Proliferated Petrification

5- Lost And Found

Amelia was baffled by this latest request from her Aurors. "As many Unspeakables as we can spare? Why?" she demanded.

"We found the Lost and Found," Auror Shacklebolt said, "and it looks like it hasn't been cleaned out for a thousand years."

"Hogwarts has a Lost and Found?" Amelia asked, turning to Dumbledore.

"I'm as surprised as you are," Dumbledore answered. "Normally, the house elves return anything they find if they can."

"What does this Lost and Found look like, Shacklebolt?" she said.

"It's as big as the Great Hall. Maybe bigger. We're worried about going too far into it, but from what we can see from the door, it looks like most of the space is taken up by piles of discarded furniture. I can also see stacks of mouldy books, piles of used cauldrons, cabinets of expired potions ingredients, a lot of student contraband, and pixies breeding in the rafters—and that's only the stuff I can identify."

Naturally, it was the stuff he couldn't identify that was most worrying, and if some of that stuff really was centuries old, there was no telling what could be in there. "Alright, I get the picture," Amelia said and sighed: "I'll go track down Croaker and tell him we need to call some teams away for the search. We'll send them with the first shift tomorrow."

"Got it, boss. We'll mark the spot and meet them here." Shacklebolt's head disappeared from the fireplace.

"First the horcruxes and now this," she muttered. "Not to mention disrupting the Ministry's business for a third day in a row. If we don't have a shake-up in the government after all this, we'll be lucky."

"We must all do the best we can, Amelia," Dumbledore said.

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Amelia entered her office the next morning to find piles of paperwork backed up on her desk. She sighed when she saw them. She'd put off most of the paperwork the last two days and it was quickly coming back to bite her. "Alright, Scrimgeour, what's the situation?" she asked.

Rufus Scrimgeour entered to give her her daily briefing. "Croaker's putting his team together now to check the Lost and Found," he said. "We brought in a bunch of stuff for the Lockhart file from his office. Can you believe he was wearing a wig the whole time?"

"I don't care. What else?"

"Professor McGonagall requested a couple of Unspeakables to investigate the alleged curse on the Defence Professorship."

"Sounds like a good idea to me. Forward it to Croaker. Anything else?"

"We're still building our case against Malfoy, so just the paperwork for the moment."

"Lovely. And refresh my memory: what is all this?"

"This stack, here, is the paperwork for the diversion of resources for the search," Scrimgeour said, pointing to one of the piles on her desk. "This stack is the paperwork for searching the castle and the students' chambers. This one is claims by students for possessions that weren't returned to them. You've got a list of illegal items confiscated from the castle over here. And this is the list of complaints you've got from Fudge as of this morning."

"Right. Keep up the search, then. Notify me of anything important."

"Yes, ma'am."

Scrimgeour left, and Amelia started sifting through her paperwork. The largest piles all just needed the same rubber stamp: there was a damn basilisk spotted at Hogwarts, so yes, they bloody well did have to drop everything and search through everybody's stuff. That was tedious, but not difficult. She set aside the memos from Fudge; he could wait. And she pushed aside the list of illegal items. Most illegal items students were likely to have would be small fish, and she only had staff to spare for the big fish just now.