The kitchen of the Harris manor on the Island in the Lake had been designed with input from the portrait of Helga Hufflepuff that hung there, though Allen had driven her into the sitting room for now, so she could not remain in any of the frames in the kitchen.
It looked somewhat like the kitchen at Hogwarts: a large room with a very high ceiling, even bigger than the dining hall. Many gleaming copper pots and basins were piled along the surrounding stone walls, while the food storage cupboards under Preservation Charms that had once filled the Hogwarts kitchen were nowhere to be seen.
In their place, those spots were filled with beautiful, diamond-like flickers of leaping light. The walls were covered in clocks of all sizes, from great grandfather clocks to travel clocks. A hurried, endless ticking filled that corner, like the orderly footfalls of thousands upon thousands of tiny marching feet. The diamond-bright leaping radiance came from the bell-shaped crystal glass covers in front of the clocks. Inside the covers, all kinds of ingredients were stored and constantly changed their stages of growth—sliced mutton transformed its texture within this time zone. Though this could not revive it from a piece of meat back into a sheep, it did make it cycle endlessly from lamb to old mutton and back again, all things returning in a loop.
Aside from the traditional great fireplace and oven at the other end, Hufflepuff, who had accepted modern cooking techniques, had also placed quite a few modern kitchen appliances here—many of them experimental products from Umbrella that were still being developed by wizardizing Muggle kitchenware and books. They had not yet gone on the market, but several prototypes had been provided first for the company's big boss to try.
But Allen, who