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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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"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."

"Curious," he mused. "And then I assume the page of the book was destroyed, so it could not be used against him again?"

"Of course. We couldn't destroy it until we'd worked out how to remove it, but we got rid of it as soon as we could."

It had been a tense night. Until Goliath had finally woken up, there had been no way of knowing if her plan would actually work.

"It won't happen again. At least, not that way. There are a lot of other spells out there, in both our worlds."

"Innovative wizards are dangerous ones," Lupin said. "Most dueling, indeed most efforts we make to suppress Dark magic, rely on skill and ability with established charms and countercharms. Facing a completely new spell or even a charmed item with unusual properties often leaves us at a loss. And Dark wizards do love to experiment."

“Not all of them,” she pointed out, “You were working on a new spell when I arrived. You don’t have to use it for fighting.”

The fact that it was so often used that way said a lot about the human race, both wizard and muggle.

"It is a spell entirely unsuited for fighting, that is true," he agreed, a bit more cheerfully. "Most of what I've done that's been new and unusual, though, was with the help of my friends, and... well, let's just say that if mischief had names, it would have been theirs. Not quite the same as violence, of course." Though there had been a few incidents that really trod on that line.

“Hopefully it’s a lot more fun,” she said with a smile. He sounded considerably more cheerful than he had a moment earlier and, consequently, Elisa was happy to change the track of the conversation. “Unless you get caught?”

"One of the advantages of being a prefect," he said, somewhere between amused and embarrassed, "is that you are usually among the last people to be suspected of wrongdoing."

"That was one of the reasons I was able to help the gargoyles keep off the radar for months," she said with a similar sort of expression on her face. It was a cause for both pride and shame. "No one really suspects a detective either."

"That is a position you chose to take, rather than one you were appointed to?" She spoke of it as, he assumed, a job, but didn't wish to assume.

"A bit of both," she explained. "I've always wanted to be a police officer, but I had to work my way up from the bottom when I started. I was appointed to a detective position, but not until my superiors thought I’d earned it."

Not that she'd have wanted the position for any other reason.

"Much like an Auror, then, that position requires rigorous exams and a great deal of extra training, if you can even meet the very stringent N.E.W.T. requirements expected." Of course she hadn't studies any of the magical skills, but he was sure that as Muggles went, she had achieved a skill and ability beyond most.

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