Coffee in My Tea

Michael had been half of the pair who had extracted Brian from a dangerous mission that had failed. Brian was wounded and was going to be sidelined awhile. In the meantime, in an early morning request, Robert had asked Michael to go pick up the latest wand from an American chap that had developed them, and it sounded very much like, despite the wands being classified, that it was going to be a fairly standard pickup. Robert and Michael neither one saw a reason why Anabelle could not go along. It would be a day's trip to New York, given the time change and the bad weather off the New York coast. At best, it looked like perhaps they would need to delay a return to England long enough to let the storms pass--a good excuse to stop and get a bite of supper before they returned. Michael put a couple of alarm buttons in his pocket and pinned the other two to his jacket and then he made his way to go find Anabelle.

Michael figured that since Brian's mission had been secret, Anabelle would be arriving shortly to Brian's office to start another day with him, not knowing he would not be in. He did not want her waiting, nor did he want her being swept off to go fetch tea for someone. She was better than that.

He made his way to Brian's office and found the door still locked. Well, since when did that stop him? Locked door/ Not a problem. He picked up a paperclip off a clerk's desk and bent it into a makeshift lockpick and unlocked the door, going inside and switching on the lights.

God, Brian was orderly, and Michael figured he got that from Robert. There didn't seem to be a scrap of paper out of place. Brian hadn't paid attention the philodendron, though, and it did look a few days away from the dustbin if it didn't get some water. Michael knew where Brian kept a few bottles of water, and he got one out and used part of it to water the neglected plant before settling himself down at Brian's desk to simply wait on Anabelle.

It was great to have friends who worked at the Ministry with her because it made getting there easier and it meant she didn't have to cut her plans with them short, most of the time. Anabelle and Freyja had been going around London together, shopping like normal teenagers would, though Hit was a little less pleased with it than Freyja had been. While the two girls were total opposites in these kinds of things, they were still the best of friends. Freyja had been excited to go shopping for things like clothes and makeup, while Hit had wanted to go shopping for things to prepare for the upcoming school year.

This was going to be the most important year for them, since they were now seventh years and were going to be graduating. Thankfully, she and Freyja had their careers already going; both of them being interns in the Ministry, but they knew anything could happen. After glancing at a wall clock in one of the shops they'd gone into, Hit had told her friend that they should start heading out to the Ministry for their work days to begin.

They knew they weren't going to have time to take their things home, so Hit suggested they stop by Eyelop's to drop their things off and she would tell Ryo when she saw him that they'd left their things so they wouldn't be late to work. Then they made their way to the Ministry, not without getting a weird look from the guy running the shop while Ryo was out, and parted ways at the atrium.

Hit wasn't exactly sure what Brian would have planned for her today, but like always she felt a surge of excitement coming on as she walked down the corridor to his office. Once she reached his office, Hit paused and knocked on the door though she didn't wait long for an answer from Brian before she opened the door. She'd opened her mouth to greet him when she realized that it was not Brian in the office, but someone else.

"Oh, um.. good morning."

"You must be Anabelle," Michael smiled. "My apologies for not being your mentor, but he won't be in today. I'm Michael Tremaine, and, the Lupins are friends of mine. Nice to meet you. Robert and Brian have both spoken well of you and your work."

He drew out his ID from the Department of Mysteries and showed it to her. He did not expect her to simply cart off with him to parts unknown without having some reassurance that he really was who he said he was.

"I don't necessarily expect you to know me. After all, nobody generally knows anything about the Department of Mysteries. However, Robert tells me you can be trusted to some information, so, I can tell you this--my work is always very classified but Robert felt that my work today was something that might interest you.

"I have to make a trip to pick up some new equipment that's being specially made for us, and it means, probably, being gone most of the work day, due to some rather inclement weather that might well make porting difficult. If it looks like it is going to get stormy, we can certainly stop for a bite to eat to get out of the rain and while away a couple of hours. It all sounds rather routine and banal, I know, but if nothing else, if porting doesn't bother you, it might spare you from having to brew tea and run errands for someone who doesn't know your potential."

Oh, so Brian wouldn't be in. Hit could feel her already small smile flatten more into a neutral position, with her lips pursing ever so slightly. She couldn't say she wasn't disappointed, but as she listened to the man, who called himself Michael, she was glad that she could at least do something productive while Brian was gone.

"Oh okay, that's perfectly fine. Is Brian okay?" She found herself spewing her thoughts, though she was thankful that they weren't anything bad or negative. She couldn't be expected to not wonder where her mentor was, right? And the question was innocent enough, she thought. It did make her comfortable knowing that he was a friend of the Lupins though, because that meant he was trustworthy.

At the very least, it put her mind at ease with having to go somewhere with him.

"If Robert thinks it's something that might interest me, I don't see why it wouldn't spark at least a slight interest. I'd be more than happy to accompany you, sir." She spoke, unsure of whether she had to be formal with him or not, though she gathered that she generally didn't have to be when it came to the Lupins. It was still better to be safe than sorry, though.

"Where would we be off to?" She asked, holding her hands behind her back; a habit she had recently developed that usually meant she was nervous.

"Robert says he'll be fine, but it might take him a little. He's a fast healer, so that's in his favor. Pure Gryffindor, that one. Brian's always been a good lad, but he let his feelings get the better of him and he made some missteps. I daresay we've all done that at one point or another when our hearts have gotten the better of us, but no doubt he'll be glad to get back to work as soon as he heals a bit."

Her questions about him were natural enough, and Michael did not feel as he was talking out of turn in telling her about him. After all, she was here not merely to learn the job but also to learn how to deal with it, how to survive it in a healthy way, and that wasn't always easy.

"Robert is a good judge of character, and if he's welcomed you into the sort of work I do, then he has full confidence in your ability to step up to it. You're a bit young, no offense, but I don't see this as being necessarily life threatening. It's a pickup and delivery. Have you ever been to New York? It's your typical large city, and I've always found New Yorkers to be a tad more brash than Londoners, but there's always something to see and do.

"As I said, though, this might not be the day for sightseeing in the States since their east coast is expecting some strong storms today." He reached in his pocket and handed her a couple of tiny pins. One was a simple small gold round pin with a green stone set. The other was a tiny British flag.

"You'll want to put these on," he told her. "They're enchanted to work as alarms, in case of emergency. Just don't muck with them much unless you need it. They will send a distress signal to allies who will respond to your signal. To activate the green one, all you need to do is push the green stone. To activate the other one, twist the red stripes so that all the stripes are parallel. The pins summon different groups. Make sense?"

"I can't say I have, though I have visited the States before." Hit responded.

She had gone a couple of summers ago with friends, and they had intended to go to New York for one of their stops but for whatever reason, it had never been a thing. She wasn't quite sure on the details but there had been some kind of emergency that had made the person who organized the entire trip have to cut it short and return back home. Obviously, they weren't going to be left behind when their guide was going back home, so everyone that was there had come back to London.

She had never been to New York before and had been excited to be able to visit, so going back early bummed her out. She'd never really gotten the chance to go back since, so excitement began to form within her at the thought of finally being able to go. She tried to focus herself as Michael went on to speak about the pins that she'd just taken from him. Holding each one in either hand, Hit looked from the first one to the second as she was told about them.

"Yes. Are there specific situations I should each one? Or does it not matter which one I use?" she asked. She assumed that there would be certain situations where one pin was more useful than the other if they each summoned a different group.

"Oh," Michael said. "I should tell you that, shouldn't I? I'd wear them on my non-dominant side, so that your wand hand is still free to fire, if I were you. Most of us wear them on the left for that reason, but you do whatever you think will help you react the quickest.

"The flag, ironically enough, does not bring Ministry backup, though you would think it should, wouldn't you? However, the flag alarm is something that works with our foreign allies who have agreed to provide us assistance when we're abroad.

"We've been able to form a good professional alliance with Lee Shepherd--Robert's counterpart in America. He's also become a solid personal friend of ours, and he cut his teeth by working as an auror, so he knows how to fight. I have no doubt if we end up having to sound that alarm, he will surely come."

As he was speaking, he had a totally separate thought. Cigarettes--if they were going all the way to New York, Michael did not want to go with crappy cigarettes, and he did not want to traipse all the way back to the Department of Mysteries to get more. Michael knew Brian didn't smoke, but Brian had learned to keep some cigarettes around for the cases where a trainee seemed to need a morale booster to cope. Now, where the devil did he keep them?

Michael opened and closed some of the desk drawers, hunting for them. He found a package of them pushed way to the back of the left hand drawer. He looked at them and scowled at the old, bargain muggle brand.

"How long has he had these? Ten to one, the tobacco has disintegrated into dust," he said, pocketing the pack. He looked at her. "If you never learn anything else, never buy muggle cigarettes. They're complete crap."

"The other alarm--the green one--is not something everyone has, but, it's every bit as effective. For Robert to decide you should have access to this, much less to know it exists, speaks very well for you--you've impressed him, and he clearly trusts you.

"You've been to the estate, so I hear, so I'm sure you must have noticed how tight security is there, and that can't happen without some fast friends that help keep things secure. The green alarm is personal to family members and friends to the Lupin family. Every one of us has one of these green ones to help us protect one another. In my own experience, the green one gets a faster response, but that could well be my own imagination too because when you're put into it to the point where you need to sound an alarm, you start to want familiar faces, but as I said, I don't expect we'll need either of them today."

She was trying to stay focused, she really was. But knowing that she apparently had impressed the Minister of Magic and had gained his trust was so exciting and scary at the same time that she was finding it hard to keep her attention on the explanation Michael was giving her.

At the very least, he'd mentioned all of that after most of his explanation was finished. She'd been told what she needed to know about the the pins, and she was glad that Michael thought thy wouldn't need to use either of them for their errand today. She was surprised, though, that Robert thought her worthy enough to gain access to such things.

She personally didn't think she'd done anything out of the ordinary, much less extra, but she was glad that she seemed trustworthy to him as well as the rest of them. She had always been worried that her family name would cause everyone to be weary of her because of their allegiance. The last thing she wanted was to be associated with the Death Eaters just because her parents and brother were a part of the group.

Of course, she would probably be the only one to not be a part of the group and that was scary in itself because she would never know what was going to happen. Though she did make it a point to stay out of her parents affairs in that.

"Duly noted." Hit nodded with a chuckle that escaped her lips when Michael spoke about the cigarettes, as she attached the pins to the right side of her shirt, taking his advice on putting them on her non-dominant side.

"So, when would we be leaving?" She asked as she finished placing them.

"I can go as soon as you're ready," Michael replied to her. He had a second thought and re-opened the desk drawer and picked out a book of matches and pocketed them as well. "Muggles don't understand lighting one's cigarette with a wand. Frankly, when it comes to magic, muggles don't get much beyond some old moldy film about a girl with red shoes. I hear there's a witch that has green skin, for crying out loud. I don't think I'll try to spook them into thinking some similar weirdness about us." Michael had seen a couple of muggle films but not that particular one, and he didn't think he wanted to either.

"From what I hear, the new wands Robert's had made are supposed to be faster and easier to control, but I'll believe it when I see it. I hear there's a new wandmaker in Ollivander's, and I'm sure he'd have liked to have the Ministry's business but he wasn't around when Robert ordered these. Better luck next time, I suppose."

Michael had been to this wandmaker before, but he hadn't actually ever bought a wand from him. The man lived in some old tenement flat in a part of New York that needed some revitalization. Michael believed that the wandmaker had more money than his shabby little apartment let on, but he had no way of confirming it. And how the man had met Robert, Michael had no clue. Robert seemed to know all sorts of weird people on both sides of the law, and from what Michael knew, Robert didn't generally operate solely on one side or another but rather by what would help him accomplish his desired ends. Michael didn't know of Robert actually breaking any laws, but he surely wasn't beyond bending them a bit from time to time. Still, this seemed routine enough.

"How soon would you be ready to leave?" Michael asked her.

"Oh, I've seen it." Hit quipped. "It might be slightly offensive to some, but I find it rather funny. It just shows what muggles think we're like." She recalled her memory of the film. "They viewed an evil witch as one with green skin. There was a good with as well, but she had normal colored skin." She told him. "I guess colored skin might usually mean someone's bad? Or something of the sort?"

Hit knew a few things about the muggle world, having snuck off on her own enough times to be able to adventure off into Muggle London to observe the no magical people that lived parallel to her and the others. Her parents obviously didn't like that, though. But the consequences were well worth it in her opinion.

The Gryffindor didn't have any vast knowledge of wands but she did know how hard it could be to control one, if you weren't used to it. Everyone experienced something like that at some point, usually in the beginning of their Hogwarts years when they get a wand for the first time. Hit still remembered when she was taken to get her wand for her first year of Hogwarts. Merlin, what a mess that had been. Three ties, three wands and many shattered objects later, she'd been matched with her current wand.

Thankfully it had survived all the things she'd already been through.

"I'm ready to go." She nodded at Michael.