Years have passed since Argus Filch was imprisoned in an intricate net of gum, and Janine has learned a lot since then. So much, in fact, that she is writing down her studies, which she hopes to publish someday. It is unclear if she will ever fulfil her dream; for obvious reasons she cannot publish in the Muggle world, and she has certain suspicions that the wizarding world has active interests in keeping such studies unseen. But for now she continues, pulled along by the true love for knowledge and its exposure that is the joy of academics everywhere.
Janine is not a full-time academic; she actually highly disapproves of people being allowed to study all day without exposure to the outside world, and looks upon most of the research wizards with some disdain. In any case, she is not yet making money from her research, and so she moonlights as a Muggle doctor, a geneticist actually. The delicious irony of this, a Muggle-born witch eradicating hereditary imperfections and diseases in others, is sadly lost on her magical friends, who have no idea what a geneticist even is.
But at night she is pure theory and logic, breaking down her findings into words and numbers and charts.
It has long since been established that the ability to cause magic is a genetically inherited one, she writes. It is not entirely clear how, in the absence of clear scientific research, such an assumption gained such wide acceptance, particularly in the face of the commonality of the Muggle-born wizard, but it has unmistakably been regarded as axiomatic for some time, as evidenced by the emphasis on blood purity in the magical community for centuries.
In the past, it was believed that Muggle-borns acquired their magic by stealing it from wizards (and more commonly witches) that they executed. This theory discredited, the most common conjecture is that the magical gene is recessive and is able to lie dormant through many generations of Muggles until it resurfaces in what is then mistakenly believed to be the first witch or wizard in the line.
The idea of the genetic ability to perform magic being recessive carries a certain weight of plausibility. It provides an elegant explanation for the seemingly random emergence of magic in the Muggle population. It also explains, albeit incompletely, why the wizarding population is so much smaller than the Muggle population, and why the pureblood families are so genetically unstable. Various other oddities of how wizarding life has evolved fit in well with this hypothesis.
The question of why the magical gene evolved in a recessive form and not a dominant one, when instinctually one would assume it would be an evolutionary advantage, is not addressed in this paper, but merits further study and could shed considerable light onto the nature of magic itself.
One element of wizarding society that is seemingly contradicted by the recessive hypothesis is the rarity of the occurrence of Squibs in the population. Statistically, the birth of a Squib should be a fairly common event; yet, over the last five hundred years, less than two Squib births were reported annually.
The improbability of a recessive gene so consistently arising in the wizarding population, combined with the failure of the wizarding population to grow despite the regular influx of Muggle-borns, leads to two hypotheses: that the incidence of Squibs in the community is being artificially reduced by some means of population control, or that the existence of Squibs is not reported or in fact actively hidden from records.
Either or both of the above options is likely, given the widespread animosity towards Squibs. In the aftermath of the Second Voldemort War, much effort went into promoting tolerance of and respect for wizards of impure lineage. Yet no similar overtures have been made towards the Squib populations; hostility towards them is found in every element of wizarding society.
Janine's dissertation goes on in this style for some time. As she writes, she feels a sense of completion, of coming full circle from a fascinating search for knowledge.
x
Once she is finished her first draft, Janine goes to visit her father and takes with her manuscript for him to peruse. Now past seventy, he is still the same vital man who so confused Professor McGonagall. He now lives in a retirement village; all his children visit him, but none so often as his youngest.
Neither of them quite realizes how remarkable their continued closeness is. As a rule, a distance springs up over time between Muggle-borns and their families. It is quite natural; after all, Muggle-borns spend so much time learning to fit in at Hogwarts that very little energy is left for remembering those they have left behind in the rather boring world, and in any case the Statute of Secrecy forbids them sharing so much that it becomes easier to share nothing at all. They feel a creeping resentment to their family for being a source of shame and mockery.
On the other hand, the Muggle relatives grow resentful and increasingly frustrated with the implicit assumption that being interested in cars is so much shallower than being interested in racing brooms; that a life with spells is somehow intrinsically more meaningful; and they hate the constant use of words they cannot understand. No harsh words are spoken on either side, no accusations made. It is a gradual shift over time, very subtle; but tea every Sunday becomes lunch every Christmas, and often finally nothing at all.
But in so many ways Janine is still very much eleven years old, and retains her tendency to chatter obliviously about whatever interests her at the moment. She has nary a thought of any Ministry restrictions as she tells her father of what is going on in her life. And her father listens with fascination undimmed, ungrudging and always happy to learn of the other world at second hand, his overwhelming pride obvious for anyone but his daughter to see.
He reads slowly with his ever-critical eye, alert to any possibilities of error or sloppy thinking. Finally, he looks up. His daughter, somewhat prideful, is loath to admit how much she needs her father's validation.
"You need some stories, Jeannie." This prompts a puzzled look from the witch.
"You're researching people, not genes. Who are the people you are writing about? What are they experiencing? Do they all get treated like your janitor?"
"That's not science, Father."
"True. But science never matters unless people decide that it does. Like this, your stuff will gather dust in some journal, or whatever your people publish." Janine's eyes sting with hurt at the possibility.
"Make people care, Jeannie. Capture people's hearts, and their minds will follow."
x
Most magical researchers, like most Muggle academics, are male. It is not politically correct to point this out, but it is undoubtedly true; women are not so good at entering the unaware daze that is the hallmark of the denizens of labs everywhere. But, as in any field, there are a few.
One of these is a heroine of Janine's. Dead when Janine was still a baby, she leaves a legacy of awe and slight bafflement.
Her name was Miranda Lovegood, and the most familiar description provided by her ex-colleagues is "frankly mental". She had been fearless and reckless to a fault, and had she been an iota less talented she would have dismissed from her position as a hazard to herself and to those around her. But, as it happens, she was quite brilliant, and pioneered various ideas that changed the magical world forever.
What Janine plans to use is one of Miranda's inventions. It is not actually approved for standard research, or in fact for use at all, but Janine did not spend seven years in the Snake Pit of Hogwarts for nothing. She knows that the method works; all she needs is permission to use it.
So her next stop is the home of Luna and Rolf Scamander. She met Luna some time previously, when the older woman innocently asked her if she was spearheading a Muggle invasion of the wizarding world through the evils of mathematics. As it happened, Janine's wide-eyed denial struck exactly the right chord in Luna, who was quite happy to have her brain picked regarding her mother. The two are still friends; both a little out of touch with reality, although in such different ways.
She knows Luna quite well by now, and makes sure to drop words like "conspiracy" and "exposure" into the conversation. Luna's eyes light up as if on command, and she happily hands over certain notes of Miranda's that will make Janine's life a lot easier, as well as a very special silver bowl.
Miranda was an expert in, among other things, residual magic and the echoes it left on the environment. She was able to see spells after they had been performed and various other after-effects.
In the notes now in Janine's possession, she explains that a wizard's memory leaves an imprint on his surroundings, faint but readable for one who know what they are looking for. The Pensieve is one she developed for reading such memories, designed to amplify the faded threads to full strength.
It is using this device that Janine plans to find the stories, buried deep in the walls of wizarding homes, both ancient and modern. Lost in the treacherous gap between worlds, some very special tales are about to be told.