A Badgers Love

Chapter 6

Senior Undersecretary Attempts Murder of Boy-Who-Lived

By: Bernadette Tooflower

It had started out as such a normal day at the Ministry of Magic. Witches and wizards coming and going to either their jobs, to visit someone they knew, or to file various forms for one reason or another. Imagine their surprise when Amelia Bones, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement arrived with half a dozen aurors and our very own Senior Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic, Delores Jane Umbridge, bound like a common criminal.

I have no need to imagine it, as I was there to witness the entire thing.

As Madam Bones and her aurors escorted Madam Umbridge through the Ministry atrium, they were stopped by the Minister for Magic himself, Cornelius Fudge, demanding to know what was going on and for Madam Umbridge to be released. Madam Bones declined his request, stating that Madam Umbridge was under arrest for torturing students at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, where she had been recently placed as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in accordance of a recent law passed stating that is the school could not find a suitable witch or wizard to teach the class, one would be provided to them from the Ministry.

If torturing our young is considered suitable, I wonder what the Ministry considers unsuitable?

However, the shocks did not end there. When our esteemed Minister backed down from his request to have Madam Umbridge released, it obviously did not sit well with her because she went into a rage induced rant stating that the Minister was not only worthless and incompetent, but that she had sent dementors after none other than Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, in an attempt to discredit the young wizard by forcing him to use magic in public and have him expelled from Hogwarts.

For those few of you that might have missed the story over the summer, Harry Potter had been tried and found innocent of breaking the Statute of Secrecy when he claimed he and his muggle cousin were attacked by dementors. It was Madam Umbridge, who at said trial stated that it was impossible for that to have happened because the dementors of Azkaban were under Ministry control. Obviously, she was only partially truthful in that claim.

When asked about the evidence regarding the claims of torture, Madam Bones stated that she had viewed an authentic memory of the event that had not been tampered or altered in any way with any sort of memory modifying charms. However, since it is possible for a person in the memory to in fact be someone else under the guise of polyjuice potion or complex glamour charms, the event was further verified when Madam Umbridge confessed under Veritaserum to using an illegal blood quill, a Ministry banned dark artifact, on Harry Potter after he openly claimed in class that You-Know-Who was back.

It is of the opinion of this reporter that if Harry Potter was in fact telling the truth about the dementor attack this summer, could he possibly be telling the truth about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return? I am sure those responsible within the Ministry will want to properly investigate these claims before irreparable damage is done.

OoOoOoOoOoO

Cornelius Fudge finished reading the article in the latest edition of the Daily Prophet and cursed quite loudly. It was bad enough that Delores had done the things she had done behind his back, which resulted in the public questioning him as Minister. But now there was the possibility that Potter and Dumbledore had been telling the truth about You-Know-Who being back.

If it turned out to be true, his political carrier was over, especially after he had spent so much time and energy running a smear campaign against the two of them in the papers.