Fudge carefully read through the contract and frowned as despite being certain that Nick had placed a trap in the thing somewhere he couldn't find one. All the terms were correct and even the specified punishment was pretty standard issue. Little did he know that there was a trick in the contract but that the reason he couldn't find one was that it wasn't targeted at himself but the department of mysteries. Nick had placed the words "the entire collection of" in front of the archive of knowledge which meant that the department could not play the partial collection trick on him.-
He also specified that any attempts on his or those close to hims life , freedom , mind or soul to prevent his part of the deal would be seen as a breach of contract by those responsible and thus forfeit their lives to him. This in turn was his way of fully tying the departments hands against him in any way , they would have no choice but to give him his part of the deal even if they wanted nothing more than to prevent that. Fudge saw no traps in this contract and with some reluctance signed his name as the minister of magic thus binding the entire ministry to it as well including the department of mysteries.-
After Nick also signed the contract the parchment flew into the air and duplicated itself so that both side of the deal had a copy. Nick then took out a folded sheet of parchment from the realm and handed it over with a smile. "This sheet of parchment has everything you need to replicate the entirety of the sport other than the players themselves as promised , it was a pleasure doing business with you." Nick said with a chuckle at Fudges sour expression. -
The reporters had recorded every part of that interaction and were all dying to publish it to let the world know that blitzball would soon be made a global wizarding sport like quidditch. The more astute of them had also noticed a conspiracy that Nick had all but revealed about the department of mysteries. It would take a bit of research but a few of them would eventually discover what it was before vanishing mysteriously when they tried to share it. None of this concerned Nick though as he had gotten what he wanted from this event and was looking forward to the juicy secret knowledge that would soon be his.-
(Pov Gareth Greengrass/head of the department of mysteries)
I had not been having a great day after Minister Fudge returned from discussing the terms of the new sports release to the ministry with it's creator. First was that the centuries of work that my department had done to hide certain things from the rest of the ministry had been undone by the brat in one foul swoop. To top it off there wasn't a damn thing I could do to stop it since it had already happened and the brat had placed a heavy trap in the contract for us. -
We simply couldn't make a move on the brat or anyone close to him in any meaningful way due to the contract. This included using the power of time to travel back to before the contract was signed since this would count as a breach of the contract in the present and thus kill the person making the attempt. 'He got us good this time.' I thought with more than a little irritation while dealing with the furious yelling of Fudge.-
The funny part of this situation was that we were actually thinking about recruiting the brat after he graduated as he had shown his brilliance and curiosity towards magic that were high value traits for this department. Now though we had this potentially horrible situation on our hands in which the vast library of knowledge we had accumulated gets used by a nonmember. For each member of the department there was a special contract binding them that kept them from leaking department secrets that weren't public in some form. But for the brat he had no such contract and thus was free to share anything he found in the archives.-
"Did the boy say when he would be coming to visit the archives?" I asked Fudge after he calmed down enough to answer without yelling profanities at me. "No he didn't say exactly when he would be visiting this "archive" of yours." Fudge said spitefully. That wasn't good news at all since it meant that the brat could in theory just never claim his full two months in the archive and thus leave him untouchable to us. I could only pray that the brat proved incapable of understanding the ancient lost language texts in the archive that we haven't translated yet.