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The morning of July 26th found Mamori about 45 minutes into his post-practice window and roughly 45 seconds from escape. 2 hours of Quidditch drills done, something edible stuffed in and already forgotten, wetsuit on, towel and lunch in the waterproof bag, surfboard under one arm, and the only thing between him and surfing was the fireplace. He had been going to Machrihanish almost daily for the past 3 weeks, first because it sat far enough from home that parental authority arrived pre-weakened by distance, and second because it was the only spot in the region where the Firth of Clyde didn't eat the ocean swell and surfing actually functioned. His summer, minus summer camp, amounted to only one month and he had no intention of wasting any of it.
Mamori had nearly made it, but unfortunately, when he walked into the living room ready to leave, his dear father was standing by the fireplace looking tired with the green flames behind him just dying down. A Floo Call, presumably.
"Dad, move it." Very much an uninvolved bystander to whatever had just happened, the pink-haired badger gave two lazy waves of his hand to shoo his father aside.
"Portencross sent a notice just now." His father did not move, but instead opened with a briefing. "The Hippocampus eggs started hatching early."
"Congratulations to them." Mamori had a bad feeling about this, his father was NOT someone who shared work updates outside of dinner unless it was going somewhere.
Here's some relevant context for anyone who skipped several family dinners' worth of secondhand updates: Dad was a magizoologist. This weekend it was Dad's turn on the inspection rotation. Which normally meant nothing because it was the on-site keeper that handled the actual work, so all Dad had to do was walk around nodding at things, handle some light clipboard work, and be home by noon, yay. Except the plan had clearly died and Mamori didn't need to be a genius to see where this was going: Now SOMEBODY had to absorb all the extra work happening and GUESS WHICH MAGIZOOLOGIST THAT'S GONNA BE? And backup on a weekend? Easy, all Dad needed was a functioning adult willing to work overtime, on a weekend, voluntarily, a species which, oops, science may or may not have already declared extinct; nay.
"Today's workload probably tripled." As briefings went, this was doing almost none of the briefing, and if the writer hadn't just dumped entire previous paragraph of context on the reader's behalf, that 4 words would have been the entire available information.
"Oh no, tragic! Anyway, I'm sure you'll figure it out, you're so capable." The fuck did adult staffing shortages have to do with him? Yet Mamori didn't even dare meet his father's eyes, one foot already in the fireplace, well aware that if he didn't leave now he never would.
"15 Galleons." Knowing perfectly well his son wasn't looking, his father illustrated anyway, one finger on the left hand and five on the right.
Mamori pressed his lips together and withdrew the foot. His old man had clearly known him too well to bother with family obligation, basic empathy and the educational value of witnessing live conservation, thus skipped straight to the method that would.
"Fixed rate?" "Fixed rate." "Paid today?" "Paid today." "I had plans for Machrihanish."
"You were already running late," his father was looking noticeably smug now, pushing up his glasses to add, "Portencross gets a westerly this afternoon, there may be a stretch of rideable wind swell. Finish the work and you can head straight out." Late, his ass. The man was spinning fiction out of thin air given that it was barely 9 in the morning, so right now was prime surfing time. But turning down money was a crime against himself, and Mamori was already half, no, seventy-five percent convinced.
"Obviously lunch is on you." Thinking that an opportunity to fleece his own father like this did not come along every day, the 13-year-old had already unzipped his bag and lobbed his sandwich back toward the kitchen without waiting for an answer."Oh and past two o'clock the rate changes." "Four o'clock." "One thirty." "Three thirty." "Two thirty." His father closed his eyes for a moment, and from the expression on his face Mamori suspected he was not thinking paternal thoughts. "Fine."
And so, less than ten minutes later, Mamori had transitioned from a free young boy on his way to go surfing into a temporary employee still wearing a wetsuit and carrying a surfboard toward a magical creature conservation station.
The station hid near the Portencross coast, which from the Muggle side looked like an old stone boathouse and not worth slowing down for. Past the concealment charms the interior ran straight back into the natural rock face — saltwater hatching chambers first and then the holding pools and then channels that let water through to the near-shore enclosures where the adult Hippocampi live — and the whole point of that arrangement was control. The premise being that the ocean couldn't be left alone with its own temperature or salt. And to be fair the premise had behaved itself right up until this morning.
Mamori left his surfboard at the rinse area outside laid flat between the stone wall and a shallow tide pool that the station's outflow fed through mesh-covered overflow channels, all of it still within the wards; his father did guarantee that nobody would touch the board, but Mamori did not express trust, thus looping the leash around a rack and knotted it.
Inside, 10 semi-transparent eggs sat fixed in the hatching pool — each one roughly the size of a horse's skull — with 2 had already cracked open. One Tadfoal was flailing around the shallow trough like it had somewhere to be, the second was still mostly wound in membrane, and from all directions and the remaining 8 were producing small and regular cracking sounds. The keeper on duty was managing the water flow and trying to coax the first foal through the examination channel.
His father took over the health checks immediately and pointed Mamori at the recording table. "Hatch time, weight, length, colour, markings, then match it against the ring number. In that order, ideally."
Mamori looked at the paperwork, then at the pool... with creatures that all looked exactly identical. So he had surrendered Machrihanish and come all the way to a different coast in a wetsuit, to do paperwork??? Paperwork! Of all things. 15 fucking Galleons. He should have said 20 and let the eggs wait.
"Don't you have an automatic recording system for this?" "We do." "Why not use it?" "Magic interference near the hatching pool." "So your contingency is a 13-year-old." "A 13-year-old who agreed to 15 Galleons." That proved difficult to refute on both legal and moral grounds, so Mamori made a face of pure agony and picked up the quill.
The first one went fine. It got steered down the narrow measurement channel by the keeper, got its breathing and eyes and fins signed off by his father, and then hit Mamori's station, where the numbers were taken, colours noted, and ring one went onto foal one and not anywhere creative. None of it was hard, if anything it leaned monotonous in a way that was almost meditative, and would have stayed that way past foal 2, who was halfway down the channel with Mamori leaning in to catch a length reading, form in hand, when eggs 3 and 4 cracked at almost the same moment.
Of the new arrivals, one hadn't fully separated from its membrane and the other had already caught a current, making real progress toward the holding pool. The keeper shut one of the gates. Egg 5 split from the side right as Mamori jerked back, and the jerk was the problem: water went across the form, the ink at the corner bled, and the ID ring he'd been holding got loose and rolled to the bottom of the equipment box.
Mamori pinned the form down with one hand and went fishing for the ring with the other.
"This counts as a workplace hazard, right?" "Put it in your appeal letter." "I'll be attaching an invoice for damages." Damages meaning himself, the form, and the ink, in ascending order of importance.
His father didn't get to answer because another egg had started rocking. Within a few minutes it was apparent that two adults and one paid child laborer was not quite the right headcount for several simultaneous hatchings. And to be clear nothing was in danger or failing, the problem was purely arithmetic meaning that everyone short at least one hand at any given moment. The keeper was welded to the main gate while his father kept having to pick between the foal in front of him and the eggs behind him. Mamori, whose contract as he understood it covered a quill and nothing else, kept getting waved over to hold gates and pass equipment, and every minute spent holding a gate was a minute the forms sat blank and multiplying.
His father finally set down the examination tools.
"Keep recording in order. Don't let any foals go into the holding pool without a ring."
"Where are you going?" "To find someone who knows what they're doing." Mamori watched his father walking toward the small office with the Floo connection.
"I'm right here." "I mean a breeder." Then the office door closed on him.
Mamori said nothing, because he was a professional. Tadfoal number 3, however, received a full and confidential account of how essential personnel were valued around here.
The next hatchling entered the channel and Mamori was back on the clock. Grey blue, one lighter streak on the left front fin, half an inch shorter than its predecessor. Ring on, gate open, into the holding pool. Next.
By the time his father came back out of the office the rocking egg still hadn't made up its mind.
"Richard Lee is on his way, he has breeding experience." "How long?" "Soon. His niece is coming with him."
One more adult was a genuine net positive, but one niece of unspecified age was potentially one extra item on site requiring supervision, and who would end up assigned to babysitting duty was truly one of life's great mysteries. Mamori looked up from the form and sighed dramatically, at this point it was hard to say which fate was worse, the admin or the babysitting.
A few minutes later the protective charms at the entrance flared, and a grown man walked into the hatchery with a girl about Mamori's age in tow.
Mamori's gaze stopped on the vaguely-familiar-might-be-his-DADA-classmate's face for one second. Hogwarts was not short on students, but running into someone from his own year at a research station on the Scottish coast, damp to the elbows and mid-hatch on ten Hippocampi at once, still qualified as an extraordinarily inefficient coincidence.
But whatever. "Please tell me your uncle mentioned you'd be working today." Somewhere behind the pools another eggshell gave a crisp crack. He slid the stack of unused ID rings across the table to the girls' side. "Because I need someone who can count to ten and won't put ring nine on upside down and call it a six. Congratulations on the interview."
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