Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine. I also don't own Harry Potter or any of his world, again, I'm just borrowing it from JK Rowling.
Disappearing Departments and Disappointing Reads
AN: Okay, someone wanted a cross-over story with hp and this is an attempt. If it doesn't make sense, it's because I've worked on it for a couple of days, working out logistics and such, between sleeping and going to work. I'm in daze basically, so forgive me that it sucks. Sorry.
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Gale watches the pick-up game of quodpot being played at the center of the oval, the patch of grass at the center of the university. It's a bit boring, it's a plastic quod and there's not even any tackling, so he loses interest quickly and turns his back on it.
He's sitting with Madge, under the shade of a huge sycamore. They aren't indigenous to the desert, but the soil has been altered to magically support them, the herbology department's doing, part of the beatification of the campus that had started years ago. Squinting, he sees the sun overhead and can almost pretend he's back in the Twelfth District, not in Area Fifty-One.
Not that he isn't happy to be there, he is, he just still misses home sometimes.
It's his third year at the magical university, and his parents, neither of which had gotten the opportunity to go to college, are constantly telling people about how bright his future is. He won't be a moonshiner, selling watered down potions to unsuspecting but eager muggles like so many in his family have done for centuries.
"He's going to be an engineer," his mother is constantly telling people.
"He's going to help design a new floo network, right Gale?" Vick always starts asking each time he came home. "He did an inter-in-ship with The American Floo Cooperative."
Everytime they bring it up Gale has to stifle a groan. He has no desire to work for TAF Co, or any of the other floo network providers, no desire to improve the floo network at all-which in his opinion is already outdated with the increased use of MIRRORs (Magical Instruments for Receiving and Replying Of Rap…someone really wanted the name to spell mirror) and the creation of affordable alternative travel means that don't allow people to pop into houses unannounced. Gale is pretty sure he doesn't even want a fireplace in his home when he finally gets one. The Hellhound Bus and the new SUB (Subterranean Usher Bus) weren't quite as quick or convenient, but they are affordable and you can carry things with you on them. A fair trade in his mind.
No matter what his family thinks, Gale's plans don't include helping to patch the crumbling infrastructure of the floo network. His studies, classes in advanced runes, arithmancy, and portkey studies, are all gearing towards working for the National Alternative Voyage Administration (NAVA).
Mass travel, across the world by magical means without the use of portkeys, has been a widely chased dream among the wizarding community for decades.
"Floo isn't good for international travel and apparition is incredibly tricky as the distance increases. Portkeys," Mr. Latier, Beetee to the older students, had told the class on Gale's first class of his freshman year, "well, let's face it, Portkeys are uncomfortable for a lot of people and the process for set up is cumbersome."
"We in the magical community have been trying for decades to create a means of comfortable mass transport. Ever since our muggle friends created airplanes, however slow they may be."
Their efforts had been stifled though. Mostly by intoxicated college students.
Roswell, House Elves and Unidentified Flying Objects: Why the Bureau of Concealment Hates Us and Why We Deserve Their Scorn, is required reading for all incoming freshmen in the lower level history classes.
The project had lost support, and funding, after all those high level breaches.
Now, though, with all the trouble going on in Great Britain, the government has encouraged both Area Fifty-One and The Bermuda Triangle to reinvigorate their alternative travel projects.
It's a ploy to get their minds off of what's happening across the ocean and at home, Gale is well aware of that, but it lets him get his hands on wizarding technology that's been locked up in the underground storage of the Area since the sixties, so he keeps his mouth shut.
If worse comes to worse, they might need a mass travel system. His grandfather had fought in the war against Grindelwald, and if Voldemort really is back with his aspirations for blood purity, which sounds every bit as insane as Grindelwald's, then getting as many and non-magical born and part-blood wizards and witches out of there might be considered.
Glancing at the front of the paper Madge is so intently reading, Gale frowns.
"'The Boy Who Lies'," he lets out a low whistle. "They don't pull any punches over there, do they?"
Madge makes a face, shakes her head and sets the paper in her lap. "I almost can't read it. That poor boy."
Gale glances at her bag, stuffed full of papers, pictures winking out at him from their black and white pages, and pulls one out.
President Snow dismantles Dept. of Magic-less Born individuals
The article discusses the long running campaign President Snow and his cohorts had fought to get rid the old Bureau of Squib Affairs, which is what most people still called the department that handled the needs of non-magic born children of witches and wizards. It was unnecessary, they claimed, and redundant when there were other departments that could handle all squib complaints just as well, plus it would save untold amounts of money.
Gale doubted that.
They'd apparently won, finding a compromise by placing it under the Department of Non-Magical Relations, removing its autonomy. It's not only shady, it's insulting to squibs, which is what many of the Squib Rights activists point out in the article, even if no one seems to notice, or care.
"It's setting the rights of squibs and muggles back decades," Madge says, biting her lip. "If the blood supremacists in this country have their way all the Departments of Non-Human Relations will get combined and eventually we'll be back to having a Bureau of Others again."
She's on the verge of tears, not looking at him and staring out blankly at the quodpot game, which has dissolved into a duel between a small dark haired girl and a blonde boy.
"That won't happen," Gale assures her, taking the paper from her lap and stuffing it into her back haphazardly. "We're past that kind of thing."
Her hands rub over her face, smear tears out of her eyes and she shakes her head. "No, we aren't, and you know it."