Change Just One Piece
Professor Dumbledore, the Transfiguration master, was scheduled to visit a boy in a London orphanage, to see if he qualified for Hogwarts. But at the last minute, a friend from the Unspeakables came to visit him, to try to persuade him (once more, unsuccessfully) to join the war effort against Grindelwald. This left the visitation duty to the next in line: the Ravenclaw Head of House, Agnes Frink.
Professor Frink was strict, sensible, and much wiser to the ways of misbehaving boys than Dumbledore; so when she was led into his little room, she looked around swiftly. She could tell something was off right away: the room was too clean, even though the boy's clothes were a bit dirty. A simple surface scan of the boy's short-term memories showed her that, while he would never let anyone touch him, he would gladly use his powers to force or blackmail other children to clean his room for him. She could also tell that he had "trophies" of his conquests and thefts hidden in the room.
Frink conducted only the briefest of interviews before seeing herself out.
She apparated immediately to the Ministry of Magic, where she spoke to the assistant head of DMLE, who assigned an obliviator and an auror specialist to accompany her back to the orphanage. They conducted a further interview, and when the boy tried to use his powers to get them to hand over their wallets, they used the knock-out jinx to render him unconscious. Both ministry workers used extensive Legilimency to verify Frink's analysis, and what they saw more than agreed: the boy was a sneaky devil, a vicious manipulator, unscrupulous, malevolent, utterly selfish, morally insane, and a nasty piece of work. The auror specialist proceeded to bind the boy's magic; and the obliviator then proceeded to modify his memory, so he would not recall meeting any of his visitors.
When Headmaster Dippet called together the professors to review their visits to the prospective muggleborn students, Professor Frink described her visit to the orphanage, and its aftermath. Dumbledore was aghast, and expressed his concern at not giving the boy a chance to prove himself worthy and outgrow his bad habits. Frink replied that the boy was already what the muggle scientists called a "psychopath," with dangerous, antisocial, criminal and predatory thinking and behavior. The option of unleashing such a cruel and conscience-free person on Hogwarts was unthinkable; better to nip his magical predation in the bud, and leave him to the muggle authorities to inevitably mop up.
Dumbledore insisted that every child deserved a second chance, because after all, there was some good in everyone really, and argued for a vote of the staff to reverse Frink's decision, reverse the binding and obliviation, and offer the boy a place at Hogwarts. When Dippet called for the vote, all except Dumbledore voted no. Miffed, he sat in silence for the rest of the meeting.
- fin -
