April 25th, 1895 - MoM Atrium

Fresh off his lunch break at the Broomsticks (an unusual venture, but paperwork was killing him today— wasn't that supposed to be someone else's job?) Mateo was on his way back into the Ministry itself to work on the last batch of evaluations. He had faith that these second-year trainees were going to do well on the whole, but he wasn't sure about Thornto ; Teo had his reservations there and that was saying a lot. There were so few graduates that came up through the ranks over his years in the ministry that he hadn't been able to work with to get to a good point. Though his position in the Auror's Office was relatively new, he had been a Hit Wizard for many years, had trained a lot of younlings in that time, but sometimes they were just hard to breach. A trainee had to be willing to make the necessary changes, to fit the mold, as it were, and some of them just couldn't squish in. They had standards to uphold.

Mostly Thornton just wasn't a team player and that was a safety issue; that could get somebody killed.

Teo was trying to figure out how best to bring this up to Sterling, but maybe he'd run it through Selwyn first, to see if the other instructor had any insight on the matter. Maybe he'd stop in and visit with Sandow, he enjoyed her particular brand of ruthless straightforwardness. This was the plan, he figured, until he stepped back into the ministry atrium and was greeted with the sight of something amiss.

It had been a long time since Mateo had dealt with Cornish Pixies, but he was about to get a crash course in subduing them.

Unfortunately they were everywhere, one suddenly tugging in his ear as he swatted it away and even as he reached for his wand, felt one pulling on the other end. Teo shook it off, stunning it with a spell, but it didn't last long before another was coming straight for him. Swearing under his breath in Spanish, Mateo looked about at the nearest batch and froze them, as another small troop went flying directly at the nearest person. "Cuidado!" He hollered at first, followed up with, "Watch out!"

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Open to 3-4 others; 2 posts/2days if lots of people join!

  

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Clarissa had been on her way home after visiting her auror fiancee and bringing him some lunch. Gerald would usually escort her out but one of his fellow aurors had needed him for something pressing so Clarissa had shooed him off to do his auror things.

The last thing she had expected as she made her way through the atrium was to be dealing with Cornish Pixies. She'd had no reason to since her days in Hogwarts. A small troop of them came towards her and before she thought much about it, she swung her closed parasol at them, her empty picnic basket serving as a sort of shield at the same time as the Pixies scattered to avoid her parasol.

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Mateo would not have considered a parasol a good weapon against pixies, but as the young woman swung it at them, they scattered. shrieking. Effective enough, given the volume of them currently occupying the atrium. Teo didn't even have time to figure out where they were coming from, just that they ought to be contained, so he was focusing on that.

"Are you alright, Miss?" He asked as he hurried over, swatting at a pixie the old fashioned way as he did. He only felt a little bad for it, they were quite nasty and a serious problem, especially with this many of them. They had a herd sort of mentality, the more of them there were, the cheekier they behaved and the more problematic they tended to be.

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Clarissa looked over as a man hurried over. "Yes. Where did they all come from?" She asked curiously. The atrium felt full of them though that could also just be her own perception due to the proximity of them to her. She batted another one away from herself though using her hand this time. Perhaps she ought to get her wand out though. "I haven't had to deal with pixies since Hogwarts," she mused aloud. It was not like she'd ever had cause to beyond schools walls.

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"Keep that handy." He motioned to the parasol. "And that is an excellent question." Mateo had no answer for it, this really was something far out of his department— either one of the ones he'd been in.

Moving toward one of the grand columns in the atrium, swatting at more pixies, he hoped it might provide some shelter or at least a vantage point to give him enough time to see if he could locate the source. "Truthfully, it might be the same for me, and I wager that would be much longer ago than it was for you." He had to be at least twice her age.

He rolled around the column slightly, looking to see if there was any indication of where they were coming from, but all he was greeted with was a face full of pixie.

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