Rule by Graythryn

7458. Just because someone writes a letter and sends it to the wrong person stating that they are involved in some form of marriage doesn't mean you are allowed to threaten the sender with death or worse.
7458a. Even if it is justified
7458b. Even if the senders are self-righteous idiots who have breeding problems and less brains than an empty tortoise shell
7458c. You're also supposed to capture them and turn them over to the civilian authorities, not use them for practice or turn them into fertilizer

Dear Miss Megan Jones,

Because of the recent war with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, our once thriving and prosperous wizarding population has been greatly reduced, along with the growing rate of Squibs being born since the end of the war, and needs to be saved before it is too late. By Ministry Decree Article #20995, a mandatoryMarriage Law has been implemented to ensure that our society continues on.

If you are receiving this letter, then you are among the still registered available and unmarried witches and wizards between ages seventeen and up that the ministry has selected to take part in the marriage law, where you are required to submit yourself to the ministry within a week of receiving your letter, where you will be put through a series of medical tests to confirm if you are compatible for the law before being assigned to your ministry appointed spouse who will be chosen for you beforehand via a special ritual.

The ministry has decided that everyone must do their part in keeping our great society going in the name of progress so that we do not die out. Another safety measure to ensure that no Squibs are born from the pairings, the ministry shall also implement a special ritual that will match up all couples with their perfect match that will ensure that any children born from the union will have magic, along with monthlycheck-ups on the lucky brides will also be mandatory to keep track of the pregnancies.

All matched couples are required to get married within a month of being paired with each other, and all couples are required to have produced at least two to three, or more, children within the next five years of their marriage to each other, cheating and illegitimate children will not be tolerated among the couples.

The ministry has decided that in the off chance case that the chosen couples are already otherwise engaged or already married to other people, then we are terribly sorry for the inconvenience to everyone involved, but they are now hereby required to dissolve their current relationship with that person in order to participate in the marriage law, as the relationship is not approved by the ministry, and will be seen as failure to comply with the law if refusal is implied.

The ministry has also decided that one of the members that are matched is already married; the married one is required to dissolve their marriage in order to take part in the Marriage Law. Failure to do so shall send the guilty party and everyone involved to Azkaban for three months, before they will be married to their ministry approved spouse upon release. Anychildren already conceived or born from the previous relationship will be given over full custody to the other parent or taken into to ministry custody until further notice.

It is detrimental for the continued wellbeing of our society that you comply by any means necessary in order to help ensure our society's future. Aurors shall immediately be sent out to collect anyone who refuses to comply and bring them in to stand trial where they will have the choice to comply with the law, or be sent to Azkaban for three months. Continued failure to comply with the law will face direconsequences. Continued refusal will result in having your wands snapped with your magic sealed, and all knowledge of magic erased from your minds.

Sincerely yours,

Lilith B. Crawford, ESQ.
Head Director of Regulation of Magical Marriages Ministry Department

Scowling at the letter she had received, via an owl of all things – pigeons made sense, heck falcons would make sense, but owls? Someone was bloody stupid – the young navy captain shifted over to the office computer to pull up what she could on 'magic', 'aurors' and several other key points in the letter.

A few minutes later she had hits all over the globe, wand waving magicals, self-proclaimed witches and wizards. Of course with anything potentially a threat to security of a nation, the military and intelligence agencies were keeping a watch on them, as were several of the Schattenjägers and she had access to both being one of the founders of the Schattenjägers and a member of what was effectively navy special forces, the type that dealt with things black ops didn't know anything about.

Most magicals were apparently supremely self-aggrandising and self-righteous, not to mention isolationists and completely disconnected from the modern world. The whole forced marriages thing stunk of something done away with in most of the first world countries, only really lingering in Africa and the Middle East where most people took religion far too seriously for their mental health.

The captain snorted, shaking her head even as she booted the new information around so people could cross-reference stupidity. A moment later her phone rang. "Good morning, Captain Megan Jones, Devonport Kanmusu and Schattenjäger Fleet," she said, picking the device up.

"Wow, Megan, that sounds a mouthful," a youthful female voice answered. "What's up with this stuff about magicals that you've got bouncing around?"

Megan smirked, recognising the speaker. "Hey, Eldridge, it's nothing too important, just a group of them local to me apparently being more stupid than most." She shifted, reaching over to take a sip of her soda. "I got a letter… about half hour or so back that basically read like a threat. Apparently the local ones had some issue with an inbred moron and with more morons breeding too close and breeding themselves to death so they decided it'd be a good plan to try and force everyone to marry and pop sprogs. Five years for two or more kids whether or not the person in question is already married and has kids or not." She snorted in amusement, shaking her head as she checked through a few emails she'd gotten back. "I'm betting at least seventy percent refusal rate just from natural inclination against that sort of crap."

"Yeesh… that's nasty. Do you want any of us to come to convince them to leave you alone?" Eldridge asked.

"It's more of a heads up, look-it the stupid… I mean given everything that happens around our bases, some idiocy outside might give people a laugh, though if you or someone else happens to be passing Devonport by in say a week or two, I wouldn't mind the extras to knock sense through thick skulls." Megan frowned, and then smirked as she picked out another email. "Actually, it might be worth being in on the fun, this might get all the way to the throne if the stupid is doing the rounds. Just remember to pack for supernatural and weird creature central if you decide to come over, you know what Devonport seems to attract."

Eldridge snorted in amusement. "Yeah I know, more weirdness than me and Hornext combined most days. We're actually up the coast from you girls in Scarpa at the moment, I'll see if we can get a train ticket down."

"You remember which line Myngs runs?" Megan asked, getting an affirmative answer. "See if you can get a run on that, she's got passenger and troop trains for getting people to and fro, actually about 30-45% cheaper for us over most lines, which probably means she's making a mint off shuffling military personnel about the country, maybe the continent as well. I'll copy you girls in on the response I send them, but I'd better get back to it. Catch you later, Eldridge."

"Yeah, see you in a few days, Megan," Eldridge responded before hanging up.

Shifting in her seat, Megan frowned at the computer as she pulled up a new document – using her official letter template – and started to type out a response.

Dear Ms Lilith B. Crawford, ESQ.

RE: Ministry Decree Article #20995 – Mandatory Marriage Law

I received your "letter" earlier today, and I must say, I've never seen such a waste of paper (parchment?) in my life, and I've been to a base that generates literal mountains of paper. Granted that's a major supply base for naval ports in the eastern hemisphere, so it gets a lot of things passing through its doors that it needs to track.

With regards to this 'demand' that I come in to be married to someone I've never even met. I think you have the wrong Megan Jones. Yes, that is my name. Yes, I do live in Plymouth. No, I am not a witch. I'm a Karas. More to the point, I'm a Royal Navy Captain stationed at HMNB Devonport's Kanmusu and Schattenjäger Fleet. While the combination of names I have might be somewhat uncommon, the names themselves aren't. I believe there were three other 'Megans' and five or more 'Joneses' at my school just in the year I was in, the one above and the one below, just for a start, not counting my twin sister among the latter.

There are, at last count, roughly 65-70 million permanent residents in the United Kingdom, and even if Plymouth doesn't have that amount, there's enough here that even slim odds get more than a few outings.

That aside, I believe the term for this is 'try me, see how much trouble you end up in'. You send anyone to attempt to force things and you'll be lucky if they return alive, much less in one piece. Want to know why forcing things would be an issue?

1) As stated, I'm a Karas, which means I'm the person chosen by a manifestation of the city to keep the peace between the supernatural and natural sides of her inhabitants. Usually this means settling disputes and knocking people over the head, but there are Mikura – mechanical demons that run on blood and eat humans raw – that often need to be destroyed, which I do. With a sword. Some of them have enough armour to make a battleship go green with envy.

2) I'm currently involved in the Royal Navy fighting a war against creatures called Abyssals, corrupted versions of tsukumogami of warships mostly from the first half of the twentieth century, circa 1900-1950. I can and have fought up to cruiser level ones with my own abilities and brought them down. If you're wondering, a cruiser is a ship that weighed – at that time – roughly 5,000-15,000 tonnes and equipped anywhere from 6x 5 inch up to 9x 15 inch naval rifles as their main battery – that's the shell diameter, not the gun length. Think about that.

3) My twin sister is also involved in this war, she's a destroyer shipgirl fully capable of ground bombardment with her main battery guns, which are 5in HE and trained as part of the Special Boat Service, the British Navy version of the better known SAS, she's also fully capable of holding her own against supernatural and is third in command of the local kanmusu fleet.

4) My aunt is the commander of said fleet, and she's a 'five-in-one', though the other portions of her soul are a Blue Mermaid engineer, an Argonian assassin who knows battle magic capable of killing her version of demons, a Spectral Knight that can shape shift and use enchanted battle staffs and a Strike Witch that has been fighting an alien invasion by creatures made mostly of hard light. She can, and has, killed both Abyssals and Mikura herself, and summoned aedra to aid her, not to mention she has a striker pack that lets her fly at Mach 1.6 – that is 1.6 times the speed of sound or just shy of 1220 miles an hour –and carries a 30mm assault cannon. The pack weighs over a tonne, never mind the gun.

5) My twin's sister ships – all seven of them, are all destroyers and pretty close to as capable as she is. The Z-class, or Zulus, are known to attract supernatural and shrug off hits that would leave a battleship crying in a corner.

6) There are also the eight W-class destroyer girls (Wilders), with their quirks. Wizard can actually use magic and has a cave drake as a 'familiar', Whelp has two sea basilisks for pets, Wager looks after a slime ranch that has at least two innately hostile to life slime types (boom and rad – take a guess as to what happens with them), not to mention the tars that show up when they eat one another's dung. Of course that's not even counting the two carragors Kempenfelt owns. Those giants that tried crossing the ocean into Plymouth? They tore them down and tore them apart. Alone.

7) We also recently gained the rest of the eight Minotaur-class cruisers and all four named Lion-class battleships along with HMS Unicorn, the light carrier, and two transferred carriers

8) Along with them, there's UEC Conqueror. She's an assault carrier girl equipped with a tactical missile launcher and plasma cannon in addition to her MANTA and WALRUS compliments.

9) My girlfriend is also in the mix, she's Anna Howell or HMS Umbra, U-class submarine, a descendant of Jack the Ripper, someone who was a scourge on London in the late 19th and really early 20th centuries. Push her at your peril because she will pull out her ancestor's bag of tricks and butcher you if you piss her off. Meaning expect to see your guts spread around for people to look at.

10) There's also two more kanmusu I've not mentioned yet, Devonport herself, who can take you apart and put you back together again. She's patched me up plenty of times. There's also Raven, an airship with a dragon knight as a commander, a wizard as the guy's chief of staff and a demon as a power source. She's also plenty capable of setting up and deploying bases and armies with four generals and four princesses to lead them in addition to the aforementioned dragon knight.

11) Of course, all those points completely ignore the normal naval personnel and marines around the base, of which there is in the region of three thousand of, any of which can kill you flat. Guns can fire anywhere from one to six hundred rounds a minute and are man-portable, non-man-portable guns are often either faster firing, use heavier rounds or both.

As you ought to be able to see, trying to force me into becoming a trophy wife for any magical nitwit is a losing proposition, particularly since this is just Devonport's personnel I've talked about, not even going into the rest of the British kanmusu based out of Alexandria, Portsmouth, Scapa Flow and other locales, the groups outside Britain (including the Destroyer Alliance that my sister is part of along with a couple of long-time friends of hers, one of which is an admiral in her own right, the other, like me and my sister, is a captain) my friends among the various groups dealing with supernatural BS including the Schattenjäger guild and any allied abyssal, spaceship kanmusu, aliens, supernatural creatures and other things.

Long story short, you've got the wrong girl and if you try, you die. I've got enough power at my back that we can probably eradicate your entire subspecies, not to mention a fairly direct chain of command to the Royal Family, who will probably be most interested in the fact you're trying to subvert a member of their armed forces for your own ends and will probably be 'unhappy' about your continued existence if this is the type of 'law' coming from your side of things.

Lose the law and bugger off, or try screwing around and see how screwed you are. Your choice.

Captain Megan Jones

Commander of Supernatural Operations
Kanmusu Fleet Operations
Her Majesty's Naval Base Devonport
Plymouth
PL2 2BG

After retrieving the owl – barely – from the gelatinous jaws of several hunter slimes that had managed to slip their enclosure, and packing them back into it with a few of Kayleigh's former chickens, Megan sent the letter off to wherever it had come from with a sigh.

While it wasn't exactly news that there were hidden societies out there, even ones that should have only been fictional, the fact that this batch of magic using twits thought that they could boss around someone that had never been part of their society was more than a little annoying. Of course, with the amount of weird that was part of her normal life, it wasn't exactly likely to be unheard of that someone would find something weird around.

She snorted to herself as she started back to her office at HMS Drake. The only real question about this mess would be what sort of fallout there would be, and whether it would make the List.

The aurors, when they finally got around to going to Devonport Naval Base two weeks after receiving the letter from their target, were immediately greeted by the sounds of heavy metal music blasting from various speakers as armed men and women rushed around to cut off bouncing balls of goo and several waves of demons while another, much larger pair of monsters, clashed in the bay.

"Come on you crab handed cocksuckers! Is that the best you've got?" a female voice yelled above the melee. "Your father was a ghost crab and your mother was a half-starved imp!" it continued, breaking off into cackles at the shrieks of outrage from a group of monstrous beings.

As the group of aurors watched, the group attacked an armoured woman with their pincers, only to explode in showers of gore a moment later as the woman seemed to teleport past them.

"MEGAN!" another voice called from closer to the water's edge. "STOP PLAYING WITH THE BLOODY IDIOT DEMONS AND KILL THE FUCKING COCKSUCKING, BLOODGULPING CATFISH!" The sound of explosions cut off anything else the other voice might have said for a solid minute.

The time and distraction was long enough that one of the bouncing balls of goo, this one mostly red apart from yellow cracks over its face, to land in the middle of the group and explode, blowing them all off their feet.

It was stunned by the explosion long enough for one of the marines carrying a vacuum of all things, to suck it up before running off to deal with something else.

Faced with the amount of chaos around them, the aurors retreated before anything else could happen.

Blinking herself awake, Megan scowled at finding herself tied in a chair. The last thing she remembered was some ugly akuma getting in her way, asking her name and telling her that she was under arrest, though not why, before things went black.

Testing the ropes, her scowl deepened. "Ly?" she called softly.

"Right here, Karas," a voice answered before a girl that could have passed for her younger sister appeared out of the air in a flash of golden feathers. The girl waved a hand and the ropes fell apart, letting Megan gain her feet.

"Thanks," Megan said, "Any idea what happened or where we are?"

Ly adjusted her flat cap before opening her black jacket and fishing out a familiar talisman, which she passed to Megan. "We're behind some sort of perception filter near the Brownhill Battery. You were attacked by magicals, though it took ten of them to stun you, and they had to hit you at the same time, without your armour." The neon blue haired girl gave Megan a smirk. "Just so you know the other girls aren't particularly happy with them…"

Megan gave Ly a curious look, which was answered with a smug, sadistic grin, before she initiated the change into her armoured form, walking through the runic circle that appeared from the talisman. "Then I guess I will have to show my own displeasure," she said, drawing her sword and using it to slash open the door as an explosion rocked the building.

The first magical she met, the pink frog thing from earlier, started screaming almost as soon as she spotted Megan, sending a green spell her way. Megan raised her sword, deflecting the spell into a wall where it blew a chunk out of the stone and kept advancing. Two more spells both deflected with equal ease saw her close enough to slice the woman's arm off.

Blood splattered the ground as screams of anger turned to pain. Another, horizontal slash and the frog's head bounced off a wall and to the ground with a series of dull thumps.

The eye plates of her helmet turning red, Megan stalked through the building, killing anyone stupid enough to attack her and not run away like they had a demon on their arse.

Commodore Glenn looked over the ruins of what had apparently been a small town or base hidden near Brownhill Battery, ignoring the growls of Helen's caragors as they used one of the more persistent magicals for a chew toy.

"On the one hand, it's good to have you back, Megan," she said, turning to look at her niece. "On the other, we now have to deal with a lot of corpses and the Sea Lords wanted to… talk… to whoever was in charge of this mess so it wouldn't happen again."

Megan snorted, standing in her armour next to her sister. "I say we just take pictures then dump the corpses in an unmarked grave or feed them to the animals at the farm. Farkas and Aela certainly seem to be enjoying their toy."

Glenn scowled at her nieces. "You two do realise that the only reason we were allowed to deal with this rather than the police was because it was one of our own that was kidnapped this time. Without a prisoner we can't find out anything about where they might be hiding or whether there are any others that they've kidnapped," she pointed out. "Next time, take at least a few of them alive so we can give them to the police or MI6, understand?"

"Sir, yes sir!" both girls snapped.

"Good, you're in charge of cleaning this mess up, I need to explain things to the Sea Lords," Glenn said, turning and marching in the direction of one of the cars nearby.