Chapter 2:
Life After the Statute
Most people can't remember anything from their early childhood. Life before the age of five was a blank canvas, or blacked out memory.
Not for Harry. This wasn't because he had photographic memory or anything like that, in fact, he didn't remember much. Just a few things, but he remembered them vividly.
He remembered a flash of green and a woman's scream. He remembered seeing those three bizarre birds that always followed him around for the first time. And he remembered the 1984 Olympics.
Everyone remembered the 1984 Olympics.
The sudden overcast. He remembered that woman, that witch, that terrorist. Carlotta Pinkstone appearing out of thin air. And of course, all of the blood and bodies she made from the athletes.
July 4th, 1984 was known as the day the Statute broke, and the start of Pinkstone's reign of terrorism.
Turns out, there are wizards! And witches, and vampires, and werewolves and dragons, and fairies and a whole lot of other things everybody thought was make-believe. Learning that he lived in a world where an entire separate society of magic wielding maniacs came as quite a surprise. Learning he was one of them was a but more difficult to swallow. Learning they were also just regular people with bad apples like any other took an inordinate amount of time to accept.
Over the eleven years since her attack on all Muggledom, tensions had been high between Muggles and wizards.
Integrating their two societies together was an ongoing process, which initially started with the wizards opening up charter schools, national forests and magical services to "Muggle" kind. The former to learn about their way of life. The second to let them see dragons and manticores and other crazy shit up close and personal, while paying a premium to do so. It was worth every penny.
The last of those was for simpler motivations.
Good old fashioned crapitalism!
"Come to Crispa Culpeller's Drugs and Preparations for all of your beauty needs." The face on the magical advertisement they walked past said.
"Our latest scar removal cream will have your skin baby smooth in no time at all." She went on.
Dudley and Piers both Guffawed at the poignant advertisement. Stopping in their tracks to laugh at him.
"Our new line of perfume come with sweat odor elimination. Only nine, ninety-nine." the advertisement went on, this time directed towards Dudley and Piers.
That shut them up.
"At a certain point, don't you wizards figure making ads too customized to the victim becomes offensive?" Piers asked Harry.
"I mean, we are all in our league clothes and carrying our gym bags with us." Harry told him. "So I imagine we must smell like the changing room."
And it was true. Their baseball clothes were in need of a wash, and would be getting one after today's game, but they didn't smell THAT bad.
"Come on! Ignore the bint, or we'll miss the bus!" Dudley beckoned.
"Oi!" The advertisement complained as they rushed past her towards the bus stop.
They arrived with an entire minute to spare before the bus arrived, to find it already crowded with elderly witches. French by the look of their robes.
They stared at him. At Harry in particular.
Dudley had a hairpin trigger at the best of times, but when he caught strangers staring at Harry's forehead with mouths agape it was a good idea to get out of his way.
"Yeah! That's Harry Potter. You want to make something out of it?" Dudley snapped at the women.
The women, as one, flinched from his musclebound cousin. Harry and Piers had to drag him away to reprimand him.
"Dude? Really?!" Harry said.
"I'm sorry! It's just... gross. She may have been your mother, but she was my aunt and I actually remember her. A little. They celebrate it and congratulate you and ogle you because she died." He said. "How would you feel if Mum died saving me from that Pinkstone psycho and people went around shaking my hand for it?"
That was one way of putting it. Harry didn't like it either, but he thought apathy was a more appropriate response. There was also the small matter that the guy who killed his mother was a significantly bigger deal than Carlotta.
"Well, we'll be playing against a mixed species team from France, so expect more staring." Harry told him. "Or better yet, direct some of that aggression at winning the game, eh?"
Before he could answer, the telltale BANG of a magical bus appearing at the stop announced it was time to board. They waited behind for the elderly to find their places and then boarded through the back entrance, paying with the toll setup there. Best to avoid the people with wands that Dudley just tried to start a fight with.
"Oi! Over here!" They heard a voice from the back.
Sure enough, Dean, Seamus and Malcolm were on the same bus, dressed for the game themselves.
The entire league was student run, a collaboration of different magical charter schools and Muggle schools alike.
Baseball was boring. Quidditch took up all of the mainstream these days, and football was boring. But magical baseball? Now that was a good time. And with enchanted gloves, balls, cleats and bats even Muggles could play. Quidditch required brooms, which Muggles could not fly on by themselves.
Harry, Seamus and Dean were classmates in a charter school named Quibbler's school of Magical Arts. It had a focus on using magic for painting, sculpting and music and had somehow stolen professors from both Hogwarts and Bauxbatons. After the statue of secrecy was broken native wizards, who some derogatorily called purebloods, decided they didn't have to tolerate the immigrant class of Muggleborns or their Muggle politics anymore, so booted them all out. They kept Hogwarts, but nobody cared because any witch or wizard could create their own school in the Muggle world.
And they did. A lot. Let the Purebloods live in their isolationist country, with their own culture and religion free of modernist issues.
Harry, being a half-blood and famous, was invited to Hogwarts. But a quick comparison of their curriculum and the rich assholes that went there compared to all of the other, cheaper, and closer options sealed the deal.
There, he met all of the other Muggleborns and half-breeds of Britain with an artistic bent. Dean was excellent with penciling and inking art. Seamus? He could paint alright, but he really liked fireworks, which headmaster Xenophilius somehow allowed him to experiment with. Under their music teacher, Flitwick's, strict supervision.
"The others are coming on the ninety eight, we'll meet them at the field." Malcolm said.
Traveling by train? What a bore! Why do that when you could get on a roller coaster of a bus? Speaking of.
"Buckle up everybody." Harry told his teammates, doing the same himself.
As usual, the knight bus corporation did not disappoint. Even with the seatbelts Harry and Dudley, who had been seated closest to the windows, had developed intimate relationships with the glass throughout the ten minute ride to their baseball pitch.
When they were let out they stumbled like drunkards onto the grassy edge of the fields of Devon. Their baseball pitch was just within view. A crowd of friends and family or general onlookers was already taking up the bleachers.
"Come on! We gotta get there before the others." Seamus goaded.
So they got their warmup in running towards the pitch, only to be outrun by a van painted with a white flag.
On no wait! That was the French flag. Somehow he always missed the red and blue bits. It just faded into his periphery every time.
They reached the edge of the pitch leading to the pitchers just as the clowns exited their clown car. Figuratively speaking. The vehicle was clearly bigger on the inside than the outside.
"Wait. They're co-ed?" Piers asked stupidly.
No. Not co-ed. It was all girls who stepped out of that van, and their uniforms declared them as their opponents. They waved flirtatiously at the boys. For their part, they mock growled while making threatening gestures, like Dudley's finger across the throat, much to their amusement if the giggles were any indication.
They all stopped their horseplaying when the last of their players stepped out of the van.
"I thought we were playing against other high schoolers." Dudley whispered conspiratorially as the blonde woman, not girl, woman ran to catch up with her peers.
"That chick has got to be a senior in college, at least." Said Malcolm.
"That or the French are putting something stronger than flouride in their water." Seamus said.
Harry was too busy watching the woman, and the feeling of her magic washing over them like a miasma. He didn't like it, the way it attempted to grasp onto their attention and emotions. Her magic felt like a violation. And he knew what she was.
"No. She's a high school senior alright." Harry said. "And she's a Veela."
Even from ten meters away, she must have heard him, because her eyes snapped towards him, his utterance of the V word earning him a hateful glare.
Then, her eyes moved towards his scar, and her expression turned vindictive. Excited, even. Or maybe even hungry?
That was not the usual response his scar earned him.
The shorter chapter format really lets me experiment with "Tell, don't show". But this is pretty much the best case scenario of a world where the statute of secrecy is broken and the two worlds have to coexist. Glossed over most of the growing pains, but they'll play a big role in future chapters.