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Witch Weekly · December 23, 2019 – 3:52 AM

The Secret Scandal of the St. Mungo's Charity Catastrophe
If you weren't at the St. Mungo's Charity Candle Lighting event on December 19th, you likely don't know exactly what took place. In fact, even if you were there, you likely don't know, as everyone involved in the incident — which indisputably left four bystanders dead and filled the injury wards of St. Mungo's immediately following — has been utterly wiped from the minds of all who witnessed the events.

So what happened at the Ministry? A pervasive rumor has been circulating that the catastrophe had something to do with an attempted break-in at the Department of Mysteries. This was reported by the Daily Prophet immediately following the event and has been cited as just cause for the alteration of memories related to the incident. The truth, however, is not quite so mundane — it is, in fact, something far more sinister, and while it almost certainly did involve the Department of Mysteries, it was not so much an attempted break-in but rather a successful break-out.

Disgraced former Minister of Magic Balthazar Urquart took the position of Head of the Department of Mysteries this spring, after spending some time living in obscurity with his now infamous daughter, werewolf Topaz Urquart. While some might have seen this move as a bid to return to normalcy after the upheaval of the previous several years, Mr. Urquart's motives were far from mundane: he sought to use the resources of the Ministry, and the Department of Mysteries in particular, to cure his daughter's affliction.

Due to the secretive nature of the Department of Mysteries we do not have details on precisely what type of experiments this lead to, or what progress has been made — but sources close to the Ministry have indicated to our reporters that the Department of Mysteries may have, in a misguided attempt to maximize their potential to experiment with a cure, created a group of werewolves who transform not two or three times a month, but repeatedly. It was this unfortunate group of test subjects who, tired of their constant exploitation in the name of progress, broke out of the Department and unleashed chaos on the Ministry.

Why the memory wipes, then? Clearly, Mr. Urquart's friendship with current Minister Justin Ross is not without its perks. Knowing that the public would be rightly outraged to hear how the Department of Mysteries has been spending it's resources lately, the Minister ordered the event removed from the minds of the victims, and our sources imply that the details of the event may have been altered even for Ministry personnel who were allowed to maintain their memories, essentially resetting knowledge of these vile experiments.

The question that remains to be answered: will any of the countless injured become afflicted with lycanthropy themselves? Because we cannot know the details of what was done to this group of wolves between their acquisition in spring and their breakout in December, it's impossible to say for certain. The symptoms, if they do appear, may occur at any point, even months in the future (remember, the transformations of the offending werewolves were no longer connected to the full moon). Our advise to readers who were injured in the chaos is to watch careful for any sign of affliction and work closely with a healer to stave off the effects as long as possible — and our advice to everyone else, if someone you know was affected by this catastrophe, is to keep a safe distance away from them until their status as a healthy, normal human being is confirmed.

A photograph of Miss Topaz Urquart, werewolf; this teenage girl allegedly inspired her father to commit atrocious experiments in search of a cure for lycanthropy.

An artist's rendition of what this new breed of 'wolfman' may look like — transitioning between human, wolf, and sometimes to stages in between.

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Issue #223 - The Secret Scandal of the St. Mungo's Charity Catastrophe