[Galen Yardley]

Galen laughed charmingly. He greatly admired the professor's academic passion. The other man clearly was a man of reading and learning and his ambition to do well was rather commendable. Galen found himself wishing he would have been able to attend a magical school to have had a professor just like the man in front of him. He was certain he absolutely would have loved to study under an expert, rather than plug away at books in the hopes of slowly building up an understanding.

 "I wouldn't know the first thing about magical schools and their teaching, but I think your students are very lucky to have you. I was never afforded the privilege of attending one, but I dare say my grandparents did a good enough job in setting me up for life. Dhanya over these though went to a school for Arithmancy I believe? And the curriculum is impressive." He searched her eyes and she nodded to confirm that Galen remembered correctly. She'd talked about her school years on occasion and he was sure he had heard it before. Relief spread across the features as she nodded, confirming that he wasn't talking nonsense.

"If you have the time it would be fascinating to know what you see in the mirror or what you can say about it from observation. I've identified the rest of the stock that has come in, but this particular one seems to be a little elusive." He decided to be economical with information and not share what he and Dhanya had seen until the professor had taken a look for himself. He didn't want to influence his thinking in any one direction in particular.

He set the professors book choices down next to the cash register where he could pick them up later. "Well, I'd you come around the corner here," he said politely and indicated the mirror in question. "I'll take a step back so I'm not accidentally caught in the image as well, complicating the matter. We've not yet made any observations on how it behaves when two people are looking at the same time. For now, just see what you make of it on your own."

Curiosity was killing him. Maybe this man would be able to say why he was seeing Dhanya in a place neither of them recognised. His mind demanded an explanation for that and judging from his friends expression she was curious to learn more about it as well.

[Dhanya Raveendran]

"I'm surprised you remember," Dhanya exclaimed and gave Galen a bright smile. "Yes, he's right I'm a graduate of the Kerala school of Astronomy and Applied Arithmancy. However, I'm afraid the curriculum there isn't as impressive as the name might lead one to believe. There is really a lot of focus on prediction and divination and less on magical theory. There were only a few artefact creators in my year. Only six of us who took woodworking."

She sighed, lamenting the lack of interest in the subject. "I was quite fond of some of predictive stuff though. It's quite useful in analysing wand cores. Afraid I haven't used it very much outside of that though in quite some time. There's just not much practical application in what I do."

Dhanya knew she was rambling a bit, but didn't really care. Galen's customer seemed like the sort that would genuinely be interested and she did like sharing knowledge and experiences. Maybe, this was an opportunity to make a new friend? She still found it hard to find common ground with English witches and wizards and form solid friendships. Perhaps, it was just that she hadn't met the right people yet.

She watched on in fascination as Galen encouraged the professor to take a look into their mirror. What would he see? Whom would he see? Was there going to be a second person in his reflection as well or had that occurrence been specific to herself and Galen? She had to restrain herself from just asking the questions out loud.

Knowing Galen though he'd want this man's unbiased opinion just as he had wanted hers. Though she'd have probably handled the situation differently herself, she respected her friend's choice and held her silence on the matter for now.

[Harold Prendergast]

Harold pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. It had entirely escaped his thought that someone so deeply rooted in all things magical - how else would he be able to make an establishment such as this viable without knowing the real value of things? - should have come from such an inauspicious background; the notion that a wizarding child should grow up without having studied in a wizarding school was alien to him, especially now.

"A magical school is indeed a privilege to have studied at, and one all too often taken for granted, I'm afraid. Though I must say your studies of magic seem remarkably astute in absence of a formal tuition, your grandparents did indeed teach you well."

He smiled. "If you should ever like to visit a magical school, I'm sure our headmaster would be more than delighted to receive you as a guest, show you around and so on. Albus Dumbledore is many things, one of which is curious about how others see the world, and I'm certain he would be fascinated to get an insight into the life of an individual who is clearly studied in magic but without having attended an institution."

The charming shopkeeper turned the conversation back towards the mirror - and he could certainly spare the time, plus he had offered to take a look.

First he studied it from a distance, even taking his glasses off and replacing with a lens-eyeglass that he kept in his breast pocket, for the closer examinations of things. The frame was wooden, not a typical English or even European wood, but a dense rich hard-wood, golden brown in colour, and artfully carved. There seemed to be no inherent pattern to the carving, except for a form of rotational symmetry about it, as though the top and bottom halves were indicating some kind of relationship. He peered, but it yielded nothing, perhaps it was simply decorative.

Then there was the silvery sheen of the glass in the mirror. At first glance it appeared slightly concave, more than normal for a mirror of that size, but closer examination showed it to be an optical illusion of the frame. He didn't have any of his instruments with him to determine the refractive indices, that might better suggest what the mirror might show if observed directly, and as such there was nothing further to learn by proxy examination.

Harold squared his shoulders, evened his weight out between his feet and then stared directly into the mirror, full-facing.

At first the reflection was simply his own face, as one might expect from a mirror, though it seemed to Harold as though he were both younger and older, by a margin of a few years either way from his present age. A background faded in around his portrait; it was familiar: the entrance hall to the Ministry of Magic, albeit hazy and distorted as one might see in a hall of mirrors. Staff entrance, specifically.

Harold raised an eyebrow. "How curious."

Then a figure emerged from the haze and distortion, until becoming crystal clear. To his great surprise it was a former colleague of his from the Ministry. From the Department of Mysteries if his memory served, but he was having trouble putting a face to the name. That was one of the curses of the Unspeakables, of course, with the levels of compartmentalisation across the Ministry and the surrounding secrecy. But Harold was positive he recognised the face; he couldn't place where the face was from, he could no more tell an individual from Japan or Korea or China than he could someone from a specific South American country, simply due to a lack of exposure. But the face he saw definitely had some ties to the Far East even if unable to be specific about it.

Then the face and the background dissolved. "Well, that was rather unusual."

How could he begin to explain it? Had they seen the face he'd seen?

[Dhanya Raveendran]

Dhanya watched closely as the professor examined the mirror. It was obvious to her that Galen rather admired the man, but she couldn't help being amused by him. Who in the name of Merlin carried a special eyeglass with them for the examination of magical objects? Well, this guy. She had a feeling that how her friend had seen it there was a distinct possibility Galen would get one of those things as well. Then they could be the most ridiculous nerds together. It would probably make Galen happy, so who was she to judge.

The examination of the mirror itself seemed to take ages, or quite possibly her anticipation of results was making Dhanya rather anxious. Her imagination was running wild. Would he find himself in the garden too? Maybe this mirror just showed the garden to everyone who was looking. It was beautiful and who wouldn't enjoy seeing themselves in nice surroundings. However, that seemed an awful amount of effort for the creator of this mirror to have taken for an effect that was ultimately meaningless and whimsical. Dhanya tried to think about it in terms of magical theory. How would one even go about creating an artefact that showed everyone studying it the same illusion? She had no idea how to accomplish such a feat, at least in any way that would last like this mirror obviously had.

Finally, the professor appeared to be done, leaning back and once more straightening his posture. His remark was mildly infuriating. Of course, the mirror was rather unusual. Galen wouldn't have asked his opinion if it was anything but.

"So, what did you see?" Dhanya blurted out no longer able to reign in her curiosity. She wanted answers. "Was there a garden? It showed an English garden for me when I was looking and a rather beautiful one at that with juicy, green grass, topiary bushes and neatly kept flowerbeds featuring echinacea plants and hydrangeas, but, rather curiously, it also had a few South Indian plants that you don't usually see here. Anyway, I don't think it was showing me a real place, or at the very least not anywhere that I know. I would have remembered a garden like that if I had been to one. It had some fruit trees as well. A targola and I think a mangustaan. It was strange."

Her gaze drifted from the professor back to Galen. She hadn't had the opportunity to describe the garden in detail earlier, but she was curious what her friend was making of it. A subtle nod told her he had seen exactly the same. She still couldn't wrap her head around how that was possible, let alone how one would create such an effect with spells and enchantments.

[Galen Yardley]

"That's very kind of you to offer," Galen responded. "I might have to take you up on that sometime." It would be a splendid thing to see Hogwarts for sure. It had such lasting influence on the witches and wizards of Britain. Where he'd grown up, the magical world was vastly different. Here, people seemed to have been bonded together by the common experience of learning magic in Scotland.

While he was musing over that aspect, the professor has started his investigation. "Is that an arcanometer?" Galen asked about the piece of instrumentation the professor had gotten out. He'd heard about lenses like these but had never seen one of them before. From what Galen had heard they could be rather pricey. Did the ministry issue these to its Unspeakables? As part of Law Enforcement he didn't really know much about what went on in those mysterious room downstairs, but it was a matter that had long since captured his imagination.

Before the professor even had a chance to explain what he had seen, Dhanya couldn't hold back any longer and burst out with details of her experience. The way she described the garden resonated with Galen. Yes, it was definitely the same place. She'd even named the fruit trees which he'd been struggling to place. He nodded at her vaguely to confirm that his vision had been the same. However, he still didn't want to say more.

"Unusual in what way," he addressed his question to Professor Prendergast. "Have you worked out what this mirror does exactly?" Galen didn't actually hold out a lot of hope for that. If this was a Eureka-moment, the professor had certainly downplayed it. Instead, Galen thought it likely he was about to join them in being somewhat baffled by this mirror and the strange reflections that it produced. 

[Harold Prendergast]

The young lady's excitement answered the question in Harold's mind, even if he hadn't said it out loud: no, he had not seen the same as she had, or even perhaps what the shop-keeper had seen. There had been no garden, no foliage, but of course such things would not make sense in the context of the Ministry, especially the deeper levels.

Then there was the question of the face. It was familiar, but not so familiar he could put a name to it. A member of the Ministry for certain, and one he was quite sure he had spoken to and worked alongside for at least a time.

"No, I didn't see a garden, I'm afraid. Your English garden sounds rather wonderful and I should have been glad to see it for myself. Unfortunately what I saw was rather less wondrous and far more traditional; a building, I should think in the heart of London from the brickwork. It may even have been the Ministry of Magic building. And I saw a face, but it was only a glimpse..."

He paused, uncertain of how far to explain. "It looked rather like someone I think I used to work with, a chap from far off east. But we didn't speak much, we were both rather too busy with our work at the time. Pity, he seemed like the sort of chap that would have quite the interesting point of view on life."

Harold peered through his eyeglass again, studying the mirror. "Also to answer your question, this is a small eyeglass with, yes, an arcanometer in it. I find having one useful for close-up studies into things when I am not entirely sure what I am looking at."

After a few more moments of studying the waves of energy that the eyeglass was measuring, Harold wiped it absent-mindedly with his tie before putting it back in his pocket and returning his glasses to the bridge of his nose.

"There is a very unusual arcane presence to this mirror. It reflects you, naturally, but it reflects a connection in your life. One of course hates to extrapolate from incomplete data, but from what we know so far, it appears to reflect you in a place. In my case, a place I have been, in yours a place you have yet to visit. There is certainly a chronomatic signature to the arcanometry, so both glimpses of the past and future seem to be possible."

He smiled, uncertainly. "Unfortunately exactly what connection it shows you may be entirely private to you, along with its meaning. I daresay this mirror's maker was deeply skilled and a fine craftsman, but his mind was always somewhere else - perhaps with someone else. If you feel so inclined, you could ask other patrons that seem interested to take a look and tell you what they see. With more information, we may be able to draw more of a precise conclusion."

The smile broadened. "Well, I do believe that is all I can tell you today - perchance I will visit again, term time permitting, and you can tell me all about the other customers and what they've seen and perhaps we may learn what it was constructed to do. Now, how much do I owe you for the books?"

[Galen Yardley]

As the professor's description came to a close, Galen cast another quick glance into the mirror. This time, he didn't see Dhanya or the beautiful garden they had been so intrigued by. Instead he found himself in the Department of Mysteries next to Professor Prendergast. A cold shiver ran down Galen's spine. Was he the Far Eastern chap that the other man hadn't recognised? Exactly what face had Prendergast seen? His original face? One of his legends? He could hardly ask and it was best not to inspire any deeper thoughts on the subject.

"Fascinating," he commented softly. "A mirror that shows connections. That is quite something. I suppose that means Dhanya and I will have some gardening to do in our future." He stepped to mirror to lift it off the wall and turn it around. "I'm sure it will prove useful to its new owner when they come and pick it up. Thank you so much for providing us with your insight."

He was sure that Dhanya knew him well enough to know he had no buyer and was trying to force an end to this conversation, but he hoped the Professor wouldn't notice his manoeuvre as the clear attempt at damage limitation that it was.

He rang up the books for the customer, accepted payment and handed over the purchases. "Well, I hope you enjoy these and we'll see you back here soon."

Truthfully, Galen wasn't sure that he did. Though he greatly admired the other man, interacting with him could potentially spell danger. The last thing he needed was getting embroiled in Unspeakable business.