| Front page of the Daily Prophet, September 2nd, 1978. |
[01 Sep 2008|04:17pm] |
This is the official story. The one that got sent out on the front page of The Daily Prophet in the early hours of Tuesday morning, more than 12 hours after the assassination itself took place. This came after the emergency owls, the shocked Floo conversations, the rumours, screams, and riots across the United Kingdom. At 3:45 pm, in between meetings, Millicent Bagnold was walked in on by an Auror trainee, one Vesuvius Rickenbacker. Vesuvius, who suffered terrible acne, was only 18 years old and painfully skinny. There is no plausible way that he should have been able to get in through the Minister's many security precautions, both age-old and Ministry-operated and personal. Millicent was a formidable, intelligent woman. She had not taken chances with her personal safety. Parts of her security system were scattered across the nation, safeguarded in dozens of different places. There should have been no way for a gangly Auror trainee to get in alone.
But he did. And the curse he let loose on her was out of his wand and burrowing its way into her system before she could even finish asking what he was doing there. It wasn't Avada Kedavra. You have to mean that one for it to work, and already, a couple of hours later, the Ministry has come to the conclusion that Vesuvius was almost certainly a victim of the Imperius curse. Regardless, it was fatal, killing the Minister slowly and inexorably over the next 33 minutes, and immediately after casting it Vesuvius walked back out of her office, just outside, and released the catch on the homemade explosive he'd managed to conceal on his person, killing himself instantly, injuring all those nearby, and creating enough of a disruption to ensure that any help the Minister may have gotten to save her from the curse would not reach her in time.
Everybody knew by the next morning, but the paper came out anyway, with the official story. Everybody knew already because people had already come home sobbing, and there had been a press conference held by impossibly stressed Ministry officials who burdened their populace with the equally impossible task of staying calm, and the riots had begun shortly after the Minister was attacked and wouldn't stop for days. The press conference has just finished, now, at 6:30 pm. The paper will not come out until tomorrow morning. But here's the story, since it can't hurt to have it.
( September 2nd, 1978: Minister for Magic Murdered, Ministry Orders Calm. )
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