The Office of Acquisitions is here in Himlin, and restricted in scope to Himlin now, though once most Muggles the world over have cameras and the inclination to report crimes it seems likely that wizards the world over might benefit from their services and find it impossible to continue operating without them. If you just want someone meeting certain criteria they will help you find someone satisfactory; if you want someone in particular then you need to fill out some forms and will be notified of a time window during which it's safe to abduct your target.

Huh. How about that.

"I don't really get how you, uh, deal with that. I mean, presumably some people go through the process, or is it completely impossible -"

"It's not completely impossible," says Aitim, snuggling a tiny baby. "If it were they'd go back to doing it illegally. It is significantly more of a hassle than requisitioning a non-specific person, the idea being that rather than list last three addresses if they've lived at their current address for less than two years you might say 'okay, you know what, I don't really care who as long as she's pretty' and then we can just set them up with someone who signed up for this. Or that having to negotiate with a bureaucracy will take all the illicit fun out of it. But some of them will probably go through with it and we will help them do it."

"And that's the part that... yikes."

"When doing the right thing doesn't make peoples' lives better it's the latter I think of as my job description."

"Wouldn't 'my government will at the request of sufficiently important people arrange for me to be raped' bother people more than just 'my government can't stop people who try it' -"

"Yeah. But not twenty times more and we expect we can cut down on requests at least that much. And this way we can get them an explanation and restitution."

"Unless they get murdered."

"That process legitimately is intended to be so convoluted you can never get through it. You can request someone who is going to be executed anyway, though."

"Are there, uh, a bunch of things like this which the government is doing."

"No, this is unprecedented, all the things that look like petty corruption are actually just petty corruption rather than awful schemes with aliens."

"Good to know."

"Eventually when there's more firepower than literally the one family you could consider tipping off vigilantes sometimes."

"Once this whole thing isn't balanced quite so finely vigilantes will absolutely hear about as many cases as we can manage."

"Did you actually get people to sign up for being abducted by wizards?"

"We have plenty of people who think 'a wizard comes over and slips you a potion' sounds hot, we have fewer but not zero people who'd take their chances on 'a wizard runs off with you'. It should rightly be grey but we don't have enough interest to caste it yet so we're being flexible."

"Wow."

"I have heard of people into much, much weirder stuff."

"I am trying very hard not to be curious."

"I hear wi-fi works in the house, you could just look it up.

But for, like, one example, if wizards were fully public there would be people who wanted shrinking potions because they have a sexual fetish for being six inches tall."

"Wow. Uh, potion ingredient prices are going to skyrocket."

"It seems like some care for potions ingredients can be done by nonwizards?"

"Sure. I mean, it's riskier than growing apples, but the things all grew wild initially and not all of them will eat you."