17 June, 1998
Dear Diary,
Hello! After the insanity of the past year, B'l — I mean, Hermione — suggested I get a journal to chronicle what's happened to us. Lucky you.
I was born Evette Vaisey into a proudly pureblooded family. My early life was similar to many Slytherins' – a constant reiteration on the importance of blood status, the depravity of filthy mudbloods stealing magic from real witches and wizards, and the rapturous dogma of the Dark Lord, may he return to us.
But despite how hard my family tried to instill in me their hateful principles, I always had trouble buying into it. Deeds, not blood, make a person, I always thought. So when the Preperatory Act for the Distinction of Magical Distribution was announced, I became the first Slytherin to approach Hermione about creating an anti-Prep group. See, the Prep Act was an attempt to discredit non-purebloods, with the goal of evicting halfbloods, muggle borns, and "near human" magical beings from the magical world on the basis that magic was supposed to be distributed among pure loods, and the increase of intermixing with muggles, mudblood births, and insufficient culling of non-humans had led to weaker purebloods, who deserved better. It was also a load of rubbish. Our group of freedom fighters ('cleverly' nicknamed the "GOFFs" by Ron, who has a kind heart but really is not the smartest guy around) opposed the Prep Act and its proponents (cleverly nicknamed "preps", also by Ron) in our efforts to maintain the rights of all magically inclined beings.
Symbolism became important to our group, almost to a fault, leading to us taking on ridiculous names and get ups in our fight for omni-magical visibility. Based on Ron's name for the group, we styled ourselves after a type of muggle called a "goth". My understanding of these "goths" is that they are muggles who hate bright colors, enjoy listening to painful screaming, and like Satan (or maybe Stan, I can't remember which). I don't really understand it, but it was still pretty fun to dress up and be all "emo", as Hermione called it. Sort of like playing make believe, or dressing up for Halloween, but all the time. It was kind of stupid, but in a fun, humorous way.
So our group (Harry, Hermione, Ron, Luna, Neville, Ginny, and, most surprisingly, Draco) all dyed our hair and clothes black and experimented with over-dramatic makeup and terrible poetry. We gave ourselves new names and, when a diplomatic mission to a vampire colony last summer went all pear-shaped and half our group returned without a pulse, moved into the Slytherin commons to get away from the other sun-filled dorms. Still don't quite understand how we got away with that, but at some point the school became divided between the preps and the goffs and no one seemed to care. With the war against Voldemort raging on, the Prep Act pushing its way through the Ministry, and a mind-altering curse spreading among the teachers, order and balance at Hogwarts was fractured.
Thankfully, that's all behind us now.
And without further ado, kind diary, I give you the story of Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way.
God, that's a terrible name. Seriously, I got the worst name of the group.
Ugh.