Rarely did Marcus ever specifically call anyone to his office. When he did, it was usually bad news that followed. Today, hopefully, would be the exception. Marcus had decided to move forward with his plan for werewolf reform, despite not having an honest chance to speak with most of his Department Heads. It was a shame, but something had to be done. The planned meeting with everyone had been pushed back, as has the mid-year reviews. There just wasn't enough time in the day.

It was one of the reasons why he had called Tamis Raynor, the Head of the Aurors, into his office. She had an insight on the problem that few people possessed. Things were different than when Marcus had been an Auror, and there was only so much he could observe from an office desk. The reports only told him so much, and Tamis was on the ground level, and could see the troubles much better than he could.

All Tamis knew was that Marcus wanted to speak with her about current affairs, she had no idea about anything else that would become the topic of discussion. It was no secret that the Ministry of Magic was now missing a Head for the Department of Magical Law Enforcment. Marcus had been doing the best he could in dealing with his former head's loads of work, and Tamis has been invaluable in making everything go smoothly.

Marcus had wondered how she would feel about a promotion. She was more than deserving of the job, and her organizational skills had no equal. It's not as if Tamis had brought up the topic of job promotion, so Marcus was getting the feeling that she wouldn't exactly cozy up to the idea. Regardless, he was going to find out how she felt about it.

There was a knock at the door. "Come in," Marcus said to the person outside the door, as he shuffled some papers on his desk to prepare for his talking points.

Tamis Raynor was worried.

Gray eyes watched intently as the lift’s floor indicator shift (what seemed) impossibility slow between Level Two and Level One.  The Lift was unsurprisingly sparsely populated, just a couple of youthful messenger boys that were probably hoping that an internship in the Minister’s Office would lead to something extravagant. Few individuals had reason to travel higher than Magical Law Enforcement. Even so, the pair stuck to the far back corner of the shaft, giving the woman a wide birth. If her reputation did not do it, then the combination of her badge glittering at her hip and her rock-strewn expression surely was warning enough.

After an agonizingly long two minutes, the pointer finally came to a rest on the number one and the doors to the lift grated open.

“Level One. Office of the Minister of Magic.”

Raynor was halfway down the hall before the soft, feminine voice completed the announcement. The two interns allowed for some distance to accumulate before exiting themselves.

It was uncommon for the Minister to single out a governmental employee to his office. If something demanded his attention, it was usually brought to his threshold before he had to inquire about it. Likewise, the Annwyl had been known for hunting down Ministry personnel when he wanted them instead of having them come to him. Raynor was sure it was a diversionary tactic to escape all of his paperwork. There were a million and one reasons that flashed through her head for this summons and she did not like any of them.

In recent months, Raynor and the Minister had been working closer together, it was true. With Belisario’s disappearance, there had been little choice in order to keep the largest department within the Ministry from coming down around their heads. Luckily, Raynor had been doing the fundamentals of Belisario’s job for him long enough that the brunt of a crisis had been avoided.

She had never worked so closely under the Minister’s curious eye. He had said he wanted to discuss current events… had he found her performance lacking? Her mind jumped to the article Colette Wheaton, the Prophet editor, had shoved under her nose at the beginning of the month. While biased, it had retained some fair points. Tamis had been vastly untested as a Law Enforcement leader before the second of May. She had been a competent Auror for years previous but had been appointed as Head of that Office in a time of relative peace. And when a crisis befell them, the murder had escaped. She could blame it on the contrasting orders between Belisario and herself all she wanted, but the truth was, he had still gotten away.

Walking past the Minister’s secretary without so much as a word, Raynor raised a fist and knocked abruptly. She had never been the type to hesitate before an encounter that was inevitable.

A muffled noise floated through the wood work and she turned the knob, entered the private office, and closed the door firmly behind her.  

There was a moment of awkward silence where Tamis just stood there, her anxiety smoothly concealed from her face in a way that all Aurors eventually seemed to master. Finally, when she could not take it any longer, she broke it.

“You wished to speak with me, Minister?”

"Yes. Please, sit down," Marcus said with a small smile across his face, as he sat down in rhythm with his guest. Tamis' experience showed with every calculated movement. Even something as simple as sitting down was done in a manner that commanded respect, and dripped of dignity. She was law enforcement through and through. Which was why she was here in the first place. Anymore awkward silences and Marcus would be wasting her time.

"As you know Ms. Raynor, there have been some... let's say, troubling news regarding the werewolf population here. I don't really know how else to describe it. You've seen the case reports and to a lesser extent the Prophet articles, so I'm sure you're aware of the problem, but it seems that neither of them are telling the whole story." Marcus thumbed through his stack of papers and pulled one out to the top of the pile.

"Tyler Bates, a sixteen year old afflicted with lycanthropy. He can't afford the potion he needs to help control the transformation. His family has to chain him at every full moon to prevent him from escaping and killing anyone." Marcus set aside the piece of paper and began rerading from the one below it.

"Charlie Whitman, age seven. Woke up to a noise, so he went investigating, and found himself being chased by an escaped werewolf. Tyler Bates, to be specific. His parents kept the boy from being killed, but not from getting attacked. Little Charlie survived his injuries, but is now also afflicted. This was a year ago, and the Whitman family are still struggling to make sense of it all. Their son is slowly decaying into something that they don't recognize. At eight years old."

"The question is, could this all have been prevented? Could we have stepped in and done something about it? Perhaps provided care with a cheaper Wolfsbane potion needed to keep him in check. And Charlie, helping out with counseling so that he knows he's not the only one out there his age with lycanthropy."

"What I'd like to ask you, is about a possible revised Capture Unit. A group of people specifically trained to handle these situations, under joint authority of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Realistically, how effective do you think a group of poeple like this would be?"

There was a paused as she considered if his request had been a courtesy or a command.  She decided that it was a command disguised with polite askance and lowered herself cautiously into the chair before his desk. Raynor was a woman that preferred action and, like many Aurors, preferred to stand to quell the restlessness that came from the onslaught of nerves. She, however, was not going to be rude about it.

The tip of her nose twitched at the “Miss” appellation. It was a concerning trend when a woman over thirty was still referred to as a “Miss,” regardless of her marital status. Especially in her current position, it made her feel like she was still a naive twenty two year old, trying to understand her place in the world. Auror Raynor… Madam Raynor… even simply Raynor. All acceptable. But it did not seem like she was going to be able to shake the trend any time soon.

The cadence of professional, business matters was familiar and comforting, so when the Ministry jumped straight to the matters at hand a rush of relief washed over her. She had over analyzed the situation, not unusual for a Ravenclaw. While it was not the norm for the Minister and the Auror Office to confer directly, as there was a current lack of a middle man, perhaps the situation was not as unusual as she thought.

Of all of the topics he could have wished to speak with her about, this had not been among the ones she would have expected. Lycanthropy? She recalled a few reports that had crossed her desk and she believed she might had read an article at one point, but the Minister knew her well enough to at least surmise that she was not an avid follower of the Daily Prophet. In honesty, she had not given it much though as she had been more preoccupied with topics more traditionally related to her Department. But she assumed the Minister was going somewhere with this.

And he was.

“I do not believe it would be any more effective than the current Capture Unit,” she told him honestly. “Werewolf attacks are not predictable. It is impossible to know when one happened until it is reported. The only way it would be possible would be to make already existing Lycanthropy registration and monitoring laws more severe – which would not be my recommendation.”

“Improving prevention would be more effective,” she agreed. “Wolfsbane Potion is a very complex and time consuming, I assume the ingredients are also expensive. To commercially market it, as you are suggesting, would require volunteer Potions Masters to work under salary and available expenses from the Ministry in order to make it economical.”

 “If you were considering Auror involvement in a new Capture Unit,” she assumed he was as the Head Auror’s opinion would otherwise be insignificant, “I would advise waiting until there is a guarantee that such a Unit would actually be more productive.” That was the politest way she could figure out to explain that she did not want to waste man power on a venture that would prove fruitless. Especially when it was a task the Aurors traditionally were not responsible for.

The result was exactly what Marcus hoped it would be. It took far too much time to find a way to bring this up in the concise and business-like manner that was worthy of reachingf Tamis' ears. Using the 'Miss' honorific was probably a bit too much, considering the obvious (to Marcus anyway) flinching that it evoked. There was a reason why Marcus kept things only semi-professional. Deep down he was still that same old dog for the Ministry's Auror department.

"There is definately an elephant in the room when it comes to budgeting. Wolfsbane Potion ingredients are indeed expensive, and I'd have to look through our expenditures to find a way to make it work with only minor setbacks if at all possible. I want to make this work, but I'm not going to force it either."

Marcus shuffled around some paperwork, bringing to the front the statistics regarding the current Capture Unit. "I fully intend on keeping the same wizards and witches for the Capture Unit. My only concern is that with an unusual number of documented attacks that could not be stopped, that the current Unit might not be performing as well as they could be. With werewolf attacks, common sense tells us that we need coverage on the nights of a full moon. I know you're aware of that just... humor me."

He continued, "So there is something of a pattern. It's not much, but it's enough to start with. We give them the training they need in order to be more alert in the event of a rising threat, and we can decrease, or eliminate the amount we have to outsource. I know you can agree with me when I say that just because it's a time of peace does not mean we need to be lazy as well."

"Raising awareness will, in theory, keep the general population better educated in the event of an attack. So they can, again in theory, see the warning signs earlier than what is the norm. If we can get at least half of that accomplished, then we won't need to tighten registration laws, which I agree is a terrible thing to do."

Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose to reign in a growing headache. "I understand that I'm idealizing this, I really do. Something has to be done before it gets out of hand. That's why I asked you, specifically here, to be the realistic yin to my idealistic yang in this discussion. Speak freely, by the way, on anything we discuss here. I wouldn't have asked you here if I didn't respect the hell out of everything you have to say."

That was a very politically correct way for him to call Tamis Raynor a natural pessimist. She took a moment to consider that, her head tilting to one side in contemplation, eyebrow arching, and finally nodded in a very shrug-like manner. It was a valid point. But surely there were other cynics higher up on the hierarchy that could answer these questions; Raynor certainly could not be the only skeptic in a bureaucracy.

Blinking rapidly, the Auror stared disbelieving at Annwyl when he bestowed his compliment. It was a large one, coming from the Minister of Magic himself. While a politician, Raynor knew that the man did not compliment lightly and only genuinely. That was part of his slogan, the “honest” and “open” Minister. Almost shifting uncomfortably, she was not quite sure how to respond. She decided to keep it simple.

“Thank you, Minister.” She replied tactfully. 

A time of peace, he called it. It seemed petty to nitpick the Minister on terminology… but the man truly did have his head in the clouds if he still thought they were in a peaceful period. They did not have masked and hooded terrorist following some twisted sociopath’s idealisms plaguing the streets. Men and women did not leave their homes in fear that they may not see their loved ones again. But it was not a time of peace.

There was wide spread scandal spreading from the still unsolved murders of the Second of May, she had placed Cináed Tawse back in the Bridge Houses at the beginning of the month for numerous accusations, and they still had the unaddressed letter from Theodora Kingstreet announcing her opposition to the Ministry of Magic to contend with. They were not at war, but there were most certainly thunderstorms in the forecast.  If the world was in harmony, she would have no qualms against the expense of Auror man power on the project; it would have been excuse to get them out from behind their cubicles.

The man wanted her to speak freely. She resisted the urge to rub her temples.

“Probability still factors against you, Sir,” she finally responded. “Increasing the Capture Unit’s diligence will only be effective if they happen to be in the right place at the right time. I assume they frequent known hot zones already. Unless you know the residence of every werewolf and have men stationed nearby on the nights of the full moon, unless there is that extensive of a task force … moral and economical conflicts are once again obstructions.”

It was very similar in concept to what Law Enforcement faced. Predicting crime was a continuous aggressor to their cause. Quite often Law Enforcement was a response to crime as opposed to prevention thereof. If crime did not exist, the Aurors and Hitwizards would not need to exist.  It was an evil that gave her a paycheck every other week.

But if the Minister was going to do this, and she was sure there were positive political points to doing so… “The Aurors have their hands full currently, as you know,” she began slowly, thinking it out carefully. “I cannot afford to give them extracurricular assignments. However, if the Capture Unit could be merged into mini-sessions with our Auror Training program, they could receive the additional training you want without becoming too large of a nuisance for the Men. “ Oh they would still complain and Raynor would silently agree with them, but it would not hinder their productivity. It would have to be the definition of “mini” sessions. The Aurors were a proud, exclusive group, they did not wish to impart the secrets of their training process on individuals who would not, in turn, be become Aurors. But the Capture Unit would have to receive enough of an education to be effective with new techniques… new techniques… that made her remember something very important.

“Sir, if the public became informed of a Capture Unit receiving Auror Training would that not upset Werewolf supporters? It could be perceived as an increase of offensive measures.” Just as it had been when Barty Crouch had given the Aurors permission to use illegal curses in the First War against supposed You-Know-Who supporters. That was a more extreme scenario, but the same concept.

Memories of Barty Crouch authorizing the use of illegal curses during the first war sprang to his mind. Marcus squashed that thought as soon as it entered his head. It was a different time now! Prejudice and hatred fueled those fires. Acceptance was the name of the game. Truthfully, Marcus had indeed given much thought to a possible public backlash of his reform. "Everyone's got an opinion. Unfortunately, the ones that spew their message of hate are most oftentimes the loudest," Marcus said, intentionally mixing his internal and external monologue.

"Something has got to change, and it has to be something that will be generally accepted. I have no illusions of universal acceptance, but I do believe that we, the people, can come to some sort of comclusion." Marcus shuffled through some more of his papers. "That's why I'm going to have the Ministry of Magic organize a meeting. So that we can meet with the people, and find out what they think. It's going to be hard, but I feel that this has to happen."

"In that same vein, do you think that the Aurors are going to get along with the Capture Unit, if I do decide to impliment that part of the plan?" Marcus was thinking back to the time when he was an Auror. He lived for the competition, but he also didn't like anyone that thought they could do what he did. "It was a different time back then, but I know how they might feel on the matter. Some things never change. Regardless, what could we figure would happen in the event of some sort of falling out between the two groups?"

Perhaps Marcus was giving her too much to think about, or perhaps it wasn't enough. Tamis had a poker face that was not easily shaken. At least, not to most people. If Alex had been here, he'd be the one sitting in her place. That wasn't going to happen, and Marcus had to make peace with that. Tamis was here because Marcus believed she could do some good as the head of the department. Marcus would find out how se felt about such an opportunity, in due time.