Chapter 17 Accreditation, birth, combat
Ted and Lilian simultaneously called Harry. Ted was in the school in Britain, while Lilian was in Norway, adding security for a potion ingredients import firm who were worried about the attack on the Belgian firm two years before. The reason that Lilian had agreed to add to their security was much more about developing new lines of communication to keep tabs on Death Eater activity than for the money they saved on potions ingredients, as they were still on track to reach a self-sustaining economy before they ran out of money. Ted was accompanied by Okri in their mirror. For a moment they all stared at each other, until Ted prompted the elf, "Okri?"
Okri still had trouble taking the initiative, but after Ted's prompt reported "Okri witnessed 11 groups of witches and wizards appear on the maps. They are spaced around the circumference of the UK. Okri was told this was one of the worrying situations, so I alerted Professor Tonks."
Lilian took up the tale, "They called me, because they correctly inferred that the most likely explanation is that they are putting up a new ward around the country."
They had been fearing such a response from their adversaries ever since they had successfully countered Death Eater attacks, especially after they had embarrassed the Ministry of Magic by getting the ICW to censure them for the destruction of 9 muggle houses 18 months before. "I think the best strategy would be to cast a fidelius that tunnels underneath one of the wardstones before they activate the ward. I think that location would have the least risk of interrupting the ward and thus preventing them from activating it and leading to an investigation. And activating the fidelius before the ward will be necessary to cover enough distance." Harry had breached the wards around Gringotts by repeatedly casting fidelius charms to create a secret entrance, but it had taken 16 charms to cover a distance of 2 feet for the outer wards, and he couldn't manage more than one fidelius every 4 days, so if they waited until after the ward was established, everyone who was abroad might have to wait months for the ward to be breached before they could come home.
Harry accepted that, and jumped to the next point, "What are the easternmost points where they are warding?"
Okri answered "Guernsey, Dungeness and St Margaret's at Cliffe in Kent, Lowestoft in Norfolk, and two points on Unst in the Shetlands."
Harry was used to formulating strategies on the fly, so he was about to propose a course of action, when Lilian continued their explanation. "We've sent Mags and Marny to Kent and Colin and Opal to Norfolk, each with a ward-detector to find out if they have set up security perimeters."
Harry was glad that Lilian had taken on one of June's catchwords that Harry had often repeated, "redundancy is safety", and had sent out two teams, because Harry's mind was still in the process of putting aside thoughts about ICW exam results. He was not particularly happy they had had to send out Mags and Colin to spy on Death Eaters, but they had been so worried about what might happen at the ICW that they had taken all their best fighters abroad. Ted was best left at home to heal anyone who was wounded, in addition to him being the primary caregiver, together with Andromeda, to the children who didn't have a home to return to for the summer. And Neville still hated flying, especially with a wand in hand and flying a broom with the other hand, which would be the fastest way to approach while lifting the ward-detectors out in front of themselves. He spared only a passing thought to those considerations, because his defence training was kicking in and he was thinking of how to implement the strategy that Lilian was proposing. "How about this: I will make an illegal portkey to the unplottable point in the South Belgian dunes. Dobby and I will take the portkey. We'll bring a trunk for me to hide in and Dobby will then take me back to the UK." There his thoughts stalled for a moment; it would be faster to follow after Mags, but safer to wait, in case they decided Norfolk was the better situation and they had to apparate to the unplottable point that was nearest to where they were setting up the ward. He decided that decision could wait, so he continued, "We'll bring two brooms as well. I'll call again when we get to the UK to decide whether to follow Mags immediately or to wait for Colin to report. Although the Ministry will detect a house-elf crossing the border, the risk that the border-crossing will lead them to take counter-measures strikes me as a smaller risk than that the Ministry is bluffing and they haven't designed a ward that can detect us crossing the border inside a space expansion. I'll ask Hermione to talk to the ICW and Germanic Ministry of Magic, to try and settle any ruffled feathers over my illegal portkey, and explain that it was either this or give up on our efforts to resist Riddle's takeover of Britain."
By the time Harry got to the UK, which hadn't caused an auror response yet, both Mags and Colin had reported back that the presumed ward installers had set up detection wards that had a circumference of several hundred yards. That was too far for a fidelius, even across an unprotected tract of land.
They had held a conference by mirror. Lilian had only been able to come up with one idea that might work on such short notice, which was to cast three fidelius charms, spaced as far apart as possible. The problem of course was that Harry was the only one who had ever cast a fidelius, and when they called Andromeda, who was the next most powerful human in their school, she thought she couldn't manage it. There was a long silence as everybody fruitlessly cast about for an alternative.
Lilian broke the silence with a hesitant, "there have been efforts to formulate a ward-breaking ward, but they tend to be detectable, requiring more wards to detect anyone trying to take them down, and normally, less effort is required to break through any malicious wards than is required to police ward-breaking wards, so it's become one of those ideas that only theorists are interested in."
More because Harry couldn't stand the defeated atmosphere than because he thought it would do any good, he offered an equally hesitant, "I could probably manage two fidelius charms ..."
"Dobby will try the third one," Dobby said immediately.
"Dobby, don't." Hermione was the first to voice her objection. Harry thought she looked more horrified than the idea warranted, but before he could turn that into a question several other people spoke up, the general gist of which was, 'we can try something else.'
This went on for a while longer, with several people speaking at the same time, not saying much more than had already been said. When there was a small break, Dobby put in a simple statement, "Harry Potter would do it if he could".
Somehow, this silenced the objections. Harry was sure that there was something that he had missed, but they couldn't risk waiting, so they proceeded with the plan: he would show Dobby how to cast a fidelius just South of the detection ward at St Margaret's at Cliffe, Dobby would then travel to The Cow, off the Southwest coast of Ireland, and attempt to cast a fidelius using Okri as the secret keeper, while Harry would go and cast a second fidelius on Unst with Mags as the secret keeper.
Harry was not surprised to wake up in a hospital bed. He /was/ surprised when the first words that Ted spoke, once he noticed that Harry was awake, were "you'll be glad to hear that Dobby survived, but-"
"Survived? What did he do?"
"Harry," Ted chided, "I've told you that magical exhaustion is a young people's game, that, once you're old enough that magic is the only reason you're still alive, magical exhaustion will kill you."
"But Dobby is young."
"Harry, Dobby is a magical being. There are no squib house-elves. Without magic they die at any age."
"Shit," so that's why everybody had disapproved of this plan so vocally. He almost asked if Dobby was well enough to be summoned, so Harry could chew him out over risking his life, but also to apologise for being so intent on sabotaging the ward that he lost sight of the risks. However, as he went over the signs he had missed, he was stopped short by remembering the next thing that had happened, Dobby had ended the discussion by saying, 'Harry Potter would do it'. The damned thing was, Dobby was right. And it didn't stop there. It had silenced everybody. Which suggested that they were there, not because Hermione had wanted to start a school for the muggleborns, but because Harry had done whatever he did to make people want to join him. In the end all he could say was a lame, "I've been setting a bad example." Also, the prophecy /had/ to be made because it was self-fulfilling; the only way Harry could justify continuing was the knowledge that if they were all going to die, the last and most painful death would be his.
"There's more," Ted cautioned, "the fidelius charms failed hours after you put them up."
While Harry was unconscious, Andromeda and Hermione had done their mastery exams in transfiguration. Hermione had wanted to use the opportunity of having to go to the educational offices of the ICW to do their exams and present their masterworks. In typical Hermione-style, this had led to a lot of stress, since, despite her already having passed two mastery tests with flying colours, she was still both insecure and a perfectionist. A combination that still baffled Harry. In every other situation Hermione would have been able to step back and observe that her meticulous preparation would inevitable lead to a top score. Being excessively prepared apparently only soothed her after she got her diploma, while before then her selective blindness functioned as a handicap. Depending on whether one was more inclined to look at her impressive knowledge or the stress she endured along the way, it could be seen as a productive handicap or not. At least it meant that Hermione was the only one who was surprised when both were awarded their masteries.
Just like waking up in the hospital, there was another thing that was becoming a pattern: Harry had missed a trip abroad. Harry and Hermione had planned to visit Hermione's parents in Canada with Sirius and Remus while the ICW reviewed the exams of their pupils, and while, for the first time since starting the school, they had more staff members abroad than were needed to prepare for the next school year, they could have taken a vacation. Harry mirror-called them to tell them to have fun without him.
~break~
The ICW had judged the general level of knowledge the pupils had shown in their OWL exams to be acceptable, and the grading realistic, so the school received ICW accreditation. Out of the 16 new OWL pupils, 15 had obtained their wand-right. One pupil had failed to obtain her wand-right. Her magic was bound and her parents were obliviated. Although it pained them to do this after 5 years, she had done well enough on her GCSEs, so they thought she would manage back in muggle society. They had lost 7 pupils over the previous 4 years, which brought the total OWL graduates of their first cohort to 25. All of the drop-outs had been older weekend pupils. In contrast to the two that had dropped out after the first year, they had not obliviated the most recent five to fail their exams, as the risk of them running into anyone from the ministry of magic and telling them something that had previously been covered by their unbreakable vows of silence, a vow that without magic was no longer unbreakable, was deemed to be smaller than the risk that if they had magical children that their ignorance of magical society would lead to a problem. For instance, they agreed with the five to supply them with unplottable wards if they had children, so they wouldn't face the risk of the ministry of magic getting to the children before they could.
The 5 NEWT pupils had also done well at the ICW exams. In contrast to the 4 that had finished the accelerated OWLs two years before in order to obtain their wand-right and then pursue a mostly muggle life with the odd charm thrown in, the NEWT graduates wanted to know enough magic to keep their options open about leading a mostly magical life. Two of the five went to university, and had taken part in the accelerated schedule so that they could devote all their time to finishing their degrees. One was going to work for his uncle, who had a garage that specialised in vintage cars. He was going to try and repair broken parts with magic. The school staff had agreed that as long as he was careful that the parts had no residual magic and could not be identified as the same parts the customers had handed in for replacement that this didn't violate the International Statute of Secrecy. To be on the safe side, he would also need to do any magic within an unplottable ward, as they didn't know what detection capabilities of adults doing magic the ministry might have added to track down rebels. The two remaining ones hadn't had a clear idea of what they wanted to do; they wanted to stay in magical Britain, but didn't know what jobs they could do. The staff tried to interest them in masteries of charms, potions, arithmancy or healing, as those were four jobs that Hermione and Ted were currently doing, but that, with the projected increase in pupils and adults, they would need more hands to do. Unfortunately, neither of them were interested in teaching or healing. In the end, they convinced one of them, Peter Moriarty, to do the MACUSA entrance exam for aurors, and the other, Rob McKenna, to become a factotum, helping mostly with food growing and ward carving, but also joining in incidental jobs like notifying new pupils and their parents.
Thanks to the accreditation, the five Northern European ministries they had been in contact with agreed that they would be allowed to perform a ritual to put up a ward that would detect the accidental magic done by magical children. The ministries would then cross off the witch- and/or wizard-born, and they would notify the remaining muggleborn children of the two schools, which each had their pros and cons. The Dutch school was older, offered more subjects, and enabled its pupils to go home for all the holidays, while their school, which was registered as a Polish school, was free. The short version was that they would make a book of admissions like they possessed for Britain, although there was a bit more to the ritual and ward than that, to make it more difficult for either them or the ministries to misuse the personal data they were going to collect.
The ward took 47 people to put up, 43 of whom were stationed around the perimeter of the ward, where each of them would activate a ward-stone at the same time, and 4 at a central location in Germany to anchor the ward and the information it would gather to where the book would be. By combining the school staff, the recent NEWT graduates, and most of the expatriate participants in any of the ward-, communication-mirror- and broom-crafting workshops, they managed to bring together the required number of people. They only had to replace Harry, who would have been one of the 4 to anchor the detection ward to the book of magical children, but he was stuck in Britain.
They had a party after the successful ritual to celebrate the accreditation of the school, and to thank the expatriates for the efforts they had put in to help them protect the muggleborns and build an alternative to the Riddle-controlled British wizarding society. They had to force themselves to look on the bright side, though, because they still needed to find a way to get half their school staff and more than two years worth of students back to Britain.
~break~
Harry had been preparing a confrontation with the Death Eaters / aurors for most of the summer. Fortunately, they had left a large supply of materials in the school, in case one of the few remaining contacts they had in the Ministry-controlled society overheard Death Eaters talk about another attack on a muggle village. With it, Harry had set up a killing field. On the night before school was scheduled to resume, Harry flew over the site of the wardstone. He was not surprised when there was no stone in sight. They would have used an underground stone to carve the wards into and then covered it back up with soil once they had finished. They would have used the local chalk-stone, though, so Harry repeatedly cast duplication charms on bottles of hydrochloric acid until they overflowed and started dissolving the chalk. The wind spread the acid around a fair bit, as Harry had to stay above the dome of the outer ward, but that was okay, because the map they had had of the area when the ward had been installed had a limited resolution to pinpoint the location of the ward-stone. Fortunately, he didn't have to dissolve the complete stone, only do enough damage to the runes until they no longer spelled a ward.
Eventually, the ward detector indicated that the ward had fallen. He told Hermione so by mirror, so they could travel across the Channel to Britain. Then he flew away from the site. In their strategy sessions they had agreed that the first thing the Death Eaters would do is to establish an anti-apparition ward to box whoever destroyed their national ward in, and it would be better to be outside that. The Death Eaters arrived before long at a considerable distance. Harry had put up his own anti-apparation and anti-portkey wards over a large area, and he had brought Dobby with him, whose only role was to activate these wards. They didn't think they would be able to kill all the Death Eaters, which made them decide not to use their rifles, but keep those for their surprise value in future battles, and none of the elves were great fighters if there were spells flying everywhere.
In addition to the outer anti-travel wards, there was an inner anti-apparition ward, the outer circumference of which was lined with magical landmines. When some of the Death Eaters apparated closer to the site of the former wardstone, they were stopped by the apparation-ward and hit the landmines. As part of the preparation, Harry had installed a more detailed map of the area, with which Okri was monitoring the position of the Death Eaters, and reporting them to Harry by mirror. Now, Okri reported that some of them had disappeared from where they had been standing, but not reappeared anywhere else on the map. They couldn't have apparated out, so they must have copied Harry and mounted brooms. The rest of the Death Eaters spread out and approached the former wardstone on foot. To attack those on foot, Harry had released a den of venomous snakes. They had developed automatons that could roll over uneven terrain and attack any humans they encountered with poisoned knives. To attack those on brooms, there were pairs of bludgers, connected with hot garrotting wire. Harry apparated underground (the anti-apparation wards only prevented everyone from leaving, not from apparating inside), where all those who remained in Britain had worked together for the last month to dig many attack positions that were a hybrid between foxholes and arrowslits. There were small openings to the surface, just big enough to cast spells. In addition to the protection this offered, the foxholes were warded to make them spell-resistant and Harry was wearing dragon leather armour. Harry would cast a spell if a Death Eater came near one of the openings and then apparate to another opening. He was using his most destructive spells, though not the killing curse. They needed to show the Ministry controlled society that they would viciously defend their self-appointed right to be in Britain. It was unfortunate that they didn't have enough information to tell Death Eaters and aurors apart, but even the aurors couldn't be so blind to have missed that under Voldemort's control, the Ministry had become a much more intolerant place, and by joining it, they had become tacit supporters of that regime, so Harry had made his peace with incapacitating or even killing aurors and Death Eaters alike.
The terrain was sufficiently uneven that even if they used the human revealing spell, they would have to be quite near to notice he was underground. Between the different lines of attack, Harry managed to decimate the first wave of Death Eaters. When reinforcements arrived and they eventually figured out he was using foxholes, Harry told Dobby to take down the anti-portkey ward, activated the portkeys on the snakes, automatons and bludgers and portkeyed out himself to a random place in Britain, from where he flew to the nearest unplottable point, where he could apparate to the floo hub. Meanwhile, Dobby had replaced the anti-travel wards with the leaky anti-travel wards, to try and continue the damage after they had left. Soon, he and Dobby were joined by the staff and students who had been abroad, and had used the downed national ward to travel safely to the school.
~break~
Now that they were officially recognised as a school, they decided to review how they had been doing up to that point. Neville's comment on their growing areas was typical of most of their impressions: "During the first year I cursed you too many times for trying to make me grow everything we need in this stone-ridden silt desert. Every single plant needed to be carefully coaxed into not dying, and I spent all my time providing the plants with things that top-side are provided by nature without us having to do anything, like sunlight and fertile soils. But then Noêmia came, and I didn't have to do everything myself anymore, and then some of the pupils developed enough experience that they raised more plants than they managed to kill, and eventually the short-lived perennials started to settle in. And recently I realised that I've started wondering why no-one has thought of setting up a sealed ecosystem before, because by being paranoid about what we allow into the school we've managed to keep all weeds and pests outside, and even most plant diseases, and it's not entirely perfect, because some of the useful plants qualify as weeds as well, and it does take effort to keep those in check, but on the whole it's great that if a crop needs an increasing daylength to mature, then after the harvest we don't have to wait a whole year for the next crop, because the lighting and temperature are completely under our control, so we can start preparing for the next crop the day after a harvest. And we can have a tropical cave right next to a subpolar one, and if we keep at it for another decade, we might even get some decent-sized trees."
As a result of the review, they had decided to slightly restructure the curriculum. During the first two years, four magical subjects, Charms, Defence, Potions and Runes, and two non-magical subjects, English and maths, had already been compulsory. They had also already had compulsory attendance to PE, which was mixed magical and non-magical. Now, they broadened that to make the other three mixed subjects, general studies, history and art, compulsory as well.
From third till fifth year, only English, maths, one of the three wanded subjects and at least one additional magical subject were compulsory to exam level. Attendance to the four mixed subjects was also compulsory, on the grounds that they wanted every pupil to have a basic education in the structure of society, how it came to be that way, and to consciously strive to express oneself and to maintain a healthy mind in a healthy body. However, the minimum attainment in these subjects to advance each year was less than what would be needed to achieve passes in the GCSE exams. The staff didn't want to force all the pupils to become polymaths, but they wanted to make sure they were at least exposed to the ideas underlying such a universal education, to make sure all the pupils were exposed to as wide a range of potential endeavours as they could manage, so they could find where their interests and talents lay.
During the first three years of their school, they had nominally offered the option of weekend classes to incoming pupils, although, when they had had to expel two pupils at the end of their first year, they had started presenting that option as an undesirable choice, and the previous two years they hadn't offered the option at all. During the first years, when they had only taken in British muggleborns, they had had on average 8 pupils per year, and it had been feasible to be flexible. But then they had started taking in children of expatriates and Polish-Lithuanian pupils, and they had had to streamline their teaching schedules to leave room for twice as much marking.
They would be getting an even larger class of first-years, with a small contingent of 5 pupils from the four additional ministries of magic. Although they had only 6 British muggleborns that year, they would still have a class of 22 pupils, including another British witch-born werewolf. Ted warned that if next year's intake was any larger, having a single potions class for the whole year cohort would become too risky. Since the increasing number of people also meant Ted would need to spend more time as their healer, he didn't have the time to add any more classes. When they discussed their options, they found they had three: hire another potion master, hire a charms master and have Hermione teach a second potions class, or convince one of their older pupils to become a teaching assistant and keep all the pupils in a single class. They would use the coming year to advertise among the expatriates and pupils to come to a decision.
The larger class of first-years meant they had passed another milestone. They now took in more pupils than Hogwarts castle. British emigrants had been dominated by young people. That meant that while just over a third of the whole population had emigrated, that almost half of the families with children had left. Although in the early 1990s the British witch-born birthrate had been slightly higher than at its lowest point in 1981, Hogwarts castle still had only 20 first years that year.
Peter Moriarty had failed the MACUSA auror entrance exam. Sirius had called to run an idea by Harry, to take Peter on as an assistant, and once he could take on the support of the expats in the USA by himself, for Sirius to move back to Britain. Harry made sure to start by saying that it would be lovely to have Sirius near, but that he worried that Sirius would get cabin fever, and that they couldn't afford to have him start a pranking war in their school, that they had enough trouble getting their pupils to behave with more responsibility than teenagers' naturally displayed. Sirius promised to colour within the lines, but that he was sure there were things he could do that would help rather than hinder, like an annual Pink Panther week, or devising serious pranks to hinder the Death Eaters. Harry took Sirius' proposal to the next staff meeting, who agreed to a trial period in due course.
~break~
"What's your next mastery going to be?" Harry asked Hermione.
"I haven't completely made my mind up. We're going to need a charms mistress, but I worry that if I start now we will need a new staff member before I finish, and I already have a wanded mastery. I still hope to become a Grand Sorcerer, for which I'd need a runes based mastery. Lilian could act as my master, though I'd have to think of a mastery project that I could go public with, because, like with transfiguration, the work I've already done with Lilian on adapting the magic masking ward and the anti-transportation wards and the book of admittance all need to stay secret. However, my thoughts were going more towards getting most of a QTS in chemistry first. An A-level in chemistry is a requirement to study medicine. I'm hoping it would be possible to develop an immunisation against dragon pox. It's a major cause of death among magicals. Over the years several potioneers have tried to create a cure, and about 20 years ago a Japanese mastery candidate tried to adapt muggle immunisation development for magical disease. He failed, but I thought there were avenues left unexplored. I'm also talking to someone who graduated from Dinkelhof last year and is now a medicine student in Sweden, but she wasn't sure she was ready to specialise in immunisation development when adapting it to magic is such an uncertain undertaking." (Dinkelhof was the Dutch school for muggleborns.)
"Where would you put the electronics to teach chemistry?"
"We wouldn't need any. I looked over the curriculum, and a lot of it doesn't require electronics in the first place, and everything that is normally done with electronics, like a pH meter, can be done without electronics, like pH indicator paper."
"Did you say 'most of a QTS'?"
"You need to have taught in at least two schools for a QTS, and I think we don't have to follow the muggle directives to the extent that we all get QTSes, but the other parts can be done with distance learning, and I think it would be good to keep moving forward on those parts."
~break~
Lilian's opening speech included the notification that because of the small number of people taking those classes, both second- and third-years would be able to start arithmancy that year, for which there would be no starting class the next year, while first-years wanting to take Japanese would have to wait a year, when there would be a beginners class for both first- and second-years.
They started the school year with another celebration, this time for the underage pupils. They also asked the pupils to participate in an evaluation of the curriculum and boarding facilities, in response to which some changes were made to the support of pensieve-only classes and more flexibility in who shared rooms.
~break~
Their latest werewolf had an 11-year-old hag friend. Werewolves and hags had nothing in common, except the intolerance of (the rest of) human society that had driven them together. The secrecy vow hadn't allowed the werewolf to say where he was going, but the simple fact that he had been pleased to be leaving had been enough for the hag to ask if she could join him. Negotiations with the young hag's mother to establish enough trust for an unbreakable vow of secrecy had taken them beyond the start of term. And then they still had to talk about food. Hags could live for days on human food, but they needed the occasional supplement, and human organs were best for that. To keep the peace with humans, hags normally subsisted on human cadavers. The staff had agreed to establish an organ donor register, but, because of their skewed age distribution, that wouldn't become a solution until many decades later. In the end, they had agreed to try with making blood-sausage made with human blood and their dead padrafellos and snakes, and have the young hag visit her mother when that wasn't enough. Thus, at the end of October they added one more pupil to that year's intake.
~break~
Teaching was starting to become a routine. That was mostly a good thing, because it left the staff with the gumption to invest in the other things that needed doing, slowly burrowing into Gringotts, warding muggle villages, finding a more permanent way to disable the Ministry's ability to detect border crossings, making sure that no pupils were being neglected, ..., just because they were developing a routine didn't mean they were any less busy than at the start. It did become a conscious effort to not turn into the ghost of Binns. With the first years that wasn't a problem; even the witch-born were always infectiously delighted to do magic. However, once that honeymoon period was over, pupils could get frustrated with the pace of progress. Pupils had different talents in the various subjects, so for some progress in a particular class was slow, while others could barely keep up. Inevitably, a disproportionate amount of classtime was spent on the slowest learners, and the staff were all developing ways to keep the faster pupils occupied by trying out variations of the spell, learning the theory of a rune-sequence that was not part of the curriculum, or running an experiment on the trade-off between efficacy of a potion and its shelf-life. Similar adaptations were used in the muggle classes, which tended to be slightly easier, because, thanks to the much larger muggle population, more books were available on teaching strategies.
The Ministry had restored the wardstone at St Margaret's at Cliffe. The Ministry might have added additional security measures there, so they had targeted the wardstone at Lowestoft for sabotage. With more time for a cautious approach and their Runes Master back in country, they had managed to hire a muggle company to locate and dig down to the ward-stone, take photographs of the runic array, and make changes to it to ensure it would allow them to cross the border without raising an alarm, but also without triggering the security feature that reported that the ward was being brought down. By using only muggle employees, they managed to get around the security feature that detected when magicals got anywhere near the wardstone, and they used confundus charms on the muggles to gloss over the inconsistencies in their cover stories, e.g. when they told the diggers that it was an archeological dig, but told the rune carver that it was an art project.
~break~
One of the witch-born pupils had come to Harry, all indignation, "a house-elf refused to do as I told it. Did you tell them not to obey the students?"
Harry decided to let this play out and only answer the actual question, "no."
"Will you call Dobby and punish him for disobeying me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Harry was several moments formulating an answer. It didn't bode well for the discussion that the pupil was impatient and made no effort to hide it. "House-elves are sentient beings, perfectly capable of deciding whether to fulfil a request made of them."
"But it wasn't a request."
Harry was unsurprised the pupil had completely missed the point he was trying to make. It was an important point, though, so he patiently soldiered on, "which presumably is why Dobby refused to honour it." An uncomprehending silence ensued. Eventually, Harry decided to help the pupil out, "the house-elves that are with us are all free."
"But, ... but free house-elves die!"
"No, unappreciated house-elves may lose the will to live. We appreciate all the help the house-elves have been giving us more than I can tell you."
"If you appreciate them so much, why did you set them free?"
"I appreciate my human colleagues just as much, and I've no intention of bending them to my will either."
"But they are house-elves."
This brought them to the crux of the matter. "We left the control of the ministry of magic because of a similar situation. The ministry was organised with a few rich families with all the power, and everybody else was left to survive on the scraps. There are historical and economical reasons that originally made sense, which gave rise to that situation, but once it was in place it created a evolutionary dead end, where those in power had to choose between adapting to a changing situation, or to hold onto the power, but resist all change, because it would allow new players to use the changes to carve out their own place at the seat of power, thus diluting the influence of the old guard. They chose to resist that change, but over time that results in a power structure that becomes ever more self-serving, and a correspondingly growing disenfranchisement of the majority. It is a recurrent situation in human societies, and if you pay attention in history and general studies you can learn to recognise at which stage of that cycle any one society finds itself. Normally, the situation slowly grows worse until the majority grows disaffected enough to decide that violent struggle and its associated misery is better than continuing on with the silent suffering.
Magic modifies that cycle, because it enables us to hide from the ministry and do our own thing. There are downsides to hiding, mostly that we get reports of what is happening second-hand and with a delay, but compared to the violence instigated by, for instance, Grindelwald, we'd like to think our initiative has many more advantages than disadvantages."
"And the house-elves were about to start a violent revolution?"
"Not yet, but Dobby was so downtrodden that he was ecstatic to be set free, and after his encouraging example the other house-elves have also learned to embrace freedom. No violence required, only open minds and hearts." In the interest of total honesty, Harry continued, "that doesn't mean our solution is entirely free of violence. I just spent most of July and all of August preparing for a violent confrontation with the Death Eaters and aurors from the Ministry of magic, which was trying to prevent you from entering the country, but at least the violence excluded uninvolved bystanders and was only fought between those who agreed this would be part of their jobs."
~break~
Quidditch no longer had a shortage of players; at least, not compared to Hogwarts castle, where, while Harry had attended, only 1 in 10 took part in the only sport on offer. Football was still the most popular sport, but the difference with quidditch was closing. It was good that they had more than 14 pupils playing, although Harry missed the opportunity to play. Still, he got some of the vibe by refereeing and coaching.
Another contrast with Hogwarts castle was that, because of the rotating positions which had everybody alternating between playing with and against everybody else, there wasn't any animosity between competitors. However, there also wasn't any team spirit, ..., on second thought, there was a team spirit, but it was of all quidditch enthusiasts, as contrasted to those who only played when Harry made it part of PE. Which made him wonder, did a sense of belonging necessitate outsiders? The school staff had certainly done its level best to unite pupils and staff by harping on and on about the enemies that would kill them all, given half a chance. But if at all possible, the staff hoped to instil a live and let live attitude towards muggles in the pupils (albeit without encouraging them to rejoin them).
Other clubs and informal groups saw a similar slow shift from muggle to magical pass-times and attitudes, partly due to the influence of British emigrant witch-born pupils, and partly because some of the differences between magical and muggle society were a logical corollary of magic use. Other differences were due to the tendency of a smaller, longer-lived population to change more slowly, and they would have to keep a close eye on which dysfunctional unexamined beliefs, such as the one that said that free house-elves died, they were in danger of re-introducing.
There was also a shift towards more interest in the seasonal pagan rituals. Colin and Neville reported that there was little friction between Christians and Pagans; even that participation in the rituals by members of the bible study group was not unusual. Hermione, who, as usual, had read the most about the issue, explained that this wasn't as surprising as it might at first glance appear. That, as far as she could tell, despite the influence of the Christian majority on how history had been recorded, intolerance for Paganism had always been more about the secular power of the Church than it was about incompatibility between the respective doctrines.
~break~
"I want to propose that our society will be both patrilineal and matrilineal", Hermione said during a staff meeting not long before Noêmia was due to give birth.
"You mean like in Brasil?" Noêmia asked.
"No. In Brazil grandchildren still mostly end up with the two names of their grandfathers. I'm proposing that boys get their father's name and girls their mother's."
It was a rather radical idea, or at least a way of doing things that had never been used in Britain, and had gone out of fashion in Brazil, so they left it for a later meeting to be decided on. In the end they agreed that the change was consistent with the kind of society they were trying to grow, in which everybody would be given an opportunity to, even more, would be expected to, contribute equally. Therefore, they accepted the change.
Not that it ended up mattering, as Noêmia and Neville had a boy. On 9 January 2008 Gabriel Araujo Longbottom was born.
The rest of the year the whole staff was busy mostly keeping a lid on the chaos. Noêmia and Neville were being run ragged by Gabriel, the elves were a blessing in their cheerful embracing of a wailing child, while the rest of the staff helped out when the young parents couldn't manage a full teaching load while sleep-deprived. It worked well enough that Hermione got that broody look whenever she witnessed Noêmia with Gabriel. Harry was not immune either.