And I'm Here to Save the World, tag Trent @ the Ministry of Magic

[Effie MacIntosh]

She peeked surreptitiously out of the elevator, her short blonde hair leading the way and her wide blue eyes following. She checked this way and then that, and, seeing no one, she eventually stepped out of the elevator and moved silently down one hallway. All those years of stealth training at the Academy apparently hadn't done her any wrong, she supposed! And she gave herself a pat on the back for choosing lunch time to start this little escapade, because there was hardly anyone in the hallways, and that made it easier to move about.

One would think she was sneaking into some other country's Ministry. One would never know she was sneaking into her own, or that she worked there, for Merlin's sake. Oh, sure - as a fully trained auror, she could probably waltz right up to the Werewolf Registry and take what she liked, and pretend it was for a case she was conducting. Except, of course, Jones would invariably find out, and she would remind all and sundry that she definitely didn't have any cases of her own, and then she would probably make her do all the paperwork for the rest of the squad for the rest of the month. So no, she wouldn't be doing things the normal way.

She would be doing things the Effie way.

As she came to the darkened room where the file cabinets of registry information were kept, she glanced once more down both ends of the hall, and quietly turned the doorknob to step through the entryway backwards. At the time, keeping an eye on the hallway while she stepped into the room seemed like an excellent idea, but in hindsight watching where she was going probably would have been much better, because she would not have tripped over a random box someone had stuffed into the room, she would not have flailed wildly, and caught one of the file cabinets in the side, and she would not have then pulled over the file cabinet as she fell thereby making a godawful racket and nearly crushing herself in the process. Instead, she only managed to cover herself over in a mountain of the very same papers she had been meaning to sort through - silently.

The door swung slowly shut again with the longest, loudest whine she had ever heard a door make in her life, and once it was closed again she felt free to complain.

"Ow."

[Trent Dymock]

The Werewolf registry was not exactly the largest operation within the Magical Creatures department. It was definitely a small operation, and much less glamorous than the Werewolf Capture Unit that they worked with, but Trent enjoyed it. It was for the most part a rather easy job. Because of the size of their office, they were grouped in with the rest of the Beast division. The main portion of their division shared a large open area with separate cubicles spaced out for the different offices and committees. Along the edge of the room there were offices set aside for the various office heads. The sheer amount of paperwork involved with the registry had prompted them to claim a small room outside of the area for their records, but it could be accessed either from the outer corridor, or from Trent's office (although that door was so rarely used that he had a small cabinet placed in front of it).

Trent was "busy working" as he had informed his secretary, which pretty much equated to him nodding off occasionally at his desk in the middle of going through the list of names to pass on to the capture unit. Trent liked to think that if his job was challenging enough, he wouldn't have had to spend the occasional day drifting off in between paperwork and meetings. Besides the mountainous piles of paperwork that he had to get through on a daily basis, Trent was also required to attend various meetings off and on. In all it wasn't exactly the most demanding position. He was rather shocked out of his dreamy state by a crash from file room behind him. Trent spun slowly in his chair to inspect the blocked door as if it would magically reveal some answer just by him looking at it. With a small shake of his head he called out, "Renee?" assuming that his secretary would presumably have some grand explanation for him.

He looked down at the list in front of him and frowned when he didn't get a response or see her enter the small office. He grumbled something about how lazy she was as he pushed himself up from the desk and went to the doorway to the greater room beyond where her desk was. He peered around the door way expectantly, twisting slightly to see around the massive pile of paperwork on her desk (a good portion things she had to handle because he deemed them unimportant). She was busy chatting with another secretary while they both picked at salads. Renee gave him a cold glare over the smallest stack of files and shooed him away. Trent raised one eyebrow as he moved closer.

"Sorry to inconvenience you but do you have any idea who's destroying the record room? Who's in there?" He asked incredulously, clearly unhappy with the pretty blond who was giving him an even angrier scowl. She shook her head and told him no one was scheduled to be in there since anyone sensible was at lunch before dismissing him again with an irritating motion as if he was an errant child, telling him that she was clearly busy. Oh, he was so submitting a request for a new secretary later that day, or at least he would think so until she inevitably reminded him that he would be hard pressed to find another secretary who was willing to put up with him. He was more irritated by her insistence that she was not attracted to him. He was starting to suspect that the old woman who was in charge of the secretary pool was purposefully sending him lesbians after the last few.

He rolled his eyes and moved around her desk, heading for the door to the corridor beyond. He entered the Registry room muttering something to himself about Renee and the red head at her desk possibly being together. A rather satisfied smirk spread across his face picturing the two. He paused stepping around a box he had shoved in the room with a shrug as he inspected the scenario before him with a soft laugh. There was quite decidedly a woman underneath the paperwork that had spilled from the file cabinet. "What are you doing?" he asked incredulously of the feet sticking out towards him.

[Effie MacIntosh]

She had just started to lift her weight up onto her hands, thereby causing the mountain of paper to move like some kind of huge, fuzzy monster of werewolf records, when the door behind her opened again. She froze, as if she honestly believed she could remain still and the person wouldn't see her or the mess she had made - like a tyrannosaurus rex. Except, of course, the person did see her, they did, see her mess, and then, of course, they did comment on it.

And she had not been wise enough to come up with a suitable excuse beforehand. She was supposed to be stealthy! Ninjas didn't need excuses. Sigh! She tried to come up with one on the spot but, really, what sort of excuse can one make about being in a dark room with a file cabinet spewed out all over them? Childhood dream of swimming in Ministry records? She rolled her eyes at herself, and looked over her shoulder at the man, one sheet of paper folded over her head like a hat.

"I thought this was the bathroom," she lied lamely. "And then, there was a box, and I fell." For anyone who knew her, it would be the most obvious of bold faced lies. Wherever EFfie MacIntosh was, it was where she meant to be. She quite simply lacked the ability to do the things she was meant to be doing once she got there. She had a good sense of direction, which was ironic, and good instincts, to boot. She simply lacked a little something by way of coordination.

"Could you, um, levitate this file cabinet off of me?" she asked a bit sheepishly. If she hadn't made a royal mess out of the records room, she probably would have been acting like she owned the joint. She was an auror. Wearing a pile of papers and half pinned by a file cabinet, she was pretty sure she lost all cool points. "Please?"

[Trent Dymock]

One of Trent's blond eye brows arched slowly up his eyebrow. "Bathroom, hmmm? Silly me, I thought they had made a habit of marking the various bathrooms around the ministry, something about liabilities and what not?" he mused as he moved over to another row of filing cabinets that ran along the outside wall. He shifted a stack of paper out of the way with the toe of his Italian leather shoe, and leaned against the metal cabinet, crossing his arms casually. He let his eyes trail easily across the image of her under the metal cabinet and the various scattered paper rather lazily, as if she wasn't being pinned down by a large metal cabinet. He was still perplexed by why someone who was distinctly not from his department was splayed out underneath a cabinet in the file room, but never the less.

He lazily pulled out his wand, but hesitated just a moment. He leveled her with a rather amused light blue gaze. "It's not often I come upon someone pinned down in my registry room and I'm not involved in the pinning," he commented with a small smirk as he muttered the incantation to levitate the cabinet back into its rightful place. He flicked his wand and set the papers fluttering with a loud rustling back into their rightful places. He flipped his wand back against his palm and crossed the small space to where she was laid on the floor and offered her a hand up, a few pieces of paper still struggling to return to their folders. He face betrayed the mix of amusement and confusion that he was still having over the situation.

[Effie MacIntosh]

Effie's large blue eyes looked mildly suspicious for half a moment as she looked at him over her shoulder, before he levitated the file cabinet off of her and set the room entirely back to rights. Well, at least she wouldn't have to sit there helping to sort out the mess she had made, but come to think of it that would have been a perfect time to spy on his records. If only she had planned this better. She might have let someone else make the mess and offer to lend a hand cleaning it up. People always trusted aurors! Next time she was breaking into a Ministry lockroom, she was totally doing that. But bygones were bygones and her opportunity had already passed her by, and hindsight being twenty twenty didn't help her put one foot in front of the other. Where was a fresh, original idea when she needed it?

For now, she was more concerned with this smug looking pip squeak in his shiny, over-expensive leather shoes and his posh suit, making double entendres about pinning girls down in his record room all while on the Ministry's dime. "Is that supposed to be some kind of sexual innuendo?" she asked as she hoisted herself to her feet. She jabbed her finger at the suited man, not at all intimidated (because at five foot short and a hundred and tiny pounds, everyone was more something than she was.)

"Because if it is, the as a contributing tax payer and an employee of other tax payers - and this Ministry! - I don't appreciate either the insinuation that you have done anything on Ministry time except Ministry business, or your audacity in making such a remark in the first place, while on the job, to a fellow employee, while alone in that very same room no less! And if that was an attempt at a pick up, well, then, you can just write that idea straight off."

She made a writing gesture with her hand for dramatic emphasis, and then stood up to her full (albeit diminutive) height. "I have half a mind to report you to our HR department." She tugged her shirt down into place and lifted her chin, and realized that after a speech like that she really didn't have much else to say. Time to make her ninja exit.

"Well," she began, and she lifted her eyebrows imperiously. "I'll just be going, then." And then she moved toward the door with every intention of returning to the auror office and coming back another day.

[Trent Dymock]

Trent's eyebrows arched up in amused surprise at her reaction. He hardly thought the tax payers thought twice about the Werewolf registry, the capture squad maybe, but rarely the dusty old file room that held the records or the people who were basically just the paper pushers behind it. Needless to say though, the HR department was not exactly his best friend. He jumped at up off the cabinet and moved between her and the door putting his hands up in a slow wait motion. He worked to arrange his face in as civil an appearance as possible.

"I sincerely apologize for offending you, and the other tax payers. I spend an awful lot of time alone down here. I'm afraid my social graces are a bit lacking," he offered in as much of an apology as he could manage. Truthfully it had more to do with the fact that Trent just had a habit of being a bit of a cad really, and he more often than not led with the wrong foot and ended up having to insert it firmly into his mouth to scrape together some sort of semblance of a chance. He straightened his tie slightly out of habit, wondering if it was the delivery of the pick up or just him that she was turning down flat. There was only one way to find out, and it was to try a different route and keep talking to her.

"Now, just to be honest one ministry employee to another, how in the world did you mistake this for a bathroom? Either you're incredibly new, or incredibly full of it. Are you sure you weren't looking for something specific? I assure you, your tax dollars have certainly trained me well enough to know the registry inside and out if there was something you needed," he offered with a small shrug, "Or, if you really just needed the nearest toilet, it's down the corridor, around the corner and on the left." He stepped aside and pulled the door open for her, gesturing down the hallway towards the general direction of the bathroom with one hand. He gave her a small helpful smile in an attempt to show he could at times, behave himself.

[Effie MacIntosh]

She glanced between him and the door. Hrm. She supposed it couldn't hurt to ask a registry expert about the registry. And she liked to think she had him by the gotchas, after that totally inappropriate comment! (Although, if truth be told, he really had her over a barrel, though, not in the way he probably wished for.) Though she had been moving in the direction of the doorway, her steps slowed and eventually even went back in the other direction, as she crossed her arms over her chest and considered him.

"Alright," she admitted. "I wasn't looking for the loo. I was looking for this girl." She whipped a well-folded piece of paper out of her back pocket and handed it over, feeling very official about it all. "She's a werewolf, and we suspect she's a part of an illegal fighting ring. Plus, there's been a whole bunch of werewolf attacks that all seem to happen in locations where this ring goes. There's a law that says they have to take the wolfsbane potion, right? Only, what if someone doesn't, just for kicks? That's what we think she's done."

She tapped the paper expressively, but what she didn't know was that she had just given Trent Dymock her shopping list and not the illegally duplicated criminal file she had stolen from a folder on Ashleigh Dennis's desk.

QUOTE

To Effie MacIntosh: DO NOT FORGET TO BUY THESE THINGS AT DIAGON ALLEY BEFORE YOU COME HOME. Fortescue's rocky road ice cream Mordin's Undereye Dark Circle Remover Tampons (IMPORTANT!!) New robes from Madam Maulkin's A bottle of wine for dinner with Mom and Dad Sunday Love, Effie MacIntosh

[Trent Dymock]

There was a brief moment where Trent mentally high-fived himself for his rather quick thinking. He was under the distinct impression that he still had a shot, or some sort of an in. A rather carefully crafted look of interest was formed on his face, despite the urge he had to burst out in a grin and say, "Oh yeah..." Instead his rather controlled attempt at keeping the young blond woman talking forced him to rein himself in a bit more. He settled with a silent nod as he listened to the situation that had brought her down, as he reached for the paper that she held out. His eyes flicked across the paper with quickly.

His eyebrows arched a bit higher as he attempt to maintain some sense of composure. He was losing the battle a bit when he finally found the line about tampons. "Okay, I'll go ahead and ignore the fact that it's odd that someone who's investigating illegal werewolf fighting rings would come down here and attempt to sneak into the registry for information instead of just sending me an interdepartmental request," he replied with a small laugh bubbling over, "But unless the girl's werewolf fighting ring is desperately driven by a group of women who are in desperate need of dark circle remover, ice cream, and tampons, I think you're going to have to do something else to get me the details."

He offered the paper back over with a shake of his head. "Now, not to say I wouldn't be happy to help you obtain those items if that's what you're really after, but the woman's name that you suspect would be a good jumping off point," he offered with a gesture to the room full of files, "At least, if you still want to get the information unofficially." Trent may have been dense when it came to women, or repellent depending on who you asked, but he was certainly aware enough to know when someone was trying to work around the Ministry and their several processes and rules. He was just becoming more curious as to the "why" behind the young woman's odd ruse to obtain the information.

[Effie MacIntosh]

She looked at him like he was crazy, and then moved to point out the place in the file where the woman's name was -- when she realized it was her shopping list. She turned bright pink and snatched the paper back. Great! Just when she was starting to look like a real auror, she made some stupid mistake like that! She quickly folded the list and put it back into her pocket, and then pulled the real file out of her other pocket and handed that over instead.

"There. That's the file."

She then stepped awkwardly back, because she didn't know what to say to him about the... other stuff. He had called her out on the sneaking around and the unofficial request, and she felt like she ought to say something, but though she was a ninja she was not a very capable liar. She wished she was. She could never come up with a logical reason to be somewhere she wasn't meant to be, possibly because her own logic was so incredibly skewed herself, and it was even harder to do when, as he so eloquently pointed out, there was no reason she couldn't have pulled this information legitimately... if she had been allowed.

"My boss doesn't trust me to help with the case," she blurted all at once, and as soon as she did she regretted it. "Through no fault of my own!" she immediately explained. "I am an auror, and this case is assigned to my group. So.... it isn't cheating." She said 'cheating' like she was still in auror school and he was the bad professor who had caught her sneaking in to steal his answers before the big test. But this wasn't like that at all. She was saving lives here. That meant it was worth any risk and any expense! If this cost her the career she had worked so hard for then, so be it!!

But she hoped it didn't, because that would suck.

[Trent Dymock]

Trent kept his face a rather calm mask of interest as he accepted the actual file. He was rather fascinated with the strange auror. There was something rather endearing about her that he couldn't place, that and he had already gone through the motions of figuring out just exactly how he was going to make something happen with her. He caught the paper in two fingers, unfolding it leisurely as if he had nothing at all better to do with his time. He scanned the file quickly picking out the name. A small smirk tugged at the corner of his lip.

The problem with working in the Ministry is that there were certain people you knew rather well, and there were some people that you tolerated because human resources required it. Trent was sadly familiar with the name in question, since one of his least favorite employees had requested it earlier that morning. Trent brought his blue eyes up to meet the young woman's. He knew exactly where the file was, and it was certainly no water off his back. But if he had a shot at anything with the woman that was definitely going to be a priority, even more so if he could somehow use her working with Ashleigh Dennis in his favor.

He folded the paper back up and offered it back to her, still placed oddly between his fingers. "So, you work in Jones group, with Tate and Dennis right?" He asked with a rather assured nod, "I would love to get this file for you, and make sure that we keep it just between us, but there's a bit of trouble with all this. I have a request for the file on the american werewolf already. I haven't processed it yet, but if you're trying to get a leg up on your investigation we'll have to be a bit more clever."

Trent leaned casually back on his heels and crossed one arm over his chest, his other hand was tapping idly on his lip as if he were thinking very hard about what to do. His eyebrows shot up in a mock look of surprise causing him to look far too animated than he needed to. "I have this one in my office I believe, we could go take a look over it, and maybe I can work up some way to delay processing Mr. Dennis' request a bit longer. Give you a proper chance to save the day and what not."

He shrugged his shoulder as if to offer her the chance, take it or leave it. He figured the ball was proverbially in her court. She could either take the offer, and prove she was more willing to do what she needed to prove herself, or let it go and the information would get back to their team later anyway.

[Effie MacIntosh]

Effie, bless her heart, had no idea that Trent could mean anything more by saying she should swing by his office, than that she should swing by his office. She shrugged her shoulders, immediately inclined to accept such an offer. Of course she would go look at the file before Dennis could look at it! There was no downside to this scenario. She got to see the file, which she wouldn't be allowed to do if she didn't sneak around, and no one would ever be the wiser! He hadn't said anything about any kind of trade off, so she just assumed it would be free.

"That would be great!" she readily agreed with almost childlike enthusiasm. "Where is your office? Is it nearby?" She would have to take a quick look, and then get back to the auror office as soon as possible. Her lunch break wasn't that long, since she wasn't very senior. Plus, she had no intention of delaying the file to get to Dennis for too long. She didn't want to jeopardize anything, and she still knew that four aurors are better than one. That was the whole point of getting to look at the file! They had to let her help out! They just had to.