Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun, her face was dirty, hell, her whole body felt dirty as Alicia crawled through a tunnel into the basement of a home owned by a friend of the Death Eater Travers. The only reason Alicia was there was to collect some hard to get potions ingredients and knew it was a dangerous mission. Alicia had started work with the order and spent a good deal of her time helping collect ingredients and make potions.
After intel was passed to her that’s how she ended up crawling in the low tunnel. She’d made it to the house opening up the small door that really fit a house-elf better than a person, even one on the smaller side like Alicia, she moved carefully into the room and started to carefully look around.
Hearing a noise behind her, she wasn’t expecting anyone, the intel suggested the owner of the house wasn’t to be back for days. Carefully she moved around a large wooden bookcase and felt a hand on her shoulder.
The tip Silas had received from a contact within the Ministry had brought him to this house in the middle of the night. His contact had been someone working undercover, and it would have been disastrous for her if Silas was caught or spotted. Travers had been boasting about developing a new curse with a friend and fellow sympathizer of You-Know-Who, and even though his contact didn’t know the intended target, they couldn’t risk the curse to befall on anyone.
So, he was sneaking into the house in the dark to try and identify the object and break its curse. His way in hadn’t been easy, and his clothes and face showed evidence of dirt and a few scrapes. He was tiptoeing through a couple of the rooms of the house, wand at the ready, when he heard a noise from the area where he’d gotten in himself.
Carefully, he crept towards the room and spotted a woman creeping around, also with her wand at the ready. At first he didn’t recognize her, but a small turn of her head and Silas let out a silent sigh of relief, placing his hand on Alicia’s shoulder. When she spun around in surprise, he held up both of his hands.
“Easy, Alicia,” he said, trying to be calm. “It’s me -- Silas.” He didn’t know the specifics of what she was doing or who she was working with, but he also knew she’d never support You-Know-Who. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?” He said in a loud whisper. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She'd almost punched him. She stopped her hand quickly in mid-air as she caught sight of Silas Capper. Breathing in, she shut her eyes for half a second to gather herself.
"What are you doing here?" She repeated the question about the time he told her she shouldn't be here.
Frowning, she dropped her hands to her sides "I think we got the same tip-off." She answered, not answering precisely what she was doing there. "What are you looking for?"
“Mhm. Must have,” he mumbled. Silas didn’t want to give away exactly why he was here, but it did seem like they’d been given the same intel. Why else would she be here? He doubted that his same contact within the Ministry had leaked the information to her, so that meant there was someone else watching. He ignored her question at first and went to the window, standing back behind the curtain and ever so slightly peering outside to make sure no one was watching the house.
“Did anyone follow you?” He asked her. It was a stupid question, but paranoia still ran all over him on these jobs. Satisfied for the time being that he didn’t see anyone, he turned back to her and away from the window.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” he said finally about what he was looking for within the house. Pausing, he gave her a look. “What are you looking for?” It didn’t escape his notice that she didn’t directly answer his question either.
Alicia frowned as he went to look at the window. She hadn't even seen the outside of the house yet. "No." She answered clearly. "I took the tunnels," she waved a hand up and down her filthy clothing to indicate she didn't usually look like she'd just crawled out of the mud.
"Cryptic as usual." She muttered, turning her attention away from him pointedly not answering his question about what she was looking for either. Instead, she started to investigate the bookshelf she was standing next by. She was looking at some of the boxes frowning.
"These look more like your area of knowledge," she said after a moment. Alicia had been decent at Ancient Runes, but she'd never taken Arithmancy and she'd always just been naturally good at potions. She knew better than to poke at things in a house like this, despite what people might think about her rushing into situations without backup.
“Me too.” It seemed they’d had the same idea about how to get inside without being seen, and it was likely the same information stating the owner wouldn’t be back home for days. He’d started looking around but paused to take a look at the bookshelf. It was still dark inside the house, so he had to move in close to decipher the text.
Using his wand, he carefully levitated the box and moved it to the side so they could look to see what was inside of it. Texts and papers mostly, but there was something metal underneath. Using his hands instead of his wand, Silas gathered up some of the papers and sat those aside which revealed a small, unassuming radio at the bottom of the box.
He went back to looking at the papers, thumbing through a few of them. “Don’t touch the radio,” he told her. Nothing was specifically mentioning the radio but he had a bad feeling. “Some of this looks similar to the properties of a cursed object someone got tangled up within Hogsmeade last month.”
Watching him for a moment she turned to find a smaller chest, she checked for spells before slowly opening the drawer when she heard him tell her not to touch the radio. She looked back over at him with a raised eyebrow. There had been a reason she'd called him over to that stuff.
"It's all yours, Capper," she commented before carefully looking through the small glass bottles. Sighing she noted they appeared empty.
"Yeah?" She asked curiously. "Same one that had a knack for making things appear missing?"
There were a handful of ways to test an item's properties or determine whether or not it had been cursed. The sure way was of course to touch the object, but curse breakers would have a very short job shelf life if that was the only way. He pulled out a small potion vial from his jacket pocket and uncorked it carefully. It wouldn't give the nature of the curse but it would at least verify his suspicions.
"Objects, yes," he affirmed but then looked at her warily. "People too." As he held the potion bottle above the radio, he sent up a quick prayer that this hadn't been a trap and the Death Eater was indeed waiting to strike. He had to believe, though, that they would have both been dead already if that had been the case.
Silas poured a few droplets of the potion on the radio. At first, nothing seemed to be happening but after a few seconds he heard a crackling sound like static. The potion was two-fold; it revealed if a curse was bound to the object and while it couldn't break the curse, it could cause a disruption. "Do you see anything?" He asked her, glancing up to make sure he wasn't seeing anyone either.
"People too?" She asked, turning from what she was looking at to him a curious expression on her face. She watched him carefully, figuring she should probably stop her own search to make sure whatever the heck it was that he was doing didn't cause some problem of some sort.
Alicia's eyes were stuck on the radio when the crackling sounded, but at his question, she glanced around. "I see a dusty old room with a lot of creepy things in it," she answered. "Nothing's changed or appeared, yet, that I can see." She knew how this stuff could work enough to know that not everything happened right away.
“Yeah…” Silas said, his voice trailing off as he kept his eyes on the radio. The crackling fizzled out and stopped after a few seconds; the seconds probably felt a lot longer to both of them than it actually was. He took a deep breath and finally looked back up, eyes searching the room for anything that might have been different. No one appeared in the room ready to fire a curse at them or jumped out of a dark corner.
Everything seemed to be staying the same, and he almost felt disappointed. There was always a rush to the job and happening upon cursed objects. He sighed and shook his head, stepping back from the box. “I don’t know; maybe I was…” Before he could finish his thought, a table appeared across the room with numerous papers, vials, and books. On the shelves where Alicia had been searching, more vials; a couple of wands. The room was full of hidden objects.
Silas’ eyes widened and he turned to look at Alicia as if to say wow.
It was probably surprising that Alicia had the patience to be a good potions maker because she was feeling a little impatient as they waited to see if something would happen. She looked up at him when he started to talk again and started to frown until things started to appear, her eyes went wide, and she spun around before looking back to him with a soft, quiet laugh.
She heard a rustling to the left of where she was and pointed her wand towards it, she waved Silas over but held a hand up for him to keep quiet. Very slowly and carefully she started to move a cloak that had appeared as she did six baby nifflers popped their heads up looking at her.
"Bloody hell," she whispered. "What else do you know about this person?" She asked Silas without looking back at him. Her eyes were on the baby nifflers.
There was a lot here. The potions, the papers, reports and what looked like surveillance of Ministry members. It was the baby nifflers that took Silas truly by surprise, though. He stared down at the little guys and scratched the back of his head. “I can honestly say this is a first.” He’d never uncovered hidden, baby animals inside of a Death Eater’s home; that much was certain.
Like Alicia, Silas continued to stare down at the nifflers. “That the owner of the house is in league with the Death Eaters, and they’re developing a new curse. The target or targets aren’t known, but from what I understand, they’re hoping to make a big move.” He blinked and finally looked away and back to some of the papers on the table.
“They’ve been monitoring other members of the Ministry. From these names, they seem to be ones that haven’t gotten involved with either side and are staying off the radar. People that don’t want to get involved.” Those were sometimes the ones that were the most easily targeted. They didn’t want to get involved, but they also didn’t want to put up much of a fight by saying no.
Alicia nodded as he told her what he knew which was more than she had when she decided to break in, all she'd known was it was a bad bloke who had a bunch of hard to get ingredients. She frowned, looking down at the papers he was mentioning before moving to the side to look at a few more.
"Fucking bastards," she whispered. "Hey, come here," she said, looking down at a plan of how they were going to poison the nifflers and use them, but they needed to be between puphood and adulthood. The little nifflers they'd found looked too young for them to start in on it.
"We're taking them with us," she said as if that was just a fact. "And look-" she drifted off at some of the plans in more detail.
Silas had already assumed that they’d be taking the nifflers along with them, so he didn’t bother with voicing his agreement out loud. He was too caught up in reading the papers as quickly as he possibly could in order to understand what they were up to or might have planned. He stepped over next to her and glanced through the plans she’d pointed out on the table. It gave a list of potions to use involved in the poison and how to later use it for other species too.
With a slight wave of his wand, Silas whispered a spell, “Confusas verborum.” A second or so later some of the words appeared to shift or change but it was only noticeable to someone that knew the spell was there. “Anyone who reads this from now on won’t be able to make any sense of what it says,” he explained. “It won’t help if the person who wrote this remembers what was written and can write it down again, but it’s something.”
Now for the nifflers. “We can make it look like they got out somehow,” he told her. “Is there anything else you want to take with us?”
“Could have given me a second more to look at it,” she muttered but turned away to figure out the things she was planning to steal.
"They're nifflers, that's easy enough." They were known for being sneaky and she sure as heck was for getting them out, especially looking over some of the plans the person had to use them. It wasn't very humane.
"Yeah, I'm getting what I need," she paused. "And don't worry, on this front I know what I'm doing." She did too. She was careful to get what she wanted without touching anything and putting a charm to make it look as though nothing was missing at all.
She finished packing away what she needed when she saw another piece of parchment and paused and frowned. "Did your source give you a name for the bloke who owns this place?" She lifted the parchment which looked like a letter to the owner of the house. Edwin Minchum. “As in a relative of that Minister Minchum, the one obsessed with Dementors.” Alicia said with disgust. Looking up she shrugged. “1990-1995.”
“They didn’t say. Just that they were a friend of Travers and overheard the location.” Silas paused what he was doing with the nifflers and stepped over to look at what she’d found. Skimming the letter, he recognized the name but other than what was pointed out about his relation, he didn’t know much about him.
“Dementors,” Silas said with a slight shiver of disgust. Give him vampires, werewolves, hell even a Death Eater any day over a blasted dementor. “Great.” He’d never been up close and personal with one but he’d had a couple of close calls. That feeling of cold emptiness was one he never wanted to feel ever again if he could help it.
It was a bit of a struggle, but he was mostly able to get the nifflers secure and hidden, and on the other side of the room he turned over their box and a few other items that would give the impression they’d made a small mess during their “escape.”
A few papers were blown onto the floor, and he glanced over to Alicia once he was finished. “At least we have another name now. It may help connect some dots.”
Nodding she continued to go through a couple more papers before grabbing a few more things she knew would be useful for not just herself but others too.
The wave of cold washed over her, and she shivered. "No Patronus in here. It'll give us away," Alicia quickly said as she made sure there were a few scratch marks that could look like the nifflers tracks going in a slightly different direction than they were actually going to be leaving.
"Ready for the tunnel?" She asked, wrapping her arms around herself instinctively in an attempt not to let the cold in. "You've got them, do you want to go first? I can shut the tunnel and leave my Patronus there for a minute, that way it won't be seen and we'll get away a bit safer, hopefully."
“Yeah, let’s get out of here.” There were sometimes that Silas got an adrenaline rush from doing his job, even in dangerous situations. He’d had the initial rush when finding the radio and other items, but what was being planned for the nifflers plus the possible threat of being the target of dementors if they were found didn’t leave him with any sense of a rush -- except the sort of wanting to get out of the house quickly.
He gathered what all he needed and was taking with them and made sure she had done the same. With his wand at the ready, he nodded and stepped into the tunnel. He assumed that anyone coming home would simply walk in the front door, but going solely off of assumptions could get you killed.
A few steps into the tunnel, he paused and turned back, waiting to hear the sound of the tunnel gate closing. Once he heard Alicia walking towards him, he whispered, “Lumos,” in order to give them a bit more light.
“You take the nifflers with you once we’re out. I can relay the information of what the plan was for them, but I’d feel better knowing you’re able to find a place safe for them.” It wasn’t that he didn’t trust everyone that he worked with, within the Ministry and out of it, but we… he didn’t always trust everyone. A nature of the times they lived in, unfortunately.
Closing the tunnel, she could feel and see the darkness coming from the dementors, a shiver running down her spine. Closing it off she made sure it didn't look disturbed taking a few steps back she whispered expecto patronum and a silver falcon came out of her wand following behind her as she saw the light from Silas's wand come on.
Nodding, she thought for a moment. "I've got a few ideas of safe places they could go." There were more than a few places she could get them to, and she didn't have to go near any buildings that were currently run by Death Eaters.
Moving through the tunnel in silence, Alicia's mind was running in circles as she thought about everything they'd just seen and everything they'd taken and the dementors. "Suppose the dementors were keeping a lookout at the house?" She wondered out loud. "If they were..."
“If they were then we’re already made, and we’ll find out soon enough.” Silas kept his lit wand stretched forward as they walked. They didn’t have time to go back and check, and it would have been even more dangerous to check. He glanced back to look at her. “We were there long enough for them to have come up on us. We’re probably in the clear,” he added with an attempt to be reassuring, though that may have been for himself too.
The tunnels were narrow in some places, so getting through the first time had been difficult. Now that they were carrying nifflers and other items with them, it was even harder. At one point, Silas bumped his head on a wooden beam and knew he’d have a knot the size of an orange in the morning.
Once they were finally out in the open air, he took a breath and lessened the brightness of his wand. “I think we’re in the clear,” he said, surveying their surroundings. “Did you apparate in?”
Alicia's mind was working as she thought about the dementors and what it could mean. She nodded all the same to his thoughts on it but didn't say anything else. She had so many questions, and she couldn't stop them from running through her mind.
Wincing when he hit his head, she refrained from commenting on it. She was glad she was short. As they were in what seemed to be relative safety, she looked around for any possible danger but didn't see anything. Turning to look at him, she nodded. "Yeah, you?"
"Here, I can take the Nifflers." She said, holding her hands out.
Silas nodded. “Yeah, same.” It was a good thing that they would be getting some space from the location, too, since the nifflers were starting to get restless inside of their box. He handed them over to Alicia then made sure he still had everything else he needed and had brought out with him. The last thing he wanted was to leave something behind in the tunnels.
They seemed ready to go, but he paused and gently placed his hand on Alicia’s arm. “Let me know when you get somewhere safe, alright?” He knew she could handle herself fine, but that didn’t mean he still didn’t worry. “I’ll do the same.”
Alicia gave him a puzzled expression that softened as he added he’d do the same. She nodded. “Course.” She looked down at the box now bustling with the movements of the nifflers. “Besides, you’ll be curious how this lot turns out.” She added with a smirk before nodding once more and appearting away.