Several months earlier, The Daily Prophet, Rita Skeeter:
A muggle woman who will remain unnamed, went missing from her home in Dorset. The bodies of her two sons, 7 and 11, and husband were found along with the bodies of two unrelated people, another man and a woman, which were concealed in the cellar of the house. A wizard neighbor, a Marlene McKinnon, alerted the ministry. It was the aurors, specifically a Dorcas Meadowes, who noticed that the woman was missing but confirmed the violence of the murders were, to them, clearly of a magical source. The muggle authorities were informed through the proper channels and another body, that of a 4 year old boy, was found soon after and not far from the home when it was revealed that the two bodies in the cellar were unrelated to the family or to one another. The Sussex man had gone missing several days prior and the woman remains unidentified in the muggle papers. It was after this assessment that Rufus Scrimgeour, Field Head of the South Eastern Aurors Division, made clear in a briefing that if the body of the young boy had been there when the team of aurors arrived first, they would have found it and the Auror Office suspects further foul play and tampering with artifacts. The unidentified woman was confirmed to be what some still, inappropriately, refer to as a "fringe witch". Her wand is from an unknown source and she did not attend Hogwarts. Further confirmation and clarification from the ministry forthcoming.

Rufus Scrimgeour did not trust very many people but he lived by the old ways. He knew of Dorcas because of Alastor, he knew Alastor because of Kingsley and so on. He trusted all of those people in that line (and in that order…) because of the person before them but that they had all proven their own merits with time. He trusted that no one in attendance of the "briefing", had said anything or maybe they had? This reporter certainly hadn't been invited. It would be time to make further amendments to the list of people he trusted again and every time fewer people survived to make it to his confidence but many more people moved up in importance. That Dorcas was named was a matter of security as was the other witch named and for that reason, he trusted that neither had gone to find a reporter for the Daily Prophet (if he was in the habit of rolling his eyes, he would have). This was a generality given the state of tension that muggles, historically, remained unnamed but that in an investigation of this scale and sensitivity, everyone involved should have remained anonymous. What disturbed him was how difficult it would be to work with the muggle authorities, every division of the Auror Office was stretched thin and, even worse, some of the aurors he did trust were unavailable due to their own assignments. This, too, was dangerous. An auror could not just "take assignments" on his or her own whim. This wasn't the nineteen-thirties! And why did they have so many separate divisions for such a small country? All of them could be consolidated. People were dying in the field because of the lack of centralized information.

Rufus Scrimgeour could feel his stomach growling as he turned the paper over. That's it, all of that information in such a short section and no further explanation. How this reporter got the information and from where, he would never find out. But that little bit of information brought up more questions. What alerted this McKinnon that anything was amiss? How did she contact the ministry so fast, did she have a direct contact? Auror's were effective if they were reached on time but, and he loved them all, they were not generally the first to respond, especially with their steadily dwindling numbers. He ignored his hunger to reread the paper. In fact, it was usually a muggle who tipped them off in cases such as this. How did the aurors find out so quickly? Had someone tampered with artifacts? Who were all of these muggles? Why and how and, and "fringe witch"? They were no longer allowed to say that? This was also, very literally, news to him (he suppressed another eye roll) and stopped reading mid-sentence. He made his way in the direction of something to snack on to see what he could do to untangle the mystery of this missing woman.

Rita's article was full of inaccuracies but she did what she could with the time and resources she had available which were constrained mainly by the time and resources the Auror Office had available. She took her job very seriously and she had made a choice to find and get to and report on the truth as it was made available. Her chubby, slightly shiny face made her look even younger than she was but she was determined to report on the horrors of the war and didn't let skeptical looks deter her from getting the potion, hot from the cauldron, so to speak. She could research all of it and write a richer piece but she was getting more assignments at work also and the head of her department insisted she write more and more side angle pieces. People knew there was a war, they didn't always want to read about it. The paper needed more levity, he said as Rita scribbled away at her pad so quickly and with so many amendments that she had to redip her quill several times in a pot of ink floating in the air just in front of her.

She tried to explain repeatedly. She could get more information on the murders and the whos and whatsits. She could find more sources. The department head sat at the edge of his desk listening to this earnest, dumpy girl witch insist on how important war time information was. He couldn't tell her that, in times like these, there would be questions asked that wouldn't be answered for several more generations. What other source could she find more reputable than lion-farted Rufus (a difficult source, he didn't understand how she got the interview) or who would care after a month. They were dead, the missing woman was also most likely dead and they were surrounded by ever more people dying everyday. She should be so lucky that she even wrote the piece in the first place. And if she could get the information she did, her skill could be put to better use writing what people actually wanted to read. She seemed so eager to work. So eager to please. He sighed without saying a word and handed her a strip of parchment from his desk and Rita beamed and turned on her heels, triumphant. The department head watched her gold curls with a patch of black and dark blue at the corner bounced out of the way and occasionally revealed a dark splotch on her shoulder where her floating inkwell sometimes bumped into her. All her tops had one. This one looks like a seal, he thought. When she left the office with the door closed behind her, she stopped at the door to read what was written on the parchment: "Foraging Muggle Style. How to tell and acorn from and anchor." The department head could just make out from the frosted glass that her shoulders sank.

If she had been given the assignment, she might have found out. She could focus and research and analyze and, Merlin's beard, did she know her way around a parchment with a quill. She wrote the pieces that trotted in small script at the edge of the paper while she wrote about the war still and without being published. She would have the department head look at the work and hand it back with another pointless article assignment over the manuscript. But she kept writing. And it was through luck and that practice that, after having it checked for accuracy, the piece she wrote on the attacks at St. Mungo's made it to the papers in a shortened form. Because she had inadvertently broken the story, they ran the full article the next day. It wasn't until that explosive article written after the first war, that she got to choose her own articles and was given access to the same dataset that her editors were given. She saw for herself when an article did well. She chose to sit during the trials and wrote what she was most passionate about. And she earned money. She would sit with her own assistant and review the Editor Owls and saw her name repeated over and over and the acclaim and praise heaped onto her. She conducted interviews, she eventually discovered the mystery of the Dorset Bodies. She patented a self-filling quill. She earned more money. The department head sometimes handed her manuscripts back but, this time without the assignments. She wrote faster and with greater intensity. With this, and over time, she would learn that the department head was right. No one wanted to read about the war exclusively. And she found that she did not want to write about it exclusively either. She tried writing on Quidditch. More letters of praise. She mentioned, what she believed was a minor detail, the husband of one of the players. The letters asked for more information. She reported on it. They asked for more information. She shopped and noticed that people gave her interviews easier. She shopped some more, wrote more, earned more. She changed a detail, rather played it up, threw in some prose. The department head looked at her over his desk. She left dejected but found the same article in full with a disclaimer that had to be revealed with a spell, the first time the Daily Prophet expanded its "book" since the early first war years. Owls flooded the lobby of the Daily Prophet. So many howlers were sent that the ministry wondered if there shouldn't be a law, some regulation to prevent such an influx. Rita was a snake, a viper and on and on and she preferred the feeling she got with the praise.

Then the number of Daily Prophets had to be increased after that. The sales went up and up and up. They had to print several copies in one day to meet demand. People requested an evening edition. The department head, who stayed on in an advisory role after the war years, knocked at the door that had once been his. Rita had trimmed down considerably. Her silk skirt suit was the shade of yellow if it had a voice and had been caught mid scream, trimmed in purple fur from a definitely extinct animal. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it temporarily only to push himself of its frame slightly. Rita looked over her glasses, agitated as she dictated her next piece. He motioned a rectangle in the air. She turned still talking and picked up stacks of parchment to hand to the former department head. She'd cut her hair shorter which exposed the top fabric of her sleek, shiny, (loud) jacket. There was no spot on either of her shoulders. The former department head left the office with the stack of her articles for editing and proofing and animating.

He had been a good reporter. He was always honest, fair and articulate but he had been an even better editor. He could spot a serious writer from across the room. As department head, he had nurtured a team of editors and writers, the numbers of which swelled during his tenure even with the wizarding population steadily decreasing by the day. He knew where to place an article and years of watching people and listening had served him well. He had a job for life doing what he loved surrounded by people who loved what they did also. The former department head, now forever advisor, left Rita's used-to-be-his office and smiled to himself at how good he had been at his job.