Professor Zlo Shroomsky/Future

The future holds a good life for Professor Shroomsky, but the circumstances surrounding the death and subsequent return of the same is a strange and mysterious concept.

After his death, he was denied his ghost pass by Benny's impartial secretary. However, a member of the Antics household, knowing that horrible grief would strike Melvin Turtleheimer at the loss of his closest friend, used magic to pull him back by a loophole performed as he was dying. Shroomsky is now bound into what the Fourth Wall addresses as a Horcrux.

Background
Normally, mushrooms are actually very long-lived items. What one sees sticking out of the ground is the fruiting body of the mushroom. Its sole purpose is to produce spores to ensure the continuation of the species. A mushroom doesn't need a fruiting body to live, only to reproduce. Professor Shroomsky, though, like his relatives and ancestor, developed some strange method of conscience, were no longer bound to the soil for nutrition. The fruiting body was now the only body of the mushroom. The properties of a normal mushroom can be said to apply to the Professor in the exact method.

Therefore, Shroomsky has the lifespan of the permanent part of the mushroom: the root system/hypahe web that exists underground and absorbs nutrients by breaking them down externally. Melvin and he lived for decades after several penguins, passing TurtleShroom in the 2020s, Tortugadesetas in the 2040s, and the youngest, Roslyn, in the 2050s. He lived and saw most of his friends die and either return as ghosts, as items, or disappear completely.

The Masters had, a few months prior, revealed themselves to the elder Shroomsky (the shock was accidently a contributing factor to his degredation of health) and Turtleheimer. After learning that they actually were what killed him, they promised that they would secure his Ghost Pass before he died.

Time marched on, and the months after saw Shroomsky fading fast. The shock of being confirmed correct was a major part of his death (as said), and he was too frightened to exit his home. He became a shut-in, tended to by Turtleheimer and visitors. His room became his deathbed (even though he didn't lay down).

The Masters worked feverishly to authorize a Ghost Pass for Shroomsky and a rollback of their revelation to him. While the latter was granted, Benny's impartial secretary, Mandy Mortis, rejected the former. She refused on the grounds that "any further extension of the mushroom's existance could continue to endanger the universe".

This was justifiable, but it still broke Melvin's heart. An descendant of Explorer 767 answered his pleas and came to the ailing Shroomsky. Without him knowing, the Antics member decided to curse the Professor and bind him to a mortal item, so that, in a way, he could remain tethered to the mortal world.

Unfortunately, the only way to do this was by an untested experiment written by the Magician Traditionalists in 2019. As a hardcore Magician Scientist, this Explorer was extremely reluctant to cast the spell. Nonetheless, for Turtleheimer, he did.

The creation of a Horcrux was borderline on the laws of white and black magic. The policies of the universe very narrowly allowed this, thanks in part to a board meeting of the BOF in 2009.

To create a Horcrux, an item very close to the victim- the one to become the Horcrux -had to be irreparably destroyed while being held by a close friend (the volunteer) of the victim. In the destruction, the volunteer had to be harmed. All the while, the victim had to have the object that was to become the Horcrux sitting on his or her head, or suspended over it no higher than seven inches.

For the curse, Melvin was handed the Professor's medals of honor from the Great Darktonian Pie War. They were smashed with a sledgehammer, and in the smashing, Melvin recieved a large wound on his neck from shattered medal fragments, which were quickly sanitized and wrapped as Shroomsky looked on. The wound, soon to become a scar on the aged tortoise, and the pain he endured, caused the spell to work properly. As Shroomsky cringed at the smash and cut, the Explorer quickly zapped him and pulled a piece of his existance out of him and into the item on his head: an original 2008 first edition of Conspiracy Theories for Conspiring Creatures, the Professor's favorite book.

The severing of a portion of Shroomsky's ghost or whatever it was into the book greatly damaged Shroomsky, as was expected, and the evidence was obvious as he began to shrivel a bit, like a mushroom on a hot summer's day.

This doubled as the second Horcrux, because Melvin watching Shroomsky whither up like that was hurtful enough to extract a second portion of Shroomsky's existence into a second copy of the same book.

The creation of the second Horcrux passed the Professor into a state of unconsciousness. For three days, as the Horcruxes were being stabilized, the mushroom remained unconscious. He regained consciousness shortly later, before telling Turtleheimer that he was his best friend, and thanked him for all of the fun they had had together. He repeated this to the Explorer descendant, before, as his last words, calling down insults and angry rants at the Bureau of Fiction, which he had always hated but now knew was real.

At the age of 166, in the year 2159 AD, the Professor gave out. Melvin, by now 180, grieved at his loss.

Technically, though, Shroomsky wasn't dead. When Shroomsky gave out on that day, his body was cryrogenically frozen (the high tech future allowed for fungi and plants to be preserved; penguins weren't so lucky) and locked away in a special room on Basement Floor One in the Skyscraper Mausoleum.

Shroomsky never had a will, so his estate was handed off to Melvin. A funeral was never held.

Involvement
His technically alive body, now frozen and made immortal by the Horcruxes, was locked away, never again to be disturbed. Meanwhile, the Horcruxes enabled Shroomsky to exist in a detached format via the two books. Positioning them and opening them up activated the curse, and Shroomsky was pulled from his unconscious state in his frozen body to the Horcruxes, where he would then appear like a hologram from dim light shooting out from the glowing pages of the books.

Capabilities
The Horcrux Shroomsky was able to freely converse and turn around to face something behind him when being projected, but he was unable to move out of the beams of magic, nor was he able to use his telekinesis to pick up items. It was like he was on a video conference system or a two-way webcam interface. He could be seen, he could turn around, and he could interact, but he couldn't leave the vicinity of the camera and he couldn't feel or pick up anything on the other end.

He was glad to be able to see his friends again, though he considered the Horcrux loophole a bit lacking in freedom. Not being greedy, though, the Professor was fine with what he had. Melvin managed to place the Horcruxes on a cart, taped permanently open, so Shroomsky could be wheeled around and get the most out of his immortality.

Explanation
Explorer XIII's ghost sent a message back in time to the 2009 BoF, with a note explaining the fate of Shroomsky. Since telling them how the Horcrux worked would have inevitably caused a paradox, Explorer's message simply told the Masters the circumstances under which a Horcrux was formed, and to figure it out for themselves.

They did. The Department of Research managed to piece together several theories, and presented the one that made the most sense.

"A Horcrux seems to be a sort of space-time phenomenon, involving something that we call "dragging". Basically, the spell drags a point in space and time (containing an entity) into the future (or, if the Horcrux is sent back through time, the past) and binds it to a specific item. It works like this -- the smashing of the beloved item and the pain experienced by the volunteer causes the person-to-be-bound (in this case, Shroomsky) to feel a pang of emotion. This registers on the Doinkometer Complex, and is recorded into the BoF's database. The database logs all kinds of data for every single point in space and time, and the pang of emotion provides a reference point for the sorcerer casting the spell. The spell searches for the reference point, using the emotion as a guideline, and locks onto said point and the entity in it. Then it twists spacetime so that the reference point and the entity in it are forever bound to a specified item."

- Spokesperson for Department of Research

Feasibility of destruction
Horcruxes are notoriously difficult to delete. They cannot be destroyed by anything that could normally destroy them (e.g. for books, fire), nor can they be deleted. If one tried to tear a book that Shroomsky was bound to, they would find that the pages would simply repair themselves. Not even dust can collect on the book's surface. The only way to destroy a Horcrux would be to rip or untie the complex knot of spacetime tied to the item involved, and that (so far) is only possible with a Master's device.

If one Shroomsky Horcrux was to be destroyed, Shroomsky would still be able to appear as a voice, but he would not be seen when the remaining book is opened. He could still see out of the book, but only if the book was tilted to face something.

If both Horcruxes were destroyed, that would be the end of Professor Shroomsky.

Trivia

 * This is a clean parody of the Horcrux from the Harry Potter series of books.
 * Shroomsky claims that he experiences a feeling "identical to normal sleeping" when the books are closed and he is in the cyrogenicly frozen body.
 * The Professor, when displayed in the Horcruxes, looks like he did in 2009. The Explorer who induced the curse thought that he looked best that way, as opposed to his old, elderly self.
 * Melvin couldn't be happier for Shroomsky.
 * Shroomsky is happy because he is still with Melvin, though literally in spirit.
 * Mandy still insists that Shroomsky shouldn't have been restored.
 * The Professor seems to retain his happiness.
 * When the Horcruxes containing Shroomsky were placed on a cart and rolled off, Shroomsky offered to go back to his old espionage job at the AIA. Sadly, two books couldn't rule an agency, so he was turned down. No one could move the books and keep them open, and the books couldn't move themselves. If it was to work, the books would have to be closed too much, and Shroomsky, when opened, would be too sleepy to assist in the mission.
 * If one Shroomsky Horcrux is opened, Shroomsky will not appear. Both Horcruxes must be open to pull Shroomsky to them.
 * Kwiksilver, traveling through time, was prevented from seeing the "Horcrux Shroomsky" by an automatic function on his Vortex Manipulator. Whenever he gets close to the two books he is zapped away to another point in space-time. It is because the Vortex Manipulator sees the two books as something "wrong" in the universe.