Check first chapter for summary, disclaimer, and other warnings. As well as the previous ones for additional notes (in short: the kids are now teens, growing up and rebelling).

A repeat of a previous warning and disclaimer: I feel I must put that here, again (because my characters took charge, again).

The views expressed by the characters (and their actions) aren't those of (and aren't endorsed by) the author.

You might read things about outdated mores or outlandish theories. About social experiments which failed their own creators, and progress seen from people it victimized. And, once again, about teenagers (and young adults) trying to find their place in a cruel world.

Remember that this is a work of fiction.

If you are disturbed, shocked, or otherwise inconvenienced by a written word, remember what that Swiss linguist said: "the word "dog" has never bitten anyone." And stop reading this story. Leave it to those who can argue the devil's side, because some of us can still see both sides of each conflict, choose their own path, and find some pleasure in reading this kind of stories.

Chapter 27 – Tangents
posted June 16th, 2020

Wotcher!

Last I wrote, John and Hermione where standing next to two naked Veelas. The next instant, the two guests were up and glomping them, demonstrating their perfect health… and pressing their perfect body on the two teens.

When John hissed in pain, Hermione took his hand, moved it, and dropped it again. And a sigh of relief told her that her Vanishing spell has succeeded in removing the tight suit that blocked his blood flow. All conscious thought fled her mind when Fleur began to teach her the multiple manners of the French. And the not-so-little girl copied her.

"Thank you." she said. "Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You saved us. I'll do everything-"

"Stop!" exclaimed Hermione, panicking. "You are not going to bond to us, are you?"

"What? No!"

"You are not going to declare yourself slaves to us?"

"Of course not!"

"You are not going to declare a life debt, or soul mates, or something equally asinine?"

"Well…" Fleur started, before laughing at Hermione's twitch. "No. Veelas can bond, but it requires quite the ceremony. And we do not condone slavery."

"Good. What were you going to say, then?"

"Just that whatever you want to do to us, feel free." the young adult said mischievously, pushing her assets against Hermione's.

"Stop!" John exclaimed, mirroring Hermione. "How old are you? For real."

"I may be small, but I'm your age." insisted the girl. "Or close enough." she added in the privacy of her own mind. A couple years down the line, that would be true enough. "And as Fleur said: feel free to do whatever you want." she added, moulding herself to him.

"Whatever I want? Truly?"

"Yes…"

"Let's go to sleep, then." he said, pulling her on him as he fell back on a free bed.

"Sleep?" she asked.

"Yes. I'm knackered." he closed his eyes, and was asleep in seconds.

"Darn!" exclaimed the girl.

"Gabrielle!" exclaimed her sister, raising her head.

"Fleur!" exclaimed Hermione, grabbing her and trying to retrieve the sensations she lost a second ago.

"Hermione!" exclaimed Su and Luna, at the tent's door.

"Su! Luna!" I exclaimed myself as I followed them inside. And I showed the two couples, indicating that they ought to be hidden from the incoming matron.

"Tonks!" exclaimed Pomfrey. "I could do with your help."

"Poppy!" came the call from outside. It was Dumbledore, levitating Cedric's battered (but still alive) body, and followed by the Hufflepuff's parents.

Several girls laughed, because the game of being called by another had been fun, while it lasted.

I replied first. "Of course." I said to the mediwitch, mobilizing my meagre knowledge of field healing.

"Send these ones somewhere else." she told me while preparing a bed for the Hufflepuff Champion. "They'll disturb the Diggorys."

Well… I stumbled for a couple seconds, storing my medical knowledge back in the small corner of my mind it came from. "Okay."

And that's what I did. First by extending Hermione's bed, then by Levitating John there (with Gabrielle sitting astride him, the minx). And then by Levitating the whole thing. With Luna and Su behind, keeping them covered in a large sheet, nobody saw anything.

And we found ourselves in John's quarters. Hermione dropped immediately from the bed, and changed the passwords, before putting locking spells on the door and windows, as well as alarm wards everywhere.

"Now I can sleep." she said, before falling back in the arms of Morpheus… or Fleur.

"Why would you propose… what you offered?" I asked, curious. "Is it a custom of the French? Of Veelas?"

"Only Veela." Fleur answered, while Gabrielle was trying to mate with the unconscious boy. With some measure of success, judging from the noises she made. Fleur smirked and kept her attention on me, while I was mightily distracted but did the same. "You know we have quite a difference in biology, right? The acts human think are depraved, or relegated to the bedroom of married couples before they have kids, this is part of our sustenance. It is as vital to us as food for you. In fact, Veelas can survive without food. But not without… that." she finished with a gesture towards her sister.

"You mean…" I indicate the young girl with my chin.

"Yes." she says proudly. "She's feeding. As soon as a Veela enters puberty, she needs it in order to grow. Gabrielle hadn't had enough, and it shows."

"Wow. I didn't know that."

"It is not widely known, and less in England than anywhere else."

"Why?"

"This is… complicated. Are you sure you want to know?"

"Of course. That's my little brother your little sister is being attached to.

"Of course." She smiles, and take a deep breath. "To understand, you have to imagine the state of England, and the world, two centuries ago. Here, with the religious dogma of that time, the status of women was linked to the status of the family they married into. Some had independent power, often inherited, but they were few and far between.

"Everything was about family, and as the inner family's visible protector and figurehead, men got to protect and direct it. It wasn't a conscious decision to leave hard power in the hand of men, mind you, and the women weren't powerless within the family. But as theirs was less visible, it was less reported, and it now looks like they were secondary citizen.

"But I digress.

"When England sent men to conquer and establish their various Colonies, they were sent alone, at first, because there was too much danger to bring the whole families. When things settled down, a process that took time, the women came. And found local mores less restrictive than they were used to: local women were often offering bodily pleasures in exchange for material things, because such were the habits of their people.

"When they saw that, the English women were horrified and outraged… and afraid. If their men found their pleasure elsewhere, it meant that their link would break, and their marriage would dissolve.

"Remember that divorce existed in England before most other countries, because one of your kings wanted to marry several women, one after the other."

"Henry the eighth." I mumbled, nodding along. That part of my country's history was widely known.

"Yes. Still, for a woman of two centuries ago, a divorce was akin to an excommunication for a contemporary catholic: they would lose all her power because they would be parted from the family in which they had it."

"And what did they do?" I ask.

"It seems that you know some of your history. You tell me."

Reflecting about the evolution of social mores in England since that time, I came to a shocking conclusion. "They sought power for themselves."

"Exactly. It started small, but grew steadily. A little thing here, another there, sometimes obtained by whinging at the door of some powerful minister, sometimes exchanged against sexual favours – as those indigenous women they despised. Instead of strengthening the family by adapting themselves to a changing world, they stayed rigid in their mind and body, and sacrificed the concept of a stable family in order to gain individual power."

"Still, women can vote, now. I wouldn't want to live somewhere I would be considered… a second-class citizen, as you said."

"Good for us, sure. But consider this: instead of one vote per family, there are two. And they don't want the same things. That introduces infighting in every family cell, leading some down the separation path."

"That infighting must have happened before."

"Yes, but it stayed inside the family. And you know how men are: they easily cave in when we insist enough, or when we restrict access to the pleasures of the body – that's part of what I meant when I said women had power. The end result was a vote for the family. With a vote for each, we don't even need to discuss the issue since each of the spouses has their own vote to cast."

"We could change the voting system, so that there would be less cause to fight."

"With what? We are not the only ones discussing the subject, but we are perhaps the least powerful to change things."

"Why?"

"To change things, now, you need a large enough following to quickly sway all the politicians in one direction. A following able to go down in the street and make a lot of noise, because that's the only thing that moves the politicians. And to gather such a following in the short amount of time needed for the phenomenon to become inevitable, you need a tragedy. Not only that, you need to react quickly to the tragedy, either by being ready whenever one happens, by contorting something already happening into the tragedy you prefer, or… by creating it artificially."

"You're not serious. Are you speaking of killing people to advance political rights?"

"Not necessarily killing, because an assault can be sufficient. But I am serious. Check the news yourself: several people tried. Some failed outright, a few with laughable results; some succeeded for a time, before crumbling under the examination they were under; and some have succeeded and are now unassailable despite their original thesis crumbling into dust."

"That's insane."

"That's life. People want their fifteen minutes of fame, and generating a buzz is the ideal way of doing so. Good or bad, the buzz is the aim. And it invades our media. Objective journalism is dead, killed by sensationalists. Why do you think Rita Skeeter is so successful?"

"She's only one which, though. We aren't muggles, and we aren't inundated with their media obsessions. Why would we care if their heads are filled with false news?"

"Despite some advances taken from the muggles (and not the best ones), the English "wizarding world" is locked in the social mores of two hundred years ago. You can only look at how the muggles live now to see what your future looks like."

"Screens everywhere, for one thing." I replied immediately. "Every muggle has one, now. Or more. Even the kids. Even the littlest kids."

"Speaking of them, do you think the kids of today are happier than their grandparents, globally?"

I snort. "They'd say they were, because they are indoctrinated this way. But they are more apathetic than happy. The screens, again."

"They lost their identity. The concept of family is a joke. When you look at their behaviour, as a whole, you don't find similarities with balanced people, but with uprooted ones – for the better part, because some of them already display psychopathic tendencies before adulthood.

"They seek approval from any source, even anonymous. They are vulnerable to any comment. It creates stress. The whole idea of a country made of uprooted people is generating an unprecedented amount of stress. And stress kills."

"Why do you say all this?"

"You asked why the English had less understanding of the Veelas than, say, the French."

"And I notice that you haven't answered the question."

"I did! Well, not directly.

"When the women discovered their men gallivanting with "scarlet" women, in the colonies, they started by castigating them, and when that didn't work immediately, they pushed their opponents away. Several Veela enclaves where destroyed by armies led by men married to jealous harpies. For the English, Veelas were just another kind of indigenous women, like humans, but even freer with their body."

"Why not the other countries?"

"The method used by England to colonize its numerous settlements was efficient: send men, then send families to keep men where they were, forcing them to entrench the Commonwealth there, before pushing even further.

"Other countries did differently. Some sent only prisoners, for instance, leading to a quick separation with the new country. Some sent armies without sexual outlets. These stayed, true, and intermingled with the local population through the women. The place perhaps changed name, or owner, but not the inhabitants."

"And the French?"

"Noticed that I didn't speak of them yet, didn't you?" she smiled. "The French didn't have two colonies organized in the same way. Where the English had a model they stuck to, independently of the locals, the French adapted theirs each time – perhaps because our political system changed every twenty years or so, while yours is still the same today. Sometimes, they let the local power in place, sometimes they replaced everything. Sometimes it worked for a few years, sometimes it was a quick disaster."

"And they adapted to you, or you to them?"

"Well, at first, if there were "easy women" nearby, those men sent there didn't see the need to bring their families, and created a second one."

"Isn't that illegal?"

Fleur shrugged, causing her assets to bounce hypnotically. She laughed softly when she noticed my staring. "It is, but what people don't know shouldn't damage them. Of course, with everything interconnected, it isn't' possible anymore. Besides, there aren't that many colonies anyways."

"So, why are you French, now?"

"Because, as their management of their colonies was chaotic, they didn't really care about who came back from them. And my ancestors followed the flow towards the country, and established the largest of their enclave there."

"Why?" I asked.

"Why?" she laughed. "You should come see why, one day. You… and your little group." she indicated the group, including a softly snoring Hermione at her side, the boy her sister was hugging tightly with her whole body, as well as the two other girls – who had stayed silent until then, quite surprised by the young Veela appetite, and learning much from the older one. "We settled there… because it's beautiful."

To be continued in next chapter: Amazing...