the definition of family

"You are a brave woman," Kate said to Lily. "And if you can keep up with his madcap potions ideas, then you are a far better potions assistant that I am for him."

"She only comes down to the lab when I am desperate to chop up bushel baskets of new plants," Robert told her. "She can do that, but I am not likely to let her brew much of any potion. It is not her forte. I trust her implicitly in the kitchen, but in the lab? I'd rather not."

"I passed all my potions classes with Outstandings, I'll have you know," Kate frowned.

"And that was a millennium ago," Robert teased her.  Kate rolled her eyes.

"He is such a boy sometimes," she said. "You want to see how much of a boy he is? Let me show you something." She walked out of the hothouse, motioning them to follow her. Robert glanced at Khaat, wondering what Kate was on about, and Khaat shrugged her shoulders, without a clue. Kate went over to the weapons room, opened it up and walked in, turning on the lights. The shelves were chockablock with wands, staffs, various types of cloaks and boots, equipment belts, wand holsters, handcuffs, and all manner of blades. In addition there were jars upon jars of little cherry-sized fabric balls, with several jars of fabric balls that were a bit larger, about the size of tangerines, and, then there were two large crates in the corner. She took one of the jars of the little balls down and opened it and got out a few of the fabric balls.

"Oh. Those," Robert said. "They have purpose."

"They didn't until Angus found them," Kate said. She gave one to Teddy and one to Lily .

"They're fun," Robert smiled. Khaat looked at him and saw pure boyish mischief on his face. Her mother was right. He did have a bit of a boy still within him. She began to see that perhaps Remus's tales of the mischief they both got into might not have been purely fabricated after all.

"Stand over here," Kate motioned to them to stand on one side of the room. "Now, they're noisy, so just be warned. Chuck them over against the far wall." She hurled her little fabric ball over so it hit the floor right against the far wall. It blew up with a flash and a bang, and a completely opague cloud of smoke rose up from the floor. Khaat expected Abbey to be startled enough to cry, but she laughed and clapped.

"More!" Abbey said, fascinated.

"It's a smokescreen!" Khaat said.

"It is indeed," Robert said. "They're called cherry bombs. Small enough to fit a lot of them in your pocket. I made them for a Hogsmeade Halloween party one year, and I had some leftovers. Angus found them, brought them here, and I've been making them ever since. Our agents seem to like them quite a lot, and they make for some dandy pranks."

"Give me one," Robert told Kate. She passed one to him and Robert made a pretense of letting Abbey throw one but he made sure he tossed it to the other side of the room. She was delighted by the bang it made and the bright flash of colored sparks.

"You see the larger ones behind you? They don't fit in your pocket," Kate said, pointing to the tangerine sized.

"Depends on the size of your pocket," Robert teased, "But they'll usually clear a room in under fifteen seconds."

"And those two crates? They make no sense at all," Kate said. She lifted the lids on them to show two large fabric pumpkins.

"There are only two of them," Robert sighed.

"There are only two because I would not let you make three," Kate said. "I cannot imagine how big of a cloud those will produce." Robert cast a particularly rogueish grin at them. Those were his favorites. He had done a rough calculation of how big a smokescreen it would make, but he hadn't actually tried it.

"You're not even out of Hogwarts yet, and he's going to be teaching you pyrotechnics," Kate looked at Lily. "You might not want to tell your potions professor about what you're learning."

"I'm sure this isn't the first little bit of smoke and noise you've seen," Robert looked at Lily, not concerned about her. "At any rate, this is where the replacement equipment is for the agents. Clothing, especially mission wear, is upstairs near their sleeping quarters. If you damage or lose something, not to worry, its why we have this room, so you can get things replaced quickly. I want eventually, to add some different sizes of first aid kits so that our agents have them at the ready, and I'm certainly interested in any ideas either of you have or any help you can give towards it. Very few of our agents are healers, so the kits, hopefully, would hold them until they can get back here to us."

"A fair question," Robert looked at Teddy. "How much danger they're in generally becomes proportionately increased with how many other people are involved. Usually one or two of our agents can slip in and back out of a place and not be seen or caught. However, our enemy is organized too, and they have multiple operatives and locations. There are times when a relatively large number of what they refer to as 'merchandise' is moved at one time. For us, those operations are large scale and require not only a large number of agents but it also requires us to be able to move large numbers of people without getting someone hurt or killed and without our location being compromised. The larger the risk, the more the need is for weapons or all kinds of different distractions. We're having to be more creative with those things all the time." He pulled a key ring out of his pocket and looked through his keys and started work to remove a key from his key ring.

"We are fortunate," he continued, "to have some agents who are well trained and experienced extraction specialists, some of them are either current or former aurors or Unspeakables, but you never heard me say that. When we have no choice but to remove someone from a dangerous situation--that's what's known in the espionage world as an extraction, and there are people who particularly specialize in knowing do those sorts of missions. Of anything we do, the large scale extraction operations are by far the most dangerous." He tried to shield his own emotions well, but even so, Robert could not completely hold back his anger and revulsion at the practices he'd come up against so many times over the years. "And in those cases we can be rescuing sometimes 20 or 30 frightened children--usually of all sorts of ages--and trying to do it quickly and without injury. When those large scale operations happen, it's almost always at night because that's when our enemy is moving, and it's an all hands on deck thing. We need agents in the field, and we need agents here. Those operations are always as well planned and coordinated as we can make them, and it can be a long and very busy night. We all hold our collective breaths until everyone is back safe and sound."

Changing subjects, he turned to Lily. "Before I forget to give this to you, I want to give you this." He handed her the key. "This key will open the door of the hothouse and the potions lab. The only other people that have keys to the lab are Brian, Kate, Angus, and me. Brian and Angus do not brew potions. They only have keys because of their position in the organization and in their occasional need to see if we have a certain potion on hand. The only potions makers in this operation are me and you. I think the ingredients stores are in good shape, but if we're missing something, let me know, and we'll get it. And, you'll soon be able to get those things yourself. I'm glad you're interested in healing potions, and I can help you polish your skills with those since I brew most of the ones used at St. Mungo's. We do use a fair amount of things here, too. I have a book of the formulas we need, and it's laying on the workbench in the lab. I've made little sidebar notes as I've used them to note down any special tips or tricks in each formula. It should help you if you need it. There's a separate book that has not only an inventory of equipment and ingredients but also a list of what potions we already keep at the ready. You're welcome use my lab at the farm too. It carries some of the more oddball ingredients there, so you might enjoy some of those things too. Shall we go see the lab?"

He walked across the hall and opened the door to the lab, the place that he often found himself spending time in. He flicked on the lights, wondering how many hundreds of hours he'd spent here over the years, and he was getting the feeling that Lily was going to be making this a home away from home as well, just like he had done. It was what he needed her to do. He needed her to take some leadership of this portion of the operation because he had so many other irons in the fire and in so many different places. He needed to be able to leave this in very capable hands, and he had a good feeling about her.

The labs he worked in now, whether it was here or home or St Mungos, were quite a bit different from the academic lab in Hogwarts, or at least from what he remembered the school's lab being. This was not a dark, ominous looking teaching lab. This was a workhorse of a lab. It was designed for one or two people to work quite comfortably in, with a lot of room, well organized, impeccably clean, and well lit with stained glass magical lamps. The shelves were backlit, causing the jars to look like hundreds of additional colored lights. There were some lush hanging plants in front of the cellar windows, partly to conceal the lab and partly to give a sense of life to the place. There was a wizarding radio on the far corner of the worktable because music helped to drive away the silence, especially in the wee hours when the nights got long. On the outer wall of the room were the shelves of cauldrons and equipment and a large farmhouse sink for all the washing up, with a counter and a pot for coffee and one for tea, with a hanging rack of some of Kate's colorful pottery mugs. There were two trash bins, one near the sink, and the smaller one was built into the workbench. A handy hole in the surface of the workbench allowed the entire bench to be cleaned off with a mere swipe of a bench scraper, straight into the bin. On another wall was a smallish Victorian era fireplace with a cast iron grate that was still in working order. It could easily drive off any winter damp and cold, and in front of it were two deep and comfortable wing chairs and a somewhat worn Persian rug for those periodic breaks that every potions maker desperately needed. Robert thought it was a rather pleasant space, if any potions lab could be considered pleasant.

"All he needs is a cot and a shower, and I'd lose him down here for weeks," Kate said. "Feel free to update this if you need to, Lily. Put your own touches to it."

(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."

(Awesome, because Robert wants to get into the training room with Teddy and spar with him, and he wants to get into the lab with Lily. And all of mine want to go on this upcoming night mission to round up kiddos. lol)

"Well, you're right, of course," Robert said to Teddy, "and corruption being what it is, I am equally sure that there is some element of corruption in al the wizarding governments regarding the prime directive and how secure it is or isn't, and the motivations around it, both pro and con, are surely, endless, as they have always been. In my own humble opinion, I've always thought that how long our world stays secret is only a matter of time. Eventually, if we are wise, the two worlds will have to learn how to co-exist in some form or another." He heard the tension in Teddy's voice and the need for some sort of reassurance that the battle could be won. Robert didn't have a doubt about that. Regardless of how much time it too, they would win, and the children would be rid of people like Tom Gelding.

"The situation with Gelding isn't as desperate as it seems. Remember, we have the advantage at this point," Robert reminded Teddy. "Tom Gelding is interested in looking like he has the world by the horns. He lives exorbitantly so he can flash money and all kinds of accoutrements of wealth. That's what motivates him. His father and grandfather were only motivated by bitterness and rage. This guy? Not so much. His ancestors were more cunning, and, fortunately for us, Tom Gelding has made a serious mistake. He's been entirely too open about where this particular auction is going to take place. Our intelligence says that he has been caught bragging to too many people that I am too old to be any sort of force to be reckoned with." Robert laughed. "I truly don't know which misstep was the most foolhardy. He truly has no clue that I'm about to take him to task in a way he's never considered. This mission that's coming up this weekend is his most ambitious yet, and so we have to minimally match him one for one on it. I'd prefer to do better, though. That's why you're getting this quick little crash course in espionage. One of Brian's informants says that there could be as many as 40 or 50 children that could be moved from our world to the muggle world in a single night. Gelding's never tried to move that many before, and it will be a hard thing to accomplish. And,yes, it will be equally hard for us to extradite that many and do it quickly and safely, but we will try because it's only way out for those kids. Without us, they have no way out, so yes, we will be there."

He took a breath and then exhaled slowly, needing a pause for himself and that strategic part of his brain that had been already working, strategizing, mapping out the event site and moving units and agents around in that site. He noticed Abbey was getting quite restless now with him only standing in one spot. He was sorely trying the patience of a three year old. Khaat saw her squirming and she reached in her pocket and got out one of Teddy's cookies and gave it to her. Abbey was never going to be a child who refused a cookie. She took it and immediately settled again with the cookie, happily munching away and dropping crumbs on Robert who had more important things to consider than cookie crumbs.

"Good," Robert said to Lily, satisfied with her desire to keep everyone safe and her drive to start in right away. "The notebooks in this lab are only the formulas we use the most. If you want to research something else, I would suggest either Hogwarts' library or my own library at the farm. You haven't seen that yet."

"He has a library that is three floors of books, and probably between a third and a half of those books are potions related books," Khaat told Lily. "Most people are bored stiff with a library full of that many potions books, but i have a feeling you aren't going to be so put off by it."

Kate reached in her pocket and got out a key on a keychain with a small silver doxy charm.

"Oh, don't give her that one," Robert frowned at Kate.

"It'll be fine. He's enchanted, not stupid. You worry too much," Kate said. She looked at the little doxy. "Behave yourself now. You are a gift to someone new, so don't bite her."  The little charm made a little chirping sound.

"If you bite her one time, I will take all your teeth out," Robert told the little doxy who promptly stuck out its tongue at Robert and blew raspberries at him.

"He's enchanted to not be venomous," Kate told Lily, "but his teeth are sharp. If he does bite you it will give you quite a pinch. When he gets to like you, he's liable to bite anyone else but you that tries to pick him up, just so you know. Your farm key." She handed the key chain to Lily.

"A friend of mine who sometimes rather likes practical jokes gave me that keychain some years ago," Robert said, "after he had enchanted the thing, and Kate took a liking to it. I had other plans for it, but Kate rescued it and it seems to like her. If it gives you trouble, you let us know straight away."

"Just let him know you mean business and he'll be fine, Dear," Kate told Lily.