I can talk shit about my brother but you can't - Printable Version

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+---- Thread: I can talk shit about my brother but you can't (/showthread.php?tid=13467)

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I can talk shit about my brother but you can't - Lycoris Dempsey - September 1, 2023

August 31, 1893 — Dempsey Estate; Ireland

Unlike some of her siblings, Lycoris had no head for politics (though she did think women and all others of sound mind should be allowed to vote). Truth be told, as much as she loved Ozy, she also did not think he was likely to win Minister of Magic. She thought he was doing it just for the hell of it and not as a serious bid for office. And so, she had not been taking it seriously. It wasn't like she could vote.

One thing she did take seriously when it came to her elder brother was his career as an inventor. She loved his creations. Thus when she heard the next table over at The Painted Lady discussing how he was not even a good inventor, she had been incensed enough to discreetly hex their teacups to stick to their lips before leaving.

"Ozy, you will never believe what I heard at The Painted Lady today," she declared once she found him within the household. This declaration was likely not quite out of the norm to hear from her lips. "They had the gall to say you are not a good inventor. You might not make the worlds best Minister but you are the best inventor that I know." She was fuming, that much apparent as she paced around the room as she spoke. She really did think Ozy was a great inventor, and not only because she had sometimes helped him come up with a name or sometimes drew up ads for his creations.

Lycoris bursting in with something dramatic to say was nothing new, but the content was new. Oz was immediately stung that anyone was talking about him as a poor inventor, but did his best not to show it. Cool and collected. This was hardly the worst thing anyone would say about him during the course of his campaign, but it was the most personal so far. Prior to the beginning of August, he had never tried to convince anyone that he was a good Minister. He did fancy himself a decent inventor, though.

"How many inventors do you know?" he asked, tone dry (anything to not seem affected). He turned the page of the book he'd been reading (not that he was paying any attention to it now, but one could keep up appearances). "Most people don't understand what it means to be an inventor, anyway, so it's not as if their opinion is worth much."

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Well, at least his baby sister believed in him. It was not exactly a panacea to the idea that the whole of wizarding Britain might be talking about how poor of an inventor he was at this very moment, but it was at least a bit of a salve for the moment. "The Prophet article didn't mention of my actual patents," he complained with a nod. "Though they're on record at the Ministry's Ludicrous Patents Office, so I imagine that's just laziness on Pengloss' part — or maybe disorganization from the patent office," he allowed. On his occasional visits to the office, they hadn't exactly seemed like the most organized division in the Ministry. Perhaps they'd gotten a request for a list of his patents and simply misplaced it and forgotten to reply before the article went to print? Or perhaps they'd misplaced the patents themselves? It wasn't as though Oz had any reason to go check if they were all being maintained well, and unless someone tried to claim credit for one of his inventions he would continue to have no reason to check on them.

"But even if I only had one patent on record, it would still be more than any of the other candidates have," he pointed out. "So it's a bit hypocritical of anyone to use that against me for the sake of the election."

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Oz chuckled. "I don't think anyone other than the patent clerks would consider that a big move," he pointed out. There was a reason the office had been allowed to get to its present state, after all; no one was much harmed by it being inefficient. It wasn't something the average citizen cared about, like crime or disaster relief. The only people who cared about patents at all were inventors and their lawyers.

"I certainly don't patent until I'm done tinkering," he agreed. "I don't know how the Prophet even knew about those abandoned projects. Rumor, I suppose. They're not much better than Witch Weekly, when it comes down to it."

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"Oh, certainly," he agreed easily. "That man who invented floo powder never did a single noteworthy thing in the rest of his life." For all that Oz had agreed that the quality was more important than quantity, this last was said with an undercurrent of derision. He invented things because he didn't know what to do with all his free time otherwise, so it struck him as singularly odd that someone might invent one thing and just — stop. Unless they had died immediately afterwards. "And his family is set for the rest of time, financially."

Oz had never patented anything that had brought in a noteworthy income, but at least a third of that was probably down to marketing; he simply didn't do any, and could barely be bothered to expend any effort at all into getting his inventions into the hands of other people. He did sometimes make money from the things he created, but never anything that made a significant difference compared to the wealth he already possessed as heir to the Dempsey estate.

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"Was it?" Oz asked, then shrugged. It wasn't as though he had much personal experience with the Wildsmiths; he knew the name because he knew they owned the floo powder manufacturing company, and they were established in society. He certainly didn't know their family history. It seemed rather immaterial at this juncture whether the invention was the product of a man or a woman; the men in the family ran the business now, and it didn't diminish his point about that single invention having been enough to set the Wildsmiths up for generations.

Still, he didn't like to be wrong about anything, so he found a way to change the subject. "You're coming to the next campaign event, aren't you?"

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