Order Only: Private message to Cedric Diggory and Aurora Sinistra

[alt_rachel]

Cedric, where are you right now? If you're not within a Fidelius zone, get into one. (F, not Neo-F.) Apparently the DEMLE has been ordered to apprehend you because they think you're the Dover Secret Keeper.

I'm going to send Ron or one of the other Albion Aurors or Enforcers over to get some of your hair. We can certainly use their interest in you to bait a trap, but I'm not baiting it with real bait. Unless you really want to volunteer, in which case I'll come by and we can talk.

Aurora, the DEs think that they can bring down the wards by sacrificing Seamus Finnigan. Can they? Just how messy would the results be?

Comments

[alt_sinistra]

I'm in Dover already. (And Cedric is around here somewhere, though not right with me at the moment.)

If we hadn't removed the Ireland wards, they could have sacrificed Seamus, and it would probably have worked. That's a part of why we went ahead as quickly as we did.

For values of probably that would have depended on if they could make a ritual that worked (just killing him might have worked, but maybe only temporarily? I'm not exactly an expert on Dark ritual magic, I'm just the best we've got, so some of this is guesswork, and I was focusing on the parts about undoing it without killing people.)

The original ritual, it was Bella and Rod, and then Lucius, Tosha, Barty, Rookwood, Stephen Rosier. And all but the first two are dead, and while I'd never ever underestimate what Bella and Rod know, they're both more about other kinds of Dark magic, and not so much the ritual parts.

But now? Give me a minute, want to check a couple of things in my notes. Also, give you a couple of thoughts about tonight.

[alt_cedric]

I'm in Dover. At the floos. Happy to donate hair. Do we know if anyone polyjuiced into me would have use of their arm? It should be checked before any sort of emergency situation.

If they are targeting me, my family should be brought into protection. Either fidelius the entire property or have them come to the castle. If they are brought to the castle someone should take Jenni aside and assess more thoroughly her situation. I know they are paying her now, I made absolutely sure of that, but I'm not completely positive that they made it fully clear she can leave and get a wand and training. I don't know what she wants. My attempts at talking to her weren't particularly successful.

[alt_sinistra]

Ok. Current wards.

I don't know for sure what will happen after we do the switchover tonight. Insert my potted comment on 'this is all stuff no one's done before' here. We'll know a lot more later this evening when we can get readings, and I'll update as soon as I have something more definite.

Anyway. They also don't know what they're doing. I'm fairly sure Rookwood was one of the only people who knew details about all three sets, and I'm also pretty sure he was either ignoring details about parts he wasn't interested in or a lot more intermittently senile than people realised a lot earlier, or probably both.

Once we make the switch tonight, it's possible that killing Seamus would make a difference, but it's more killing anyone would make a difference, because enough death magic does weird things to wards. The Octoboros wards are based on rune and arithmantic models, not ritual magic, but - could they take out an individual stone that way? Maybe.

It would really really be a bad idea, though. There are lots of reasons we're not just taking down all the wards at once, some of them political, some of them practical.

But some of them are about how if we don't have a way to rebalance the energy flows of the country - the ley lines - we're looking at Atlantis. Or at least Ys. And that would affect not just us in Albion (and I'm biased, but that would be bad, we have spent too much trying to save Albion to be drowned) but also France and the Netherlands and Scandinavia and all sorts of other places.

So our hope - and our models - are that we rebalance things using our 9th stone on the Octoboros, and then take down the 83 wards in a way that is at least a little controlled. But then it will take some time for all of those energies to balance out. And we don't know yet what that will look like.

Taking out the wards while that's still going on? Likely extremely bad for a whole lot of people. Probably especially whoever actually tries.

After it settles, it's a little more complicated, but I'd expect that'd be a few weeks, at the very least, and it could be months. Maybe years

[alt_sinistra]

Last part, I promise. Writing fast, not so much editing. Tonight. I passed this along before, but one more time so it's all in one place:

- The switch will be at 7:56 precisely. Cecilia and I have coordinated watches. Both of us have advance prep to do, so we may not see notes to us after 6, but Evelyn or Jeremy or Septima can all get hold of someone who can tell us.

- Ireland is going to be outside the Octoboros wards, and cut off from the rest of the British Isles again.

We should be able to establish a connection through the wards, like at Dover, eventually, but we won't know how long it'll take for the Octoboros to settle until we get to the other side of the switch tonight.

- If you can manage to avoid having your Aurors and Enforcers and so on doing anything terribly complicated between 7:50 and 8pm tonight, that would probably be good. Magic everywhere may be rather odd.

- Current models give substantial preference to the notice-me-not and other area effects lingering for a bit, but it's not certain. I think this got communicated to people over there, but right now I'm not sure, and I can't find my notes about it.

- Floo and portkeys will stop working again when we do the switch. I strongly suggest people avoid taking them after 7:50 tonight. (I've asked Lee to put out a warning on the radio, vague, 'unexpected effects due to celestial conjunctions'.) If everything goes well, we will have revised coordinates very quickly, but we'll need to do some spot checks around the country to confirm.

- We expect there will be flares of magic, most likely near the Octoboros points and along the major connecting leys, but we have no idea what.

- There may be more earthquakes. All over. Or there might not be. Models suggest worse as you go away from Dover, so possibly worst in Scotland and Ireland.

- Between 7:50 and 8pm would be a really really bad time for the other side to try and do anything large and complicated to interfere, but I guess we just sort of have to trust that they won't pick those particular ten minutes.