Welcome to the new installment of NAT. It's a tad longer than normal.


That Thursday, Harry crept down to the forest under his cloak. At the tree line, a nervous Emily was waiting for him. As he threw off the cloak hood, Emily gaped.

"That is so cool!" Emily whispered, mindful of their location. "Now's not the time to talk about it, though." Slowly, Emily and Harry crept into the forest, towards the roars that had kept half the transfers up one night before muffling charms had been laid. Staying within the trees, Emily and Harry looked at the holding pens and gasped.

Dragons. Five dragons, each larger than an average house, were chained to massive posts. Fifty or so handlers were trying and failing to calm them down. As quietly as possible, Emily and Harry walked back into the trees and raced for the Front Lawn. Johnson stood in the doorway of Dorothy, patiently waiting.

"What is it?" Johnson asked with fake calmness.

"Dragons," Emily replied. "The first task is fucking dragons."


Despite it being November, the temperature in Houston was still well above freezing. Casually, a short Hispanic girl in the uniform for a nearby middle school walked into the large library. The librarian manning the front desk looked up from a massive history tome and grinned.

"Hello, Marjorie," the librarian said softly. "How's Maria doing?"

"She's still sick, Miss Jones," Marjorie answered sweetly. "Mind if I check out a few books for her?"

"Not at all," Miss Jones replied. "I think you know the way by now." Marjorie nodded and slipped off into the expanse of shelves. Checking that no one was looking, she silently opened a closed and stepped inside.

In what would look like a broom closet to nonmagicals without authorization was in fact another library quite similar to the one outside. Dark shelves lined the walls to the ceiling and were filled with tomes titled Herbology and You, The Nitwit's Companion to Magical Beasts, and Magical Creatures of Southwestern America. Few people milled around. The Lady Bird Johnson Magical Library was rarely full. It was a specialized library aside from the normal Lone Star District Library. Marjorie had been there exactly twice to find the rare tomes this side branch specialized in: wildlife.

Late last night or possibly early that morning, an email had been sent out to the "home support group" members (which actually comprised about thirty percent of the Liberty population above fifth grade) asking for research help about dragons. In a flurry of emails and texts, the group had arranged to search every magical library in the two countries for answers, with two per District library (needed due to the amount of material needed to sort through), one per unrelated magical library (things could be misshelved), and three per related specialized library (for the sheer amount of plausible material). Two boys, each younger than her by two years, were already searching through a towering pile of books for any relevant information. Sighing, Marjorie joined them.


Oddity, Minnesota, was a small town where the temperature was already forty at best. Two teenaged girls walked from their high school to the local library. The library was across town, so the admired the colorful leaves and chatted idly. When others walked by them, they talked about normal things: how their parents were doing, Scottish Rugby, Mr. Smith being the worst teacher ever, what they were going to have dinner tonight, exactly where they had gotten that item of clothing… the list went on and on. When no one else could overhear, they talked about their mission.

"So, how's Ahmed doing?" the slightly taller one asked. Wisps of auburn hair peeked out of the gap between her bright blue scarf and navy hat.

"He's doing well, I think," the shorter replied. It was difficult to tell but she was wearing an orange hijab. "But that was on Saturday. Something may have happened since then. How about your aunt?"

"Which one, Lamia?"

"The one on mission to Iraq."

"Oh, Sister Joan? She's doing fine the last time I heard. Her father's really proud of her coming over."

"Her father?"

"Army. He's a full-bird Colonel. How did you do on the Civ test?"

"87. Subjective score on the free responses were 7 and 8. Mr. Smith hates me."

"Hey, he hates me too. I got a 90 and my free responses were 3 and 4."

"Mr. Smith is an asshole and everyone agrees on that, Joanna. Let us leave it there. Besides, we are nearly at the library." Sure enough, the two had stopped in front of a tiny brick building. Checking no one was looking, they slipped through a broom closet. "Imagine if our mothers heard of this," Lamia muttered. Joanna snickered.

"That'd be an interesting story for sure." With that, they stepped out into the main concourse of Hudson Library of Magical Biology and Associated Subjects. The shelves were dotted with such classic tales as So You Wanna Be a Beastmaster?, Chimera Do's and Don'ts, Travels With Direwolves, and the ever-popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Magical Arctic, a member of the much-renowned Hitchhiker's Guide series of nature books that documented various climate regions and famously all began with the words "DON'T PANIC". Within two hours, the pair had assembled a small stack of knowledgeable works. Unfortunately, there weren't enough dragon species in the entirety of the Americas to warrant more than six specific books on the subject across all of their libraries. However, there were plenty of books on magical reptiles and that was good enough.

They could win against idiocy and unpreparedness. They could win against dragons. If they could do all that and a bag of chips, they could win this tournament, too, or at least survive it. No curveball was too big to be tackled with research and an open mind. This allowed them to succeed.

Of course, it would most likely also be their greatest shortcoming as research could eliminate emergency preparedness and open minds often didn't quite understand what they were up against but at least they could turn out fine in the end.


For general information, I will most likely NOT be updating this before the new year thanks to my schedule being my schedule. Instead, I will be doing a 12(+) days of christmas thing, which you can see the parts of on my profile. Thanks to Emmyann for being my beta (otherwise this would've been... interesting).

The Library: the US is big on public libraries, so it makes sense there would be magical ones (as you wouldn't want the nonmagicals to see those books). References intended. I know direwolves don't technically exist in the HP verse, but neither does most of this. Picture massive arctic wolves.

Oddity, Minnesota does not exist to the best of my knowledge. It is where the more important OCs who aren't at Hogwarts live.

Houston, Texas, does exist and is currently the third largest city in the U.S. It does not get winter. Every five or six years, we get a quarter inch of snow.