6 September 1895 — Ministry Perimeter Outskirts, Irvingly

One problem with having a catastrophe which affected the center of a mostly non-magical town was that it was rather impossible to get there easily. The train service had been suspended, it was outside of convenient broom-riding distance from anything, and all of the floos the town did have were inside of the quarantine area. Apparition was an option, but given the risks should one miscalculate the arrival point by two dozen yards it wasn't something Oz was keen on. The portkey office had arranged for regular trips to and from the evacuation area at Hawthorne Hollow, both to help get people with other places to go out and to get necessary services to support those who remained in. Oz had arrived there but walked quickly away along the perimeter; he hadn't come to help with crowd control or to make a humanitarian appearance, and he didn't want to be detained by questions he couldn't answer. Instead he walked along the quarantine line until he found the hastily erected tent — like the one helping the displaced citizens in the Hollow, but much smaller — serving as a command and control center for the barricade.

It had only been a year, give or take, since the cave in of Padmore Park. He wasn't inclined to have another mass death event on in hands, but so far no one had been able to answer the question of how many people had been affected with any degree of certainty. Some things were (maddeningly) out of even his control.

"The last word I had was that it was maintaining size, not growing," Oz said to the first employee he saw in the tent, entirely without preamble. "Is that still the case, to the best of our knowledge?"

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