December 11, 1894 — A Wellingtonshire Residence

Poltergeists were not exactly a common occurrence but it was not too surprising when it happened in a home that contained eleven children. Was this couple trying to give Old Man Valenderius a run for his money or something? Poltergeists were generally no trouble for most of his crew except, perhaps, George Robins. Greengrass had answered that call and so Desi had only been left to ponder the merits of taking a nap. It was the middle of the week with the weekend so close and yet still so far away.

He had been about to lay his head down for said nap when an owl flew through the window. It wasn't one of the Ministry owls and he opened it to find a howler where a womans voice screeched about the poltergeist and the man he had sent to deal with it. He didn't quite tune into the rest before he was standing up. Field assignments were usually a handful but ultimately no problem for Greengrass.

He apparated to the home in question, finding a poltergeist indeed pelting his poor employee and whom he presumed to be the woman of the house with all sorts of things. "Now what situation is this?" Desi asked as he moved to both get some sort of handle on the situation and protect Greengrass from the projectiles enough that he could fill him in. "Immobulus," he cast, satisfied when that stopped the Geist for a moment.

  

Ford was having a bad day. He had never been excellent with poltergeists; he gravitated more towards the more emotionally-driven spirits, or to ghosts themselves. They were easier to reason with, and easier to understand. Poltergeists were just chaotic, and it had always been difficult for him to predict what they might want or how they would react to anything he offered, which made negotiating with one impossible. Still, he was usually better than this. He'd been dispatched to try and persuade the poltergeist to leave (a fool's errand from the beginning; they never did that) or to use some charms to force it to at least keep its behavior contained to the non-dangerous variety of trouble. He had failed to do either, and now he and the lady of the house were cowering behind a settee while the house's entire collection of silverware was set their way, one piece at a time. How did some people own this many steak knives? How could she possibly have sat this many people around one dinner table? Really this inconvenience was mostly her fault, for having such an outrageous collection of dinnerware. At least the poltergeist hadn't moved on to the fine china yet — the cutlery was probably standing up to being thrown far better than the porcelain would have.

His boss was here now, and the poltergeist was immobilized, for the moment. Ford peeked his head out from behind the settee suspiciously. "I did try that," he protested. Was Morgan just better at magic than he was? Had he missed when he'd cast the spell before? The poltergeist also didn't look like it was going to hold him forever ... Ford wasn't sure how much of a reprieve this was going to be, in the end. But it was something.

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Set by Lady!

"I'm sure you did, this poltergeist seems especially strong," Desi assured Greengrass. It was even still moving, albeit very slowly, through his freezing charm. There was really no reasoning with a poltergeist, they differed from ghosts in that way. Though some could be talked into signing contracts, this one did not seem a candidate for that.

"Were the children of the house relocated for the time being?" With eleven of them, that was a lot of chaotic energy to be fueling the geist. Lessening the poltergeists sources might weaken it a bit. But that was down to the parents taking their children elsewhere, not Greengrass.