(this put my memory to the test, trying to remember the villain's name and his backstory. I could have started fresh, but i got a wild hair to get it right. lol)
Robert saw Lily shine when he handed her the key, and when he finally let her in the lab, he saw a light in her face that he rarely ever saw in someone who worked in the St. Mungo's lab simply duplicating the things that the hospital needed. She had passion, a real and rare desire to be in the lab. He could see it, and he could feel it. And that heart that he saw meant more to him than any of the insecurity he could also see. This, he could work with.
"Of course," he smiled when she asked about the copper. He liked her thinking. "Copper cauldrons are some of my favorites. I used to have a nice one here, and one of our aurors believe he could simply open my book and brew one of my potions. He buggered it and split my good copper cauldron completely in half and caught the workbench on fire. Hence, the reason why there are only certain people allowed now in the lab, and that's why I don't actually have a copper pot here right now. It's an excellent choice.
"When you get a chance, you brew me a potion," he told her looking straight at her. He wanted her to see that he did believe in her. She had already proven herself to him, even if perhaps she didn't know how she'd done it. That was irrelevant. Now he needed to see where her skills were. "You pick it. Help yourself to any ingredient you find in here, and put together for me your signature, favorite potion--something that you think shows me your best skills in some area, whether you're showing me knowledge, or technique or finesse or your own creativity. That's all up to you. It isn't a job interview, understand? You've got the job already, and I'm turning you loose to work in this lab or at the farm, either one. I'll give you a key to the farm too. You come and go as you want. I just want to see where your strong suits are, so show me your chops."
"The story of our enemy is goes back longer than our agency has been around," Kate told Teddy. "We're dealing with a family named Gelding--a powerful, wizarding criminal family with a large scale business that isn't afraid to extend it's tendrils all over the wizarding world from one end to the other. They're into making money in all sorts of ways, but over the last two generations, they've focused in pretty tightly, believe it or not, on making muggle money. Think about it--muggle money is almost endless. Most wizards don't even think about muggle money, and it's easy to get it converted to our currency. And, in point of fact, it goes almost completely unchecked because of the universal prohibition in letting muggles know about our world. It ties our hands from creating a cooperative agreement with the muggles. The Geldings do it on an unabashed basis because it's the key to what makes their operation work.
"What they do is reprehensible," Kate continued. "They either take wizarding children or they manage to find the most desperate wizards and witches and make deals by giving them a payoff of some sort for their children, almost always a pitiable sum. That's why we can't return some of our rescued children--their parents have sold them to Gelding who eases any trace that the child exists. The Geldings prefer to get children who are just starting to come into their magic, and they only teach them the few spells they want the children to know, and then they make lucrative deals with equally greedy muggles and place the children with them. The job of the children is use what little magic they know, working for the muggles making them wealthy and passing on the majority of the money they make back into the ones who placed the children there. We have reason to think that when the children reach a certain age, they are administered either a potion or spell that blocks that child's magic on a long term basis, and then they are turned out into the muggle world to live out their lives as muggles. That allows another child to be placed into that same muggle home, creating turnover opportunities."
"They're slippery and nigh onto impossible to catch," Robert sighed. "We damage them on a regular basis, but they always somehow survive and live to try my patience another day. There are times it does feel like we're one little crew battling an enormous kraken. Thomas Gelding, the man who heads their operation now is the grandson of Jeremiah Gelding, the man who started it. Jeremiah was a squib who was deeply bitter about not having magical powers, so he made up his mind to take full advantage of his knowledge of the muggle world, and it was his twisted thinking that came up with this. He was an old man by the time that we knew of him at all back in the early days, and he was in the process then of turning the reins over to his son, Isadore, a man who was not a squib like his father. Isadore inherited the magic his father had not, but he had been well indoctrinated into the family business and the lure of big money. Jeremiah died twenty years ago or longer--I'd have to double check the dates, and Isadore died about ten years ago..."
"Tell them the full truth," Kate said to Robert. "Don't sugar coat it. They don't need it. Robert killed Isadore to save one of our other operatives. Robert used to go out on each and every extraction we did in those days because the design and command of those missions had fallen to him. He and Michael and I were the only founding members left. It was a serious blow to them that night, and now they hate everything Robert stands for. He has to be a good deal more selective now on whether he dares to go out or not, and if he does, he nearly always has to use something like polyjuice to do it, and that just isn't healthy for him to have to do over and over multiple times, year after year. I'm not willing to have him tax his body like that. I plan on both him and me living very long lives and growing completely ancient together even by wizard standards."
"Ancient?" Robert frowned. "Do we really want to be ancient? At any rate, we're dealing now with Thom Gelding, who is very bitter that I killed his father. If there is a good side, he is not quite as gifted with IQ points as Isadore, and he's hot tempered and impulsive. He likes to live large, and that sort of ostentatiousness makes him more visible and, at times, more careless. That leads him to be more prone to making small mistakes that can give us some little openings, and so far, we've been able to watch him for every little crack we can find and we use those to get more children back, which of course only yanks his chain a bit harder. It's been a bit of a back and forth contest, and, since they're not operating in England, I can't do much about it in the way I'd like. We could wrestle some of the tendrils of the thing but in order to shut them down for good, we need to hit the beast right in its filthy core, which is here. Frustrates the daylights out of me, but that's the nutshell version of it all. Part of the obstacle is that for any of the wizarding governments to acknowledge that Gelding's operation even exists means that they would have to admit that the primary directives of wizarding law that prohibit muggles from knowing that magic exists has been openly violated and has been allowed to continue to be violated for nigh onto fifty years, and that would cause a massive panic in our world--a panic that they think they can avoid by simply turning a blind eye to Gelding completely. Obviously, I can't settle for that because it also turns a blind eye on the children, and I won't ever do that. I can't. It isn't in me to leave them behind."