World Blasting Itself Apart (Blaise)

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So far it was a slow night and Logan couldn't decide if that was a good thing. He liked relaxing a little and talking with his co-workers, but at the same time that's not why he took this job. He became a member of the Invisibility Task Force because it was new. There was always something interesting to do and he loved the excitement of it and the challenge. Doing the same thing over and over would be boring for him. 

However, today he didn't have to deal with the boring. He wasn't on shift for long before he was called out to the middle of London. Grinning, he apparated there immediately, arriving before anyone else. He walked around the corner, of course he'd apparated to a small alleyway close to the location. He didn't want to make things worse and this was the way he was trained. He strode out of the alleyway and down the street, his eyes widening slightly at the sight that greeted him. There was an entire outside wall of a building missing, right in front of him. Muggles were standing there- both on the street and inside the building- staring at the sight. The muggles inside the building were backing away from the missing wall, looking terrified. Without anything to support it, the fire escape had fallen to the ground, and it looked like some people were injured. Great. What sort of an idiot pulled a stupid stunt like this. It wasn't a legitimate attack, it just looked like a prank. 

Logan took a step closer to the scene, ready to start taking charge. Someone had to. As unfamiliar sight as this was, they needed to fix it before things got too widespread. He looked around himself, curious if any other ministry workers were there yet. He shouldn't still be alone here, after all.

blaise leo zabini

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@logan

Why couldn’t idiots keep their magical mischief to normal hours of the day? Like ones where he was subjected to mountains of paperwork and would kill to be in the field for a change? Lately that was all Blaise could do. Lots of questions following his debriefing of the Shacklebolt girl that was still breathing. Apparently some took issue with how he had handled the whole situation. In his opinion, it shouldn’t have mattered how he got the information, it was that he had gotten what the higher ups needed. Regardless, the paperwork for that as well as his normal amount was finally slowing down enough that he could flex his muscles outside of the office every now and again. Today was slightly different though. Blaise had finally made it home after cleaning up a few minor cases of underage wizards accidentally causing their local babysitters to blow bubbles out of their ears. He wasn’t sure why children had magic like that occur around them, but it was always guaranteed to bring a laugh, even when he was supposed to be stern with them about the whole thing. It wasn’t like they could officially control their magic until they went to Hogwarts anyways. No harm no foul.

The peace and quiet of home was shattered in mere minutes upon stepping inside though. There was an issue in London, and he happened to be one of the Obliviators closest to it. Of course there was a problem when he wanted to relax. That was how it worked, right? Still, it beat sitting around and waiting to go to sleep, so Blaise left his house almost as quickly as he had entered. Disapparating close to the scene, Blaise waltzed towards the crowd. It was quite easy to see who was a muggle and who was Ministry in it. One stood out more than the rest, and Blaise made his way through the crowd towards the man. “What’s it look like?” Blaise inquired as he stopped beside him. If Hartridge was here, then that meant they would need to be concealing quite a bit. “Once more of my people get here and a perimeter goes up, I’ll start wiping memories. Faulty structure sound like a good cover story?”

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Logan looked over curiously when someone approached him as he started directing some of the ministry workers who were arriving. Most of them just scuttled around, following his directions as he barked them out. It was oddly satisfying to him to have so many people doing exactly as he said. So who was coming up to him? Logan nodded when he recognized Blaise Zabini. He hadn't really spoken much with the man before, but he made a point of knowing as many people who worked in the ministry as he could. It was good in situations like this and it was convenient when it came to working with the Purifiers. He recognized people that most of the other members didn't know. 

He shrugged at the question. "It looks like a prank, poorly pulled off," he answered, rolling his eyes. "They made the entire wall disappear, obviously." He gestured to the building in front of him. Obviously. He nodded once more at Zabini's comment. "Sounds like a good plan. We're already working on putting the building back together and then we'll aid you." He wasn't an obliviator, but working on the invisibility task force meant obliviating sometimes. You had to fix things that went wrong and sometimes others couldn't come and assist. "That sounds good. We could even use a vehicle and say it slammed into the fire escape, causing the problem." To him, the reasoning sounded flimsy, but muggles accepted any and all reasoning quite easily. That'd pass.

blaise leo zabini

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@logan

A prank? Blaise had a hard time not rolling his eyes at that one. Hartridge was right though, whoever had done it had executed the task poorly, and now the Ministry was left with covering up for an idiot. Blaise knew that if he was that person, he would be long gone by now. Getting dragged in on charges of magical exposure over a prank or something equally stupid was idiocy at its finest. Assuming Hartridge was correct though, that this was all a prank, then that meant they wouldn’t have to work double time in case a second round of walls disappeared in London. Making objects poof wasn’t exactly dark wizard tendencies; Blaise had spent enough years hunting them down to understand how they worked. He was perfectly content with being yanked from home late at night for an idiot removing muggle walls over someone killing them. He was sure most of the Ministry would agree with him on that one. This sort of thing they were currently dealing with was trivial.

Blaise nodded his head as Hartridge agreed with his plan. Whistling over one of the younger Obliviators that had arrived only moments earlier, he directed them to start work on the cover story. The goal for his department now was to clear memories of anyone that thought they saw something weird, replace them with their version of the story with the help of the memory modification squad, and then send the muggles on their way. There were a lot of onlookers this time though, and that made Blaise wary of the situation. If the other containment teams had done their jobs correctly, the streets would be locked down with charms for several blocks. Escaping one of those as a muggle was almost impossible. “Car accident huh?” Blaise contemplated the idea. If they fixed the wall enough, they could definitely pull it off. “Works for me. Muggles have a hard time remembering car descriptions during accidents, so that’s an easy one to get away with.”

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Zabini seemed to agree with his assessment of the situation, which was good. Logan didn't want to have to explain why he thought the way he did and was relieved that the person in charge of the Obliviators was experienced enough to take his word for it. Logan had absolutely no intention of being here any longer than he had to be. As he saw a few more people from his department arrive, he called them over and gave them specific duties to attend to. Obviously the wall needed to be repaired, and he decided they should re-attach the upper part of the fire escape as well. A car hitting it wouldn't cause the whole thing to topple. If it did, that definitely wasn't good workmanship on the muggles' part. So he'd rule on their favor this time.

Logan nodded when Zabini agreed with his plan. "Alright then. It looks like a few cars got ruined because of the fallen fire escape. We'll leave some of those, since we're not putting the whole thing back up. That way it'll be more realistic, not that the muggles will really look into this accident." They were rather thick that way. Once they'd been obliviated about something, they refused to see the truth, even when the evidence was blatantly obvious. It was ridiculous, now that he thought about it. "Is there anything we're missing?" he asked as he started moving closer to the scene. Logan didn't think so, but asking the other man was a way of covering his tracks. If two of them agreed this was enough, it probably was.

blaise leo zabini

[Deleted]

@logan

Some of the stories they had to come up with to ease the minds of muggles were almost laughable. Never would he have imagined that taking a job at the Ministry would stretch the fabric of his imagination this much. Blaise preferred to outwit and intimidate. He could do that, in a way, while dealing with muggles, seeing as they would never encounter each other ever again. And if they did, there was a fat chance that they would remember him. If anyone was the angel of death with memories in the Ministry, it was him. He was at liberty to do whatever he wanted to muggles. Sometimes he wondered what the legality of that was, but the statute of secrecy always weighed down on him in the end.

Both of them had employees running back and forth, and it was almost hysterical how they were virtually in the same positions here. Each had equally important jobs to complete in order to maintain the biggest secret the world held. It was always like this during breaches though. “Don’t go too overboard with destroying the cars. Make it look like the one hit the wall, and the rest were parked there.” Blaise had to watch quite a bit of muggle television to understand how they thought. Plus it was a good way to distract himself when the kids were at school and the wife was working. If he thought his imagination was good, some of the things they came up with was insane. He always chalked it up to their lack of magic being the reason for it. The best part was Daphne working in the film industry, and having her bring home stories of muggle special effects and how they were amazed by all of it. If only they knew… “Looks good to me. Only thing we really need to worry about is taking care of the residents in the building. I’ve sent someone in already to do memory modifications, but they haven’t come out yet…” As if on cue, one of his Obliviators came running around, yelling about a lot of damage inside the building. “I think that’s your job, right?” He stated as he turned to face Hartridge before sending his person back inside to finish their job.

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Logan turned away from Blaise, making it look like he was glancing around when in all reality he was rolling his eyes. Really? The man thought that Logan and his people didn't know how to properly deal with this, how to make it look realistic? That was utter rubbish. Then again, he probably didn’t mean for his comments to be taken that way. Logan pasted on a sincere-looking smile as he turned back, deciding to give Blaise the benefit of the doubt. "Yup, we've got it," he said, gesturing for one of his people on the street to come over to him. He relayed the information given by Blaise and the man nodded vigorously as he trotted off to the people he was working with, explaining what Logan told him. This was one of the better parts of being among the senior people in an office. Logan could often delegate the work if he didn’t want to do it or didn’t feel like doing it. At the moment, that was the kind of attitude Logan was in the mood for. So Logan nodded as he watched the men work. Blaise started saying that they really just needed to worry about the people inside and Logan started walking toward the building, looking for one of his people that wasn’t busy. He really should get someone inside. Then an obliviator was yelling about damage inside of the building and Logan was suddenly shouting at his workers. Two came running toward him and he gestured to the building, “Go inside and take care of whatever is wrong in there. It should look entirely normal. The car wreck wouldn’t have messed up anything in there.” They ran inside and Logan turned toward Blaise, nodding. He was ready for this whole fiasco to be over with already. He walked back over to the man, glancing over at the cars and the outside of the building. “Looks like this is almost taken care of,” he commented, hoping that nothing else would come up. It was late and he wanted to go home.

blaise leo zabini

[Deleted]

@logan

Blaise held his tongue when Hartridge said that his people had the set-up for the damage. Did they really? He wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place if they had been doing their job correctly. Time was money, as muggles put it, and while they weren’t too worried about money right here and now, they had to be worried about the possibility of a leak. Everyone knew that. Running around like chickens with their heads chopped off helped no one. That was the first thing taught when taking up a job that dealt with cleaning up magical messes. Hartridge was still young though, and while Blaise was fine with giving him the benefit of the doubt, the other man should have been on top of his workers from the get-go, hounding them to get things done the second they were found out. There was no excuse for Blaise to telling him the calls to make. And he wasn’t paid to do two people’s jobs at the same time. If that were the case, then he would cut half of his team and do it all himself. He was certainly capable of it at this point in his career.

Instead of making any more remarks about the work that needed to be done, aside from his own, or criticizing Hartridge’s abilities as a leader, Blaise stepped back and observed from afar. The shadowy figures of Ministry workers running around the floors of the lit up building was straight out of a comedy sketch. Blaise had seen this dozens of times, though it always had the same effect on him. Hilarious how the nobodies worked so hard, with only a few ever making it anywhere in life. While he watched, Hartridge seemed to finish up the work that Blaise had reminded him of. “Heard if the person has been apprehended yet?” He asked as he continued to watch the charade of shadows. “I hope they have a really stupid reason, just so I can rip into them if I’m given the chance.” That was easily the best part of the job. Picking people’s minds, literally, was fun. Simple as that. Some called it torture. Blaise called it part of the job. Best way to not have your memories jumbled around and erased was to not be an idiot. Unfortunately there were lots of idiots in London.

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Blaise didn’t say anything for a while, but Logan was too busy making sure that things were going smoothly to really care what the other man did. Still, the job appeared almost done and Logan was relieved. Strange as it was, he just wanted to go back to the office and get the paperwork for this done so he could be done for the night. It was times like this when he really hated paperwork and was often tempted to leave it until later, but a few years in the job taught him better than that. He was never in the mood for paperwork, so it was better for Logan to do it immediately.

Logan shook his head when Blaise asked if the culprit was caught yet. ”No,” he muttered, annoyed. Why did witches and wizards feel the need to pull stunts like this? If they really hated muggles, they should do something more about it than make a wall disappear. There were more … effective ways of fighting back and he hated having to deal with stupid idiots who thought it was all a game. It wasn’t. ”I bet they’re long gone by now, he added after a few moments. Sure, it wasn’t too hard to catch culprits like these, but aurors had better things to do, since they were still searching for Elaine and the rest of the Purifiers. They weren’t even close. He shrugged, ”I bet they don’t have a reason at all. They were probably just in the mood to cause mayhem. Good luck with that though,” he muttered, his own annoyance seeping through. He’d like to berate the idiot as well, but didn’t care enough to actually make it happen. When the person got caught they would have enough to deal with and Logan would have other things on his plate as well. There were too many people who just wanted to pull pranks like this and he had to deal with them all.

blaise leo zabini
(you wanna end it?)

[Deleted]

@logan

The two letter word he hated the most while at work finally decided to make its grand entrance. Blaise could feel the annoyance in Hartridge now. Catching the culprit wasn’t either of their jobs, but it didn’t prevent them from feeling like they could. At least Blaise knew he could if given the chance. Hartridge though…he wasn’t too sure of what the other man’s abilities were aside from having to be told to do his job by someone else. A snort escaped from Blaise as the other man went on to say that the person was probably long gone by now. “Possibly. You ever work as an auror or hitwizard Hartridge?” Blaise asked rhetorically. “Because if you had, you’d know that a lot of these nutjobs get off to watching us clean up after them.” He turned around to motion to the muggle crowd that was now dispersing because the defensive spells were kicking in. “They were probably right out there, watching the whole time.” Blaise assumed that the aurors on patrol probably had a good idea of where to start looking, if they didn’t know who did it already. That is, if they weren’t a bunch of incompetent dolts. One could never tell with the people on shift at this hour of the night. Take Hartridge for example.

“But,” he relented, “you’re not wrong. All they care about is destruction. I don’t blame them these days. There’s a lot against them,” Blaise shrugged as one of his Obliviators came up to tell him that they were finished. Nodding his head, he gave Hartridge a firm pat on the back. “That’s my cue. Have fun with the rest of the cleanup.” Blaise made sure all of his people were accounted for before directing them to begin right on the paperwork once they returned to the Ministry. He wanted it completed by time he came in the next morning. This was a relatively easy case. Stepping to the edge of the barrier, he disapparated back home.

[THE END]