"I'd like to be at the negotiations," I said.
Minister Bones stared at me with her fingers steepled.
"You really think the Death Eaters will attack an international conference?"
"What better way to make your administration look weak?" I asked. "And if they can convince the other countries that it was the Ministry who caused the attack, using the Death Eaters as an excuse..."
"Why in the world would we do that? Nobody is stupid enough to believe..."
"They tried to kill our children," I said. "It'd be easy to push forward the story that some of our hotheads decided to do something about it and it got out of hand."
She frowned.
"Do you think that's likely?"
"No," I said. "Pure and halfbloods seem not to care about injuries all that much, only death. The Muggle parents might, but they don't have the power to do anything."
I stopped.
"Do you think that they'd stoop to controlling muggle assassins? Make us think the muggles hired them?"
"What?" Minister Bones looked startled. "A muggle couldn't..."
"I grew up in America," I said. "I've used guns before. With the right sort of gun, you are dead before the sound of the shot ever reaches you. There's no time to raise a shield spell."
"That's...disturbing," she said.
I shrugged.
"It's true. They don't use guns as much over here, and so you aren't as familiar with them, but I can assure you that there are people here who have them."
"I understand that it takes special training," she said.
"There are plenty of people in the muggle British military services who have those skills. Some criminals have them too. It wouldn't be hard to find a specialist who could kill wizards from a range far enough that you could barely see him."
She shook her head.
"That goes against everything they believe in."
"Everything the Death Eaters believe in," I said. "But it advances their goals perfectly. It turns the Wizards against the muggles, it weakens the Ministry, and it possibly unifies Great Britain against the rest of the world."
"We'd lose that battle, even if he were somehow able to take over."
"He's clever, but he's not wise," I said. "There's ways to take over the world, but you have to be strategic about it."
"And I suppose you know some of those ways?"
"I can think of three or four ways the Ministry could do it if it was so inclined," I said.
"Some people worry about your influence," she said. "They think that you are dangerous."
"New ideas are always dangerous. In nature, when life faces new challenges, it adapts or it goes extinct."
"Are you suggesting that the purebloods should go extinct?"
"There are plenty of purebloods who are adapting just fine," I said. "There's a certain population of them that seems to be having more trouble than others, but as long as they don't try to force their views on others, I have no objections to them."
"So get out of the way or get trampled?" she asked. "I'd think more than just a handful of people would have a problem with that."
"If things were normal, we'd be able to have long discussions, make legislation, have people vote on how quickly they want change to happen. We'd have ways to safely vent people's fears."
"And we don't now?" she asked.
Clearly she was humoring me, playing Devil's advocate.
"People are dying," I said. "And the way things are now is keeping it that way."
"And so your solution is more people dying?"
"Ultimately, force is the only thing people like the Death Eaters understand. If they were really confident in the rightness of their cause, they'd take it to the public and vote everyone out of office who didn't feel the same way."
She nodded.
"But their view isn't the popular view, or at least not enough that they can be sure of winning. That's why they feel they have to attack."
"And yours is?" Minister Bones asked. "History is full of revolutions that led to tyranny worse than what they overthrew."
I frowned.
"When the strong are calling the weak tyrants, you can be sure that they have ulterior motives."
"Are you calling yourself weak?" She sounded amused.
"I'm a child," I said.
We were both silent for a moment, before Bones chuckled.
"I'm not sure anyone who has ever met you believes that."
"But the success of one member of a persecuted minority does not mean that all of them are successful. The laws are designed to keep the muggleborn from succeeding."
"Be that as it may, change too quickly is as likely to create a rebellion as change that is too slow."
Bones had already made strides in the areas of werewolf rights and in reversing some of the injustices that had been perpetrated by the Umbridge administration, so I didn't dismiss her complaints out of hand.
"Maybe," I said. "So will I be allowed to attend the conference?"
"You don't think your presence might make the attack more likely instead of less?" she asked.
"If he's already planning to attack the conference, my being there won't matter. If he's not, I doubt he'll stage an attack just for me, not when the full might of the Ministry will be there. I'd be more concerned that he might use the distraction of the conference to attack another target, frankly."
"Any idea what that might be?"
"If I knew I'd tell you," I said. "It's in everyone's interest to get the Death Eaters off the streets."
"The French will be attending as well," Minister Bones said. "As they had children at risk. As high Mugwump, Dumbledore would normally be in attendance, but as a former Headmaster, he had to recuse himself. Instead there will be a panel from the International Confederation consisting of three judges."
"Who will be speaking for us?" I asked.
"I will," she said. "And the Ministers of Magic for France and Norway will each speak for their own countries."
"Where will it be held?"
"In this country," she said. "The location is to be held secret as long as possible for reasons I'm sure you understand. We also have alternate locations should the primary location be compromised."
"You don't want to leave the country because the Death eaters would take advantage of that."
She nodded.
"It is to happen in three days, because this is an incident serious enough to cause political problems if it is allowed to fester."
I nodded.
"Be ready at 8 AM, and I will send auror Tonks for you."
"Because the Death Eaters don't have any animaguses," I said.
She nodded.
"Now leave," she said. "I will be spending the next three days working on my arguments and I cannot afford to have any more distractions."
I nodded, gathered my things and stood up to go.
As I was about to step out of the door, she said,"Please inform Alastor of any anti muggle techniques you think might be appropriate to make the event safer."
I nodded.
Two days later, I found myself out on a field surrounded by a dozen aurors. Moody had arranged for me to have the equipment I would need to demonstrate to the aurors the danger of muggle weapons.
"Muggle weapons are less versatile, but in some ways more dangerous than wands. Few wizards have ever accidentally killed themselves with their own wands, outside of incidents of incredible stupidity, but it is easy to kill yourself with these without meaning to."
There was a long table beside me with as many muggle weapons as Moody had managed to get hold of in such a short time.
"If there is an attack by muggles coerced by Death Eaters, you may have to handle these weapons once the enemy is down. I am here to teach you how not to kill yourself or anyone else when that happens."
We'd had this training in the Wards for exactly this reason. The last thing the Protectorate needed was to have some young hero to accidentally shoot themselves or someone else while securing a crime scene.
Of course, we weren't supposed to handle guns at all, but sometimes they had to be secured.
"This end of the gun," I said, picking up a Glock and pointing it in the air, "Means death. Do not point it at anyone, do not look down the barrel. Even if a muggle believes that it is out of ammunition, they could be wrong!"
I could tell from their looks that they weren't sure about how dangerous a muggle weapon could possibly be.
"Why do you have those pig heads?" Tonks asked uneasily.
"Pigs have bodies that are very similar to that of humans. That means that damage to their bodies is fairly analogous as well."
"And those things around your neck?"
"These things are loud," I said. "I have been assured that the healers will be able to return your hearing. These things are to protect my hearing."
They glanced at each other.
"Why do you get protection and we don't?" Tonks asked.
"Because I know what they sound like. You need to know what to listen for, or it's possible that they could start picking you off without you knowing what was happening."
"How do you know all of this?" an auror I did not know asked.
"I'm from America," I said. "A third of all American adults own guns, and many of them teach their children to use them."
I didn't say my own father had taught me, but the implication was there.
"We'll start with a watermelon," I said.
I was using hollow point bullets, because I wanted to impress on them how dangerous guns were. Other bullets had better penetration, but didn't do as much damage because the bullet passed all the way through.
I had bugs on all my targets, and so I was ready, almost.
"I need everyone to get behind me," I said. "Guns are not as safe as wands and I could easily kill someone without meaning to."
They nodded and stepped behind me.
I had an eye on them just in case the master stranger protocols missed someone. Of course, anyone who attacked me with a gun in my hand was likely to find themselves with an unpleasant surprise.
BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM.
Five watermelons exploded in the time it would have taken one of them to cast a spell.
Most of them looked startled. Some of them look stunned.
Moody didn't look surprised. My guess was that he'd encountered guns before, which was why he had allowed this demonstration.
"Well," the auror who had spoken before said, putting his hand to his ear. "That's great for watermelons. What would it do against a human head?"
"Let's see," I said.
Before he could respond, I turned.
BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM.
Carefully clicking the safety on the gun and setting it down, I gestured for everyone to gather around the pig's head.
"I've heard you aurors have forensic spells to help you look at bodies. I don't know those yet, so why don't you tell me what kind of damage this did?"
"She's admitting she doesn't know something?" a redhead in the back whispered to his friend. I doubted they knew I could hear them because I wasn't using my own ears.
"Only because she's too busy making dead bodies to worry about who killed them," his friend said.
I ignored them both, and waited for the Wizards to make their own conclusions.
"Any one of these would be fatal," Tonks said, staring at the pig's head.
"So you could kill five people that quickly?" an auror asked. He seemed smarter than some of the others, with a penetrating look.
"They don't have to be this close together either," I said. "The smaller weapons are more difficult to use at long range.
Gesturing for them all to step back behind the firing line, leaned down. The Barrett M82 was a fifty caliber rifle. As it weighed twenty eight pounds, I doubted I'd have been able to use it without a stand. Likely no one outside of a troll or Hagrid could use one comfortably.
I gestured for silence.
"You see that wall in the distance?" I said.
There was a wall that had been set up especially for this demonstration.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
I kept firing until I was out of bullets. The gun only held eleven, but the sound seemed to stun and disorient the aurors.
The wall was destroyed, and the pig bodies on the other side had gone flying.
"Even being behind a wall might not save you."
I then realized that some of them still couldn't hear me, so I waited for them to get the ringing out of their ears.
"With the right equipment, muggles can kill you even through walls," I continued.
I then pointed at a target much, much further away.
"This weapon is much larger than the ones I am used to," I said. I quickly reloaded it with another clip. "So I may not hit my target the first time. Be assured that anyone they hire to use one of these will know what they are doing, and they'll hit you the first time around."
It took me seven tries to finally hit the target, a pig handing from a tree fifteen hundred yards away.
Although I knew exactly where the pig was, because the bugs on it were at the extremes of my maximum range, I still had to deal with the bullets being affected by wind and gravity.
They stared at me, stunned.
My range was now far beyond anything I'd had when I'd had my passenger. My normal range when I had started had been about five hundred feet in all directions. Eventually I'd been able to manage maybe nine hundred feet. I'd more than doubled that that during times I was under a lot of stress.
My normal range now was double what it had been when I was panicked in my old life; likely that was due to continuous use and because the power wasn't being limited by my shard's computational abilities.
On the other hand, I still missed the extent of my multitasking before, and so it was a bit of a mixed bag.
Hopping on our brooms, we all rode down to look at the hanging pig.
"They don't have to be in the same building as you to kill you," I said. "This is the real reason that the Statute of Secrecy is so important. If the muggle governments wanted us dead, they wouldn't just send one man with a gun like this. They'd send a thousand... maybe ten thousand. One for every man, woman and child in the Wizarding world."
"We'd hide," one auror muttered.
"We could replicate food for a while," I said. "But there's a limit on how long you can replicate food before the base food goes bad."
"We could fight," another auror said.
"And we'd likely do them a lot of damage," I said. "But every Wizard that dies takes seven years to train a replacement? You know how long it takes to train a muggle soldier? Six weeks. They could afford to keep sending bodies against us until we've lost enough people that we have to run."
"To where?"
"Yeah," I said. "There are seven thousand muggles for every Wizard. An enemy of my country once said, 'beware the sleeping giant.' That's true of the muggle world as well. Muggles have much, much better weapons, but I doubt that any of those are likely to be used by the Death Eaters."
"Better?" Tonks asked.
"They have weapons the size of a human car that can destroy an entire city in the blink of an eye," I said. "Go to muggle London and look through their bookstores, and you'll see what I mean."
"So what can we do?" Tonks asked.
"Well, first we need to do some experiments to see whether a bullet will penetrate a shield."
Everyone looked suddenly uneasy.
"You can make a shield from behind a brick wall," I said. "Keep the wall between you and the shield, and we'll see what penetrates."
They all stared back in the direction from where we had come.
"We won't use the big guns," I said cheerfully. "At least not yet."
"So you're saying you'll be shooting at all of us," Tonks said dubiously.
"Well, of course," I said. "How else can we find something like this out? I'm hardly going to be shooting at schoolchildren."
They all looked even more dubious.
"Do you want to find out that yer shields don't work now, or tomorrow when some Death Eater flunky is shooting at you?" Moody barked.
I'd cleared my plan with him in advance.
If the bullets penetrated, then we'd know that we needed to make additional plans. If they didn't, it'd get the aurors used to being shot at.
Personally, I suspected that it would depend both on the caliber of the bullet and on how good the wizard was at making shields.
As it turned out, I was right.