Chapter 20: Notes From The Field

DISCLAIMER: Does the Potterverse wizarding Britain not include any of the actual magical families of British history? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

This is a bit of a bonus chapter. Things that aren't easily fitted in elsewhere, but were ideas I had that I thought good enough to write down. Since we're all cooped up in our homes waiting for the current pestilence to pass us by, I collected them together and here they are, as a sort of Drabble Sausage. When they take place should be fairly obvious from context.

CHAPTER 20

Notes from the field.

-oOo-

"Well, that's entirely useless." I'd got lucky with a thunderstorm only a couple of weeks after I got the potion finished. Shame it turned out to be a total waste of effort. And of a month of enduring everything I ate tasting of mandrake leaf.

"Oh, come on," Sirius says, putting down the polaroid camera and helping me up from the floor, "there's no such thing as a useless animagus. You've just got to get creative."

"You reckon? Piss-poor eyesight, stone deaf, and slow. Too small to fight anything larger than a vole, too big to pass entirely un-noticed, and if I go outdoors I'm beset by natural predators from arsehole to breakfast-time." It's also not even a mature specimen. Being able to do the magic is a function of maturity of mind, heart and soul, but the transformation itself starts from your actual physical form.

"Always with them negative waves," Sirius opines, being currently in the middle of a war-movie fascination and doing a fair impersonation of Oddball, "You've got venom, at least."

"Rubbish venom. As I said, deadly against voles, no threat to anything larger that isn't already half dead. Does it count as transfigured venom?" Transfigured poison, including the venom of transfigured or conjured animals, doesn't work. Anything introduced to the body - not just food - comes under the relevant Exemption to Gamp's Law (which is badly formulated but apparently we can't overturn a theorist as respected-of-long-standing as Gamp even if half the shit she came out with makes no sense in the context of actual spellcasting). It de-transfigures, making it useless at best and potentially harmful at worst. Or, in the case of venoms and poisons, irritating at best and harmless at worst: you get only the damage it can do in the few seconds it takes to de-transfigure or vanish.

There are foreign theorists who have some excellent ideas about why this is so, but it's hard to get the relevant texts in Britain because they all treat Magical Core Theory as the racist joke it actually is.

Xeno Lovegood travels a lot and is an absolute darling about lending the books he picks up while out of the country. Also, anti-copying charms only work against magical copying and I can afford a photocopier. I'm personally partial to the Morphic Resonance theory, not least because it's so obviously formulated to be as utterly offensive to the world's muggle-haters as humanly possible, down to and including borrowing ideas from an actual muggle biochemist.

Sirius shrugs. "Honestly? No idea. I got quite good marks in transfig theory, but I promptly forgot it all the day after NEWTs. We could get you some mice to bite?"

I give him a Look. "I don't need to know that badly." Although I suppose milking my form for some venom and seeing if it turns into human saliva under one of the standard transfiguration-reversal spells would at least prove the general concept.

Sirius is openly sniggering at my disappointment "Speaks well to your character, though. Harmless unless provoked is hardly the worst way to be. Although from a symbolism point of view, the subtlety and cunning of serpents isn't to be sniffed at either. And adders symbolise rebirth and healing if you go back far enough."

I shrug. "Symbolism is all very well, but I'd been hoping for something useful."

"That," Sirius says, "is what everyone hopes. Apparently a lot of would-be animagi stop right where you are, and from the sound of things I now know why. Anyway, even if you're not going any further with this - which you should, by the way, partial transformations can be quite useful, and sometimes just being able to transform into anything is a great help - tradition dictates that you name your form."

That raises my eyebrows. "Huh. You know, when you were telling me about your hijinks at school, I thought the codenames were just teenage foolishness." It also raises the question of what Minerva McGonagall calls hers. There's a pussy joke in there somewhere, but I'm feeling too browned off to go chasing after it.

"Well, they were. Looking back they were horribly obvious and frankly a bit naff. But also tradition. Here's your picture, anything spring to mind?"

I take the polaroid off him and take a good long look. My animagus form is a juvenile Vipera berus, one of the most common snakes in the world. Utterly undistinguished in every way. What I have to look forward to is eventually being able to transform into an adult common adder. Be still, my beating heart. "It's not even as if I got the coolness factor of being a melanistic specimen. Well, since it's completely crap and not a black adder, I'm going with Baldrick."

-oOo-

"It sounds a bit borin', Uncle Mal." Dudley, blunt as ever, is frowning at the morning's proposed activity.

"Yeah," Harry adds, "What's it for?"

I give the boys a grin. We're all sat on the fireside rug, cross-legged and comfy on cushions. "What it's for is helping you make your brains work better. But it's like every other kind of training, you've got to learn the basics and practise them a lot. Like I keep telling you, there's no getting away from lots and lots of drills. And today's basic thing that you're going to have to drill a lot is simple meditation. Which is a good habit I want you to get into."

I'd asked Sirius how he'd been taught, and he cheerfully admitted that he'd been yelled at and hit until he could maintain the right mental state for occlumency. Tom had got his through being yelled at and hit, albeit in a less formal and directed context. This meant I got it that way too. Although my own early years involved a lot of yelling and getting hit, so there may have been some natural fit to that skill-set. The ability to set one's mind aside comes naturally to people who have been helpless in shitty situations. The challenge, therefore, is teaching the boys to dissociate without traumatising them. Which is where teaching them to alter their own state of consciousness via meditation comes in. Harry will be able to go on to practise proper occlumency, with his magic reinforcing the defence, but Dudley is going to find it a help as well, as the world can be a tad frustrating to those of narrowly-focussed talents.

"The really useful parts come later, but for now being able to meditate is a good way of calming down and refreshing yourself when you have a lot of work to do, or things are difficult or upsetting," I go on, "And if you pay attention for a whole hour, and make a good effort, then we can have fiery orangey pancakes for lunch."

Neither boy can yet pronounce crêpes suzette properly. They do like watching me make them, though. If there's one thing that unites kids it's watching a grown up set food alight and getting dessert at the end of the show.

"Did I hear Fiery Orangey pancakes?" Sirius asks, sticking his head round the door, "I'm joining in, boys!"

-oOo-

"Mal?"

"Yes, Sirius?"

"Is this you in the Quibbler?"

"Ooh, is this month's issue here? Let me see?" Sure enough, I've got my byline on the front cover. Magical printing being what it is, the six column inches they've given me is enough to fit a quite lengthy essay. When you start reading, the rest of what's on the page shuffles politely out of the way.

Sirius interrupts my proud perusal of my own material, "Why are you writing for the Quibbler? Not that I'm criticising, you understand, but we do have a lot of projects on."

"Well, it started as an attempt to make contact, the more publications we've got that're willing to print our stuff the better. I just, well, sort of got into correspondence with the Lovegoods and Xenophilius asked me if I'd let him have my thoughts at essay length for publication." There's a secondary motive, of course. If I can wangle an invite I can give Mrs. Lovegood a lengthy lecture on experimental safety. No guarantee it'll save the poor woman's life, but I'd feel an utter heel if I didn't at least make the effort. And Xeno is an engaging correspondent and all round good egg, I've learned. Worth cultivating even if we never prevail on him to print so much as a word of the propaganda we're ginning up.

"Thoughts? On what?"

"On how there are useful insights from mundane zoology and investigative techniques in solving magicryptozoological mysteries." I was actually quite pleased with how the piece turned out. Best part: I can almost certainly sell the piece - with a few judicious redactions - to Fortean Times, which I'm taking in this universe to get wind of unusual phenomena that the Ministry of Magic miss altogether. On top of it being a reliably good read.

"Spare a chap a lengthy read? I really only bother with the rune puzzles and the conspiracy theories." He's looking at the magazine in my hands with an air of nervous intrigue that has an option on horrified fascination.

"Well, they're looking in the wrong place for the Crumple-horned Snorkack. The type specimen is a partial skeleton - cranium and right forelimb - mounted on a trophy plaque, and because it was found aboard a tramp steamer in Malmö, everyone who's looking for it is looking in Scandinavia."

"And that's wrong, why, exactly?" Sirius is looking interested in spite of himself.

I decide that he has, in fact, Got Me Started, and let drive. "Well, it's pretty obviously a magical species of dwarf brontothere, on morphology alone, and you don't tend to get dwarf species in higher latitudes - completely the other way about, under Bergmann's Rule. Throw in insular dwarfism, and you're actually better off looking on subtropical and tropical islands. Now, the historical range of the brontotheriidae doesn't offer us any help narrowing it down, the wretched things turn up everywhere in the fossil record, but I had a chap look up the ship the type specimen was found on and she had been previously registered out of Zanzibar. So, western Indian Ocean. It wasn't fossilized, so there's still hope it isn't extinct, but I'm not personally hopeful. Lot of habitat destruction in that part of the world. Be absolutely brilliant if there's a relic population somewhere, though. Lazarus taxons are always good news."

I give Sirius my biggest, cheeriest grin while he backs away slowly.

-oOo-

"You know, you should have got this charm right by accident before now."

"Yes, thank you for that constructive criticism, Sirius."

Black - he's been annoying me enough today to no longer be on first-name terms with my internal monologue - cocks his head on one side. "You know, usually it's the other way about. Transfiguration hard, charms easy."

"Yes, well. For some reason - I don't even have a good theory - I seem to find it easier to impose my will on the world around me than to seek the intervention of magic itself to bring about the desired result." I actually do have a theory, and it's that charms are designed around baseline humans activating them. Where other sorts of magic are worked directly by the mage, affecting the world, the mind, or what-have you either on the fly or in pre-rehearsed ways, charms are a sort of higher-level magic, in which spells are in a very broad sense 'imprinted' on the world's magic like functions that can be called later. Something about the way I came to be in this universe makes calling on charms to do their thing harder for me than it would be if I was a native. Not impossible, just harder. I'm never going to manage the fluid, rapid fire grace with which Sirius, for example, can rattle off charms with scarcely more than a thought.

I've come up with a cover story for if I'm ever pressed on the matter: nearly every charm requires some form of intent, state of mind or summoned-up emotion. The spells in the books generally start with 'having in your heart' or 'clearly intending' or similar wording. I'm going to tell people I just don't focus like that with any ease, but that the visualisation required for transfiguration and conjuring comes naturally. It neatly explains why I have absolutely no trouble with written charms when I turn to rune-work: the extra time and effort involved gives me opportunity to get my mind right.

For now, though, back to trying to make a lockpicking charm work despite the fact that I know how to pick locks and can just transfigure the entire door into wet fucking cardboard anyway.

I grit my teeth.

-oOo-

"You know, Mister Reynolds, you don't have to pluck every last feather. We do expect there to be some give and take when we contract for these things."

I can't help but chuckle at that. Barchoke, who is one of my client contacts, appears to have picked up some of the human contract lawyer jargon over the years. "I take the view that they shouldn't get the idea that they're allowed feathers at all. Stops them taking liberties later, if nothing else."

There are no law firms that consist entirely of Knowledgeable Muggles so until I came along buying stuff (or, rather, mostly leasing, as Goblins don't trust anything that the maker is willing to sell outright) for the goblins involved a great deal of lying, which took up altogether too much of Perenelle Flamel's valuable time. The Goblins have to go through someone when dealing with muggles to avoid tiresome Statute of Secrecy complications, and for obvious reasons they prefer not to use wizards. The bankers they have a stake in would do, but they run in to the same problem: no in-house expertise and a real difficulty retaining outside help and keeping all the lies straight.

Gobslice, who's representing a different group of goblins who also want the water-treatment kit Perenelle has me negotiating for, bursts out with the rasping wheeze that is goblin laughter. "You humans have this word 'stereotype', Mister Reynolds," he says, "and talking with you teaches me why." He goes on to say something in his own language - I've been warned not to call it gobbledegook - that makes Barchoke wince. I like Barchoke. He might harbour racist views about humans, but he has the good grace to do so secretly.

Yeah, the downside of dealing with goblins. Much as wizards don't get their culture, they have preconceptions about us surface-dwellers. Outside of minerals and fossil fuels, the hominids who went underground to hide from the glaciers of the Younger Dryas are dirt poor. And unable to live in any kind of dense population, underground food supplies being what they are.

They practise the communism of hard-country tribes: all resources pooled to survive, knowing that your neighbour's welfare is in part a guarantee of your own. It's why they get so touchy about their finished goods being kept beyond the terms on which they're willing to lease them: stealing from a craftsgoblin is stealing from every goblin he might have helped with the work of his or her hands. There's probably more to it - I've heard things that imply that goblin-on-goblin warfare is basically tactical burglary - but I'm not about to add anthropology to the list of things I need to study. I know enough to make educated guesses about what they will and won't stand for in a leasing contract and that will have to do.

The goblins who move to the surface have to get their heads around the every-man-for-himself bullshit that is endemic to the human condition. It's why most of the goblins who leave the caverns and manage to make a go of it are their criminals. And the ones who don't leave the caverns have some very fixed ideas about all humans being grasping, conniving, unprincipled bastards: by their standards, we are. The most human-like goblins get exiled, often for quite serious offences.

Meanwhile Gobslice, sniggering little shit that he is, is renewing my sympathy for the jewish colleagues I've had over the years. I'm sore tempted to start mispronouncing his above-ground name.

-oOo-

If you want to enjoy Blackpool, there are two methods, speaking as someone who spent a chunk of his childhood there: have it as your only annual relief from grinding industrial poverty, or be a small child.

Or, apparently, a Pureblood wizard. We're back in the eighties, so the Pleasure Beach is still on the ticket system, and the price of a book of the things is peanuts to Sirius. He, Harry and Dudley are getting in line for their fifth attempt of the day to get whiplash injuries on the Wild Mouse. I remember loving that ride - it's the absolute best of the B-ticket rides - when I was Harry's age, and there aren't height restrictions. (We could get Harry on the likes of Revolution - the only one that has them this early in history - by use of ageing potion, but that would be unfair to Dudley, who can't use it). They won't put height restrictions on the other rides, or even require adult supervision, for some years yet. It's within my own living memory that people would take dogs on: my grandmother's poodle used to love the Flying Machines ride.

Vernon and Petunia are taking their time to get themselves squared away for the new baby girl, who's due any day now. Sirius - suitably disguised - and I have brought the boys for a long weekend: we've climbed the Tower, boated on Stanley Park lake, been to the Zoo, visited the piers (if Neville Longbottom is to be thrown off one of them, it didn't happen while we were there), and we're blowing the whole of Sunday doing the Pleasure Beach and making complete pigs of ourselves on the greasy fried fast food that is the authentic taste of Blackpool.

The only fly in the ointment was the jackass at the Zoo who decided that Sirius and I were capital-T together and thought he had a god-given right to give us shit over it. I was content with giving him enough jedi mind-trick to feel bad about his attitude for a few hours, in the vague hope he'd learn from it. Sirius was offended more by the assumption than the overt homophobia, which is why his response was a jinx of intermittent rectal itching ("because it's worse that way, you can't get used to it") that would last a full lunar cycle.

-oOo-

I hear the kitchen door behind me, which I'm expecting. The voice I hear, not so much. "Oh, sorry. You must be the housemate Sirius told me about?"

I turn away from where I have my wand and a thermocouple trained on the teapot. Sirius had warned me via the time-honoured method of note under the door that he had company over - he's been showing himself undisguised in a few locations and of course he thought fit to involve what is probably an innocent bystander, I am going to have a word with that boy. Fortunately, silencing charms being what they are, I wasn't disturbed by him and his guest knocking boots last night. His note did warn me to take ageing potion and transfigure my hair close-cropped and blond before getting dressed this morning, though. Adult Mal only looks related to Kid Mal, not like a grown-up version of him. "That'd be me, yes. I'm fairly sure we haven't met, I feel sure I'd have remembered. I'm Mal. How do you do, Ms. -" I trail off the question.

"Charity, Charity Southworth." Her accent is a breath of home, although I decide not to ask if she's one of the Samlesbury Southworths, as that's tantamount to asking if she had an ancestor who stood trial for cannibalism. Even though she was acquitted, it's too awkward a topic for a first meeting. Charity herself is a shortish, curvy, blue-eyed dark brunette with a face that looks made for smiling or sarcasm alike. She's of a type that I'm familiar enough with - most parts of the world have a repertoire of Standard Types and she's of one common to most of northern England and southern Scotland - to have dated more than one. She's barefoot and wearing one of Sirius's shirts as a short dress in best not-ready-for-the-walk-of-shame-yet style, and has her hair up in a sort of bun thing that's pinned in place with a couple of the imitation-wand wooden hairpins that a lot of witches favour.

"Call me Mal, everyone does," I offer in return, "and forgive me not being more formal about things. Unlike Sirius, I'm a morning person, been up a few hours already, and I need to refill on tea. There'll be a cup going if you want one, and chorley cakes in the breadbin there if you want a taste of home with it. Plenty of other sorts of cake in there too, Sirius stocked up for the sake of his sweet tooth. Had to use extension charms to fit everything in, he'll be like the back end of a bus if he keeps it up." I'm fighting down the urge to lapse into dialect with Ms. Southworth. Adult Mal is supposed to have been raised abroad, or so runs the legend I've built around Diagon Alley over the last year and a bit. Nattering away in my native dialect would erode my cover.

"What are you doing to that teapot?" she asks, taking a seat at the kitchen table.

"Being a complete nerd, if I'm honest. Tea snobbery, techno-sorcery style. Warming the pot before I brew up, I'm aiming for an exact temperature rather than just swilling the pot out with boiling water and hoping for the best." I tap the notebook I've got next to the tea-caddy. "I keep notes, recording the effect of different variations."

She nods. "You will, of course, be publishing once you've figured out the perfect cuppa?" she says, mock-serious. She's play-acting the 'mock' part, of course. We're both deadly serious. Tea is important.

I draw myself up in theatrical affront. "Miss, I am a man of science. Of course I will publish. If nothing else, being able to make a good brew with the local water will be a breakthrough for the ages."

"You're on the muggle supply here? Down south? Yuck. That's about half of why I put up with flooing to work every morning. Can't beat the water back home in Ramsbottom."

"Been there, and while I don't think it can't be beat I will allow that it is good stuff."

"Long as you're not using conjured water, then," she says, with an exaggerated sneer at the very idea.

As well she should: the water-conjuring charm (it isn't conjured water, it's real water gathered from whatever sources are nearby) gets you the equivalent of distilled, de-ionised water, with all its attendant flatness of taste. I shake my head firmly. "No. Although there are methods for rendering it suitable to use, that's more faffing about than even I am willing to put up with."

She laughs aloud at that. "A wizard? Not faffing about? Well, I'll go to't foot of our stairs. I've seen everything now."

"Oh, I do plenty of faffing about. Just not when it comes to tea. Besides, I'm not a wizard."

"You've got a wand," she quite reasonably points out.

"Well, yes, very handy for the magic, is a wand. Glad I bought one. And since I'm doing magic I'm very definitely operating in my capacity as a magus, or mage to use the anglicised version. However, if you wanted to introduce me in company, you'd tell people I was an alchemist. It's more accurate, and I don't like the word 'wizard'" The kettle comes to the boil at this point and I get the brew going while she digests that one. I've been winding Sirius up with this for weeks, time to try it on a member of the general public.

"You don't like the word? Other than because you're really an alchemist?"

"Truly, I don't. Time was, we had a perfectly good word for people who do magic, wicc, and you stuck the masculine or feminine ending on as suited your purpose. Wicce or wicca. There was a neuter ending too, not that I can recall what it was off hand, and most people would take offence anyway. Anyway, that's where we get the modern word 'witch'. Although only for ladies nowadays, of course. Then along come the Normans with their strange and continental ideas about everything and the boys don't want to share a word with a lot of rotten girls. Might get girl-germs! Can't have that!" I wave a finger in emphasis.

Charity finds this highly amusing, and is giggling as I put the teapot and a mug in front of her. I use the business of arranging the tea service to cover a look into her eyes and a spot of legilimency that tells me she's exactly what she appears to be: Sirius's date from last night, renewing an acquaintance from when they were both at Hogwarts and being deliciously naughty by coming home with him. If she's anything more sinister, it's hidden better than I can uncover without going overt on the poor girl.

"As I was saying," I carry on, with some off-hand wand-work to select a plate of cakes and buns and float them over to the table, "they decided on the worst possible choice. Wizard."

"What's wrong with it?" Charity asks, raising my opinion of Sirius's taste in women by not sugaring her tea.

"The ending. Think about it. Drunkard. Bastard. Dotard. Coward. Dastard, although that one only survives as an adjective. Dullard. They're all insults. There was a point, somewhere in the history of the english language, when male magic-users made themselves really unpopular. Absolute stinkards, in fact."

"Then there's you, honking like a bustard," Sirius chimes in as he comes in to the kitchen, adjusting himself in the crotch of his jeans as he does so.

"Which you only heard because you were eavesdropping like a mouchard," I reply. "Tea's just brewed, Charity's already introduced herself, I was just about to ask her to explain what happened to make her taste in men so dreadful."

"Strong drink," Charity avers, raising her mug to the whole idea of drunken lowered standards.

"True," Sirius says, lifting the teapot, "if it wasn't for alcohol, I'd have to become a musician to get dates. I'm just that awful." Sirius is selling himself short. He was raised by a family that considered the ability to play at least something as part of being a well-rounded mage, so he's a dab hand at the harpsichord. Or anything with a keyboard, really, which is why he now has a whole rack of keyboards and synthesisers and enjoys re-arranging baroque standards for Humourous Chicken Noises and Comedy Flatulence effects.

"In short, a wizard," I say, "who is a considerable laggard in getting up." Which is true: it's nearly ten. Which I would have regarded as no great lie-in back in the day, but apparently the mix of James and Lily constitutes Morning People Genes.

"He," Sirius tells Charity with a firmly-pointed accusatory finger in my general direction, "has been annoying me with this for weeks. The only mercy is that it brought temporary respite from all the accursed puns."

"He brought it on himself. He started with puns on his name, of all things, and learned that old age and experience will always defeat youth and enthusiasm."

"Old age?" Charity looks puzzled for a moment, and then gives me a Look, "you mean you are an alchemist? Immortal? How old are you really?"

"Older than I look, but not actually outside a normal human lifespan yet," I say. Even counting all the life-experience I absorbed from Tom. Even if I took the lot and became a Tom-Mal hybrid, that still only adds up to one hundred and six-ish, which would be a decent age but not outrageous for a man born when and where I was. It makes me a year or so 'younger' than Dumbledore, which I intend to twit him with as opportunity allows.

"But immortal, though, yes?"

"Bit of a silly claim when I could reach this age without magical assistance," I tell her, "I think the record for muggles is a hundred and something-teen if you stick only to the verifiable ones, and I'm not that old yet. And no, not immortal. I can die, after all. I'm just good enough at what I do that age and disease aren't a factor. Although, as I understand it, making it to one's sixth century is generally more by good luck than good management."

"And if you do get that old?" Sirius is curious too.

"You've met Perenelle Flamel. You think anything can kill her?"

"Point. I've never seen her raise her voice or have a cross word for anyone. But you can just tell even the devil himself wouldn't dare get on her bad side."

Charity's eyes have gone wide. "So you have a philosopher's stone."

"Nope," I tell her, "they're a bit of a red herring, those. Used to be a test of skill, made much easier with modern methods. If you could make a Stone with medieval lab gear, you were fit to work unsupervised. Here's the thing, though: how old was Armando Dippet when he died?"

"Uh, very? He retired from Hogwarts when my dad was there, and he was three hundred and something, I forget."

"Can't say I know precisely myself," I tell her, "but he wasn't an alchemist. He was doing unconsciously what a lot of magicals do: controlling his own ageing with his magic. To put it in alchemist terms, he was controlling and reversing the entropy of his own body. And reversing and controlling entropy is a very major part of what magic does, so it's no great stretch to do it to yourself. There are a lot of ways to do it, to the point that there are several recognised classes of method. You just have to learn to do it consistently, over and over again, without mistakes. Stop doing it, or make a mistake bad enough, and you age and die like any other creature. If you want a tip, though, avoid the dark arts. Maleficium damages your mind, makes you hate yourself and your magic hate you, so you can end up shortening your lifespan. Which is why a lot of your dark sorcerors go in for horrible life-extending and death-defying magic to keep them alive when they've turned their own magic against themselves. Otherwise they'd die younger than even muggles manage."

That provokes a long silence. Pretty heavy stuff for the breakfast-table, but in all fairness she did ask.

"So," says Sirius, "these three wizards walk into a bar, right…"

-oOo-

"Well, Sirius knew your mum and dad best, Harry, perhaps he can take this one."

"Take what one?" Sirius has come through to see who was at the door. It's Harry, who has come straight here instead of home from school because he needs help with homework.

"We were doing about families and names at school and Miss Minshull said Harry was short for Henry or Harold and I didn't know which, and Dudley's getting all about mum's side from his mum because mum was Aunt Petunia's sister and we're going to share that bit but I reckoned you'd know about dad, Uncle Sirius, and I thought Mal might know how to look stuff up because Miss Minshull said there were jenny-logical researchers who looked up stuff about families -"

"Genealogical, Harry," I say, before he gets into full small-child spate, "and I get the picture. We'll see what Sirius can remember, and we'll figure out what we can look up and how to explain your magical family at school where you can't mention magic."

"And, Harry?" Sirius puts in, "You're Harry for both Henry and Harold. Harold was your mother's father, your granddad, and there was a famous Henry Potter who was your great grandfather. You're named for both of those men, who were both Harry to their friends."

AUTHOR NOTES

Mal getting a crap animagus form: Far too many fic writers assume that it's a magic that leads to guaranteed awesome, when out of the five animagi we see in the books, two are definitely slightly rubbish and hardly any use at all, one is slightly awful mitigated by usefulness, and the other two are basically mundane animals.

The muggle biochemist mentioned is Rupert Sheldrake. Who actually was a biochemist, before he turned to formulating and propagating some decidedly odd but thoroughly entertaining ideas in the field of magical theory. (No, really.)

Magical Cores are one of those fanon things that have absolutely no support in the books. I'm using them in this story as a pureblood supremacist thing that emphasises what special snowflakes wizards and witches are at the price of being reductionist about magic. (Which "magical cores" are.) Every pernicious ideology has to have its drivel pseudoscience, after all - Lysenkoism, Rassenlehre, Supply-Side Economics - and in this fic magical core theory fills that niche.

Fortean Times: real publication, look it up. It and Private Eye are obvious candidates for the real-world inspiration of the Quibbler. At the extremely minor risk of doxxing myself, I have actually been published in both. Mal, as my SI, lets me complete the set.

As for the Crumple-horned Snorkack being a magical member of the Brontotheriidae family? Completely my own invention: the horns on Brontothere snouts are often quite crumpled-looking. Bergmann's rule, insular dwarfism and applying real zoological insights to cryptozoology are all real things.

The Younger Dryas is the last period of glaciation that affected the British Isles. The marks it left can still be seen all over the landscape. Look it up if you're interested in geology.

Barchoke the goblin is a fanon character who first appears - I believe - in Robst's 'Harry Crow' (which is a fun read, as Robst's stuff tends to be when he's on his pace, consider this your fanfic recommendation for this chapter although he overdoes the Harmony in my view) and has been used by a number of other authors since.

As for Gobslice's attitude: many people assumed that as Nasty Bankers the goblins of the books were a stand-in for jews, which I found baffling. None of the nasty, grasping, duplicitous bankers I met in the years I worked in the City of London - including some appalling specimens - was jewish. (None of the bankers at all that I can recall. Plenty of jewish lawyers, mind, including some very fondly-remembered colleagues) It therefore amused me to turn things around a bit.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach:old-fashioned - founded 1896! - amusement park. Amazing place if you're a kid, and still has rides from its opening years in operation, as well as more modern ones. The Wild Mouse, dating from the 1950s, only got taken down in 2017.

Dogs on rides: yes, really. There's a photo of me as a very small boy on one of, if not the last of Hiram Maxim's Captive Flying Machine rides, (and yes, that Hiram Maxim) holding the dog's lead. The seventies were a more free-and-easy time. And 1904, when that ride was built, was even more so.

The Samlesbury Southworths were one of the families caught up in the Lancashire Witch-trials of 1612. The allegations against them were of the murder and cannibalism of a small child (animagery and various magical harrassments were also led in evidence, but weren't actually illegal at the time, no really). Their family seat, Samlesbury Hall, is both preserved as a historical attraction and a very nice venue for wedding receptions and the like. I've been there a few times. (The Southworths also have a canonized saint: one of them got gruesomely martyred for trying to convert the English back to catholicism.) Chorley, home of the eponymous cake, is about ten minutes' drive from Samlesbury.

The discussion about local water: you get potable water out of the taps wherever you go in Britain, something not even privatisation could fuck up. It does, however, taste very different from place to place. As for the tea-making, Mal is somewhat worse than I am about this, but then he has time and resources I don't. I would totally behave like that if I could.

Wizard lifespans: the Black Family Tree that JKR put out is complete bollocks on its face and contradicts stuff she put in the books, but she does have most of this family of Dark Wizards dying at quite young ages for wizards and witches. I've included an explanation for the phenomenon… enjoy!

Finally: Harry's name. Harry is the diminutive for Henry or Harold. Harrison died out entirely in Britain other than as a surname until the mid 90s (and at that I only know one, the child of my neighbours at the time). As for the fanon 'Hadrian', oh dear me no. Even on the wizarding side people would exclaim 'You named your baby after the WALL?'