Hannah heard from Moody that the Burmese who were more or less on good terms with the Order were willing to provide information, and that seemed inarguably good. The information was all true and accurate from what the former Auror had been able to determine, though he still took everything they said well salted, and she found it hard to call that a bad thing. The problem is what they're actually saying.

In neighboring China, it was no longer a secret that the Xian had been dispatched to put an end to Voldemort, but the four that had tried ended up dispatched by him instead, and basically the Imperial Ministers decided it was not worth more deaths to pursue him. They had intended to observe each battle after the first and learn from it, but either the Dark Lord or one of his many servants was cutting off their mental communication, and what they had been able to learn with Divination was unclear. The Burmese at the very least were concerned about someone who could kill no fewer than four of the Xian, if not all at once, and the same kinds of indications were coming from the Lao and Thai people, which seemed to indicate that if either of the three peoples had some sort of fighting force that were more powerful, it would remain a secret.

From what little she had seen and what more she had been told of the country where she was, she knew there were powerful wizards, but no one who seemed strong enough to take on Voldemort stood out to her. The nat-kadaw of the royal family would probably have some sort of chance against him by virtue of being unexpected, but she had about as much chance of expecting him, especially because what she imagined he spent all his time doing was researching magic. For his faults, he was never prejudiced against wizards from foreign countries, at least not from what I've learned. The information was mostly second or third hand at the very best.

During the middle of the summer, they had a witch come to them who claimed she could return Ron to his normal state, but basically it required rare potion ingredients. Moody was skeptical, as expected, mostly because neither of them knew much about eastern potion-making, and it sounded like a terrible way to waste time since the nat-kadaw who had been helping them had never heard of it, but Hannah was willing to give it a shot when everything else had failed so far. Hermione had managed to reach Ron in some sense, but he had not stirred; it was only his conscious mind that had woken, meaning with nothing wrong with his body, there had to be something going on in his spirit. There were those who had theorized it was disconnected in some way, but most of them were honest people who did not recommend anything because they did not truly know any treatment that would work. Thus far she had only retrieved one of the four ingredients that was requested, but that was because of her other Order duties.

Hagrid had been transferred to Burma, and he had been both a consistent source of help as well as a liability, since he was inclined to investigate all the magical creatures of Southeast Asia and without a wand, someone had to keep an eye on him in case he ran into muggles. Most of the time there was someone who could help with that, but on this particular venture, it was Hannah's turn. As she walked in front of the eternally salivating dog, she was almost regretting telling Moody she had started work on memory charms.

"We're lookin' fer a Demiguise, Hannah," he said, speaking with a familiarity confused her somewhat. Maybe he's just good at making friends with everyone.

"How do we look for them if they are invisible?" she asked. "I can't just summon them." She was not exactly sure of the theory, but there seemed to be limitations on the summoning charm, else she imagined people would just summon enemies and kill them.

"Right yeh are. Don' have a clue where we might find one either. Tha's the bes' part right there. It's the thrill o' the hunt."

"I thought you said this creature could be useful to the Order." Hannah jumped over a particularly persistent vine for the second time. If it bothered her again, she supposed she could just use a severing charm.

"Tha' it is, Hannah. All the same, yeh can't expect to find anythin' if yer not lookin'."

As she understood it, the Demiguise was not terribly dangerous; if anything it was the opposite extreme. It was a peaceful herbivore that used invisibility and some instinctive form of divination to escape predators, mostly horned serpents, or a particularly hungry Occamy. Humans, especially wizards, virtually never saw the creature, leading to serious doubt that it actually existed, which was the initial reason its habitat was not regulated by the Statute. Once it was confirmed in the early twentieth century, the International Confederation of Wizards decided, not at a full assembly or anything, that the creature was better at avoiding being caught than the relocation organizations were at relocating them, and they were better off left alone. According to Hagrid, there were only one or two in captivity in the entire world, but they did not live forever, nor were they an interesting spectacle as they could just disappear whenever. Also according to Hagrid, there was a clever Squib in Vancouver who claimed to have an invisible Demiguise in a cage, when really it was a disillusioned house elf.

"Can't they see the future?" she asked. "Won't they just look at all possible scenarios and avoid the ones where they get caught?" She felt like she was channeling Terry as she hopped between the footprints the half-giant was making in front of her. It was not as if she wanted to expend the extra energy, but it helped her think sometimes when she focused on something, and she did not like the squishing feeling of walking on the virginal floor of the jungle bog.

"They can't think abou' everythin' at once," he said. "Part of the reason I brought yeh along. I've heard tell 'Miss Abbott can think of just abou' anything'." Hannah thought about it for a moment. Does the creature just envision the most likely ways it could possibly get caught? If I could only hold a handful of possibilities in my head at once, those would be the most useful.

"So all you need to catch it is something unlikely?" she asked. "If, say, you learned that only one person has ever tried to catch a Demiguise by walking up to it and grabbing it, then it wouldn't be able to foresee that?"

"Don' think so. Wouldn' you see it comin' if someone walked up ter you with an outstretched hand?" Hagrid shook his head. "Yer predictions change all the time," he said. "Prob'ly can' change 'em as fast as you'd like, but there it is."

"So how can we get one?" Hannah asked, getting her wand out as she heard some sort of creature's call. Let us hope that was a mating call and not a 'kill the werewolf' call.

"Can' trap it. Bleedin' knows what a trap is, prob'ly seen 'em all before once or twice. Can't catch up to it. Already knows we're coming."

"Can we surround it?" she asked. "What if there's one that's asleep right now, and we got some of the locals to help us, and we surrounded it before it woke up? It would still be a challenge to catch it, because it could turn invisible, but that's why we've got your dog with us."

"Where're we goin' ter find one tha's already asleep?" Hagrid asked. It seemed like he was testing her more than anything else. If he really wanted her to bounce ideas off him, he would have told her a few things that did not work ahead of time. "It'd be real swell if we did, but we can' plan fer that sort of thing."

"I know," she said, keeping her voice down. "First we have to have a general idea of where one is. Then we hedge it in with a ward and wait."

"Wait?" he asked. It seemed less like an incredulous question and more like an invitation to continue. I'm on the right track.

"When it's just doing whatever it normally does, whether awake or asleep, it most likely only predicts about a day in advance. I can't think of any kind of animal that could benefit from predicting that far in advance, and if it could, it would never have been caught."

"Tha's a good girlie," Hagrid said. "Don' have a damn clue how far they can see, but it can' be more'n a few hours. Pretty sure there was a Chinese wizard who chased one until it was all tuckered out and had to kip in a tree. Not really practical fer us to do tha'. Can' chase it far in this environment, and we'll run inter someone afore long."

Not to mention every creature in the jungle would be aware if you were crashing through it.

"Do we have a lead on where one might be?"

"Tha's why we've got Fang with us. Bleedin' coward, most o' the time, but he got a scent o' Mad-Eye's invisibility cloak. Should put us pretty close ter a Demiguise soon." Quietly, Hannah put together that invisibility cloaks had something to do with the creatures, but did not ask about it. She imagined that Hagrid was passionate about the subject and sorely missed teaching it at Hogwarts, but she had never possessed much interest in it, at least not relative to Charlie.

Meeting him in Africa had been strange. He was a little like Ron, or rather, Ron was a little like he was, she supposed, but there was seven or eight years between them, so it was reasonable to expect one to be more grown up than the other. She remembered seeing most of the Wealsey family when they took her to Egypt to see the eldest, who managed to break the curse on her eyes. At that point, I remember Percy being more of a gentleman.

The dog broke the silence with a growl. Silently, she supposed it was less audible than a bark and less likely to scare off the quarry.

"Bestium Revelio," she incanted. All the spell told her was that there was an animal in front of her, which was more than she could see. Even those without invisibility knew better than to make their presence known, whether they were predator or prey. Pointing her wand forty five degrees to the right, she had a negative response.

"Useful spell, tha'," Hagrid muttered. "Wha's it do?"

"It gives me a sense as to whether or not there's a creature in the direction where I'm pointing the wand," she said. "It's really hard to get it right, but the way Charlie explained it made sense." The proper way according to all the academics was to cast it by specifying the area of effect using heraldry language, but the super fast way was apparently figuring out the natural area of effect with a target siting right in front of you and then sticking with that. As long as she had a feel for the area, she could control it by just angling her wand differently and casting three times to triangulate the position of whatever creature she wanted to find.

"This is a method I invented myself," the older wizard had said. "It's the Weasley way." She thought of how Ron sometimes took shortcuts with potions as long as the end result was close enough.

"I see," she had said. "Do you all do things the Weasley way?"

"Well, no, not Percy, but sometimes we wonder if he really counts." He was joking, she could tell, but it was a joke she had heard a few times.

Returning to the present as she laid down wards that Hermione showed her, she was thankful for having always been a pretty quick study. Hannah did not credit herself with anything that could be described as brilliance, but when her skills really counted it paid to know what they were, and hers was work ethic. It was not as though her friends were lacking on that front, far from it, but she knew why she was able to master various magical abilities and understand the concepts, and she could reasonably expect it was because of her hard work, because there sure as hell was nothing else going for her.

Am I studying more effectively? Is there something I've been doing that other people would benefit from learning?

"Hannah, tha' looks like enough wards ter me."

"You can never be too careful," she said. "All we have to do after this is waiting." She sighed a bit, remembering a conversation she had on the Hogwarts Express one time with Ron and Terry. At the time, she had assumed that a tyrannical government would behave the same way as a fictitious tyrannical government and just ban voting or popular sovereignty one day, but they could not do that while people had wands, because there was a limit to how effectively they could put out propaganda. Even with a near-monopoly on media with the Prophet, the population could simply not read it, even if there were no alternative. Part of the reason there's no alternative other than the Quibbler is because the Death Eaters destroyed two of the major anti-blood purist publications during the last war. It was not because any other paper was treating them better, it was because they intended to take over.

The trick that Ron and Terry had taught her was something she realized she had just applied against the creature that they were trying to catch. A simple, direct method seemed like it would be effective, but the Demiguise was basically immune to any direct approach. She likened it to an informed, thinking population. As a result, their first task had been to account for its ability to predict the future. Nothing is all-powerful. Nothing can survive patience and planning. The goal was not to act so quickly it would not have a chance to react, but to act so slowly it would have no idea what was going on.

An hour passed and they stepped into the wards. They would not be able to get out without the creature, but they were prepared for that. Either the Demiguise heard them or predicted something and was now jumping from tree to tree. It was not going to get out; all it could do at this point was make things more difficult. The Hufflepuff witch only placed down a smaller ward barrier, and as soon as it passed all the way through, it was trapped. She attempted to stun it, but it kept moving out of the way by predicting her stunners.

"You're not making this any easier for you," she said, annoyed. "There was a time to resist and you passed it." She knew the creature probably could not understand any human tongue, and that it stood to reason that if it resisted long enough, there was a better chance some outside force would come along and keep her from capturing it, but on the off chance it could understand her, it served her ends to convince it of the inevitablity.

"Can yeh make a smaller circle?" Hagrid asked.

"Not with it bouncing all around. My only real concern is that it might try to pass outward through the barrier as I place it down, which might cut it in half. It was easier when the area was bigger, and even easier when it didn't realize we were here."

"Well, there's got to be some other way of flushin' 'im out."

"That's a good idea, actually," she said, raising her wand again. "Aquarius." A jet of water surged from her wand and into the one-way boundary. It soaked into the already moist ground at first, but quickly there was a circle of water on the ground, rising as she put more volume into it. Though there were limitations to the spell that prevented wizards from filling up the world with water, she could basically put out as much as she wanted as long as nothing broke her concentration. She filled the area until she started hearing splashing sounds.

"That'll keep 'im from movin' around enough," the Care of Magical Creatures teacher speculated. "Prob'ly shouldn' stun 'im, though. Lemme at 'im." He stepped past her and waded into the tall cylinder of standing water, his head still above it because of course it was. Grabbing the creature, she was somewhat surprised it consented to be grabbed, but now that it was grabbed, that was it.

"Was it worried about running out of energy in the water?" she asked.

"Don' really know. Jus' didn' want ter stun it an' then have it be hard ter find. Can yeh dry us off?" Hannah used a drying charm. The Demiguise had turned visible, seeming to have given up on trying to escape. It was a bit smaller than she expected, with the way it made so much noise jumping through the trees, but she guessed it was just expending all the energy it could at that point.

"We're not going to kill it, are we?"

"No. These li'l buggers are dead useful, but not tha' useful dead." He did not elaborate on their uses and she admittedly forgot what they were herself. It seemed like the kind of thing that would come up before it turned out to be perfectly necessary, though, so she was not worried. As they walked back to the encampment Moody had set up as an Order base, her thoughts were mostly pointless ideas about how to help Ron out of his current predicament. He was not the center of her whole universe and she could do things without thinking about him for a few minutes, but it seemed pointless to deny her feelings. The impression she had from her now fondly remembered talks with her mother was that most teenage girls went through a phase where they were super attached to their boyfriends, and roughly the same thing happened to most teenage boys with their girlfriends. She had worried that there was no substance to their relationship, and she had voiced those concerns with her friends and with him, but no one who cared about her had ever indulged her fears. That was really the job of armchair life coaches and relationship experts, after all.

Something Macmillan had said not too long ago was starting to make more and more sense. She had known or at least suspected that it was the case for what felt like her whole life, but he had a way of putting things into words. Ignorance is the rule; knowledge is the exception. Everything she knew was beholden to what she could actually say she observed; things she had heard from other people ranged from true to misleading to wildly inaccurate. When she thought about it, for everything she knew, like 'Hogwarts was founded in 990 AD', there were an infinite way of changing the sentence to something she did not know, like when other schools were founded, when Hogwarts was actually build, or anything else that happened in the same year. Hannah could be reasonably confident that someone knew the answers to most of those questions, but the fact that someone else knew did not mean she knew.

Arriving back at the encampment got her out of her own thoughts. Moody was reclining by the fire, and though he looked comfortable, she knew he was on edge because he always was. He looked over the captured creature as they put it into a conjured cage, muttering he was thrilled his invisibility cloak had been of use to Hagrid, as it had already been of use to him. The Hufflepuff witch did not particularly want to ask what use it had been, because it felt like she was being led there, but the Care of Magical Creatures teacher had no such concern.

"I was watching the encampment underneath it this morning. After an intruder tripped my detection ward, I apparated seventy five feet behind him without making a sound and stunned him in the back. Never saw it coming."

"I would not imagine he would," Hannah said. "May I guess he did not turn out to be a door-to-door salesman?"

"He's a Death Eater."