Who: Charlie Weasley and Gloria Mori + a friend of Charlie's (who is not Mircea!) What: A "date" gets really exciting When: 23 April, evening Where: Starting at the Crimson Kestrel, moving on to additional locations Warnings: None significant
To the extent that a friendly meeting for drinks that Charlie had organised as an apology tour for Mircea's misbehavour could be called a date, this date was, Charlie reckoned, going pretty well. Without Mircea sniffling around her, Charlie had no trouble paying attention to Gloria. She was friendly and a good conversationalist and had already proved she had a sense of humour. Which was why he had to roll his eyes when he felt the silent charm alarm from his journal trigger.
"Sorry," he said, "but apparently someone halfway across the world is having an emergency, like there's something I can do about it here." He pulled the journal out of his pocket, spoke the word to let it return to normal size, and reached for the biro he kept in his pocket for exactly this kind of thing as he flipped it open with the other hand.
At least it wasn't his mother's handwriting, or one of his brothers, so it wasn't that kind of trouble.
It had been going rather well. He'd been interesting and attentive, and understanding of her choosing to nurse her one mixed drink rather than order another -- a very good quality, showing that he wasn't just trying to get her drunk. But there was no sense in resenting a journal alert, quaint though it was that Charlie used one. At least he hadn't pulled out a quill to write.
"It's inevitable when you live far from home," Gloria said, waving her hand. "My father doesn't understand time zones, and my mother does, but doesn't care." She shrugged. Parents were a law unto themselves. "Nothing too serious,I hope?"
Charlie scanned the message and made a face. "Not too serious, no, but it's--sort of work-related, actually. From a European colleague who's--in the area, or compared to Europe anyroad--how far are we from Washington state here?" He looked up at Gloria, clearly a little confused. "He's run into something and he wants me to take a look at it and I can't tell whether it's round the corner or he's round the bend."
Gloria considered him with interest. "We're on the right side of the continent, but it's a different territory and state. So it's far enough that it's a good thing you're a wizard, you'd never be in time to help without using magic. Has he said what area? I went to school in Washington for a couple years."
"Somewhere near--" Charlie held the journal near the candle on their table to get a better read and puzzled out "--Forks?"
She snorted, and shook her head. "Sorry -- literature joke. Sort of." But then her eyes narrowed as if just realizing something, and she drummed her nails against the tabletop, click-click click-click. "That's not far from the school. Not far for dragons, certainly. It is dragons, isn't it, since that's your work?"
He lowered his voice. "In this case, yes, but it isn't always. One of my best friends of many years in Romania left the reserve a few years ago to go work for the Confederation agency in charge of anti-smuggling efforts. Maybe you've heard of them? MANTICORE? Anyroad, he calls on me sometimes when he's got a hot one and he wants someone he trusts to have his back because he knows I've--well. He helped me smuggle a dragon out of Britain once, during the war, and he knows I'll go the extra mile for him. And that if there's trouble, I know what to do.
"He doesn't think there's likely to be trouble in what he's looking at now, but he's got a line on a dragon-smuggling ring operating on the Pacific coast and he's wanting someone to do overflight with him. I can put him off until later--I wouldn't want to leave you on a make-up date after I buggered up the other night--but I also don't want to leave Radu to his own devices for too long." Charlie pressed his lips together momentarily in a look that combined longsuffering concern, exasperation, and a healthy dose of being a big brother. "We're not doing anything tonight other than flying. I'd need to get my broom anyroad so I've got to back up to the Reserve anyroad, so I can see you home when you're done."
Having come up with what he hoped was a satisfactory plan, Charlie took up his biro to write a reply, depending on what Gloria had to say. Then he recalled what she had said, and asked, "What school?"
Gloria thought to herself that if Charlie had concocted a plan to impress a date, he couldn't have thought of something better than investigating a smuggling operation with MANTICORE. It was only the fact that he seemed essentially honest and down to earth, and that a dragon wrangler war hero hardly needed to try to be impressive, that kept her from seriously considering this an elaborate stunt. (But if it was, it was a flattering bit of effort, and she accepted the offering.)
"Olympus International," she said. "The one I started out at. The campus is a bit east of Forks, but the town is right on the edge of the forest. I can understand using the area for smuggling, it's dense enough. But much too near if anything gets loose."
"I was going to say I don't want to drag you into this but if you know the area, we could definitely use a hand. Especially since Radu and I are, uh, not so good at maintaining secrecy as we might be. Like the best thing for us is not to get caught or seen. Especially Radu." Charlie made a face that could best be described as hangdog. "How's your flying?"
"It's not… my greatest strength," Gloria admitted. Heights weren't the problem so much as self-consciousness: when learning to fly at Olympus she'd been compared to all kinds of things by her peers: a pig on a spit, a marshmallow on a roasting stick, a "really fat" koala (they were children, and weren't always creative). "But I'm an excellent apparator, and I'm happy to help even If it has to be from the ground." And she was curious now about Radu, who seemed to constitute a breach of the statute just by existing.
"No, you'll fly with me, if you're willing. I can do this with a rider. I'm not as young as I used to be but I can still do this, and better me than Radu." He had Muggle money to pay for their drinks--he had asked her and it was an apology date--so he put it down with a generous tip and offered her his hand, like a proper gentleman.
Better him indeed. "You're young enough," she said with a smile, taking one last sip of her drink, and Charlie's hand.
When they'd apparated, broom in hand, to the location Radu had specified, it took Charlie a moment to reorient. Before he could finish, Radu was on him, picking him up bodily and giving him a big hug. "Pyrooooooooo!" Radu said by way of greeting, swung Charlie around, and set him down on the ground again. Charlie slapped him on the back, hard, a couple of times, and grinned.
"Who's your friend?" Radu followed up in heavily accented English. Gloria could already see why Charlie worried about Radu's ability to pass under the statute. The man had long dark hair, was built like a Viking, or maybe a big pickup truck, and he probably had more than half a foot on Charlie, who was an average sized guy. He might have some giant a few generations back in his ancestry.
"Gloria, this is Radu Ionescu, an old friend and colleague, who is now working for MANTICORE. Radu, this is Gloria Mori, who works with me at Brightstar Reserve, in the Northwest Territory, and yes I know we're further west here but I didn't name it and neither did Gloria, so don't ask her either."
Radu held out his hand. "A pleasure, Madam Mori."
"A pleasure," Gloria echoed, shaking his hand with a smile that even the darkness couldn't fully disguise. There were plenty of other things she could say, which had come to mind immediately upon seeing Radu, but most of them were not the sort of thing you say to a man you've just met, bare minutes after arriving in the company of another man. Besides, they weren't here to ogle each other.
"How close to the town are we here?" she said, glancing around the clearing, her mind already populating the gaps between trees with fictional werewolves. She hadn't been in the area for years, but she doubted it had grown much in that time. And it wasn't tourist decade, much less tourist season, so they were probably safe from being spotted, but it didn't hurt to be careful.
"Couple of miles, I think. Not too close; I'm not good with your--" Radu said a word in Romanian that Gloria could guess at the meaning. He indicated the direction of the town with a meaty hand.
Charlie confirmed meant "Muggles. No-maj. Give us a moment to work all this out and we'll take your advice when I have a better idea of what Radu means to do."
There was a brief additional exchange in Romanian, with Radu doing most of the talking and Charlie asking questions here and there. It wasn't too hard to get the gist of--Romanian was, after all, a romance language--but the details and fine points were easy to lose.
"Okay, thanks for your patience." Charlie turned back to Gloria. "We're going to do an overflight of where Radu thinks they are, take a look. And if we have to go in, we're going to send you--basically where you can get authorities, because if we have to go in like that, we're going to need all the help we can get. Radu and I are--" Charlie grinned at Radu and threw a comradely elbow in his direction "--something of an explosive combination when we have to wing it." He added something in Romanian to Radu, who laughed heartily, grinned at Gloria, and said, "Boom!"
Gloria chuckled. "I believe it." Part of her was sorry she'd miss the first-hand view, but that plan made the most sense. She turned in the direction Radu had pointed, folding her arms, and drummed her fingers against her elbow. "Forks is small, but it does have a wizarding neighborhood and a police station." Besides which, it was the only town in the area that she'd spent significant time in and she'd be better able to apparate there than Port Angeles. "It sounds like the main thing is to make contact, they can call more reinforcements as needed once they know where to go."
"Maybe poachers leave already," Radu said, and shrugged, though his expression suggested he would prefer the boom. He reached for the thing leaning against a nearby tree, which was his broom: taller than Charlie and as big around as the narrow part of a soda bottle, with close to two feet of twigs on the business. "Let's fly, yes?"
Charlie had his own broom, and let Gloria mount up first. After a moment's hesitation she took the front end, trying to look like this was all perfectly normal for her.
Charlie paused briefly to put what Gloria could guess were variant concealment charms of some sort on himself and Radu and Gloria, and then the two brooms lifted off, low above the trees but not so close that even Radu's tree-trunk legs brushed against their tips. They skimmed off toward the water; after a few minutes, Radu turned a little ways south and looped away from the lights of the Muggle city. As they turned away from Forks, Gloria found her eyes searching for her old school, despite knowing it was far too dark to see that telltale shimmer of a large area under heavy warding, even if they weren't also far too far from the campus.
It took them perhaps a quarter-hour of quiet approach to find the spot that Radu meant them to find. But when they reached the clearing--one that was big enough to hold a dragon, it was already gone and empty, though signs of recent occupation were clear: stakes and ropes in the damp earth and litter scattered about. And burnmarks in the earth and on the trees that clearly spoke of recent visits by some fire-breather. For Gloria at least, unused to flying and especially at night, and especially sharing a broom, it was a somber reminder of why they were there -- which she'd managed to almost put out of her mind, having plenty of other things to concentrate on.
Radu hovered above the ground for a moment and was doing something with his wand, which was as long compared to his arm as Charlie's and Gloria's were to theirs. For Radu this made it probably closer to two feet long than one.
"He's checking to see that the ground is safe," Charlie told Gloria. "Don't want to dismount if it's trapped. Might have to leave it for tonight and let your American Aurors or law enforcement come in." All of which sounded perfectly reasonable, and she was happy to allow it to continue as necessary. Gloria was not one to be on the front lines.
After a moment, Charlie added, "You can stand witness to what we're seeing, right? If it comes to testimony. I didn't think of that before but if we need to talk to CREATURE, it helps that you're an American."
"I can, but I'm not," she said, clearing hair out of her face while the broom was still staying level enough for her to take a hand away from it. Even as low as they were, it was much higher than she was on a daily basis, and she didn't often need to balance so carefully. "I'm Hawaiian. We're not part of the confederation -- I only have American citizenship on the no-maj side, for convenience. Will that matter much? It's fairly compelling evidence," she added, waving her free hand at the largest of the burnmarks.
"The question is more about this being some kind of political thing about the Confederation and American jurisdiction. You're not hooked into the business end of either CREATURE or MANTICORE, like Radu is, and I sort of am." Charlie made a face at that last bit. Being a quote-unquote war hero was a pain in the arse sometimes. "You'll have to explain to me about Hawaii--" a word that he was sort of guessing about the pronunciation of "--sometime. But yeah, I think it's compelling that someone was here and--can you get some photos on your phone? I'd do it but I'd rather split the tasks of flying and picture-taking if there's an option."
"Gladly, but we'll want to get closer, if we can without setting off traps." It wasn't a bad camera, but it was dark, and nothing picked up the detail that eyes did. Still, she did her best to document the damage to the clearing as Charlie did a circuit, pausing or turning when directed to get a clearer angle. "I think that's everything we can expect in this light," Gloria said finally, showing him her work as she flipped through the images. It was a pretty good representation, but you couldn't help but wonder how much more would be visible come morning. Enough to track them down, hopefully. This wasn't as close to the school as she'd worried, but it was still too near the town for comfort.
"You've been a great help. Thank you so much," Charlie said as he looked through the photos. "Let's land and send copies to Radu. So he'll have them when he goes to CREATURE for assistance." He made a hand signal that Radu returned to him and they headed back toward the clearing where they'd met up.
The return flight was faster since they didn't have to be quite so careful, and Gloria was grateful for that: though she wasn't about to admit it to her companions, this was the longest she'd been on a broom in some time, and it was a relief to have feet on the ground and full control over where she went. It only took a few more minutes to send over the pictures and wave Radu goodbye (after saving his number, of course, should she ever need it, for any reason at all).
"You certainly know how to show a lady an interesting time," she said. "Apology officially accepted."