a trapped soul. He says it like a story, fairy tale slow and full of wonder. He has an enemy, you see. An enemy who outwitted him and bested him in battle. An enemy who feared his power. So her grandfather had to barter away magic and some small level of freedom in exchange for the chance to stay with his family. It seems awfully noble and romantic to Cassandra, but she won’t know for many years the extent of his thwarted dark deeds.

–– She didn’t realise that her family was strange until a couple of years into her schooling. She joins the Horned Serpent house without a second thought, and struggles to make friends even among her like-minded compatriots. People seemed to shy away from her at every turn, so she closed herself off in return. She focused on her books, and her grades, and the polite small talk she could make with those who knew her from before school began. Other noble, honoured pureblood families. She hears it whispered one day, after a talented display of hexes in her Defence class, far more advanced than anything the others could produce. ‘I bet she’s evil, like the rest of them.’

–– The Astor-Reyes family has a bad reputation, and she was foolish not to see it sooner. She didn’t realise she was wrong, to know the things she did. She didn’t realise she shouldn’t have studied the darkest of arts from an early age. She didn’t realise it was wrong to gaze into the abyss, and wish it would touch you in return. They all saw it as a thing that hurt. They didn’t know that the knowledge could be a powerful and rewarding thing. They didn’t know that it could be as gentle as a father’s kiss. It had never hurt her, she’d never seen it damage anything, not really.

–– At seventeen, she has the aura of a wispy, flighty thing. Delicate, darkly beautiful. Her family had a bad reputation, but all she’d been able to do was go with it. After school, she begs her father to let her help him in the family business. She understands now what he does, and that it isn’t strictly speaking legal. Yet she wants to help, regardless. He’s just a businessman. He gets things that people wants. He sells them. Trinkets and artefacts and treasures. It’s just stuff, she thinks, in her still teenaged brain. What are people going to do? Hurt themselves with it? Though she’s older, and undeniably the brightest of his children, he tells her no. She should be focusing on marriage, like a good little girl. She should find a husband and carry on the family line, in one way or another. For the next three years she entertains the ideas, entertains suitors and boyfriends and girlfriends. She has not great longing to be a wife to any of them, and shakes them off as best she can.

–– It’s a strange thing, to be willingly blind. To believe that you have honour when you know, deep in your heart, that something is very wrong. She gets the impression that her family is spiralling around a drain, that something too dark and too dangerous is creeping in. Her eldest brother is a dark shade of the man she used to know, frantic and cloying and obsessive to an extreme extent. He inherits control of everything, in the end, when her father is arrested for his crimes and locked away. She watches the auror squad come and take both Andre and him. Brother and father gone, a dwindling family left behind. She answers questions and feels the heavy judgement of their gazes. Micheal Astor-Reyes becomes the head of their family in a deft blow, and though he only lasts a matter of weeks in the role, she wishes it had been over quicker. Her brother is a cruel man, a foul beast. Experimental and half-crazed like a character in a no-maj novel, Frankenstein the doctor, or Frankenstein the monster –– one and the same, wrapped up in the visage of a man she tries very hard to love. She watches him, far too often, his words and his deeds. She watches and wonders: is this wrong? She wonders it often enough that the litany shifts without her notice, a resigned and shaky: this is wrong.

–– Micheal almost blows her up, in the end. Him and his experimental magic. She should have been wary when he let her into the room, when he asked her to act as witness to his greatest deeds. She knows that he could have easily killed her, down there in his lab. His necromantic obsessions, his fascination with death and how to best it. That kind of spell can do far more damage than it did to her, when it backfires. She knows it could have killed her –– it killed him, after all. She’d seen his burned out husk, seen what was left of him, twitching until he faded away. A great deed. She’d known she was hurt, but it didn’t occur to her that she ought to cry or to scream or to call out for help. All she’d wanted in the moment was to lay down and fall asleep.

–– They bury her brother in the family crypt, and it’s a mark of her own strength that she attends the ceremony. Fresh from her sick bed after two weeks of healing. Intensive as the attentions of her healers had been, Cassandra still feels weary. Bone tired. Achey inside and out. ‘Dark magic often leaves a profound mark on the psyche.’ She needs help to stand, her leg still healing far too slowly for anybody’s liking. The help takes the shape of her Grandfather for the extent of the day. He keeps her steady, somehow steadfast and strong even in his old age. Her mother sobs and weeps, wrapped up in her seemingly endless sorrow. It still doesn’t occur to Cassandra that she ought to cry. She plays picture perfect hostess next to her mother after the ceremony, shakes hand after hand, and accepts condolences she doesn’t want. She plasters on a grim smile, as sad as she can manage.

–– It’s only the three of them in the house, quite suddenly. Cassandra, her mother, and her grandfather. Andre and father will be locked up for a very long time. Micheal is dead. Alexander departed in the weeks after the funeral, galavanting around Europe in a desperate effort to make a name for himself divorced from the rest of his despicable family. Cassandra feels more like a ghost than ever. A broken thing, gripping the cane her mother gifted her as she strives towards independence. She lost her wand, during the accident. It snapped beneath her when she fell. She ought to get a new one, she knows –– but she isn’t ready to face the world, she isn’t ready for them to look at her, yet. She sits in the dusty, unused Drawing Room instead, and makes fitful attempts to master simple spells wandlessly. The ancestral portraits watch her in wry amusement, until one speaks up –– ‘You’re not going to get anywhere like that.’ It’s Cassandra, the elder Cassandra. A great aunt she’s never given much thought to. Grandfather had always described her in unflattering tones, far too priggish for his taste, a stoic and upstanding citizen. His distaste for her is why she was condemned to the old drawing room, rarely used even by her mother. ‘I do believe my old wand is somewhere in the attic, gathering dust. Go and fetch it so we may all cease watching you struggle like a foolish child.’

–– She thinks a lot about the elder Cassandra in the weeks that follow. Using her wand. Gazing at her portrait. Reading about her, however much there is, in the family records. She seemed more noble than anything else, to Cass’s young eyes. Never married. A patron of various charities. Master duelist and stalwart believer in duty and honour. She had been the one who turned her Grandfather in to the Auror’s, who condemned him to a life of imprisonment in his own home for his unholy deeds, condemned him to a life without a wand. Then, the elder Cassandra had died young. She has no proof to back the chilling hunch, but there is something in Cass certain that her death was far from natural.

–– She thinks a lot about honour. Right and wrong. What kind of person she wants to be. She thinks, and then she stops thinking at all and begins to act. She moves their hoard of dark artefacts and distasteful books up to the attic, out of sight and out of mind. She opens all the windows and lets the light in. Then, with steely determination, she applies to auror training. Her career begins in fits and starts, wary eyes following her everywhere she goes. Her name carries weight, her family’s bad reputation still at the forefront of everybody’s mind. She doesn’t cower from it, this time around. She holds her head high and promises herself she’ll never quit, that she’ll never stop trying.

–– Cassandra is a good Auror. It turns out that she has a talent for it, more than she’s ever had with anything else. She graduates from the Academy in New Orleans at the top of her class, after having worked herself to the bone. She felt the rush of the accomplishment, felt ready to dedicate herself mind body and soul to the job, with a newly crafted sturdy moral compass in her heart. A lot of people still don’t trust her, even after years on the job – they think the darkness will win out, that she’ll default back to it if the going gets tough. All she wants is to prove them wrong, once and for all. All Cassandra wants is to be good, to help people, to make a difference in this world. She knows she’s going to succeed.