Professor Dumbledore sighed as he leaned back in his office several months later. A third attack had taken place about a month after the second, this time targeting two people: Justin Finch-Fletchley, a very smart Hufflepuff who had been down for Eton- a very famous muggle school- before he’d come to Hogwarts instead, and the Gryffindor Ghost, Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington… more commonly known as Nearly Headless Nick, because his neck had been only nearly severed in his death, meaning he could swing it off onto his shoulder.
Justin had been petrified- and Nicholas, who everyone was pretty sure had taken the full brunt of the attack, had gone from his normal pearly white transparency to a smoky gray. He was still a ghost, though- albeit, interestingly enough, he had seemed to interact with air, so they’d been able to use a fan to blow him up to the Hospital wing. Hopefully, the mandrake restorative draft was going to be effective on him, and not just pass through him.
Unfortunately, the Horcrux wasn’t as stupid as he and the Investigation Team had hoped, and had used a different sink for that attack- so the monitoring spells placed on that one sink near Ravenclaw Tower weren’t able to warn them or identify its victim. There was one good thing about that attack, though: Morning’s team had managed to narrow down the Horcrux to only nine hundred and eighty-three students. It was still about six times as many as there were investigators, but it was a lot less than the two thousand left after the attack on Colin Creevy, and it was enough for them to start looking into specific students that might be more likely than the rest.
Speaking of the Team… He’d seen Ginny during that Investigation Team meeting after the second attack. She hadn’t seemed overly shy, almost like someone- probably the Student Instructor Program, she was an LSI- had… coached that out of her. By piecing together Morning’s comments, she’d also found out that the girl was on not just the Investigation Management Team, but the Instructor Program’s management team as well. Perhaps she just had a ton of potential that her shyness had kept her parents from noticing, but the Program- with their highly talented help- had discovered?
He’d asked her to visit his office a week or so after the third attack, with the express purpose of simply meeting her as a family friend. In the request he’d sent her over that Communicator network (fortunately, he could send private messages through it), he’d mentioned that something seemed to be interfering with the girl’s parents anytime they started talking about her.
When she’d shown up for that meeting, she’d seemed extremely nervous, so he’d maintained a friendly front, while still taking full advantage of his political practice to get the information he wanted.
He hadn’t gotten it. Every time he felt like he was going to get close to learning exactly what all those failed letters had been unable to tell him… Ginny had demonstrated a sudden confusion spectacle that looked suspiciously like the ones her parents had given him last time he visited.
Unfortunately for him, after the first couple of times, she’d realized what he was doing and clammed up, refusing to say anything more, confused or not. He’d even tried Legilimency- only to find out that either she was a skilled Occlumens, which he found more than a little unlikely, or whatever was stopping her mother’s mail and confusing both her and her parents was also shielding her mind from him.
That was, unfortunately, quite likely.
Especially when he considered the strong fear reaction the Legilimency triggered, almost like it was the first time she’d ever detected a Legilimantic attack. She’d positively fled his office, and he hadn’t called her back, merely apologized- and explained his reasoning- through the Communicator.
She hadn’t given him the courtesy of so much as an acknowledgement, nor had he heard anything from her over the Communicator since. He hoped he hadn’t accidentally traumatized her.
It was really no different from the Royal. The anonymous Royal that had made the Communicators possible, after punching the Hogwarts Express off the tracks the year before… and some of the constructs in the Student Instructors’ offices could only have come from a Royal, so she was obviously being both employed and protected by the Program. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, not a single person would tell him who she was, or how he could reach her- nor even acknowledge her work.
Whenever he tried to reach her with the Communicator, particularly after she announced that the Monster of Slytherin was active (because of course she could sense it) for the third attack, he never got a response, even in that totally nondescript voice she used.
It was infuriating. He had thought about threatening to disband the Student Instructor Program if they didn’t tell him… but then he’d discarded that thought, as all such a disbanding would do would be to cause mayhem to break loose in the Castle- mayhem which would quickly cascade into the Ministry and the Wizengamot, where the balance was already excessively fragile thanks to the logistical nightmare of all the colorheads studying at Hogwarts. It was all he could do to keep it together as it was, he didn’t need to blow it up himself.
He really wanted to find that Royal, though. The authority of a Royal would ban mayhem from the Wizengamot, and provided the Royal understood the problems at stake (which he could make sure of), they would also be about twelve times as effective at handling that logistical nightmare as the entire Wizengamot. The entire Wizengamot, which was a nightmare itself; so many of the warlocks were so stick-in-the-mud that it took Dumbledore weeks- at best- to push through even minor laws or motions that would help to alleviate the pain of the logistical nightmare.
He still had no idea where Harry Potter had disappeared to. Hailey had never heard of him, and he’d confirmed with her- she was the Instructor Program Management Team Lead, as of a few weeks into the year- that there was no such name at Hogwarts. As such, he’d finally put the missing boy out of his mind. He’d already searched long enough, and in enough places, that continuing to search probably wasn’t going to find him; either he would turn up, or he wouldn’t.
Professor Lockhart was, as usual, proclaiming himself to have scared off the Monster of Slytherin. It was infuriating, and the reason why the man was the only member of Hogwarts staff that didn’t have a Communicator on at least the Staff Network that the Royal had set up for them.
He let out a soft chuckle as he thought about what had happened last time. So confident that the Monster wouldn’t appear after only two attacks, Lockhart had requested permission to do a little ‘dueling club’. After checking with Hailey to see if she thought there’d be a problem, he’d allowed it.
He chuckled again as he remembered the, ahh, alternate definition of “Professor” that Hailey had used in her answer, which fit the man to a T. Just like miners mine and diggers dig, a man that professes to be more than he really is would be properly termed a professer, which Hailey had respelled to match the respectable Professor title so she could insult him to his face without anyone being any the wiser. Fortunately, communicator-to-communicator messages weren’t only words, so he’d understood all that without her having to explain.
So, the very day before the third attack, Lockhart had held his dueling club.
It had been a resounding failure… for Lockhart. Overall, the Club had been a wonderful success, even as Professor Snape- who had received a raise about a week after the second attack- blew his partner, Professer Lockhart, around the stage like a ragdoll. Hailey- and the other senior Defense instructors- had taken over the rest of the club about two minutes in.
After that, Christmas had come and gone, and Hailey had commented casually on having a pile of presents all the way up to the ceiling, with a vast majority of them the Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans she seemed to enjoy so much. She hadn’t seemed to be bothered by even a single so-called ‘bomb package’, though- even though Dumbledore was sure there’d be somebody sending her one.
Valentine’s Day had then seen a rather inventive- and extremely annoying- attempt of Lockhart’s to ‘cheer up’ the school, by having a bunch of crudely dressed and equipped dwarves, his ‘card-carrying cupids’, run around the place delivering valentines. Most of the teachers, including Student Instructors, had cast locking charms on their classroom doors once everyone was present, in order to keep the dwarves from interrupting them. Amusingly, Lockhart had been handed a valentine that concealed a Howler- which had promptly exploded into flames and started screaming compliments so contrived they were actually insults for nearly an hour, without ever revealing who had sent it. Even the dwarf hadn’t known, and the voice had been just as horribly nondescript as the Royal on the Network, so Dumbledore suspected that was who had sent it.
Which finally brought him to today. He was watching silently out his office window as the students flowed out onto the grounds to watch the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff Quidditch match, but he had a bad feeling. What was it? Why did he feel like something was going to happen?
He was right about to tell the Investigation Management Team about that feeling, in case they thought it might be important, when a completely different message came in.
“The Monster is on the move.”
It was the Royal. Her voice was as painfully nondescript as ever.
The Investigation Network immediately became alive with activity, as it sounded like the investigation management team was barricading the Castle entrances until they could clear every single student that had left the Castle. They were determined to use the event to narrow it down to few enough people that they could justify questioning them and searching their belongings for the Diary, if necessary.
It felt like there were hundreds more investigators than there really were for some reason, all pouring memories into the database… publicly. He took a peek at a couple of them, and saw that they had airborne vantage points. Had the Royal enchanted a bunch of brooms to investigate for her?
“Wh- What happened?” Hermione gasped into the Obelisk Network, without adding the metadata for it to relay into one of the three Communicator networks maintained by the Database. Her voice, just like her, was absolutely terrified. “Where am I?” She couldn’t feel her hands!
Hailey’s voice came back first. “What do you remember?” she asked.
“I-!” she began, then paused for a second to… she tried to take a deep breath, but she didn’t seem to have lungs anymore. It still worked, though. “I was near the library. Found enough hints there, so I plausibly could’ve figured out what the monster was, so I was going to tell Penelope Clearwater, who was in the library too for a last-minute fact check… only for her to tell me. So I warned her the Monster was known to be active, and she pulled out a mirror. Only…” She sighed, carefully suppressing her fear- and, to be fair, her other emotions as well- so she could think rationally. “Only, the first corner she looked around, she suddenly froze up and tipped over. I- I didn’t realize what that meant… and when the Monster appeared around the corner three seconds later, I- I-!”
“You met its gaze, didn’t you?” Ginny asked suddenly.
She nodded silently. It sounded like Ginny probably knew something.
“Yeah… That means you’re dead. You probably can’t see, hear, taste, smell, or feel anything?”
“H-How do you know?” she gasped. “And how can I be dead but still… here?” She paused after that. It would explain why she didn’t seem to have any senses; dead bodies couldn’t see, after all.
“Because the Obelisks have a feature I didn’t tell you about,” Ginny informed her. “I didn’t think it would work without a Seed, which only I have, but I guess it does. Anyways, it’s a death avoidance mechanism. Your Obelisk responded to your death by uploading you onto the Network- mind and soul- which made your survival completely independent of your body’s survival.” She paused. “And since you don’t have a lot of the other facilities provided by my Seed, you’re going to be basically helpless right now. Sorry about that. But don’t worry, that’s an easy fix, I just need to get to the Chamber.
“And after that… it won’t be hard to make you a fake mechanical body, for the months it’ll take to regrow the biological one you’re used to in a biofab chamber.” There was a pause. “Um… speaking of, I’m going to have to modify said biological body to work properly with the Astrium core, and the only pattern I have for that modification includes my psionics. I don’t think they’ll be hard to remove later in the process, but…”
Hermione took another deep ‘breath’, choosing to ignore the details about her new biological body for now. Especially if it was the only option, it was the only option. “So… I was ‘rescued’ in the nick of time, but now… Alright.” She paused. “Is it going to hurt?”
“Nope. If anything, you’ve already gone through the part that’s likely to hurt the most: The conversion of your mind into a form that’s fully, naturally compatible with Astrium. It’s going to make installing the additional modules necessary to bring you back very easy and very painless.”
“Conversion? Why would-?”
“Because at the moment, you’re living in a Luminous Astrium storage matrix- that is to say, inside the Obelisk Network Database. It’s not possible to hold an incompatible mind like that.” She paused. “Thanks to my Seed, my mind is already fully compatible, so even if something manages to get past all the magics protecting me and kill my body, I’ll simply jump to the Chamber of Secrets and build a new one- it won’t really affect me at all.” She paused again. “I still wonder why it’s called a Seed.”
“Good evening, Cornelius,” Professor Dumbledore greeted, when Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge was shown to his office several hours after the fourth attack, the one by the library. Penelope Clearwater… and there had also been the very interesting spectacle of Miss Granger looking down at her own, snake-eaten body, without being a ghost. Apparently, the Royal had pulled her out of her body in the nick of time and given her a new one, so the school had been told that only Clearwater had been attacked- Granger had barricaded herself in the library after she saw Clearwater get petrified, as far as the rest of the school was concerned.
“Evening, Dumbledore,” Fudge answered curtly, then sighed. “We’re going to have to take Hagrid away.”
He let out a soft sigh. He’d half-expected this particular move, but hadn’t been able to prevent it, it seemed; Fudge was not one to be swayed from his beliefs, and he was one to take dramatic actions on what amounted to a whim. “I would like to remind you that we were able to confirm it is not him as of a few months ago,” he intoned.
The Minister ignored him. “Three attacks on muggleborns,” he said distractedly. “The Ministry’s got to act- got to be seen doing something. And his record’s against him. Even the Governors have been in touch!”
He sighed again. That suggested the Governors had been ignoring his reports of the investigation progress. “Our investigation got a lot of valuable information this time,” he informed Fudge. “The analysis team is still compiling the results from the most recent attack, but it’s entirely possible we’ve identified the culprit.”
“No matter,” Fudge dismissed. “If someone else is caught, he’ll be let out with a full apology.”
He resisted the urge to sigh a third time. What was with Fudge’s obsession with imprisoning innocent gamekeepers? This wasn’t the first time he’d tried to imprison Hagrid, and given the situation, it was the first time Dumbledore wouldn’t be able to stop him!
Removing Hagrid, though, would likely send the Wizengamot into panic when the next attack hit, as they lost trust in their own Minister for Magic. Which would very quickly result in the collapse of Magical Britain, and with it possibly the whole magical world as the influx of colorheads didn’t seem like it was going to stop, which would force them into the muggle world, blowing the Statute of Secrecy wide open. “I remind you,” he began again.
A sudden banging noise indicated that his office door had been thrown violently open- revealing Lucius Malfoy and, behind him, Hailey… who was carrying a stack of papers.
Lucius completely ignored the girl’s glare, wearing a strangely satisfied smile. “Already here, Fudge? Good, good.”
Dumbledore didn’t miss Hailey’s eyes narrowing at his back. “And what exactly do you want with me, Lucius?” he asked politely, already guessing what was coming.
“Dreadful thing, Dumbledore,” Lucius said calmly, snidely, taking a scroll out of his cloak, “but the Governors feel it’s time for you to step aside. This is an order of suspension. You’ll-!”
In that instant, nobody missed the phoenix teleporting into the room, riding on the shoulder of… someone. The figure was vaguely feminine, and had long, black hair- but other than that, she was completely nondescript.
This was the Royal… who must have done some really strange magic to keep anyone from identifying her.
“You know you’re supposed to knock, right?” the Royal asked loudly, looking straight up into Lucius’ face. Her voice wasn’t quite as nondescript as usual, in that it carried tone of voice and he could tell it was a girl speaking, but it was still incredibly nondescript.
Lucius sneered at her, turned back to Dumbledore, and took a breath to resume.
The Royal wasn’t going to leave it there, though. “Do the Governors know that, through creative use of the resources available to him, Professor Dumbledore is very, very close to finding the culprit?”
Dumbledore suppressed a smile. Just hearing his title from her was immensely helpful; she respected him, even as she showed very little of the same for Lucius! If that wasn’t a political statement…
“Do they know that if the Headmaster gets kicked out now, we’ll have to start over basically from scratch?” the Royal continued. “He’s the one that has all the know-how and ideas- I don’t doubt we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are now without him.”
Lucius turned to her. “What are you-!?” He froze, staring at her. He’d evidently noticed her nondescription.
“I’m talking about how, under Professor Dumbledore’s skilled guidance, the handpicked investigators buried throughout the school have successfully narrowed the culprit down to a selection of only ninety-eight students, or less than two percent of the four thousand three hundred and sixty-six students in this Castle right now.” She spoke loudly and quickly, with an abrasive, judgemental tone. “About how Professor Dumbledore is the only one that actually knows how best to continue, making him keystone for the entire investigation effort, and meaning that removing him will completely cripple said effort?”
Dumbledore carefully suppressed a grin. He had yet to contribute to the investigation in any meaningful way; he hadn’t even warned them of his bad feeling earlier the same day!
On the other hand, she’d specified ninety-eight students. He didn’t know how the Royal got that information, but she had somehow, and given her vaunted prowess, and how everyone in the school seemed to be protecting her, he went with the assumption that she knew because she’d been told.
Still, though, ninety eight. That was quite a lot more than he- or the Investigation Management Team- liked. “Ninety-eight, huh?” he mused, and sighed. “With that many, it’ll still be too dangerous to try interrogating them; the Culprit might get the hint and do something we’ll regret.” He scowled, rubbing his chin with a finger. “On the other hand, given the number of investigators…” He paused. “I don’t see why we can’t basically guarantee that we can identify the culprit with the next attack, and quite probably prevent the attack as well.”
“Yes, Professor,” the Royal agreed, respect entering her voice for the first time. “That’s a little under half the number of investigators, so it shouldn’t be hard to have them shadowed. Especially if I do something to keep our people from being noticed.”
There was silence for a second, during which Fudge looked quite uncomfortable, glancing between the Royal and Lucius.
Dumbledore, meanwhile, was more than a little bit stunned. The Royal had referred to the very idea he had, and with her demonstrated ability to disappear…
Lucius, meanwhile, turned to face the Royal. “Who do you think you-!?”
The girl backhanded him across the office, all of Dumbledore’s shelves and instruments jumping out of his way and back in, just like everything that happened to be in the way of the Knight Bus, while she turned to look at him.
It really was quite amusing how a nondescript figure could look at someone as if they were a particularly smelly clump of dirt on their shoe… without being any less nondescript. If that wasn’t proof that she was a Royal, he wasn’t sure what was. “I asked you a question,” she barked back, returning instantly to her irritated tone from before, turning to face him and putting her hands on her hips as she marched towards him, the shelves shying away from her as she advanced.
Fudge backed against the wall, staring at her, then looked at Dumbledore. “Sh-She’s a Royal?” he asked.
Dumbledore only nodded.
Lucius looked up at her from where he was, crumpled between the wall and the floor as she advanced on him. He seemed to be oddly unharmed, which would make sense as she’d protected him against the thaumic backlash of damaging Dumbledore’s many instruments, and was staring at her as well. Finally, he opened his mouth to speak… then paused, torn between terror and resignation.
“No,” Lucius finally decided, his tone cautious, with none of his earlier blustering confidence. “The Governors do not know.”
The Royal straightened up, her tone softening as she removed her hands from her hips and folded her arms instead. “And do you think that maybe they should know, before they make arbitrary decisions like this one?” She kicked at something on the floor, which Dumbledore recognized as Lucius’ suspension order moments before it exploded into bright, blue-bell flames and crumbled into ash.
“Y-Yes,” Lucius stuttered, staring at the pile of ash with wide eyes.
“And that perhaps they shouldn’t be told that their families will be cursed if they don’t sign a piece of paper they are almost unanimously opposed to?”
Lucius let out a gasp and shrank back down against the wall, staring at her in abject terror.
“Well?” she pressed.
On the other side of the open doorway, Hailey raised an eyebrow at him… and seemed quite calm. She obviously knew the Royal.
“Ah-! Th-! They shouldn’t,” Lucius stuttered, his voice unnaturally high. That was weird, nobody had kicked him in the groin.
“Alright,” the Royal nodded. “Are you going to go do it properly, then?”
“Y-Yes,” he conceded, then rose and turned, relievedly, to leave.
“Don’t mention the investigation to anyone else, please,” Dumbledore informed him, causing Lucius to stop in the doorway to listen. “If the culprit gets wind of it, that’ll only make things harder.”
He nodded silently, and left.
“Before you go,” the Royal added vindictively, as Lucius reached the staircase, forcing him to pause and look back.
“Yes?” he asked, still half-trembling with terror.
“I and the other royals here at Hogwarts would appreciate if you could help the Chief Warlock’s economic measures to go through, so that when Hogwarts takes in four and a half thousand new students next year, or nineteen thousand the year after, the whole economy doesn’t crumble to pieces. It would also be nice if you helped him to hold things together in that stuffy stone chamber, and to help the public to manage the logistical nightmare that already exists from the current four and a half thousand student population of this Castle.”
Dumbledore froze. She and the other Royals? That suggested that there were at least three! And they were in agreement, something which had never happened in history!
Completely aside from how she was explicitly supporting his platform, while talking to the leader of the opposing party, after forcing him to acknowledge what she was.
He wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to be a good or a bad thing, though. Who knew exactly how Lucius’ efforts to obey the Royal before him would affect the balance of the Wizengamot.
Her comment on the Wizengamot chamber being a ‘stuffy stone chamber’ only brought commiserating nods from Dumbledore and Fudge. Very few warlocks didn’t think of it as that.
“A-Alright,” Lucius nodded, a little bit distractedly as he evidently thought about exactly how he was going to do it.
Then the Royal smiled cheerfully- and her tone became cheerful too, while she waved him goodbye. “Oh, and tell your daughter hi for me, please.”
“Daughter-?” Fudge began, blinking, and cut himself off before he could interrupt any more than he already had.
“I don’t have a daughter,” Lucius half-hissed.
“Yes you do,” the Royal answered dangerously, and the temperature in the room dropped suddenly by several degrees.
Lucius back-stepped, then very nearly fell down the stairs, only barely catching the railing in time. “Wh-What daughter?” he asked.
“You know who I’m talking about,” she asserted darkly.
He let out a squeak of fright, then nodded vaguely, before fairly fleeing down the stairs.
The warmth returned gradually to the room while the Royal sighed. “I suppose it remains to be seen if he’ll do that or not,” she mused, then turned to look back over to where Dumbledore and Fudge were waiting. “Anyways, I heard someone was here to arrest an innocent man?”
“Ah-!” Fudge began, flinching away from her.
She sighed, shaking her head. “Don’t be stupid,” she told him disappointedly. “Innocent until proven guilty, remember. Anything else and you’ll destroy trust in your own government.”
She then turned away from them, towards Hailey.
“A lot to do today, isn’t there?” Hailey asked cheerfully.
“Yeah, quite a lot. Thanks for the heads up, by the way.” The Royal then turned to the door to walk out of it. “Philomena?”
A flash of phoenix-fire later, and she was gone.
“You’re welcome,” Hailey told the empty air she’d been in a moment before, before turning to walk up towards Dumbledore’s desk, papers in hand, as if nothing had happened. “Alright. We’ve finished compiling all the reports from earlier, and as you know by now, we’ve narrowed it down to ninety-six students. Morning is doing some recruitment at the moment; she doesn’t like the idea of having only two shifts to monitor the remaining suspects, and wants at least three people for each one. Meanwhile, Miss Royal-” she gestured over her shoulder with her thumb- “is setting up a script on the Network to automatically coordinate them for one-hundred-percent surveillance uptime without letting anything on, looking suspicious, or cutting too significantly into any given student’s time.” She sighed, and handed him the papers. “Anyways, here’s the summary; the full report is in the usual location.”
By which she meant ‘in the Network Database’.
“Thank you,” he agreed. “I see she’s anticipated my plan.”
Hailey nodded. “We have,” she agreed. “In other news, shortly before she was attacked, Miss Clearwater deduced what the Monster was and told Hermione- who had also just deduced it, but that’s beside the point. Anyways, you know Hermione barricaded herself in the library while Penelope braved the corridors. It’s a Basilisk- and while the potion to render people immune to a basilisk’s gaze takes a month to brew and wears off in three hours…” She shrugged, then gestured over her shoulder again. “A Royal-powered defensive ward takes about five seconds, affects every student in the entire Castle, and lasts for a few decades, completely aside from how that same ward will render everyone invulnerable to its physical attacks for the rest of the year, allowing us to destroy it really at our leisure, once it comes out.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I take it she’s already done that?”
She nodded. “Yup, she did that before I ever came up here- and she said she’s ready to guarantee that nobody else will be hurt by that monster- even just petrification.”
“And I take it she asked to remain anonymous?”
She nodded. “Yup. That was some pretty impressive anonymizing magic, in my opinion- but also not the most impressive I’ve seen her use.”
“Alright, thank you,” he told her, bowing his head in dismissal.
She bowed fully. “You’re welcome,” she told him, then turned and left.
“Is… Is she that Royal’s friend?” Fudge asked slowly.
Dumbledore nodded; considering their behavior, that was the only conclusion he could draw. “I think so,” he agreed. “She does seem to feel strongly about a few certain issues, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, quite,” Fudge muttered, then sighed. “So… Not Hagrid. Not if he’s innocent.” He sighed again. “I guess I’ve got no real choice but to leave the investigation up to you, and I wish you luck.” He paused. “After that… the Governors might rescind the pressure they put on me, but the public is another matter entirely. Do you think we can get away with a news announcement?”
He shrugged. “The investigation really is pretty sensitive. If our culprit catches wind of it, we may never catch them- even with the constant surveillance method. Probably best to keep the public’s mind off of it for now.”
Fudge winced. “That’s going to be a pain,” he grumbled. “And Rita will be impossible. Again.” He glanced sideways at Dumbledore. “Can you promise me that, when you get everything around here- and the Wizengamot- ready for the public to know about exactly how many colorheads there are, you’ll have Rita tell people? She’s been dying for a big piece like that, and it’s been torture keeping her from Hogwarts.”
“I think…” He paused. “Hmm, I would prefer someone without her reputation, but if she’s willing to cooperate, I don’t see why not.”
There was a pause. “Do… Do you know who that Royal was?”
He raised an eyebrow. “No. I wish I did, honestly.” He paused. “And… that anonymizing magic. I have reason to believe it affects more than just her appearance- so, ahh, do you remember the color of her green eyes?”
There was a pause.
“... No. What color was it?”
He didn’t answer. How did he know that the Royal had green eyes? He’d never even seen them!