On the 18th of July, 1988, Professor Minerva McGonagall decided that she had finally had enough. The owls bearing one Zoro Roronoa Isshin's start-of-term letters had been returning them to her for the last four days as they found themselves unable to deliver them, and with increasingly ridiculous addresses noted on them, to boot.
Now, if those ones had been accompanied by other students' letters, she would probably have suspected a malfunction in the charms that noted down the students' current addresses the first day, but as it was, it was only Roronoa's letters which seemed to be led astray.
She had no idea how that was possible, quite frankly. It would be one thing if the charms had simply been worn down and lost power due to old age, but for one student to somehow confuse them like this while they were still in full working order... it was ridiculous! The charms were ancient magic backed up by runic arrays which seemed unnecessarily large, considering their fairly simple purpose. Ravenclaw and Slytherin had written them personally, for Merlin's sake! It had failsafes for its failsafes, and probably accounted for every single possibility conceivable!
Still, here she was, glowering at the array with Bathsheda and Albus next to her. Albus had conjured a table which was swiftly filling up with notes as they tried to figure out why it was producing ludicrous addresses such as “Big Rock in Forest Glade”, “Dirt Road Going Up” and, the one that had finally made her storm into Albus' office: “Patch of Grass”.
As far as they were able to tell, the charm should be noting down the student's home address. Should such a thing, for some reason, not exist, it should reroute the letter to their current place of residence, no matter if they considered it a home or not. Should that fail, the letter would be sent to their current location by way of longitude-latitude coordinates so that the owl could track their magical signature from there. And if that for some reason didn't work, copies of the letter would be sent to the child's guardian(s) and/or close friends in the hopes that they knew how to get a hold of the elusive student.
For some reason, Roronoa had managed to get all of those methods to fail, and it seemed like the array in desperation had turned to scribbling out nonsense.
Needless to say, Bathsheda was having a field day with this, and Albus wasn't much better.
“Now, now, Minerva, I'm sure we'll be able to figure something out.”
“You don't understand, Minerva! This is so well crafted! It combines both the elder and younger futharks – do you have any idea of how much skill that takes? And not only have they made them coexist in the same array, but they've managed to intertwine the elder script with the younger script to create a self-propagating effect! That shouldn't be possible. It should by all rights destabilize and collapse, especially in a work of this scale, unless... ooh, that is genius! Absolutely genius!”
Minerva was wondering if she perhaps had spent too much time in her cat form lately, because surely it couldn't be normal to want to hiss at people? She took off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, suppressing the urge. She had never invested a great deal of time in the study of runes, tending more towards arithmancy in order to support and analyze more complex transfigurations, and she had to admit that she was a bit out of her depth here. Still, shouldn't they be focusing on finding a solution instead of simply admiring the Founders' work?
“Couldn't we force the array to write out his coordinates instead of this nonsense,” she suggested, gesturing to the latest address they had had it write in order to observe it at work and see where things went wrong (“Field, Eurasian Continent”), “and then send it with an owl familiar with his magical signature?”
That immediately brought the two up short, and though they looked fairly disappointed (Bathsheda especially, and honestly, they could study this thing at any time, so couldn't it wait until the student had gotten his letter?), they both agreed that it was doable and likely to work.
Minerva immediately took the chance to walk off to the owlery to find an owl fitting their criteria, happy to let the two of them work it out on their own.
She had had quite enough of runes for the next long, long, while.
Part three out of three in the “Letters to...” series! You can find part one, The Letter to No One, here, and part two, The Letter to Someone, here.
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