December 15th, 1890 - Ministry of Magic

Evidentiary requests from the Ministry could be uncomfortable. They were particularly uncomfortable when he needed Freya's brother-in-law to sign off on and release them. Selwyn's office door was ajar when he approached it; he knocked on it with his left hand.

"Mr. Selwyn," August said, trying to project professional neutrality. Trystan Selwyn had at least one official bastard, so - they were similar enough at the moment, but if the rumors were true, Mr. Selwyn was worse. So he ought not to feel embarrassed, at least - and it wasn't like Trystan knew anything at all about August's situation with Freya. Hell, it wasn't unlikely that Trystan and Daniel weren't even close.

None of that was about his case or his client, though. "I'm the lawyer, August Echelon-Arnost? I talked to the office secretary about documentation on polyjuice potion."

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“That’s me,” Trystan affirmed, barely glancing up from an old case file from which he was devising a new exercise for his trainees. Until he heard lawyer, at least, and straightened up in his chair to flip the case files closed.

Echelon-Arnost. Certainly he knew the name - this Mr. Echelon-Arnost was the lawyer who’d defended Scrimgeour, for one, and that vampire - and his extended family were one of the old pureblood sorts in society, although (and this was a rare thing) possibly one with as many rumours, family complications and half-buried scandals as the Selwyns.

“What, and she didn’t shoo you right back out of the department?” Trystan said jokingly, with an easy-mannered laugh he might’ve given no matter who was before him, as if getting past the secretary was one of the twelve labours of Hercules. “That’s impressive. Come in, I suppose.” He did his best not to offer a begrudging sigh along with his wave; too late now, really, if he was already standing at Trystan’s door. But he resolved to foist the next lawyer off on Prewett.

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August laughed, easily if not entirely honestly, at Selwyn's comment. He would come in, get the records, be as normal as possible, and none of the Selwyns would have even the slightest bit of knowledge about his entanglement with Freya. This would be utterly fine. If he thought about it long enough, surely he could manifest it.

"Thank you," August said, coming in. He set his briefcase down next to the chair across from Selwyn's desk; in August's experience, these things went better if one was confident. "Did she get the chance to speak with you regarding my case at all? I'm not litigating against Magical Law Enforcement on this, for what it's worth."

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“Oh, well, then you’ve nothing to worry about,” Trystan said carelessly, relaxing a touch further and wondering why Echelon-Arnost did not seem quite so at ease about it. Not that he seemed uneasy, exactly, but Trystan had spent too many years observing people playing a role not to sense that some of his confidence was put-upon. Something in the laugh, maybe. Perhaps it was just the man, just his professionalism.

“Yes, she mentioned it,” he continued, stacking his current case files to one side as he thought back - she mentioned so many uninteresting things a day - and tried to recall whether she had located the files he had requested and brought them in yet. “Polyjuice potion, you said?”

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"Polyjuice potion," August affirmed. "Particularly anything on its usage for - " he frowned as he tried to conjure the right phrasing "- mimicking animals, and how that's not how it works, that would be particularly helpful." The more explicit, the better, in court - especially when one was trying to get a ruling of, essentially, 'this was stupid and pointless.'

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“Merlin, what have people been doing?” Trystan said at that, shaking his head but a little amused beneath it all at the stupidity of anyone thinking Polyjuice Potion worked like that. He nodded briefly, though, to assure him that he could help here, fairly certain he had some documentation that referred to just that in this office’s files after all.

“Have you seen it happen?” He asked as an aside, still not certain of the details of this case or whether it had been caught before anything went too wrong, but he remembered it happening to a trainee here once. “Attempting animal transformation on Polyjuice?”

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"I haven't seenit," August admitted; usually his career provided a barrier between him and the gory details of people's lives and mistakes. "I read about a man who got stuck with bear paws, though. Have you seen it?" Mr. Selwyn was a former auror, which - provided no such barrier, so August would not be surprised. He was sort of curious about it, too - it sounded a little delightfully gruesome.

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Bear paws - a little awkward, but not the worst to live with, Trystan supposed. Might be useful in a duel.

“Only once, in the flesh,” he admitted in return, with an expression as he thought of it that was partly lingering horror and partly morbid curiosity (and maybe weighted towards the latter, because he was a terrible person). “An auror trainee - not one now, back when I was in training - got a little confident, tried to experiment with it to pass one of his concealment trials,” he explained, with a flicker of the theatricality he would have if he were telling this to his trainees as a cautionary tale. “Got hold of a Demiguise hair. Drank the potion hoping it’d make him invisible, I think. Next thing we knew he was getting carted out of here looking like a giant hairy silver chimpanzee -” Trystan continued with a shrug, not quite holding back his smirk. “And we never saw hide nor hair of him again.”

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August couldn't mask his interest; he had enjoyed the gruesome stories of aurors when he worked here in the mid-1870s, and now he got to hear them so rarely. There was a little v of concern between his eyebrows as Selwyn explained, and in the heat of the story August could almost forget that he had made a cuckold of Selwyn's brother-in-law — almost.

Still, his smirk mirrored Selwyn's at the end of the story, even with that little note of residual concern on his face. "Well," he said, "I'll remind my friends to stay away from any demiguise-hairs, for their potioneering experiments."

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“Well, who knows, perhaps it did give him the power of invisibility in the end,” Trystan added with a faux-thoughtful shrug still smirking at the memory of it, “but I expect the humiliation of it was more the reason.” Trystan wasn’t sure he would have stepped foot back in the place, either, if everyone had witnessed that.

At any rate, he snorted amiably enough at the mention of potioneering friends - though how many friends Echelon-Arnost had in those fields, he couldn’t picture - and nodded as the secretary stepped in with some of the documentation. Trystan paused to flick through the pages, scanning to be sure the relevant details and that nothing too not-pertinent was in it. All well and good, so he slid those across to the lawyer and made a motion to wait, as he leafed through a folder in one of his own cabinets, pulling out a copy of some of the training materials on potions. “And this one might help you, too.”

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August glanced at the file after Selwyn handed it over. Yes, this would be very helpful — and it was interesting, besides. He would actually enjoy reading these files, as opposed to when he dabbled in things like contract law, which were just boring.

"Oh," he said brightly, straightening in his chair at the other side of the former auror's desk. "Thank you, Mr. Selwyn." He was rather pleased with himself for having survived the interaction with Selwyn with his reputation intact, and also with the materials he had actually come to the Ministry to get.

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“Not a problem,” Trystan offered with a shrug, because as far as lawyers went (and there were some real pains-in-arses even in the wider department, the sort of bores worth avoiding in the break rooms), this had been a relatively painless affair.

Possibly because Trystan had avoided doing actual work for the interim, and gotten to show off reminisce about old auror stories. But Echelon-Arnost had been a perfectly decent audience there, so, the fact remained.

“Good luck with it,” he added, although luck presumably had nothing at all to do with his cases. Still, the sentiment was not completely un-genuine, he was mildly interested: “I’ll keep an ear out so I can hear how it goes for you.”

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