"The only surprise is that it had taken this long for us to find out. People make such a big deal out of the deception issue; saying that our leaders should have told us, should have… blah, blah, blah. But you know, it was right in front of our faces the whole time. And who would have believed it, before that day?"
- Stephen Frampton, author of Uncovering the Lie – A Journey of Fear
It was so stupid.
Once the truth was known, the ramifications were enormous. That day – the day the world found out the truth – people would have sworn they felt the foundations of the earth shaking.
And yet, the trigger for the entire event was something so stupid, so small, it shouldn't have even registered.
This one simple thing created the ripples that turned into a tsunami and took everyone else with it. One stupid little thing.
A video on YouTube.
Bellatrix Lestrange looked like a witch. Cartoon figures and stereotypes paint witches as these figures with broomsticks, black robes, and creepy laughs. Their laughs, in particular, could be compared to those of old pedophiles about to rape wide-eyed little boys. Or maybe it's just Bellatrix.
Harry, had he known that Bellatrix would be compared to storybook witches, would have agreed with the clothes, the broomstick, and the laugh. Especially the laugh.
Neville would have agreed with the broomstick and clothes part, but added that the laugh should be compared with an ancient pedophile about to rape a baby in front of his helpless parents.
Both of them would be wrong.
The 7-year-old girl currently staring at Bellatrix could have attested to the fact that Bellatrix did, indeed, laugh even creepier when staring at young girls. Bellatrix had just launched into a beautiful speech starting with, "I am Bellatrix, you filthy little baby Mudblood," and ending with, "Would you prefer to be hung by your toes and skinned or chewed fingers first by a wolfie-beastie?"
She was an American, who had been ecstatic to be invited to travel to England along with her father for a business trip. For one thing, she would get to miss one month of school. For another, she could take lots of pictures to show to her friends.
This tendency to take pictures so she could show them to people would prove very important within the next few minutes.
She was also a Muggle girl, though she had no idea what that meant. A Muggle is: noun [mugg'l] somebody who has no magical powers, commonly regarded unfavorably; see Mudblood (slang), non-magical folks, Death Eater bait. In other words, she could not use magic, had no wand, and had no idea that meeting Bellatrix carved years out of her life. With a giant butcher knife and with not an intention of carving so much as smashing.
However, the girl did have a cell phone. One of those new, pretty, ridiculously high-tech ones with video camera and voice recorder and pink pony stickers strategically stuck over both sides.
This particular cell phone saved the girl's life. In days to come, it would go into museums as a priceless artifact with each sticker individually worth 40 grand to some collectors. But at that moment, as Bellatrix cackled and red light flew out of her wand, the girl simply raised her cell phone – and clicked.
It flashed and took a picture of the black-clothed, broomstick wearing pedophile – that is, woman – and then it did it again. And the girl clicked again to produce another flash.
In Death Eater circles, it is considered a mark of honor to know nothing about the British prime minister. Voldemort personally gives out the prizes by using Legilimens to see into his followers' minds, assuming that they had any. Bellatrix, incredibly, had beaten Crabbe and Goyle Sr. four months in a row for ignorance of anything Muggle. Crabbe and Goyle, at least, knew about the existence of peanut butter and sharpie flavored ice cream.
Therefore, Bellatrix had no idea what the flash was, except that it was faster than her fastest spell and really, really bright. In the magic world, this is a bad sign. Snape might have informed her that this was some Muggle invention. The Potter boy would have pointed and laughed, then gotten Crucio'd for his troubles.
Bellatrix fled. Elegantly and gracefully, as befitting of a pureblooded lady originally of the House of Black, she Apparated as far away from the 7-year-old girl as possible. Straight into some poison ivy which took her five hours, fourteen minutes, and two point nine seconds to extricate herself from, but that's not the point.
The point is: the girl was not dead. Not even Obliviated, and the Ministry of Magic would probably have accepted one more dead Muggle girl if her memories couldn't at least be wiped. She had been Stunned, nothing more, and would wake up within an hour.
This day marked the beginning of the end for the magic world.
Somewhere in Hong Kong, a young man logged on to YouTube. His girlfriend had recently dressed up as a witch for some type of event and video-taped it just so he could see her. The moment he got home, he immediately did as she asked. What a good boy.
His keywords: witch, black, laugh, and one more thing. His girlfriend's name. Because witch, black, and laugh really aren't very good search words. (Incidentally, those were the only English words he knew besides some words of a far more dubious nature. He used those words often in the presence of his teachers.) Due to some book that starts with a t and rhymes with blight, his girlfriend had recently changed her perfectly nice name to Bella.
Within about a month, the young man would decide that he preferred her original Chinese name after all, because every time he said his girlfriend's name people would give him looks. One woman told him, sympathetically, that it really wasn't very healthy to make up imaginary girlfriends and that he really had a very nice nose if you squinted and tilted your head sideways after drinking a lot of beer. After that, the young man decided a break-up was in order.
In the name of originality, Bella jumped off a bridge. The water was cold.
But getting back to the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend on YouTube, his search turned out several results. His girlfriend's was somewhere near the middle.
He made a note to watch that later but first chose to watch the 'Bella Trix the Wicked Witch' video. It may have had something to do with Bellatrix's black clothes. Besides being Goth, they were also tight-fitting.
The video turned out to be a few photos of Bellatrix cycling in a slide show over and over again to the Titanic theme. The photos were very clear: with a woman holding a stick with red light coming out of it. Too bad the laugh couldn't be communicated.
The boy remembered, several months ago, going to a party with a girlfriend. Another one, who had insisted on being called Edward, for some reason. On the way, they had bumped into a tiny little man wearing something that looked like a black dress and holding a stick that was pouring wine from the tip. He was obviously very, very drunk. Or maybe he just liked wearing dresses and pretended to be drunk so he could do so without being socially rejected.
The couple had never refused free wine. To be precise, Pinot Noir. It was the best wine they had ever tasted, they agreed after twenty-one gulps each.
The boy had a cell phone with a camera function and a love of snapping pictures of weirdoes. So he did, with a click and a flash.
The midget guy ran away, almost looking as though he disappeared into thin air. Weird. The boy had wanted more wine.
Wine was much better than any red light. You could get red light any day. So the boy created a video to prove that his guy with the wine was better than the woman with the light, though she was admittedly better looking in scanty black dresses. He set his one photo to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Across the Internet, several others were doing the same thing. Except they were not as good as the young man in Hong Kong, because they didn't use classical music. Oh, and their girlfriends weren't named Bella.
And in a pretty suburban town in England somewhere, the left eyebrow of a sleeping boy named Harry Potter twitched. Violently.
In Egypt, a modern day grave robber had escaped the asylum, finally. His family, wishing to spare him the horrors of jail, had consigned him the crazy house after he was found delirious at the entrance of a valuable tomb by a security guard wearing shiny leather boots and an earring.
He had babbled something about a creature with a woman's face and the body of a lion with wings.
According to the grave robber, she had asked what women desired the most and attacked him after he had told her it was the ability to talk without pause for breath and a son who couldn't get away from her talking.
Honestly, didn't everyone know the correct answer was ice cream?
After getting attacked by a monster, the grave robber was promptly tossed in a cell for his troubles. His family, however, swore he was addled in the head.
His mother wailed convincingly that he really was a good boy; that he was just confused; that she had hung him out a window to dry as a baby and accidentally dropped him; that he had never been the same since; and oh, judge, won't you please, please do this as a teensy, weensy favor to a poor mother who only wants the best for her child; because he really was a good boy; they'd make sure to pay for psychological help and wouldn't he please, just this once –
The judge hastily agreed. What force on earth could stand up to a mother's force of speech?
At least the asylum had cable. Then one day, they cancelled the football channel.
This deserved revenge. This required forethought and an intricately planned retribution for such a travesty.
After an hour of thought, the grave robber escaped. It really just required leaping over a wire fence with fake rubber spikes on it.
The first thing he did was find a computer and log on. Then he went straight to FaceBook and poured his woes to sympathetic friends, totaling two, one of which was his mother.
He watched several YouTube videos at the behest of the other friend, and went into deep thought.
After a while, he started typing about his experience. He paid particular attention to the cool-looking security guard who had driven the half-woman, half-griffin off with a stick. His friend count promptly jumped to six hundred and counting.
The Minister of Magic was not an idiot. Really, he wasn't, though he was two minutes and a puff of green powder away from getting demoted.
He practiced selective memory skills and selective speech skills with distressing regularity, but also was exceptionally skilled at crossword puzzles and finding bowler hats that had just the right balance between expensive and the best shade of black.
Anyway, Cornelius Fudge might have wasted the last six years sucking up to a former Death Eater and the decade before that sucking up to the head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, but it took something special to be voted Minister of Magic.
His secret weapon? His nephew, Rufus.
Rufus had been one of those angelic boys with silky blond hair and enormous blue eyes that make mothers coo. It's said that the first time even Narcissa Malfoy met him, she had squealed over how adorable he was. The person who had made the claim was found hanging from his own window by his toes the next day. He retracted his statement.
Yes, Rufus had been an adorable little boy. He was still blonde and blue-eyed, though not a boy anymore. Not very adorable anymore, either, but at least he had all his hair and most of his teeth.
His increase in weight was inversely related to the Minister's popularity.
His mother swore that he was a good boy. Honestly, the thing with the bet and the tube train was nothing but an unfortunate accident.
Having been suspended for another improper use of magic – or accident, depending on who you asked – Rufus had taken to looking through the Muggle newspapers for any signs of Voldemort's activities that they should be aware of.
It appeared that Voldemort and his Death Eaters' random rampages to cause mayhem had not been noticed by Muggles, but only if they were deaf, blind, and living under a rock.
Even non-magical folks could connect corpses dead without any understandable cause to those lovely green signs over their houses. Popular theories included aliens, conspiracies, and mass hallucinations.
Rufus himself liked the theory that it was the Loch Ness monster breaking wind the most.
Rufus looked first, as usual, at the personal ads of the national newspaper. Only checking for photos of known Death Eaters, of course.
Then, he looked at the obituaries for strange deaths.
Finally, he turned to the front page of the newspaper.
The front page of the nationally-renowned newspaper presented him with an oversized photo of Mundungus Fletcher creating posters of barely clad women winking provocatively, scruffy wand and heart-spotted underwear in full view.
The article itself talked about the recent influx of photos of weirdoes with sticks doing things that could imperil the virtue of youth around the globe.
Rufus stared at the photos and decided that Playwizard might want to sign Mundungus up.
Then, he tossed the paper aside, not thinking about it until the next day when wizards and witches everywhere would discover that there was something much worse than the Dark Lord.
What a good boy. Just like his uncle.
A few miles away, the Prime Minister of England was staring at his own copy of the newspaper and trying not to cry. He stared accusingly at the man in the portrait, but the guy was currently applying make-up to his face and refused to be disturbed.
Dumbledore unrolled a lemon drop and found it already cracked in three places. He frowned, but popped it into his mouth anyway.
Within an artistically decorated cave furnished in shades of Fudge's black bowler hat and Voldemort's ebony boxers, Bellatrix suddenly felt her poison-ivy-caused scratches itch (for some reason, they resisted magical healing) and resisted the urge to hex Wormtail.
Voldemort suddenly felt the urge to hex a Muggleborn and settled for the closest thing nearby.
Wormtail screamed under the influence of a particularly nasty Crucio while protesting that he was most certainly not the one who had dyed Voldemort's divine boxers a livid shade of pink.
Harry Potter was currently awake, but felt his eyebrow twitch anyway.