Lydia's technical title was Approved Parchment Quality Review and Reconciliation Assessor Department Head. This was all a little silly because she was a department of one and not because that is what she spent the greatest percentage of her time actually doing. She did in fact review a great majority of forms and letters that needed to be reconciled, investigated or reviewed for other purposes or departments. She knew, by heart, a great many obscure reference numbers. Needing to export a dragon across or out of the Eurasian African landmass? Form DG73264-B. Need to get potentially invasive seeds out of quarantine for emergency growing in a protected Ministry monitored greenhouse? Form ML98875-S and TZx Expedited forms respectively. The worst were the forms involving people and the human body. Many of them originated early in the ministry's history or, not even that, but a number of show-offs who maintained the classification systems still insisted on using runes. Say there was a duel. Someone magically lost their ring finger. There was a form for that, which differed from the occasion that one might lose their finger incidentally from magic being performed. Worse, their were members of that same rune-using ilk that knew wizards wore their wedding rings on different fingers according to their own local custom and traditions and so there were forms for every single finger with the specification for each of them potentially being a ring finger. Half of the page for this form was covered in a sort of nonsense gibberish poem, something about breaking a bond symbolically by an outsider is manifested in the act of taking off someone's ring finger. Lydia remembers paging through a stack of these making furious notes on another parchment trying to decipher what they meant knowing that if she ever made a mistake it would cost more time and cause her an even bigger headache trying to understand them later. She hoped, then, that it would become someone else's problem if she received a job at the ministry but she had been so thorough, so organized and, in the process had inadvertently or purposefully memorized so many form numbers, that it became her official job. Several ministry officials had noted that she tapped out or that they could hear her humming the remnants of soongs she had used as mnemonic devices and it had amused then impressed them.

She was guaranteed the job but this, a job that should have gone to an entire small department of people was on top of her unofficial title: cursebreaker. She, Dylan and Prisha were her only colleagues or, so she assumed, the only in her cohort that she could know of. There had also been Connor which none in their group could understand. He had died however doing his real fake job as Liason to Muggle Recreational Studies when he took an offhanded joke Prisha made and had fallen, arse over elbow, straight down into a mine shaft trying to find all the fun. Prisha in turn burst into peels of real laughter thinking it was a joke and that Connor might be on a secret assignment. Dylan, who thought Connor was probably related to a higher-up and never understood how he'd gotten that far, didn't correct her.

Cursebreakers had to go into hiding several years before Lydia even started school at Hogwarts and in that tradition, they all held second jobs at the ministry. Her assignments were few and apart but she found at the least that her day job gave her access to any of the enormous volumes of history and a room to try spells and chants out in. Most of the time, when she was doing her fake real job, she was getting the remnants of a spent cursed objects back to a neutral or safe state after they were transported directly to the ministry but sometimes she would be called to retrieve or assess and object in the field or called to St. Mungo's. An auror or, more likely an agent for magical law enforcement, might be called in to supervise or protection and she awaited the day when she might run into Dorcas as her escort finally able to tell someone about her job or have to come up with a story for why she was there. Even that would be preferable to the ministry assigning a witch or wizard from the League of Phantoms. Master obliviators. When she learned what they did it made her hair on the back of her neck prickle. They stayed at the corners of active field scenes hardly moving or looking bored even as chaos unspooled around them. They were even more likely to have their own auror escort or trained to casually dodge and deflect spells but mostly they stayed at the edge of the melee. When she brought them up to Prisha, she acted as if she had never heard of them. They gave her the creeps.

Because Lydia didn't know who else was a cursebreaker, she had to roundly assume that there were many more than her small group and yet Connor had been part of their group. Maybe there were fewer. All she knew was that she always had so much work to do. So much. All the time and it was a pain to work in her actual office though it was well decorated. If she successfully snuffed out a curse and it wasn't a protected or disputed artifact, she could keep them. She didn't mostly, but there were several artifacts scattered throughout her office, masks from all over the world, a quidditch poster of the Ghanian team, the Golden Gloriosas from the African league, a little broom that made small circles around her desk and piles of books and parchment squeezed into bookcases of every size and shape throughout the space. Much of it held in place by spellwork that never seemed to hold. For all the magic any of them knew, they understood that at any moment something could go flying across the room.

She had an office on the "floating floor" and they had been relegated to a hallway that shifted and changed sides clanging and bouncing around depending on which elevator passed it, what time of day it might be or whenever the building itself felt the need or so it seemed. They made quick work to gather what they needed and squeeze out to be on other floors doing their other jobs where the offices were more stable but Lydia was used to her place of work and study moving around her changing and so she could be not found in her office most often where it was quiet and if it was early or late enough the dimensions of the room stayed mainly the same. Otherwise she could go to the dungeons or find another office space. She tried to avoid the department of mysteries but for no other reason than she didn't want anyone to get any fancy ideas that she was there to do more than her scheduled share of work. She already knew what would happen if she made herself to available and competent at a task.

As it was, she was in the truest sense an Unspeakable. They all were but only by extension. She shuddered to think what other jobs and tasks at the ministry that no one else knew anything about. She had access to almost every department and corner of the ministry but what did that even mean, really? No one would know where her real desk was unless they knew where it was. Prisha and Dylan were the only other people on that floor at all. She had access to the department of mysteries but only on a schedule and she didn't inted on being there in her free time. Orbsy usually didn't talk about other wizards at all but she couldn't have been the only living thing down there all the time.