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Inventing a new spell; a most tricky and daunting proposition. Beyond most wizards. Lupin flattered himself by thinking he had a chance, but if pressed, well, he had helped with the Marauder's Map, had he not? He knew a thing or two about Defense Against the Dark Arts, and this was not dissimilar.

Besides, what did it hurt to try? (Besides the very real chance of an injurious backfire.)

Lupin came to the City, seeking out a place by the river where he (probably wrongly) thought no one would venture close enough to be harmed by his experimentation. Once there, he sat down on the grass without much regards for his dignity, and began writing on the book he had liberated for such a purpose.

"Protego Minutiae," he began, writing the words down as he spoke them.

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"Thanks, but I'm really more of a coffee drinker," said Elisa, confirming his suspisions with a genial smile. "I wouldn't want to use up your supply."

"One of the perks of magic," he replied. "Food can't be created, but if you have some it is entirely possible to duplicate it. If you ever get a supply of coffee..." He lifted his wand to give it an obliging little wave.

"Wow." She was genuinely impressed, wondering if Demona and the other practitioners of her magic from her own world could have done something similar if they hadn't been so busy casting spells to harm the human race. "It's not a perk I'd thought of, but I'll definitely keep the offer in mind."

"It isn't much, but I have enough skill at Transfiguring to get by." He shrugged self-deprecatingly.

"False modesty doesn't work well when you're talking about magic," she warned him with a grin, "If you don't have that sort of power, it's all impressive."

"I suppose to a Muggle it must be, but... My friend Sirius is aboard the ship, and he is more skilled than I am. So in wizarding terms, I don't claim to be anything special." Lupin was underrating himself, but James and Sirius had always been the show-offs, the ones most proud of their ability.

"A muggle?"

The phrase was entirely unfamiliar and Lupin's tone didn't suggest that it was an insult, but curiosity was a police officer's trademark and she had to ask.

After all this time, he still never remembered to forgo using that term before explaining it.

"A person who can't use magic." True, Lupin said it without prejudice, though other wizards might not be so kind.

"That would explain why I've never heard it before," she said, apparently satisfied with the explanation and the fact that it hadn't been an insult. (Not that she'd have been insulted anyway. It would take far more than words to wound her. She'd have bemused at the most.) "Is it used a lot in your world?"

"Often enough. Mostly we wizards live apart from the Muggles, but our paths often intersect, and of course many witches and wizards are the children of Muggles, or marry a Muggle. It does help to know whether a person can perform magic or not." The darker aspects, such as pureblood pride, he had no real intention of getting into. It was frankly embarrassing.

"Not here," Elisa noted. "Here, we're all part of the same crew."

More than that, they were fighting for the same reason.

"So, how do you tell if someone has magic? Do you just wait until they cast a spell and hope they don't start with something big?"

Because that didn't sound like a particularly safe system.

"Magic, of course," Lupin said with a smile. "In the United Kingdom, for example, a magical quill records the names of all children born with magical ability. It is checked yearly, so letters of acceptance to Hogwarts can be sent to all the children eligible to start school that year. It's true that magical children do exhibit uncontrolled magic when they are underage, particularly before they receive their wands, but as children they are rarely able to do much harm."

"I was going to say that sounded simple enough, until you got to the magic quill," she said with a laugh, "It sounds like a good system, but ... what you do you do if someone who isn't magic - a muggle - sees what a magical child can do?"

Edited 2011-12-19 23:17 (UTC)

"The Ministry of Magic places a charm, a Trace, on magical children. It detects the use of underage magic. From the moment they earn a wand and begin schooling, students are forbidden by law from performing magic outside of their school, and they enforce this as strictly as possible. In the case that the Restriction on Underage Wizardry is broken too badly, trained wizards are dispatched to modify the memories of the muggles involved, much as we would do if they sighted a dragon or encountered a giant." His smile turned somewhat grim. "And generally with less mess to clean up than in the latter cases."

“The Ministry of Magic? So they’re sort of ... wizard police?” Of course. Even wizards needed law enforcement. “Wizard police with a lot of special training.”

Even with the ‘trace’, that couldn’t be easy to enforce. Memory modification? Magical detection?

“And I thought my job was complicated.”

"Police and government both," Lupin said. "They set the laws and enforce them. Every country has its own Ministry, or equivalent. Muggles don't do it quite the same way, I think?"

Some days aboard this ship, he regretted not taking Muggle Studies, though he recognized that it probably applied very sparsely to the people here in any case.

"Our government and police departments are separate," she said, by way of an answer. “The police enforce the laws that the government makes, but they’re kept impartial. It makes it harder for people to get try to adjust the rules for themselves.”

Harder, but not impossible. Unfortunately.

"I can see how that would make the most sense for you," Lupin said with a nod. "Many wizards, I'm ashamed to admit, haven't moved past the old concepts of pure-bloodedness and privilege. The Ministry is generally quite good about avoiding such things, but money and history still count for far too much." Particularly when it came to anti-werewolf legislation, he added privately.

At that comment, Elisa raised an eyebrow. Her father was a Native American and her mother was an African American. Pure blood wasn’t a phrase that was used very often, but she knew all about prejudice. And that was before she even got on to what her best friends, the gargoyles, faced.

She knew all about money, too. Evenin a modern New York, wealth was the real ruler.

“I’m sorry to say that a lot of muggles haven’t got past that either.”

"Ah, but with Muggles, you don't have to worry if the crime's they're escaping are, for instance, the use of Dark magic, or the fact that they used to be in the chosen circle of the most powerful Dark wizard of all time." He said this mildly, as he did most things, of course. He had no intention of letting himself grow angry or bitter now, this far away from England and that history.

Elisa’s eyes widened at that statement, but the idea was more familiar to her than it would have been to any other detective from her world. She recalled the spell that Demona had placed Goliath under – forcing him to obey her every command – and how she had used the same spell to release him, commanding him to live the rest of his life as if he was not enchanted.

“No, we don’t. Most of the time. That would make things difficult.”

"That is one reason the Aurors, that is to say, the wizards specifically trained in dealing with Dark magic, are kept within the Ministry. Just by having them there, it becomes that much harder for someone to, say, slip in and place an Imperius Curse on the Minister."

Which, he grimly acknowledged, might have been a danger in days to come if not for this whole mess.

"Exactly what is the Imperius Curse?" she asked. "Is there anyway to fight it, other than making sure it doesn't get cast in the first place?"

She had to ask. It sounded like the sort of thing that Demona would love to be able to use and it didn't hurt to prepare for every eventuality. Besides, the next person from Lupin's world to wake up might be very different to him.

"Mental control. If done properly, it puts the victim under the complete mental control of the caster. There is no reliable countercharm, though a person with strong will and some experience may be able to resist it." He shook his head sadly.

"There was a spell like that in my world, but you had to be holding the sheet from the spellbook to use it," mused Elisa, intrigued by the way that their worlds could be so similar and yet so different. "Goliath is the strongest person I know and he wasn't be able to fight it, so I guess that wasn't an option for us. But we did manage to get around it by ordering him to live the rest of his life as if he wasn't under a spell."