The once-neat apartment looked as though it had been through a small explosion. The coffee table lay against the wall, tables and chairs had been overturned, coffee was splashed across the sofa, shards of bowls, plates, and teacups covered the floor, and a dining knife was embedded deep in the doorframe.
The mistress of the house clutched her endlessly crying child and cowered in the corner of the living room in terror, while her husband, Soren Minden, Deputy Director of the Memory Cancellation Command, stood ghastly white before the uninvited visitors.
"What... what do you want?!"
Soren Minden's voice shook with fear and rage, his fingers clenching and unclenching spasmodically.
Across from him, Lila, her hair color and facial contours altered, waved her Wand and made a relatively intact chair hop behind her. Smiling, she gestured for him to sit.
"Please sit, Deputy Director Minden. Relax. I mean no harm. I merely happened to recall... before you became a deputy director who no longer needed to work on the front lines, it seemed you had never properly mastered the Obliviation Charm, had you? Sometimes you erased Muggles' memories a little too thoroughly... and turned them into idiots."
Soren Minden's expression stiffened. "I... I was only careless..."
"Really?" Lila tilted her head. "How many times were you careless? Five? Ten? Do you remember clearly? Because as I recall... when we were at school, the Obliviation Charm was actually the spell you mastered best."
She leaned forward, staring intently into Minden's eyes as she asked with a smile, "You did it on purpose, didn't you? You hated Muggles so much that you did not even want to kill them. You only wanted to turn them into idiots and take pleasure in their suffering, didn't you?"
Minden's wife looked at her husband in