Charlie Weasley felt somewhat more at ease in the Romanian Ministry building than he had felt the last time he walked its halls. Of course, the last time he'd been running from door to door, begging for a chance to study dragons.
The Ministry workers had what Morgan called "Romanian work ethics", which meant a bunch of them went off and dropped all their work on the newest of the lot while they stuck to the simple stuff to justify their sallary. Charlie was fairly sure anywhere else in the world this would simply be called "lazyness". But as he descended to the lower floors of the building, he could see people walking with purpose, dilligently, obviously doing their job. He wondered if it was a coincidence that these people were older.
He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what application hadn't gone through. He'd completed such a massive amount of paperwork that he wore down three quills, including his lucky one from Hogwarts.
The Weasley stopped in front of a room simply marked 108. This was where he was supposed to be. He knocked gently and received a gruff reply.
As soon as he openned the door he realised he hadn't heard a gruff reply, but the deeply displeased grunt of a wild boar. Said animal was sitting in a cage on the opposite side of the room, grinding its tusks against the bars in a visibly aggresive gesture.
An old man appeared from behind the desk and said something in Romanian. Charlie wasn't sure, seeing as he was barely learning the language and the man had a very garbled voice, but it might have been "Come in and close the door."
"Err, I was called here because they said..." Charlie stopped when it became apparent by the man's panicked face that he didn't know a drop of English.
He was quite used to it by now, so he came prepared. He pulled out a quill and asked, in a crude Romanian, for a piece of parchment. He was immediatly given one and the Weasley started scribbling down why he was there. He'd become an expert in translating charms, but only for writing. The kind used for speaking involved wards, continuously sustained spells and a lot of careful phrasing.
"Oh!" The old man rummaged through his desk and pulled out a familiar form- standard Ministry application.
"What is it for?" Charlie, indirectly, asked.
"Volunteer work with children from wizarding schools," the man wrote back.
He hardly remembered signing up for that, but then again, it might have been one of those obligatory clauses he needed to fulfill as a working hand on the Dragon Patch.
He filled it in and left soonafter. The man audibly sighed with relief after Charlie left.
---
He managed to strike up a fairly nice conversation with the receptionist about local endangered wildlife. He received an insightful, although acidic tirade about the dangers drakons faced in the wild. He was pretty sure she'd misheard him when he said he worked with dragons, not drakons.
Either way, she was nice enough to let him take a gander at the Ministry records and write down a few names. He was fairly happy to have noted those down, because by the time he walked through the barrier and saw Mr. Pallady standing there with his "Someone must get fired today" expression, Charlie was pretty sure he would have drawn a blank.
But nothing drastic happened and Charlie was free to return to work. In fact, nothing truly bothersome would happen for another week or so...