Bait and Bleed - An AU War RPG

First attack was Rothbury. The official word was it was just Death Eaters, fingers didn't start pointing at werewolves until the Diagon Alley attack. Someone picked up a werewolf leaving the area and jumped to conclusions. Bloody idiot, whoever it was.

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*Alice skips over the human rights argument in the last sentence and goes back to Umbridge.*

It's politically advantageous for these attacks to come from werewolves for Umbridge. I...well, having met her, I wouldn't put it past her to orchestrate these kinds of attacks as means for her ends. But I don't know if she has the magical prowess to take down the wards.

Whoever it was, they must have been very skilful at Arithmancy. The Muggle wards were left in place, as I recall? So...

*Alice stops. She's stuck on Fabian's use of "M.O.".*

Rothbury is a completely different attack. The past three required the wards to be lowered, but Rothbury didn't.

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...Right, so something changed somewhere between Rothbury and the others. And - there was evidence of spell damage at Rothbury, but what about the others?

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The more I think about it, the less chance there is that it can be Death Eaters. Voldemort is very specific in not wanting to damage Purebloods, and there's no way of Dementors distinguishing that. So whoever it is, they don't care about who they are attacking, just as long as the victims are of some kind of magical blood.

Do you think that matters to the person with the wand or to the Dementors themselves?

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It'd have to be the person behind it. A soul's a soul to a Dementor, what do they care? But that begs the question of why only magically-populated areas. Why not Muggle, too? What's the motive here?

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Well, it could be a disenfranchised person under the "Being Division". Or even a witch or wizard, trying to send a message. Was there anything picked up in the signature from Wither's not reported in the Prophet?

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*Fabian shakes his head, raising both the tumbler and his free hand.*

If there was, it didn't come across my desk.

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*Alice rubs her hand over her face. The circle her thought-process is following is giving her a headache. She's starting to get visibly annoyed.*

Could the Dementors be forcing random people to do this for them?

*Alice stops. Is there even away for Dementors to do that? She slams back against her chair, much harder than she meant to move.*

Do these places have a significant historical meaning? To the magical or Muggle community? Do they have provisions in who can and cannot visit them? Are they sites of older Dementor attacks? And are we seriously handing over all our information to the Prophet? Are we really that stupid that we're not holding anything back? Less information scares the participator more...

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*Any pretense of gleeful schadenfreude's been gone for hours, and Gideon's in full-on support mode. He returns into the room with the bottle of Firewhisky; without a word, he refills Sirius' glass and throws a bit more into Fabian's too, for good measure. He's holding an extra tumbler.*

Alice?

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*Alice smiles grimly. If the answers were the ones she didn't want to hear, she was going to ask for a glass anyway.*

Please.

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*Gideon pours a generous three fingers into the glass and presents her with it. He leaves the bottle on the coffee table, quite sure that they'll need it, and addresses the room a bit worriedly.*

So, er, how long do you lot belong to the Toadlet?

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Indefinitely.

*Alice downs the Firewhiskey, oddly grateful for that familiar burn.*

I had a look at the files she assigned me. She's got me talking to the victims and their families. And these some of them have been Kissed - their families are keeping them at home...

*Alice stops. If she keeps going, she'll cry, and that will not help anyone, least of all a room of three men.

Instead she sets the glass on the table.*

Sorry, could I have another? I won't knock it back, I just needed to...I needed it.

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*As Gideon obliges, refilling her glass, his eyes find Fabian's. That is low, they say. Very low. Not that Alice can't handle it, but...*

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Thanks.

It's just...that's in my top-clearance Ministry file as a sensitive issue. She researched it and is now deliberately using it against me. I thought only Unspeakables and up would have access to that. I'm guessing all of us have assignments like this...

*Alice takes another sip, her mind returning to the questions she'd been preparing all afternoon.*

Back to the questions, though. Do the locations have any significant historical meaning?

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*Sirius has been watching this ping-pong match of the same ideas they've all had, but at least it feels productive.

He ticks them off on his fingers.*

If we're ruling out Rothbury as a different motive, then we have three. Museum. Diagon Alley. Leisure center.

The only connecting facts I can think of is a lot of people. If we rule out Diagon Alley as a kind of an opening salvo, we can narrow it down to what they wanted. Consider the times of the attacks. It's when there were likely to be lots of kids around. Maybe Diagon Alley was just testing what they could do, and when it worked, they went for what they really wanted.

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I can't get it out of my head that maybe the people mean something too. When you think about it, it doesn't make sense that someone with Dementors would target places with lots of children. Their memories are short, they don't have as much for the Dementors to feed off of. Every time we brought in new Death Eaters, the Dementors would congregate around the one who had the darkest case file.

So why these places with these people?

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Maybe it's not the length of memories, it's the quality of them. Kids, you know. Happy memories. It's why the Patronus works.

--Wait, we're in the Being division now. Can we find an expert on Dementors? Get some texts or, fuck, something? Fuck knows I'll need some light reading after interviewing all the destitute fucking werewolves in the country. Maybe we can turn up a detail about them that'll point us right.

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We'll have to. Maybe in the Magical Law Enforcement Department? Someone who ships prisoners to Azkaban, maybe?

Do you think it's possible for Dementors to force people to do this somehow? They target people good at Arithmancy and somehow make them do it? Our minds are open books to them, if they were after specific talent, they could find it.

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That doesn't make sense. There are all sorts of protections against them doing just that. They shouldn't be able to go anywhere the Ministry doesn't let them. So it's got to be someone in the Ministry loosing them. At least, at first. Maybe just for Rothbury. Then, once the protections are down . . . ?

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*Fabian frowns slightly to his brother, in agreement: very low, indeed. He knocks back another long drink, but it doesn't do anything to loosen the sick knot in his stomach.*

I still don't think so. If the Dementors were behind it they've have been cut loose on Piccadilly Circus already. Tube lines. If we take the latest two as the main corpus of information we're using, as the pattern - not to minimize here, but it's not a lot of people compared to Diagon Alley. If they wanted numbers - and they'd want numbers - it'd be somewhere more crowded.

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You're right.

Still, someone had to loose them in the first place, someone had to let them go to Rothbury and lower those protections first. And that person works at the Ministry. They'd have to. And they're probably a Death Eater. Two birds, one big fucking stone.

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Work at the Ministry, or have access to the Ministy. I mean, Malfoy...

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But he's so nice, Fabian, he wouldn't dream of it.

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Fucking Malfoy.

--We have to bring this to Moody. He might have the leverage to let us look into Malfoy. No way will Umbridge approve it for our own investigations, we'll have to get some kind of probable cause.

*But there's a kind of energy, a light in Sirius' eyes that wasn't there before. This is something to work on, something they can do.*

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