Barnabus Cuffe was a thoroughly normal-looking wizard. It was like he was either exceedingly boring and chose to get involved with journalism because he needed to add as much excitement to his life as possible, or in his many years of being in the business, he had found ways to keep himself out of the news. It had been established many times that the paper was in no way owned by the kinds of families that would support the Death Eaters, and the paper remained decidedly private. The published results of the ownership and leadership of the Daily Prophet indicated that it was all a careful balance of rocking the boat the one way whenever it rocked the other way, and in that sense, maintaining a sense of stability.

"What the hell is this?" Ron asked, annoyed at the fact that there was no apparent way into the man's home. They had intended to leave a letter there, perhaps on the bottom of a stack of mail, but there seemed to be no door, and no windows, but only as they approached.

"We apparated as close to it as we could," Harry muttered, casting some standard detection charms. "Arcanum Revelio. That's not getting it either. We could put it in a stack and hope he takes it inside."

"I'll stay here and confund him when he gets back," Ron decided. He had taken his turn with looking into dark magic and he it was not long before he revealed that he did not like the way it made him feel about himself. "The others need you."

"Right."

Including the recruits, they had about seven teams all over London, depending on what he could call a team. The mission was a particularly delicate operation, because the more they wanted it to look like they never had a hand on it, the more hands they had to have on it. Of course, their involvement could be exposed, even mere moments later, if the press had some kind of recourse against their deception, but if all that happened was that the public trusted the mainstream publication less, the mission would be something close to successful.

"Fill me in, Susan," he said, noticing she was not even phased when he apparated right next to her. It was where he was expected to appear, after all. They had discovered that a lower-ranking Death Eater named Gibbon had taken residence in a muggle house in the Outskirts, oddly enough close to where Hermione lived. Particularly unfortunately, it meant that they had to let the adult recruits cast all the spells.

"He's home, and he knows we're here, but he can't do anything right now. In his position, I would be trying to contact the others for backup, but he might not have a way of doing that without our noticing and being able to do something about it. If his personal safety is not a priority for his master, then it stands to reason he might not be able to use his mark, or he might get in worse trouble for doing so. Time is on his side, though. If the others realize he's missing, they'll come here looking for him."

Most likely, the reason he was there was to maintain cover and effectively find out how muggles lived and how to inflict as much damage as they could without making a secrecy issue of it. Was that just the punishment for never taking Muggle Studies in Hogwarts? In all probability, he was going to help coordinate their attacks on muggles, or at least inform the strategic decisions, keeping an ear to the ground for Secrecy concerns. They could not, after all, occupy entire departments of the Ministry if they killed the golden goose.

"Don't kill him."

"We know. This whole thing is wasted if he dies. We're still prioritizing our own lives, though. There are other Death Eaters." She frowned. "You should be getting to-"

It was his turn to say that he knew, but he supposed he had started it. Without another word, he disappeared to join the others. Hermione and Terry were in Flourish and Blotts, which apparently sold more than school books, and he could curse his youthful tunnel vision, but he had been taking in a lot at the time, and it was hard to blame his former self for much of anything. The two of them were hard at work scanning the place and secretly reading.

"I mean, this is technically stealing, but we wouldn't be allowed to have this even if we produced the gold," she whispered as he entered the store, noting that the patrons had been carefully confunded, as had been the plan. The two most bookish of the DA had been sent to a glass case of ancient books that were on sale for absurdly high prices, more as trophies for the bookstore than something they expected anyone to buy.

"We'll pay them for their trouble after the war," Harry said, surprising her a little. She had used some protective charms to deter anyone else from coming in, but he had enough experience with them that he could power through the anxiety of the possibility that the oven had been left on at home. "Are we close to anything?"

"No, not really," Terry said, shaking his head. "I'll say this, though. Divination wasn't my subject, but these prophecies are totally different. We're getting the context for the one that concerns you and I'm honestly shocked. I can't believe the Death Eaters haven't read this... or have they?"

"There are countless references to pure bloods," Hermione said, sighing. "I hate to say it, but I think they figured they had the important part down, and then they ignored the rest. They knew that they were special, and that they were going to be fine no matter what, so, in a way, there wasn't anything else they needed to read. If the whole thing was true, then they could act like they were just so confident in it, and if the whole thing was false, then they could just ignore it."

"References to pure bloods?" he asked. "That doesn't sound like much. What does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean all that much. They were the ones who wrote a lot of the stories, but... I mean, if you read them, they don't portray the pure bloods terribly well. Everything they're given, like the gift of magic, they don't do anything with it. They don't do well with a hands-on or a hands-off approach. There are also a lot of other people involved in the stories, sometimes as the heroes."

"Wait, sorry, the gift of magic? Does this book say that we got it for free at some point? I thought it was something we studied."

"Well, that's how a lot of people act about it," she said, sighing. "As little as I like it, it's probably the introduction of people from nonmagical society. Wizards didn't have a concept of science, of discovering something that just existed and figuring out how it worked."

"I have to keep moving," he said after a moment. "I'll leave you to it. Technically, this is the only thing that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the mission, so I can't time your exit-"

"We'll take care of it," Terry said, not looking up. "Maybe this isn't related to what you're doing, but we needed the help. We needed you to distract everyone."

"Speaking of-"

He apparated again, and went to Gringotts, where two elements of the distraction team were hard at work. Michael and Ernie had been tasked with causing as much of a disturbance as possible without getting caught. While he could not see them, he could see the effects of their actions; already there were crowds of witches and wizards gathering here and there. It was hard to say how they were doing, but he had basically no choice but to apparate to the next point, where Neville and Daphne were working together. Though the former had never been in the muggle world before, except to get on the Hogwarts Express, but he had a way about him that was never suspicious at all. If anything, people who spoke with him felt the need to justify herself. His partner seemed to be enjoying herself.

"How goes it?" he asked.

"I'm just trying to contain her," Neville admitted. His expression looked harried. "She gets this look of absolute glee on her face every so often. I can only think that she's causing drama and telling everyone lies about each other."

There were a bunch of arguments all over the place. The muggle police were breaking up fights. Most likely, the argument was going to be the talk of the town, at least for a moment. He honestly had no idea if the Obliviators would ever get summoned to handle the problem; technically, the whole thing could be explained without magic, and he was sure they would come up with something.

"Daphne, we're not doing this because we want to hurt people."

"Our objective is to cause trouble. I'm causing as much as possible. What does it matter if I find it fun?"

"Your partner has virtually no knowledge of the mind arts."

"It's true. I can barely shield my own head."

"The fact that he can tell you're doing it because you're enjoying it is a problem," Harry said, sighing a bit. It was somewhat heartening that Neville trusted him so much that he would immediately back him up in an argument, but it felt like his old self-deprecating streak again. "You might not have grown up around muggles, and you might see them as a curiosity, or something else, but just take a minute to be with them and you'll see that they're all human. They experience genuine suffering." He thought back to people who had been kind to him when he lived with the Dursleys.

"I've been inside their heads," she said, her expression disappearing. "They couldn't be any less interesting if they tried. They are, in some sense, like we are, but that's not high praise, exactly. If it were half so easy, I would be doing the same with witches and wizards and I doubt the results would be any different."

"Then you need to understand what you're doing to them, if it's really not a matter of whether or not they can use magic," Neville said. "Don't use the mind arts, just walk among them. Listen to the way that they're shouting at each other."

Harry did not follow Daphne, but he could tune into the conversation right next to them and essentially this woman's single worst fear, that her husband was cheating, had been broached as a subject in the conversation, or she thought it had; she thought she just heard the word 'mistress'. The witch frowned as she turned back to them.

"Whether or not what you're doing is harmful doesn't depend on how interesting or important the victim is. The life of even an innocent person under the Imperius is effectively forfeit, and I can't ask you not to kill someone like that. I can't even ask you not to put him under your own spell and use him as a human shield. The only kind of meaningful standard there is- something that probably wouldn't hold up if we were trying to stretch this out to a larger fighting force- is just that you shouldn't use any strictly bad motivations when inflicting harm on someone else. If you can't help doing it out of fear, then don't do it out of malice."

"Is that what Terry told you?"

"It's what we agreed. I was chuffed to learn he had learned basically the same thing from his book, but it was already decided."

Daphne frowned, but that was it. She was not heartless, he knew; it just worked out better for her in most cases not to reveal what she was feeling. With the message received, there was nothing to do but get back to Ron. Technically, he could check on some of the others, but he had to learn to trust them, even though he was essentially their communication, apart from some of the recruits.

"Sergeant Westenberg," he said, greeting the much older but technically junior officer as he was helping break into the home of Barnabus Cuffe. "You've seen this before in your time as a Hit Wizard?"

"It's a modification of an old trick. You'd never get it if you were just doing what they did to unravel this thirty years ago, but you'd probably think it was just because the charm was being finicky. There's a... oh, I won't get into it. It's more complicated than it looks, and the idea is to keep a record of everyone who comes through rather than kill intruders. Based on your profile, I would guess he wouldn't like the look of that."

"That makes sense."

Almost immediately, a door appeared and they were granted ingress as it was explained to them that breaking the record keeping mechanism was all they needed to do to keep the editor from realizing they had been there. Generally, home intruders thought that once they were past the security, they were golden, and if there was something that could not be undone from the outside, then there was no helping it. Technically, they could keep the house from recording their entry and exodus, but it was much simpler just to erase themselves from the ledger, which would be inside the house. They planted the letter under a huge stack of already read, opened envelopes, just after using a severing charm to cut through it to make it look like it had been opened. Ron found the guest ledger.

"How do we know it isn't visible anywhere else?" he asked. "He could use a Protean Charm and see it from work."

"Not everyone's got a girlfriend like yours," Harry said. "I'm betting he wouldn't want that many records, though, because he might want to be able to invite someone over to talk at his house, and he wouldn't want anyone else to be able to find out about that. Sometimes newspapers promise not to reveal the names of their contacts as part of an interview."

"I reckon that's it," Ron said, levitating the book over to Westenberg, who removed their names. "Hermione also said his desk at work was always clean, so he probably expects it to be searched. This is where all the secret stuff is, and that's probably part of why he goes through so much trouble with the security."

"Let's get out of here," the Sergeant suggested. "He might not be back for hours, but the neighbors might have heard something."

No one disagreed. They left the way that they came in, confident that they would not be put back on the ledger on the way out. After all, Cuffe needed some way to offer confidentiality to his guests, and it would be even better if he could remove it in front of them. The best thing to do at the moment was to rejoin the others, at least those setting up a defensive line of sorts.

"Dragon Marshals, thank Merlin-" Blaise said, looking a bit harried. The recruits were proving to be a handful, and he was having to organize them against the chance of Death Eaters and agents of the Ministry getting called in unexpectedly. It was hard to say what exactly he was guarding and which direction from which he needed to guard, so really what they needed to do was fan out, get information, reconvene, and then go on the aggressive, but active resistance was dangerous and probably not strictly necessary. He had been chosen only because he could apparate, which would not set off the Trace, even in muggle areas.

"I'll take over from here," Ron said.

"I hope Sergeant Westenberg wants to lend his experience as well," the Boomslang General said. Out of all the cards he kept close to his chest, one thing that was no secret was that he wanted to transition to more adults being in charge. Technically, Hermione was an adult and most everyone else was not far behind, but he wanted the experience to line up with the authority.

"You'll be in good hands," the older wizard said before filing into the ranks. It spoke to his humility that he was willing to bow to the chosen system of authority of the resistance movement; he seemed to see Harry as more than a symbol.

"I have to be moving on," Harry said. "I was expecting to take you with me."

"I look forward to nothing more than leaving this in better hands," Blaise said, taking his hand before they apparated back to where he met Susan. Because he could only apparate to places, and not people, he was relying on her to stay put, but it seemed like duty called her forward. They ran straight into the house, not seeing anyone around, and found that their allies had been frozen in crystals. A record player was bouncing up and down as it played a record and they heard a cackle from upstairs.

"Reducto," he incanted right as he started feeling a stiffness in his legs. The record player exploded with a ghastly whine like a spirit being let out, but his subordinate was already running up the stairs as the crystals cracked. He heard the incantation for the Imperius curse and his only thought was to break the concentration of the enemy from below. Using the Human Reveal Charm, there were too many targets for him to isolate the enemy, but he doubted his friend would miss the target; if he destabilized everyone in the room, he could give Blaise the advantage he needed. "Relashio. Relashio. Relashio."

The Revulsion Jinx took the form of purple sparks that hit the target through a hole in the floor created by his earlier Reductor Curse. It would have been well advised for the Boomslang General to stay with him, but he could be reprimanded for that later. He went down and gave the all-clear right as the first crystal cracked properly and Susan took a long breath on the ground, trying not to hyperventilate.

"Are you quite all right?" he asked, getting down on a knee. Other imprisonment crystals were cracking more.

"I... I can't believe I failed- if we had only gone in three at a time, we could have seen what was wrong with that record player-"

"We didn't give you any intel suggesting he had such a powerful magical artefact." He took a breath. "What we had suggested he wasn't the strongest, and it made sense to rush him all at once. He had just thought of that, and that was something we hadn't considered."

"The responsibility still falls on me, Dragon Marshal. I have to resign for this. At the very least I have to be reprimanded."

"You'll get a reprimand; we need you to help get this situation under control so that the muggles don't know what's going on here. That's the priority right now. Get those tears off your face and straighten this mess up; that's an order."

"Yes, sir."

Blaise gave him a weird look, but he had the Death Eater under his spell.

"It's the kind of motivation that some people prefer," he muttered. "What works for you isn't what works for everyone."

"I see. No matter. I assume the rest of our plan does not change."

"That's correct. We'll just have to get it done without as much backup. The escort team will be with you. I'll need to monitor this under the cloak-"

"Harry, even then it's too dangerous. They might not have a spell that can point out right where you are, but they know that, and they'll have other ways of checking. The only way to get in close is to reassign Daphne like in option three, but you said we weren't going to use option three-"

"I said there was a decent chance we wouldn't. We just haven't been lucky so far-" Another crystal cracked and Michael spilled out. To his credit, he pretty much immediately started trying to heal a recruit who had been injured.

"We haven't been lucky so far and you're not taking that as a bad sign?"

"I didn't really pay attention in Divination, sorry."