Regulation and Control

( Memo to Tonks )

Who: Draco Malfoy and Nymphadora Tonks
What: Random run-in
Where: Department of Regulators
When: Thursday afternoon
Rating: TBD. Probably PG to PG-13 for language.

( . . . )

( Memo to Charlie )

( Warded owl post to Anthony Goldstein )

Who: Fred Holden, and the DoM Space division (minus Ev and Pritch)
What: Kidnapping
Where: The woods a few miles out from Fred's house
When: during the 4 o'clock hour, Thursday, 17th July
Rating: PG (mild language)
Status: Closed; Complete

( What are you going to do, snuggle with her? )

Who: Harry Potter, Charlie Weasley
What: Harry and Charlie clean the crack out of Harry's old flat. Literally.
When: July 17, 2008, evening
Where: Base 18, Royal arsenal in London
Rating: PG-13 for drug presence, language

The bin had devoured an odd assortment of prescription bottles, needles and loose pills in the past hour or so and was now coughing feebly in the kitchen. There was a slightly bad smell left over from when the dead greyhound, Dr. Faustus, had been found by the landlady a few weeks before, but Harry had opened all the windows to air the apartment. The bathroom and kitchen were finished, as was the living room, and as Harry wracked his brains trying to remember each small stash he'd hidden away, he headed for the bedroom, searching pockets in the shirt pockets and jackets in the closet, checking the mattress for split seams where he might've shoved something under the quilting. He even opened muggle pens and shook them out over a desk, some of them yielding wide powder onto his desktop.

Harry had not dared to meet Charlie's eye for most of this.

Once the bedroom was cleared out and Harry was feeling satisfied, he walked back to the bin with one last packet of coke in his hands. Lifting the lid of the trash, he peered into the bottomless hole that it was- one of the few magical items in his kitchen, something he'd brought for this purpose since it would look very weird to haul out to the curb a Muggle trashbag full of hard drugs, the sight gave him pause.

The amount of money he'd just poured into the coughing and aggravated bin was beginning to dawn on him.

( Owl for Tonks )

Who: Ford Williams & Finn McGill
What: Chillin', crack, why Ford's got a stupid name
Where: Their house, Stapleford Abbotts
When: About 4pm, Thursday, 17th July
Rating: PG?
Status: Closed;Incomplete

The only person who managed to play human better than Ford at any given time was Finn, because she'd actually been human for so long. He wasn't really the most social one, but he dealt with people more often than the others and it had made mimicking them easier. The shift was easy to spot, even to a human, as he walked closer to the house. He'd started looking like any other bloke, a slight swagger in his step. The closer he got to the cottage he shared with his siblings, Finn and the small village of cats the more graceful his movements became. By time he was near the door there wasn't any way to say he didn't move like a cat, a stalking predator. Somehow he came off as a lot easier to overlook than his little brother, though. Trent's dominance was more overt, possibly because of the fact that he was the least dominant of the siblings. Ford was just quieter about his place.

He came around the side of the house, not wanting to be inside at the moment, stripping his shirt off with one hand, the mail in the other. "I swear they do this on purpose. Ford Williams you have mail from Ford Motors. I have a bloody Volkswagen and I get mail from Ford Motors? I swear Fred does this to me." He looked up to see the owner of the scent he'd followed and grinned. "Where's your spastic half? Still out?"

Who: Rabbit Tuor and Morag MacDougal
What: Two-man coming-out party. There will be sushi.
Where: Roka, a Japanese restaurant in London.
When: July 17, evening
Rating: NC-17, hide the children.
Status: Closed; Incomplete

Rabbit wasn’t kidding when he had told Morag that he was proud of her, and his pride was conveyed in the bounce of his step and the smile on his face when he knocked on her door. He knew for a fact that she had an issue with homosexuality, that she had more than her share of difficulty when it came to accepting that about herself, and that hiding away had likely made her miserable. It explained a lot about her attitude, why she was so tense all the time, and why she kept at such a distance from most people. But despite her frigidity (the department called her ‘the Ice-Queen’ often enough beyond her back, something which Rabbit yelled at them all for), he had always liked Morag. Moe.

He waited patiently - or as patient as Rabbit could be without being dead, only a handful of foot shuffles here and there. In one hand was a bouquet of flowers which he had spent a half hour fussing over before settling on the arrangement. He was, sadly, not in a dress - party or otherwise.

Who: Jane Doe and David Brooks
What: The very exciting world outside of Mysteries.
Where: A playground in Edinburgh, Scotland.
When: July 17, evening
Rating: G
Status: Closed; Complete; Narrative

“Wow!” Jane exclaimed, muttering the word over and over. “Wow. Wow. Wow… David - is it normal for something to be so… so good?”

“You’ve never had a milkshake before?”
( Read more... )

Who: Fred Holden, two Space Unspeakables
What: Checking out the new acquisition
Where: Space division, DoM
When: Sunset, Thursday, 17th July
Rating: PG-13 for mention of slicing and violence
Status: Closed;Complete

( She’d woken up in an iron cage, literally )

Who: Bill Weasley
What: Bill has a brilliant idea.
Where: The Burrow, where else?
When: July 18th, very early morning.
Rating: PG
Closed, Complete

If Bill had studied from home rather than at Hogwarts, he reckoned that he might've looked something like he did now, sitting at his desk, spread across with papers, an abycus, several number charts, many of them not made with a Greco-Roman number system, and a number of woebegone quills. There was ink under his fingernails from the constant writing. Occasionally, he would pick up a paper from his desk and pace the room with it, brow furrowed, concentrating until the beads of sweat formed on his brow and temples in the heat. His wand was in his trouser pocket, as good as abandoned. Any magic performed here occurred somewhere between his mind and the press of quill to paper.

Transpositional and substitutional ciphers were far too outdated, and Bill was convinced that the solution was to use number theory to write the cipher Charlie was looking for, but the inherent problem was the same for anyone in arithmancy and ancient runes, or in any type of code-writing: the cipher must be designed so that a layperson could use it. Bill did have magic on his side, this was true, and the cipher might become encrypted into the journal in such a way that it would respond and translate messages only at his command.

Then an idea occurred to Bill. If the message automatically encrypted itself once written, and would decode for any individual Charlie selected, then there was a possibility that a changing-cipher system based on quantum mechanics might be used to mathematically construct personalized keys with each message, ones that Charlie need never learn because the translation would be two way between Charlie and the receiver of the message. Anyone interfering with the code would ultimately change the cipher just by observing it. Not only would the message be strictly two way, but the system would also detect attempts at eavesdropping.

Bill's heart was pounding, and not from revelation. The grocery and apothecary list were ashes on his desk and Bill felt an acute urgency in his task. In order to create the cipher, Bill would need to construct a multi-variable equation that would self-determine the cipher key for each message based on the alphabetic content of what Charlie wrote. Since Charlie wrote in English, a language based on the Greco-Roman alphabet, the best way to construct the cipher would be from another language with another symbol system.

Walking over to his desk, Bill pulled out a fresh piece of paper and scrubbed his tired face with his fingers and began writing, his quill drawing shapes that were foreign to his fingers but familiar and friendly to his brain.