SHIP: Trelawney and still life with toad

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 36793

Ama:
> I'm not really sure how old 
Trelawney is.  I mean, I get the impression she IS old, but there 
doesn't seem to be anything in the text to support or refute this.<

I've always imagined her as late forties or so, old enough to have a face written with lines of mystic wisdom, but young enough to retain a mass of untidy dark curls, as worn by all good gypsy fortune teller archetypes.  She probably needs those big hoopy earrings as well, and already has the jingle of bangles, chains and bells, rings on every finger and shawl.  I always liked Tealin Raintree's interpretation of her (I think there's a link to her art on the Lexicon somewhere...).  Of course, seeing wizards age slower, she could easily have taken longer than 48 years or so to achieve the look.  Or applied it artificially.

Hmm, this musing reminds me of something.  You know, despite the ever-proliferating flotillas roaming Theory Bay, I have yet to witness a ship which rustles up some romance for the slender, sultry Sibyll.  Come now, listmembers, even Wormtail has had some action lately.  Don't skinny fortune-telling frauds deserve love too?  Aren't there any Potterverse characters with a taste for green sequins out there?  And what about that smouldering, sensual atmosphere she cultivates up in her little tower love nest?  Are we saying that all those perfumes and incenses are going to waste??

Meanwhile, out in Theory Bay...

***
The seas have been rough lately.  After several days battling the storms of destruction and dastardry, Captain Tabouli safely sails her Ship back into harbour.  The time has come to check for any damages sustained.

Her mind turns immediately to the FLIRTIAC dinghy, recently defaced in an audacious attack from Elkins.  To her relief, it is still intact, and the last of the spraypaint has been stripped from her figurehead, with the culprit nowhere to be seen.  The Captain nods grimly, and is about to find someone to repair a nasty tear in the mainsail when something onshore catches her eye.  It is a group of people.  Judging by the way they are huddled together and glancing warily out to sea, they appear to be conspiring, or otherwise Up To No Good.  On closer inspection with her telescope, Captain Tabouli is appalled to observe among them is no less than Elkins herself, wearing kayaking gear and accompanied by a shady looking character with wringing hands and sorrowful brown eyes and a tough-looking woman wearing a FEATHERBOA and carrying a large and menacing paddle.

The telescope quivers in her suddenly perspiring hands.  What dicy deeds could they be up to now?  Slowly, dreading what she might see, she zooms in on the conspirators and a still more alarming apparition comes into focus... a shadowy figure in a pipe and swirling black cloak waving what appears to be a glossy brochure covered in pictures of yachts, rafts and sundry sea-going vessels.  It is even dicier than she feared.  It can only be Dicentra the Dastardly Dinghy Dealer, perfidious purveyor of Bargain Basement Boats!

Panicking, the good Captain races down to her storeroom, where she pulls out the last days of reports from her spies.  She knew there were rumours that the Dastardly Dicentra had infiltrated the Fourth Man Kayak, pretending to paddle along with their flimsy fancies in order to lure them into wreaking hovercraft havoc on the seas, but in the recent storms she neglected to keep an eye on her.  There is only one thing to be done.  She radios her most trusted crew and gets them to prepare the submarine.

Moments later, Captain Tabouli is stealthily approaching the dock, inches from the floor of Theory Bay.  When she judges that she is close enough to the conspirators to overhears their treacherous transactions, she discreetly extends the periscope-with-built-in-microphone (cleverly disguised as the Loch Ness Monster) and twiddles the focussing knob.  The entire viewing screen resolves into a single, pulsing eye!

The Captain reels back from this horrifying sight.  It is several minutes before she has composed herself enough to recognise what it is.  It is the eye of a toad, who appears to have hopped onto the periscope just as it broke the surface and is now peering inside.  Irritated, she spins the periscope around and extends it up and down to dislodge the intruding amphibian, but it clings to the periscope and croaks plaintively into the microphone, sounding rejected and forlorn.  It is wearing a small collar, on which she can faintly make out the word "Keeper".  The Captain's efforts finally shift the toad so that its foot, rather than its face, is over the lens and she is able to peer out onto the dock through its suction cup toes...

To her dismay, the hovercraft transaction appears to be complete.  The Dastardly Dicentra is clinking with coins, a sinister smile playing about her lips.  Worse still, Elkins is expounding enthusiastically, and the other conspirators are listening enthralled.  In Elkin's paint-speckled hand is a document headed "DEPRECIATION (Death Eaters Produced Really Evil Charm, Invoking Amnesia To Incapacitate Our Neville): New Evidence Comes To Light!"  Underneath is what appears to be plans for a longboat positively *bristling* with canons.  Captain Tabouli twiddles her knobs once more and brings them into focus.  The central canon appears to be mounted on a parallel between Neville's forgetful, bungling behaviour and that of other people subjected to Memory Charms (principally Bertha Jorkins, but also Mr Roberts).

Captain Tabouli glances away from the periscope viewing screen and looks out a porthole into the sea.  A small red herring flits by.  She decides it is time to come clean.

***
You know, I've never been sold on this Memory Charmed Neville concept.  From all I've gathered about Memory Charms, they:

1. Are used primarily to safeguard secret information by convincing a witness that it Did Not Really Happen (hence their use by Lockhart on his victims and by the Ministry of Magic on Muggles who witness magic at work).
2. Are applied as soon as possible after the witnessed event, before the witness can tell anyone, and before the memory becomes too established in the witness' mind (hence the need for Constant Vigilance before the Muggle media print anything).
3. Have an effect which wears off within a few hours at most (hence Mr Roberts needed to be re-Charmed several times each day).
4. Vary in strength depending on the magnitude of the event witnessed; an extremely strong one can damage the witness' memory permanently.

Now.  Most Memory Charmed Neville advocates suggest the Charm was put on Neville as a toddler to wipe out the traumatic memory of his parents being tortured into insanity, about 10 years or so prior to his forgetful arrival at Hogwarts.  Since then, the argument presumably goes, Neville's memory has never been the same, and he is therefore forgetful, clumsy, bungling and so on.

Hmmmm.  You know, I've always secretly thought this theory was mostly a justification for Neville fans who want to show that Their Boy is really a smart, powerful wizard who's only forgetful etc. because he's been Wronged, because IMO it really doesn't fit in with our current profile of the Memory Charm.  I also think that the most important question to answer in this theory is what Elkins alluded to in the latter part of her message: who *gave* him this Memory Charm, and were his/her intentions fair or foul?

Fair:

Under this theory, some Ministry of Magic officials, Aurors or similar turned up at the scene of the crime, ambushed Crouch Jnr, the Lestranges and the Fourth Man, packed them off to Azkaban pre-trial, and then went back to pick up the pieces, viz. two Crucio-crazed Longbottoms, whom they carted to St Mungo's, and a gibbering tot hiding under the sofa, whose memory they thoughtfully wiped with a Memory Charm so he wouldn't be traumatised for life.  Unfortunately, making him forget something so Big required a Mega-Memory Charm which accidentally damaged his memory permanently.

Well, good, good, but um, if the Big Coverup was to protect Neville from traumatic knowledge of the incident, why not whisk him away after the Charm, protect him from the aftermath, and tell him his parents are dead instead of telling him all about the Crucio incident and traumatising him by *taking him to see them* every holidays?  His relatives have obviously told him enough to make it Stick In His Memory enough to distress him horribly when fake Moody tortures the spider.  Are we saying that covered it up (tricky, given that they would have been pretty traumatised themselves - did they keep on Charming him every few hours for a couple of months until they themselves were under control?  How did they explain the disappearance of his parents, traumatic enough in itself?  More memory charms?) they coddled him along until he was "old enough to handle it" and *then* told him the gory details and took him to see his gibbering mum and dad, hence undoing all the good work?  Hmmm.

Foul:

The quiversome quartet arrive at the Longbottoms' and clobber 'em with Crucio for information about Voldemort's whereabouts, thereby traumatising Neville, etc.etc.  Then they get wind of their discovery at the hands of the Aurors, wipe Neville's memory to conceal their identities and Apparate away.  Being Evil, and not caring whether they ruined a little lad's life, they used a Mega-Memory Charm to make sure, damaging his memory permanently.

This I find a bit more likely, but still unconvincing.  What happened to Dead Men Don't Tell Tales?  Come on, these Death Eaters were trained by Lord "Kill the Spare" Voldemort!  If Neville was watching and they thought his toddler testimony would be a threat, why not use the one spell you have time for to AK him?  Why bother with a Memory Charm (unless you go for the AK is too exhausting theory)?  For that matter, given the fact that they left the Longbottoms alive convicted them in the end (through the extraction of none too reliable information, given their condition), why didn't they just kill them off when they found them of no use, to safeguard themselves?  As for their evidently dreadful condition while giving testimony, is Neville included in this?

[Presumably if they were aiming to get information out of Frank, they didn't *intentionally* break his mind with Crucio... what would be the point?  Once he's incoherently insane, he's useless to them.  So OK, first they torture Frank, he won't sing, then they torture Frank's wife until she goes insane (during which time Frank would have needed to be watching and of sound mind, otherwise this ploy is pointless).  Was this what made Frank crack?  I'd say yes (because they *wanted* Frank of sound mind so he could tell them where Voldemort was), unless, of course, they turned on him and Crucio'd him into madness in revenge when he wouldn't talk]

I dunno.  My impression was always that JKR *gave* us the reason for Neville's bad memory in GoF: his memory's fine, it's just that most of his disk space is dominated by traumatic memories of and associations with his parents and what happened to them, interfering with his ability to focus effectively on things like schoolwork.  I happily buy Elkins' evidence that Neville is in fact a powerful wizard with poor control.  In fact, I say this it is *because* he is struggling to repress so much baggage that his performance and memory is so uneven.  Perhaps he's afraid to let go (in the way he must learn to do properly to train as a wizard) because on some level he's terrified of power because he knows all too horribly how it can be misused.  Hence he goes to pieces when a powermongering known ex-DE like Snape bullies him, and performs better in a nice safe subject like Herbology (which surely involves lots of memorisation, no?).  Hence when he *does* lose his repressive grip the results are powerful and uncontrolled.

***
Shaking her head at Elkins' continuing depravity, Captain Tabouli decides she has seen enough.  She turns the submarine for LOLLIPOPS and follows the red herring back out to sea.  Just as she is reaching for the button to retract the periscope, a moist, pleading eye appears once more on her screen.  It is the toad, still clinging pathetically.  Being a kindly soul at heart, the Captain decides to provide him with a haven.  After all, back on board she does have a drawing board where she once sketched out her own personalised versions of the ToadKeeper theory (see Feb 23rd's shipping bulletin "Quaffling, Herm-eyeofevil-ne, Wizard justice, fickle Florence").

One involved Florence Longbottom-to-be snogging Mr Lestrange behind the greenhouses and then being punished by the vengeful Mrs Lestrange by having her soul entombed in the body of a *male* toad (depriving her of both humanity and femininity in one foul stroke), which, unbeknownst to Neville, lived for years in the algae covered pond of Uncle Algy until s/he knew it was time for Neville to go to Hogwarts, whereupon s/he hops into Uncle Algy's hands just as he was speculating on a going-to-school present.

The other, more sinister ToadKeeper theory is that Trevor is in fact the evil Trevor Lestrange, who cunningly exchanged his soul for that of a toad's on his way to Azkaban, letting his toad-souled human body to rot while he hopped over to Uncle Algy's place to Spy on the Longbottoms, and then, more cunningly still, wangled his way to school with Neville, where he was ideally placed to roam about and spy on Voldemort's ultimate enemy... Harry Potter.

Before the submarine surfaces to LOLLIPOPS' starboard bow, Captain Tabouli extends the periscope up to the deck and lets the toad hop aboard.  She then re-embarks herself, and picks him up, stroking his warty skin affectionately.  Toad in hand, she descends to her cabin, new and intricate theories already flowering in her mind...

Tabouli.


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