December 30th, 1890 — Ministry of Magic, Near Spirit Division

Paperwork was not and would never be a particularly exciting aspect of Ford’s job, but there was something to be said for having things neatly done. There was a certain feeling of accomplishment when he finished a stack and everything was exactly as it ought to be, exactly in place, which he never experienced when he was dealing with other administrative tasks — for instance, the sale of stock or property, or anything having to do with his family’s financial situation, really. It was a nice change, too, from some of the wilder spiritual guests he’d been dealing with lately. Christmas was a busy time for his division — not, he suspected, because the spirits were actually behaving any differently than they always did, but because people were busier and less inclined to put up with any nonsense from their undead roommates.

He had just delivered a stack to another department and was taking his time returning to his desk, strolling leisurely through the Ministry halls. At least, he was strolling leisurely until he heard a very familiar bloodcurdling scream. He knew at once what, or rather, who had caused it and picked up the pace until he was lightly jogging back to the hallway which contained his office. He rounded the corner just in time to see a ghostly woman who had been menacing a passerby — the recipient of the scream, no doubt — disappear through the wall into someone’s office.

“Good gracious,” he muttered under his breath, weary already at the prospect of chasing her down. “Quite sorry about Isabelle,” he called to the ghost’s harried victim. “She’s not supposed to be out.”

  

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Set by Lady!

Usually work didn't bring Beth out of the depths of the Ministry, where the Wizengamot was - but one of the members had sent her upstairs to get a record, and she could not come up with a good excuse. She wheeled into the Ministry elevator and up to the right floor - Beasts, Beings, et cetera - and had already recovered the record when she ran into her.

She was a ghost - she was obviously a ghost - but there was something gruesome about this one and the gore on the wound in the middle of her phantom chest. The ghost popped out of the wall in front of Beth and she screamed, abruptly pulling the brake on her wheelchair to stop herself from wheeling through the spirit - with the halt in motion, inertia brought the record flew out of her hand and into a haphazard pile of papers on the ground.

"It's alright," Beth said, blushing at the man. "I'm sorry for screaming."

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When Isabelle's ghostly form had cleared the hallway and Ford first got a look at who it was she had been screeching at, he thought they might have fallen. His heart skipped a beat as he wondered if they were hurt, both because he disliked anyone being hurt and because if Isabelle had injured someone it was likely to put a bad mark on his work record, because he was responsible for Isabelle (even if he was sure it was someone on Magical Maintenance who kept letting her out — her room looked like a broom closet from the outside and although he'd put numerous signs up he wasn't sure whether they all knew how to read). He realized on his second glance that it was only Miss Vane, however — she was always that height, because of the chair. He didn't know Miss Vane personally, but had seen her around at the Ministry. It was difficult not to notice her, given the... well.

"No, I'm sure she started it," he said with a sympathetic nod, as he bent to collect whatever papers Miss Vane had dropped. "She does that, pop out and scream at people. That's why she's here with us and not at her cottage in Shropshire," he explained. Isabelle had lived in Shropshire some hundred years ago, as best as they could tell, and she had been there ever since her death. For the majority of that time she had been quite harmless, and technically she still was (ghosts had very little recourse if they wanted to cause harm, being non-corporeal). She had, however, taken to shrieking instead of talking about two years ago after some upset that they had yet to determine. Since then, she had been living in a small room in the Spirit Division. Rehabilitating her was Ford's pet project — but it was not exactly going well.

"You didn't happen to see exactly which room she went in to, did you?" he asked.

  

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Set by Lady!

"Oh," Beth said, as if that made any sense to her - why the dead decided to take things out on the living, she didn't know. The living had more than enough problems with each other already. That said, there were plenty of things about ghosts that she was sure the Spirit Division understood better - that was sort of their purpose, and Beth had never taken Ghoul Studies, or anything. She did not know many dead people, either.

She undid the brake on her chair and pushed herself back an experimental few inches; Beth craned her neck to glance at the wall Miss Shropshire had gone through. She gestured at it. "Through there, I think," she said, "But I'm not sure where the door for that is, I think it's in one of the other hallways."

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Through the wall without a door, obviously. Ford wasn't sure if Isabelle did these sorts of things on purpose — it was equally likely that she was being malicious or simply unhinged — but it seemed like every time she got out, she managed the most inconvenient path through the Ministry (though perhaps it only felt that way since she inevitably left a trail of shaken coworkers in her wake). It wasn't as though she even had anywhere to go. The tenants who had known her before she started up with all this said she didn't even like Shropshire.

He was considering the best path forward when a second woman appeared as if from nowhere; she must have been startled back into a recess in the hallway when Isabelle emerged. Luckily Ford wasn't the sort to startle, or else her sudden appearance might have made him jump. As it was, he was simply even more embarrassed.

"That's, ah, one way of putting it, Miss Cardew," he said (recognizing her both from their school years together and her occasional visits to his division since then). He was actually surprised she'd never seen Isabelle before... but then, no one was supposed to see Isabelle at all.

"Thank you for your help, Miss Vane," he told the woman in the wheelchair. "I'll handle her from here." He assumed Miss Vane had work to get back to, down in... whichever floor she worked on (vaguely down, though, he thought, from having been on an elevator with her once before).

Of course, at that moment Isabelle soared, shrieking, into the lift, which meant none of them would be leaving.

  

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Set by Lady!

The woman in the hallway, who Beth didn't recognize, did not seem to see her - Beth was relatively used to this, and didn't even really note it. She nodded to Mr. Greengrass and was about to say something along the lines of good day when the ghost soared into the lift, screaming yet again.

Beth panicked and pulled the brake on her wheelchair again - she was not going anywhere. "Should we - should we try to herd her?" Beth said; she did not sound confident and her voice was tremulous, but after screaming just moments ago she was determined to do something braver.

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   Reuben Crouch

For a second Ford only looked at the lift doors, tongue pushed to one side of his teeth as he considered. It would have been much easier if she had simply decided to fly out again and let Miss Vane, and presumably Miss Cardew as well, go about their business, but unfortunately she seemed to have every intention of staying put, at least for the moment. It was a shame the lift that had opened on their floor wasn't the one that already had a resident ghost; he was unpleasant enough that he might have chased her out on his own. Unfortunately, it seemed that would be Ford's job.

"She doesn't much care for being herded," he said pensively in response to Miss Vane's question. He hadn't decided the best way to go about solving this conundrum, yet. When Isabelle got out (which happened more frequently than it should have) he usually lured her back into her spelled confinement room with tricks and illusions — but he had always gotten her to move away from things, which would not help them much when she was in the lift which had nothing on the other side of it. Well, presumably it had something on the other side of it, but Ford had no idea what. The floorplan of the Ministry was not exactly inuitive — perhaps it was another floor. Perhaps it was the Department of Mysteries, existing in some strange parallel Ministry between the lift and the exterior wall. Perhaps it was nothing but the exterior wall, in which case... what? Would she just float out into Muggle London, and wreck havoc there? Surely the walls of the Ministry were spelled to prevent... spills, but if they weren't Ford certainly didn't want to be the one responsible for breaking the Statute of Secrecy. Not to mention having to reclaim Isabelle.

"She doesn't like bright lights," he said, more thinking out loud than actually trying to communicate this point. "So usually I get her back to our division with a few flash spells. But I don't know what would draw her out. I suppose something she enjoyed in life, but..." he shrugged, helplessly. If he knew what Isabelle liked, or anything about her at all aside from the most basic facts, he likely would have been much more successful in his attempts to reason with her and get her to stop screaming all the time.

  

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Set by Lady!

So they had to find a way to lure her out, and they could not use bright lights, or she would just hide in the lift. Once she was out they could use lights, sure - but they had to get there first.

"What did she do when she was alive?" Beth asked. She undid the brake on her wheelchair; experimentally, she rolled a few feet back, so as to give the ghost more space. It wasn't like ghosts really needed space, but it was the idea of it - maybe Isabelle wanted more room. Maybe she wanted an adventure.

Beth didn't really have any problems with projecting onto a ghost, seeing as she could not get back to actual work until the ghost was out of the lift.

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"I don't know," Ford admitted. "She died a hundred years ago, and we've never found anyone who knew her when she was alive. The folks who shared the house with her as a ghost said she never did much of anything that they knew of, until she started screaming all the time. She must have been awfully lonely," he reflected. Spirits had it hard sometimes, he thought. It was all well and good to be Mr. Fudge and have your whole family about you and be running a resort, or to be one of the Hogwarts ghosts and be surrounded by interested and curious students all the time. The spirits who remained in isolated places after all their loved ones had passed on and gone to whatever was next, though, had quite an unenviable time of things. Ford didn't really blame Isabelle for having snapped, after decades of it, particularly when the people who lived in the house with her weren't much interested in knowing anything about her.

"Spinster, I think," he continued with a shrug. "Or else married and the record of it was lost. She never had any children, that much we know for sure."

  

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Set by Lady!

So the ghost who had gone mad had been a lonely spinster left to her lonesome, and Beth was trying not to over-identify. She would never choose to become a ghost, though - whatever happened after death was whatever happened after death, and it was not as if the living were going to become more interested in being around her if she was ghostly. So - they were not the same.

Besides, Beth had her brother.

None of this helped them, and she frowned at the predicament. "I suppose she doesn't like to chat?" she asked; that sounded easy, too easy, and if it had been that easy surely Mr. Greengrass would have figured out more about her by now.

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Ford raised an eyebrow. It was a strange question, given the circumstances; most people who encountered Isabelle, or had her scream in their faces, were more likely to ask if there was some way to magically punish or contain her, not consider whether she wanted to chat. Talking was precisely what most spirits wanted — or, more specifically, they wanted someone to listen to them — but most people outside of his division didn't really get that, in his experience.

Of course, he'd already tried that with Isabelle. "Well, she doesn't like to chat with me," he said with a frown. Presumably she must have enjoyed talking to someone, at some point, during her hundred-plus years on the planet.

  

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Set by Lady!

Beth frowned. She didn't know Mr. Greengrass very well, but he was almost certainly better at talking to people than she was - so that wasn't likely to help them. "I'm not sure what to do," she said, giving her chair an experimental roll about six inches backwards. Isabelle was sadder than she was scary, though - so there was that.

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No, of course she didn't know what to do; this wasn't her job. Ford didn't know what to do, and it was very much his job. He could have camped out in front of the lift for hours trying to find something she liked, and he may or may not have been successful in enticing her out — but that was not particularly useful at the moment, when Miss Vane needed to get back to work and could not exactly use the stairs.

"Hm," he said. "Give me a minute. Watch the lift, if you would," he asked, dashing off to the nearby door for the Spirit Division offices. Miss Vane had already done much more than what he would have expected a passerby to do, in this situation, but she didn't seem to begrudge helping him a bit. Besides, if Isabelle flew off in another direction while he was searching through his desk, and he had no idea where she'd gone, he'd be back to square one.

"So — this might not work," he said as a sort of disclaimer upon returning to the hallway, holding a glass bottle with a long, thin neck and a bulbous base. "This is, ah, new... and it hasn't exactly been tested yet," he admitted. "It's supposed to hold ghosts. And if it doesn't work, the worst that can happen is she flies by and screams at us again, and the lift is clear," he said optimistically.

He did need her help again for this part, though, so hopefully the way he'd described it gave her at least a little faith in its abilities. "I think I can go in and frighten her out," he said. "But, ah — do you think you could hold it? And put the stopper in if she goes inside?"

  

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Set by Lady!

Beth watched the ghost warily as Mr. Greengrass went off, but luckily Isabelle didn't move while they were waiting. She tilted her head at him through his explanation. It sounded simple enough, and - well, surely she could hold the glass bottle long enough to trap a ghost? She wasn't doing the difficult part.

Carefully, she centered her wheelchair in front of the elevator doors. "Sure," she agreed, "I can do that." Mr. Greengrass seemed like he knew what he was doing; she was just completing the task for him.

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Right, then. If that was sorted and Miss Vane was willing, the only thing left for Ford to do was actually get in there with Isabelle. He shot her one wistful look before he drew his wand. This was not a very pleasant experience for her, being startled and chased back to confinement, and every time it happened he thought they probably set her rehabilitation back at least a month, or maybe more. She'd never listen to him if she didn't trust him, and she'd never trust him if her experiences with him predominantly involved him making loud noises to scare her. He really wished Maintenance would stop opening the door on her room.

With a sigh, he went in. A bang and a flash of light and she went screaming back towards the hall, directly into Miss Vane's waiting bottle. One thing about ghosts: they were not very good at keeping up with the latest magical inventions, which meant it was fairly easy to outsmart them, when you needed to.

"Bottle it up, please," he instructed Miss Vane as he departed the lift once again. "I'll get you back to your room in a moment, Isabelle," he continued, as though this would be comforting to the spirit who was now contained in a much smaller spot than she doubtless would have preferred.

  

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Set by Lady!

Beth pointed the bottle at the screaming ghost, but could not help closing her eyes as the ghost approached - luckily, Isabelle was sucked into the container regardless. Beth opened her eyes when she heard Mr. Greengrass speak again and capped the bottle. She held it out for him to take.

"Have a good rest of your day, Mr. Greengrass," Beth said; she wheeled her chair into the lift and hit the button for the Wizengamot floor. This little excursion had been more eventful than she would have liked, but at least she got to be brave.

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   Fortitude Greengrass