Maisie Poppington was not having a good day at work.
Then again, working in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes as a member of the Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee had never exactly been a walk in the park.
"Two wizards pretending to be muggle street magicians in a week – two of them! That's at least thirty muggles I've had to obliviate." Faraday was complaining, leaning over the mug of coffee he was grasping as if the fumes would somehow give him the energy to get through to the weekend. He sighed, looking up across the office at Maisie, "How I'm going to make it to retirement, I have no idea. The muggle press got a hold of it too – pictures of one of the blokes levitating a market stall. Thank Merlin they don't make 'em move like we do. I got Buzzfeed to write a tweet about it being photoshopped."
Maisie shrugged and began sifting through the pile of papers that had just flown into her in-tray. A handful of flyovers to deal with, and an apparition. Nothing too difficult to add to her workload.
"Could be worse," she mused, "I got a dragon this morning – four muggle hikers saw it, I have no idea what I'm going to say."
Faraday drew in a sharp breath and shot her an apologetic look. "Rather you than me, Poppington."
Yeah, no shit. Dragons were rare, but were always the most difficult thing to deal with. Her old office mate, Remy Gregory, had been driven to retirement by a similar case to this. Maisie could see why, this was hell. She shook her head, "If only a couple more people would have seen it – over ten and it's the Office of Misinformation's problem."
"Whereabouts was it?" Faraday asked, taking a sip of his coffee and leaning an elbow down on the desk, resting his chin on his fist while watching her lazily. He kept the mug close to his lips as she spoke.
"Pembrokeshire," Maisie answered, "Bloody Welsh Greens, they ought to charm their habitat like they do with Hogwarts. I'm flooing to the regional office at four – local police are bringing in the muggles for a 'questioning session'." She mimed speech marks with her fingers, before sighing. "What do you think about it being a carnival thing? I know the Chinese ministry uses that one a lot when Fireballs are spotted."
Faraday put his mug down on the desk and stretched his arms above his head as he mulled over her suggestion, his brow furrowed. "Like the big costumes they have at new year?"
Maisie nodded, but Faraday frowned, finishing his stretch and resuming his previous slumped posture, scooping the mug back up into his fingers. "It's not Chinese New Year." He said, shortly.
"Damn." Maisie sighed once more, her shoulders falling as she reconsidered. "Okay, how about this: I tell them that global warming is causing lizards to grow to unprecedented sizes?"
Faraday shot her a pointed look, his mouth open and brow creased, squinting. "Please tell me that that was a joke."
"I wish." Maisie blew air out of her nose sharply, becoming more and more frustrated as the conversation continued. She glanced at the clock that was propped up against the model dragon she had on her desk – it was fifteen minutes to three. Only an hour and a quarter until she had to do her job. She groaned, knocking the clock aside with her knuckles so that it clattered loudly against the wood of her desk, and grasped the model dragon in her fist. She held it up to her eyes and glared at it, making eye contact with the two shiny black gems mounted into the porcelain.
"Why'd you have to go and be seen you bastard." She grumbled, before dumping the model into the rubbish bin by her feet. She never wanted to see another dragon again.
Faraday raised an eyebrow at Maisie, "'You doing a Remy there, Poppington?"
"No." She said shortly, "I'm far too young to retire, and I'm far too bloody stubborn to let a weedy little Welsh Green end my career." She paused briefly, looking out into the middle distance for a moment, before looking back at Faraday, a triumphant look in her eyes. "I've got it – it's autumn, right? Harvest festival and all that?" Maisie looked at Faraday for confirmation, and he nodded. She continued, "I'll just say it was a prop for a local farmer's harvest festival celebrations."
Faraday frowned, clearly considering the pros and cons of this idea thoroughly as he took a long gulp of his coffee. He drank around twenty mugs a day, these days. That's what this office did to a person.
"Sounds plausible to me," he shrugged his shoulders. After a pause, he continued his questioning, pointing vaguely in Maisie's direction with his mug, a trickle of black coffee sloshing over the side of the ceramic. "Are there any farms nearby?"
Maisie gave Faraday a pointed look. "Mate, it's Wales."
Two weeks passed, and soon enough the Welsh Green incident had become just another bad memory to add to the pile, along with the Bowtruckle incident of '09, and the Great Gnome Invasion of 2012. That last one had been particularly hard to explain to the poor muggle whose garden was suddenly flooded with the tiny potato-like creatures.
Maisie and Faraday – once again drinking coffee however now from a considerably larger mug – worked in silence, reading over case files and filling in paperwork as they often did on a Wednesday afternoon. The door to their office was shut, as there had been some sort of kerfuffle occurring in the main office, but it was suddenly burst open by a rather flustered looking Amir, head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes.
"Flitterby migration starts in three hours – we're going to be busy." He said, before leaving almost immediately and slamming the door behind him. Maisie sighed, and watched as Faraday banged his head down on his desk a few times.
"Bloody moths," he complained between loud thunks as his forehead met the dark wood. "Bloody moths and their bloody migration." He sat up a little straighter, picking up the muggle telephone on his desk and dialling a number. Maisie was glad that Faraday was muggleborn – she had no idea how to use one of those things.
He sat there for a few moments, drumming his fingers on the desk with one hand while he held the receiver against his ear with the other. His eyes flicked up to meet Maisie's across the room and he gave a pointed sigh and rolled his eyes before whoever he had called seemed to answer.
"Hello, is that Pritt?" He paused for a few moments while the person on the other end spoke. "Excellent, it's Faraday from the Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee. There's going to be a big migration of Flitterbies over the next few hours – yeah, like the ones Hagrid had in first year, exactly – but it's going to be huge. I'm talking national scale, here, Pritt." Another pause. "If you can get the word around that it's the Northern Lights. Yeah, like usual." His lips cracked into a smile. "Excellent, thanks, buddy, you've saved us a lot of trouble."
Faraday put down the receiver and smiled over at Maisie, who raised an eyebrow.
"Perks of having friends who work in the muggle world, I guess." He shrugged, indicating to the phone, "Pritt's the ministry's Muggle Press Liaison – stops them printing anything we don't want."
Maisie nodded. That would stop there being a nationwide catastrophe, but they would still be working overtime convincing muggles that the stray moths they had encountered couldn't possibly be glowing. They were in for a long night.
The two went back to their paperwork for the time being, Maisie scribbling notes about her recent case of five young wizards flying over a muggle sports field in broad daylight (she had convinced the witnesses that it had simply been an advertisement for a new video game dragged along by an aeroplane). She placed the stack of papers into her out-tray, where it folded itself into a paper plane and flew up and out of the letter box on the door like a cat through a cat-flap, before looking up and across at Faraday again, regarding him with a curious eye.
"Say," she began, "how many times have we used the Northern Lights excuse?"
Faraday squirmed a little in his seat, flipping over a sheet of paper on his desk and dipping his quill in his ink pot, not meeting Maisie's eye.
"More than we would like."
Faraday had bought himself an even bigger mug.
"This one can hold an entire litre," he bragged, "now Poppington can stop telling me off for having ten cups a day."
Maisie rolled her eyes, taking a bite of the apple she was eating and ignoring his comment. The fact that he was drinking less mugs of coffee made no difference if the mugs he was drinking were three times as big. Howe was buttering a slice of toast, chuckling at Faraday as he spooned instant coffee into his new mug.
"You're going to have heart palpitations, mate." Howe shook his head, before taking a bite of the toast. "Either that, or you're going to start moving so fast we can't even see you."
Faraday laughed, "'s cheaper than an invisibility cloak, I suppose." He filled his mug up with water with a tap of his wand, before tapping it again so that steam began to rise from the surface of the dark liquid. "Anyway," he started, "we need it, the office has been so busy recently – Mischievous Night was hell, we're still getting through the muggles who had Weasley fireworks put through their letterboxes." He sighed, taking a swig from his barrel of coffee, "bloody northerners."
"Oi, watch it." Maisie threw Faraday a glare, before winking to let him know that she wasn't entirely serious. As she laughed, a paper plane flew over her head and she followed it with her eyes, watching it as it flew into the letterbox on her and Faraday's office door. She nodded towards the door and raised an eyebrow. "Looks like our break's over."
Faraday groaned, and trudged towards the office, Maisie in tow, waving to Howe as he left. The paper plane had landed in Maisie's in-tray, and she picked it up and read it, leaning a hip against the edge of her desk as she stood.
It was another public apparition – three muggles had seen a witch appear out of nowhere in the middle of a town square. Maisie groaned – she was going to have to try to convince them that they just blinked and didn't notice the witch walking up to the spot. Again. Fourth time this week.
"What's up?" Faraday asked, his brow furrowed. He tapped a form on his desk and it folded itself up, whizzing past Maisie and out of the open door. Maisie put her own parchment down on her desk and sighed, looking up at Faraday and saying entirely seriously,
"Can wizards just learn how to fucking drive already?"