"These are the terms of the contract," Mai said, sliding a sheet of parchment across the round coffee table. "If they are agreeable to you, we shall proceed with the exchange immediately."
It had not taken Mai long to find a Muggle couple willing to adopt Tonks's unborn child. Within two days, she had drawn up a list of ideal candidates and presented it to Oleandra, and arranged to meet them at their homes in the Muggle-Born Sanctuary, one after the other.
"If my wife goes through with this… procedure," said the husband, a rather unassuming and otherwise unremarkable young man, as he read through the contract, "you say she'll be able to bear children again? Mine?"
Oleandra gave a slight shake of her head, and before the Muggle couple could react, Mai drew her wand and struck them with a Memory Charm, wiping their memories of the entire affair. Like the five families before them, Oleandra had rejected them.
"You're awfully picky," Mai said as they climbed down the rope ladder to the ground. "Don't tell me you're getting attached?"
"That's not it," Oleandra said quietly. "They weren't right either. I'm sure they would have done right by the baby, but they wouldn't have loved it as their own… you heard them."
This was a rather touchy subject for Oleandra, since she had grown up without much parental love. Her guilt, combined with her own experiences, made it difficult for her to abandon Tonks's and Lupin's child to just anybody.
"You could always go the sneaky route," Mai said innocently. "Bestow the baby upon a Muggle couple trying to conceive without their knowledge, and they'd never know the difference. It would be much different from how we came to be… Fairy reincarnation, you know?"
"It wouldn't be right," Oleandra snapped. "I don't want to do that."
A strange look flickered across Mai's face, but before Oleandra could attempt to decipher it, her features settled back into their usual air of nonchalance.
"I see," Mai said. "In that case, why not hand the child over to me?"
Oleandra looked at her suspiciously.
"You're not going to use it as some ingredient for some evil potion or experiment, are you?" she said, eyes narrowing. "Besides, aren't you a bit young?"
In her previous life, Mai had been Morgan le Fay, the most fearsome Dark Witch ever to darken the British Isles, so skilled she could duel even Merlin to a standstill, despite his completely broken ability to see forwards, backwards, and even sideways through time. As Mai was the incarnation of such a monster in human form, Oleandra did not trust her to make a very good mother.
"I wouldn't bear the baby myself, obviously," Mai drawled. "Incidentally, do you remember the three Muggles you battled when you first appeared on my doorstep, two years ago?"
How could Oleandra have possibly forgotten being drugged, shot at with a frightfully loud Muggle firearm, and chased around town by a muscle-bound woman the size of a small mountain?
"Gwen, Enora, and Julianne?" Oleandra said, grimacing. "The receptionist who likes throwing potions around, the lady with the X-ray spectacles and the magic gun, and the gorilla woman?"
"Oh good, you remember them!" Mai said brightly. "Julianne, whom I'm assuming you're referring to by gorilla woman, would gladly take on the baby."
The copious amounts of Strengthening Solution the woman had imbibed to attain such a monstrous physique had wreaked havoc on her reproductive system, leaving her completely barren. It was the price she had had to pay to obtain supernatural power as a mere Muggle.
"How in Merlin's woollen sleevelets did you manage to bring them over from France?" Oleandra asked in surprise. "I thought the Death Eaters had blockaded the Channel."
"Rather easily, in fact," Mai said. "I suppose that, with you having murdered Voldemort, they stopped paying such close attention to the borders."
…
It turned out that Ollivander was not the only person Mai had brought back to the Muggle-Born Sanctuary the day before. Oleandra soon discovered, as Mai led her around the football field on a guided tour, that the enterprising young Witch had recruited a great many members from the Brittany branch of the Order of the Round Table to teach the Muggles and Muggle-Born their ways…
"Young Lady!" Gwen greeted Oleandra and Mai as they approached the football stadium's changing room. "Have you come to show your friend what I've got our soldiers working on?"
"That's right," Mai said lightly. "Incidentally, do you know where we might find Julianne? We passed the martial arts grounds on the way here, but we didn't see her."
Oleandra peeked over Gwen's shoulder.
From the look of it, the men's changing rooms of the football stadium had been transformed into some kind of magical laboratory. The lockers had been torn out and replaced with Potioneering and Alchemical stations, and the benches with workbenches, where a great many people were currently labouring, hammering and chiselling runes into bullets.
"Those bullets can pierce wards," Oleandra whispered in Mai's ear. "Is it really wise to teach so many Muggles how to make them?"
"Well, that's the point, isn't it?" Mai whispered back. "What good would they be if the Death Eaters' Shield Charms could repel them?"
A Wizard's reaction time was not fast enough to respond to gunfire, unlike spell beams. Wizards could, of course, devise any number of Charms or potions to passively gain the ability to resist, block or reflect gunfire, either temporarily or permanently, but if the bullets could ignore magical defences…
"You want to see that gorilla woman? Are you quite sure you wouldn't rather have a peek at what we've been developing here first, Young Mistress?" Gwen said plaintively. "You've got such brilliant people here, they've given us so many ideas… Enora's testing one of them right now, if you'd like to come in and have a look?"
"Ideas?" Mai said curiously. "Such as?"
"Such as using Floo Powder instead of gunpowder as a propellant for our magical bullets!" Gwen exclaimed, as she ushered them in. "Come in, come in, you'll see!"
"That sounds like a recipe for disaster," Oleandra commented, quietly signing the hand seal of Elhaz behind her back. "Well, it's our funeral."