Martin flourished a Gamedeck. It was a different color than Ralph's, but of exactly the same make. He plunked it unceremoniously onto the Headmistress' desk. "Wireless uplink for online competition, including chat capability. Pretty standard stuff. So anybody here go by the screen name 'Austramaddux'?"
"You can't do this to me!" Martin exclaimed as Neville led him unceremoniously into the Room of Requirement, which had arranged itself into a rather quaint turret-top prison cell, complete with a barred window, a cot, a bowl of water and a crust of bread on a plate. "This is unlawful imprisonment! It's an outrage!"
"Think of it as field research," Neville instructed politely. "We have much to discuss, and after your ordeals in the forest, we thought you might like a bit of a breather. Take a load off, friend."
James, who was standing in the hall behind Neville, couldn't help smiling a little. Martin saw him, scowled angrily, and made to shove past Neville. Neville whipped out his wand so fast that James barely saw his robes twitch. "I said," Neville repeated with low emphasis, not quite pointing his wand at Martin, "take a load off. Friend."
James' smile faltered. He'd never seen Neville Longbottom so intense. Of course, James knew the stories of how Neville had cut off the head of Voldemort's snake, Nagini, but that was before James had been born. In all his memory of the man, Neville had been a kindly figure, soft-spoken and a bit clumsy. Now Neville's wand hand was so immobile and purposeful that it might have been carved out of marble. Martin blinked at Neville, saw something in the man's posture and the set of his face that he didn't like, and backed up. The back of his knees struck the cot and he sat down hard. Neville pocketed his wand and stepped back into the hall, pulling the door of the Room of Requirement shut behind him. Martin, seeing the wand put away, immediately jumped up and started to yell again, but his voice was cut off as the door slammed shut.
"You know, we do have dungeons, Madam Headmistress," Neville said in his normal voice.
Seeing the door closed, Headmistress McGonagall turned on her heel and walked briskly down the corridor as the others followed. "We have some rather antique torture devices as well, Professor Longbottom, but I believe this will suffice for the moment. We only need to hold him until we receive word from the Ministry of Magic about whatever recourse we may or may not have against the dilemma Mr. Prescott has foisted upon us. In the meantime, Mr. Potter, I must ask you: do you know anything about the game device that has apparently led this… person into our midst?"
James swallowed as he struggled to keep up the Headmistress' pace. He opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came. "Er, well…"
Neville touched James on the shoulder as they walked. "We all saw your face turn as pale as the moon when Prescott produced the GameDeck device. You looked almost like you expected it. Is there something you know that might help us, James?"
James decided there was no point in trying to protect Ralph. It wasn't his fault, anyway. "My friend has one. He's a first year like me, but he's Muggle-born. He didn't know it might be dangerous to have here. None of us did, really. I was surprised it even worked here."
"He used it to communicate with someone in the Muggle community?" Neville asked quickly.
"No! As far as I know, he never used it at all! As soon as he got here, his housemates saw it and gave him a load of trouble about it. They're Slytherins, so they were all ragging on him about counterfeit magical devices, about how it was an insult to the purebloods and all that."
The Headmistress turned a corner, heading back toward her office. "I assume you are speaking of Mr. Deedle? Yes. I am confident enough that he is not at the head of this particular conspiracy, although this device of his might be. Does it perhaps broadcast some sort of signal?"
James shrugged. "You'd be better off asking Ralph about that, or even my other friend, Zane. He seems to know a lot about how these things work. But I don't think it sends out information on its own. Ralph says somebody else took his GameDeck and used it. Another Slytherin, we think. Zane was able to tell that somebody had spent some time on it, and that they'd used the name Austramaddux. They hadn't played the game at all, though. They must have just been using it to send information. Probably the coordinates that that guy said he used to locate the school using his GPS thing."
"You're quite sure about this, are you, James?" Neville said, following the Headmistress back into her office. "Have you considered that Mr. Deedle might have used this device on school grounds and unwittingly shared information that he shouldn't have? It is possible that this tale of the stolen GameDeck is a ruse."
James shook his head firmly. "No way. Not Ralph. It never even occurred to him, or any of us, that the thing might be used to lead people here. He just knew it made his Slytherin mates angry."
"We're all forgetting one important thing," McGonagall said, lowering herself tiredly into her chair. "Even if Mr. Deedle or this unknown borrower of the device did attempt to share information about this school with a Muggle, the Vow of Secrecy would prevent them."
Professor Franklyn, who had remained in the Headmistress' office to fiddle with the GameDeck, replaced the device on the desk and stared at it, apparently unable to make anything of it. "How does this vow work, precisely, Madam Headmistress?"
"It's quite straightforward, Professor. Every student must sign the vow, proclaiming they will not knowingly reveal any information regarding the existence of Hogwarts to any Muggle individual or agency. If they do, the magical properties of the vow will engage, preventing any such communication. This might mean the Langlock jinx or any other curse that would disable the individual's ability to share information. In this case, we might assume that the user of the device might experience a fusing of the fingers or paralysis of the hand, anything that would prevent them from entering any dangerous information into this device."
Franklyn was thoughtful. "We use a similar means at Alma Aleron. The wording of the vow must be very specific, of course. No loopholes. Still, it does seem apparent that someone was indeed able to use such a device to communicate very specific information about this school. My guess is that each of these gaming devices is equipped with a tracker that corresponds to the global positioning mechanism Mr. Prescott spoke of. Whoever used Mr. Deedle's device was apparently able to send the geographical coordinates of one GameDeck to another. Mr. Prescott merely needed to enter that information into his GPS device and follow it very carefully. Despite Mr. Prescott's obvious Muggle nature, this made him a sort of haphazard SecretKeeper. He can, if he so wishes, share the secret of this school's location with anyone else he wishes. Whether they are able to get past the school's unplottability zone is another question, though. Not everyone is quite as persistent as he is. This might explain why he needs our help to bring in his entourage."
"We cannot allow such a thing to happen, of course," Neville said, looking to the Headmistress.
"I'm not entirely certain we can prevent it," she said heavily. "Our Mr. Prescott is indeed an extremely tenacious individual. He knows enough already to do us great harm. Even if we were to discover the whereabouts of his crew, Obliviate them all and send them back, they would discover the recording that has been made of all Mr. Prescott has seen so far. He would inevitably return, and perhaps next time, it will occur to him to bring live cameras rather than just a telephone. I see no recourse but to allow him to go on with this investigation of his and hope to talk him out of broadcasting it."