mystery

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I love a good mystery!

So Draco is itchy and having trouble breathing.

Have we got a situation where alt_amycus is poisoning pigeons students? Or is it just really cold in the castle? (Others, including McG, have noted how cold this early winter is in Scotland.) Is Draco having an allergic reaction to something? (Pansy suggests that you can develop allergies as you get older; Draco says no one in his family has allergies. This Muggle wonders if in-breeding has unfortunate effects...)

Or has someone hexed Draco? (And have the house elves suddenly this term happened to forget how to make savory food?) Or is it a dry run for a student game of AK? Or is there something going on we don't yet have enough information to understand?

Does this take us back to Halloween and the mystery of the troll? (Who set it loose in the castle?) Does it connect with Harry's broom's malfunction during the first Quidditch match? Does it connect with the reported sightings of Quirrell?

...

Or is it really the obvious (a situation where alt_amycus is poisoning pigeons students)?

Oh, how wonderful is a well-crafted mystery!!

:)

Comments

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Does it connect with the reported sightings of Quirrell?

My first wild thought was that maybe a disembodied spirit was trying to grow out of the back of Draco's head, Voldemort-and-Quirrell style!

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

Now that hadn't occurred to me yet!

[wintercreek]

And has alt_amycus slipped up and poisoned Draco? Is that why he's posting Abyssus abyssum invocat? (The ever helpful internet translates that to One hell summons another. It's originally from the "Deep calls to deep" passage in the Vulgate Bible, but "Out of context, however, the phrase has come to me 'one bad thing follows another' or 'one disaster follows another.'") Amycus's way of commenting on a misstep or two?

[wintercreek]

a disembodied spirit was trying to grow out of the back of Draco's head

Holy cats! Who would it be? Someone who died in the LP's take-over? How weird would it be if James's spirit (I don't think he could be a proper ghost without the other Hogwarts ghosts knowing about it ... unless he could be a ghost and they could be "silent as the grave" about it. [I crack me up.]) was harassing Draco somehow?

[qwerty88.livejournal.com]

Perhaps turnabout for Lucius not letting him paint Narcissa? http://alt-amycus.livejournal.com/1605.html?thread=4421#t4421

[wintercreek]

Oh my goodness! What a delightfully creepy theory!

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I'm working on a theory that the food is, quite simply, *bad*.

Molly is spending much of her time preserving food. The kids are very aware of the difference in taste between real and transfigured food, which means they have experience with this. Hogwarts has always been known for well-cooked and abundant food, but this Hogwarts is feeding the kids tuna casserole, not chicken and ham pie.

Britain has to be closed off and shielded from the rest of the world - it's the only way Voldemort could stay in power. I believe it can barely feed itself, and it's not getting imports. And, as it's not using Muggle (that is, modern) technology, probably because they don't have access to modern fuels or the knowledge to repair, oh, tractors and such...well, food production is back to horse and plow, plus maybe spells for preservation.

Canned tuna lasts a long time, but those cans would be at least ten years old at this point.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting theory -- I think it has a lot of merit. And it raises a couple of interesting corrollaries:

1. Isn't tinned tuna Muggle food (Muggle fished and Muggle tinned)? Why is it at Hogwarts at all? Or is/was there a wizarding fishing industry?

2. If it's not extraordinary for wizards to eat Muggle-processed foods (at Hogwarts and throughout the Protectorate), then you are right that there must have been a huge change in technology for farming.

I agree that we have had hints in game that would support this: the Muggles are certainly laboring in the service of the Protectorate. (I just hadn't thought about their being set to farm or process food stuffs -- I'd have expected that to be a taboo purity issue.)

But we hear from Molly that she's surprised/perplexed by Xenophilius's harvesting methods: she expects him to use magic and he doesn't, so there are surely magical alternatives to horse and plow, laborer and bushel basket, etc.

And surely wizards used to be self-sufficient in many places (Rowling has it both ways at once and refuses to be pinned down), including at Hogwarts, so why should that have changed entirely? (What was the source of meat for Hogwarts? What is it now? Was it ever a Muggle source?)

Yes, there is an embargo on imports, but weren't those imports traditionally from international wizarding sources rather than from Muggle sources? (Were the Malfoys getting their spices and holiday luxuries from Muggle sources abroad?)


3. Even if wizards do not depend on Muggle-sourced foodstuffs, there are real differences between the books and this AU that would support your thesis that good food is in critical shortage: in addition to the closed borders and restrictions on importing, there may have been a significant reassignment of wizard labor from "traditional" occupations into Protectorate security. Who is guarding the camps? Probably folks who used to be porters and bus drivers and pub workers and chimney sweeps and farmers and grocers and whatever passed as unskilled labor in wizarding Britain pre-Protectorate.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I just read back over Sally Anne's first post about her new foster family. So that contains confirmation that Muggle labor (now?) farms food that wizards eat. And her post today about the jams she received in her box re-enforces your point that a lot of what wizards eat now is transfigured (unless they are well-placed to skim the best things that do come into the country as imports -- as the Malfoys are).

I'm still surprised that pure bloods are willing to eat food that Muggles have touched. Perhaps they are as detached from knowledge of food production methods as we Muggles are?

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Well, most people wouldn't let horses into their homes but have no problem eating food that horses helped provide the labor to farm. I know it's not exactly parallel, but it's similar enough that it may explain how wizards think about it.

Also, I think that people in general are pretty good at not thinking very hard about where their food came from. Since most people will happily eat things that have been sprayed with pesticides, meat from animals that have had really icky living conditions, and so on.

Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I think that people in general are pretty good at not thinking very hard about where their food came from.

True. It's certainly one of the possibilities. I never got the feeling from the books that Wizards were reliant on Muggle food production. Certainly Wizards and Muggles lived in close proximity, and at the beginning of the first book there seem to be Wizards milling about on Muggle street corners (to Vernon Dursley's disgust), so they might well shop in Muggle shops... but really? They have their own pubs and their own brands of sweets and intoxicating beverages, and they drink pumpkin juice, which I've never seen in a Muggle market, so I just don't think the magical world was relying on Muggle food sources. On the other hand, the books don't tell us everything we might like to know about Potterverse.

Still, I'm going to need more persuading from the game to understand why there's a serious crisis of food supply in Wizardom. If they could feed themselves before the Protectorate, why can't they feed themselves now -- if that is, indeed, what is signaled by the fact that Hogwarts is serving tinned tuna and other unappetizing food? (I'll readily believe that the Muggles might be suffering food shortages in the camps because magical agriculture would have been organized pre-Protectorate to feed only the small magical minority and, though magical, might be expected to fail in feeding the total population of the UK. Obviously there's been some solution to that issue in the years since the regime change or the Muggles would have starved long since.)

If pre-Protectorate Wizardom had really been dependent on Muggle factory food production, wouldn't that have led to a different structure for the new nation than we're seeing -- a system that would have kept Muggles in their cities and working at those jobs that were necessary to provide Wizards with food and anything else Muggle they might have been accustomed to using?

Let's suppose that Mama Deb's comment does hit on the situation at Hogwarts and that it hints at the situation in Wizardom. If Wizards are not capable of feeding their own population and are, thus, subsisting by eating up what's left in the National Muggle Larder (as it were), then I think we're about to see the Protectorate economy decay pretty radically. If Hogwarts is serving its students tinned foods that were processed before the regime change, that supply is bound to run out. Then what? Meatloaf transfigured from cranberries and flax? I suspect that the nutritional limits of transfigured food would become an issue pretty quickly. (I know Ron talked about transfigured food in Book Seven when he and Harry and Hermione were on the run, but I can't remember what that conversation revealed. Was it just that you couldn't transfigure food from something that wasn't food to begin with?)

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Well...

I think the books are unclear on where food comes from. I mean, certainly wizards probably do a lot of the preparation, like turning raw ingredients into pumpkin juice and butterbeer and so on, but it seems like it would be a *huge* pain to make sure that every ingredient a wizard touched was grown by wizard hands. Modern people use such a large variety of ingredients to make their food, grown from all different parts of the world. There would have to be a pretty dedicated effort to make sure there were enough magical farmers to provide all the different ingredients in every meal. In the end, I doubt any but the most blood-conscious would really notice or care, and those are probably the aristocracy who aren't going to want to work as farmers themselves. So other than paying particularly high prices for food from non-Muggle farms, there would be little they could do. I imagine a few magical farmers did quite well by selling fancy overpriced Muggle-free ingredients, but in general there would be few people rich enough or dedicated enough to pay those prices, so it would be a bit of a niche market.

At Hogwarts, we've certainly never heard of farming as a potential career path for the students. They take Herbology, but from the lessons we see, there is no particular focus on edible plants. And we've never heard of a special agriculture school for wizards, either as an alternative to Hogwarts or as a follow-up. There's no real need in the magical world to train that kind of laborer. And farming isn't a particularly high-paying or glamorous job. Probably the people most likely to become wizard farmers would be Muggleborns whose parents were farmers. And in the new regime, those Muggleborns would be sent to camps just like the Muggles.

Also, you have to remember that until Voldemort became the LP, Muggleborn students were attending Hogwarts and were not really discriminated against except by a small group of wizards. Many (probably most) wizards would have had no problem getting food with Muggle-grown ingredients, and since it would be probably cheaper than the special Wizard-Only brands, that's what they'd buy. And probably scoff a little as they did so at people who were willing to throw away their money because of their silly prejudices.

So it's totally possible that Rowling imagined that there were in fact a ton of wizarding farmers, but if she did she didn't put any evidence of them in the books. And based on the food shortages that Molly Weasley and Sally-Anne have talked about, it seems like the Alternity version of the wizarding world did rely on Muggles and Muggleborns for a lot of their food production.

Is that convincing?

[qwerty88.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Draco has been linked to Terry in some way and is getting a side effect of the pneumonia? http://alt-poppy.livejournal.com/1696.html

(As an aside, I am fascinated by how the constraints of an rpg encourages me to hypothesize instead of just being able to rush ahead to the next chapter and find out what happens.)

Rambling on, part one ;p

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

Is that convincing?

Sure, more or less. What I want, of course, is an eventual in-game explanation.

As for Rowling and her solution, I wouldn't have expected an explanation in the Hogwarts curriculum: Hogwarts students are training for a very different set of jobs. Magical agriculture sounds like a traditional profession to me with apprenticeships rather than diplomas as the means of training. Rowling always just wrote in whatever menial or laboring folk she needed as she needed them, and (I agree) she didn't explain the whole of her magical economy. However, she always seemed in interviews to have imagined Wizardom as a more populous place than her books' characters, institutions, and settings ever provided explicit evidence for. I'm pretty sure that she was prompted to say at some point that she didn't imagine that every child went to Hogwarts (or to school at all). I think she had a semi-medieval view of Wizardom, where there was a substantial sector of the community that stood outside the well-schooled elite because they lived and worked in "traditional" jobs that didn't require Hogwarts training. I haven't by any means read all of the interview archives (and none of them recently), but I suspect Rowling never fully described her view. She seems to have been agitated whenever fans tried to pin her down about "numbers" for population/student census/Death Eater membership because she'd made some early mistakes with Maths and was embarrassed about it.

About magical agriculture, it seems to me that as long as Wizards owned enough arable land (and canonically they seem to own enough for whatever purposes JKR found necessary), magical farming needn't be labor intensive at all. Seeds, after all, could be charmed to plant themselves and fruit/veg could be charmed to harvest themselves:

* Molly describes cider-making (for two households) as involving a few day's labor for herself and two girls: "Another couple of days of lessons were sacrificed for the girls so they could help me grate the apples into pulp and put it through the press (imagine what a huge job it would be to do this without magic!)." (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/3059.html)

* Molly describes potato-harvesting as a one-man task made insanely physical by Xeno, who harvests with a spade instead of a wand (like a Muggle, if you can imagine it!). (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/2620.html)

* Molly sets Xeno to collect nuts and describes the event thus: "So the girls went with Xeno yesterday afternoon to try to beat the squirrels to the bounty and came back, red-cheeked from the cold but happy, with several bushel baskets brimming over. Summoning charms make gathering nuts so much easier. Xeno, showing his usual inexplicable logic, insisted that I not use any charms to remove the chestnut burr from around each chestnut, which I think is simply ridiculous, but if shelling chestnut burrs keeps him busy and happy for several days--and out of my hair--then he is certainly welcome to the work." (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/3470.html)

Rambling on, part two

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I take a couple of things from these examples:

1. Agriculture isn't an employee-intensive operation for Wizards, nor does it require especially difficult spells (though Molly *does* receive praise from McGonagall for her domestic spell-craft, they discuss Molly's domestic magic as something women learn from their mothers (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/3593.html?nc=3))

2. Agriculture in Wizardom *does* depend on the weather just as it does for Muggles (the apple crop is better some years than others), but other aspects are routinely enhanced by magical means.

3. A family living in the countryside is largely self-sufficient. Molly does seem to have added some crafts to her repertoire as a result of the political/economic situation -- soapmaking, for instance -- but most of what she does (grow and harvest veg, nuts, apples, pears), knit, make clothes & rugs, make candles, care for the buildings on her property, etc.) seems to be stuff she was already skilled at doing and probably has been doing for years -- and her neighbors like her. (She gets six beehives when a nearby widower moves away; Xeno can be counted on to know how to do basic family farm tasks. (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/3470.html))

4. Though we don't hear how it's done, canonical Hogwarts surely was a feudal-style operation with farms supplying its food (and elves to cook it) and laborers supplying any materials needed for the building's upkeep (though that may have been largely preserved/restored by the building's own magic).

5. Suburban and urban Wizards clearly rely on the produce of rural farms to supply their food and on goods made by craftsfolk to supply other needs that Molly can provide her own family because they have the land, trees, seeds, bees, and skills to do for themselves.

The Weasley model suggests to me that before the Protectorate (and in canon), traditional magical methods easily provided for all of these needs without anything like Muggle-scale agribusiness being involved. My own guess is that the difference between books and game is more a matter of magical labor having been reassigned from traditional tasks to other things (like Muggle camp control) than a matter of Muggle products becoming unavailable.

We've gotten a rich supply of information on the economy from Molly so far; I'm hopeful that (over time) she and others will help us fill in some remaining gaps in our knowledge of the game's world. For me, the questions are:

How is Hogwarts supplied with food (and why does the food seem bad this year -- students mention it as a new thing)?

When things are in short supply (like parafin and flour (http://alt-molly.livejournal.com/3470.html)), is it because they used to be Muggle-made or is it for some other reason?

Is there a shortage of magical farm and manufacturing labor because magical people are doing other jobs instead? (In which case, some Ministry hack is going to figure out that half-bloods and Muggle-borns should be assigned to Cultural Revolution-style co-op farms. I confess that I'm still surprised by Sally Anne's report that actual Muggles are working the "estate" where her foster family lives.)

Or were some goods import items that are now restricted?

Or is there no real shortage of some of these things at all, but a surreptitious redirection of goods into other uses and away from ordinary consumers? (I recently heard a fascinating report on WWII rationing in the US where gas was rationed NOT because it was in short supply but because the government was afraid that supplies of rubber would run short and be unavailable for military vehicles, so they needed people not to need new tires and, thus, needed them to radically reduce their driving except to and from their necessary-for-the-war-effort jobs, so they created a fake gas shortage in order to achieve the needed result. They couldn't just make tires unavailable because they DID need people to be able to drive to and from work.)

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

It's not the slightest bit obvious that I'm supposed to be grading papers again this weekend.


Is it?

;p

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

(As an aside, I am fascinated by how the constraints of an rpg encourages me to hypothesize instead of just being able to rush ahead to the next chapter and find out what happens.)

I agree!

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

(As an aside, I am fascinated by how the constraints of an rpg encourages me to hypothesize instead of just being able to rush ahead to the next chapter and find out what happens.)

Yes, indeed! And. I love that with time to speculate and a fen community to do it in, our speculations elicit responses. Sometimes the responses come directly or indirectly here in our discussion threads from players posting as themselves or as alt_player to answer our questions.

I think it's almost more satisfying when the responses come from within the game. Sometimes the response is an actual answer that resolves a point we've questioned, and sometimes the response shows us that we (or some of "we" -- *waves likely hand*) were making wrong assumptions, and sometimes the response is a tease -- another twist instead of a resolution or a red herring to throw us off.

What's so cool to me about this is that there is a degree, however slight, to which the readers' confused questions and eager anticipations and enthusiastic interests influence the course of the story (or have a chance to). With a finished story, whether fic or published, readers come along after the fact. Here, the story is not only collaboratively told by the players, but the readers sometimes make an oblique contribution to the collaborative storytelling -- and that's a rush when you see it happening.

That's not to say that I expect or even want to have our every question or speculation answered -- and I often don't want to see an immediate answer, especially if it an answer would "force" or warp the storytelling into awkward exposition.

Still, it was great when we learned more about Moddy Dhou after we engaged in a round of intense speculation about what sort of rescue program the Order had set up to raise Muggleborn children outside the Ministry's Muggleborn Labor system. (I'm eager for the day when we learn more -- when we get to see some of those children -- Colin Creevey, for instance, whom we know to be a promising artist. I suspect we will someday get to see the poignant contrast between Colin and his less fortunate brother, Dennis, Harry's happy human house elf.)

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Heh! Nope, I would never have guessed. :)

Well, if most wizards produce some of their food by having their own little magical gardens, they still wouldn't have much variety, since some stuff like chocolate, flour, etc. just doesn't generally come from gardens. I mean, I've never heard of anybody with a wheat patch in their vegetable garden.

I see what you're saying about wizarding agriculture not being labor-intensive, and your examples are very persuasive, but I tend to get uncomfortable when magic makes something *that* easy, so I'd be happier imagining that certain tasks are easy, or that maybe gardening on a small scale is pretty simple, but that larger-scale farming, and maybe raising animals for meat, is a bit too complicated to do without having someone dedicated to it as a full-time job.

I like your theory about wizarding farmers being repurposed to guard the camps and fill other new jobs created by this society.

The story about the artificial gas shortage is really interesting! But why would the Ministry want an artificial food shortage? To keep people (except those high up in government) feeling dependent on the LP and/or too busy struggling to provide for themselves to be likely to rebel? If that were their strategy, historical precedent suggests it's pretty likely to backfire if they take it too far.

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I would love to see Dennis and Colin meet down the road. I doubt Dennis even knows he has a brother, though Colin probably does.

I am extremely eager to peek into the lives of the Moddy Dhou kids, but I suppose it would be a bit difficult to arrange, since they would need to be trusted with the Order Only spell if they were going to post, and that's a lot of responsibility for kids. What if they forgot to write Order Only and gave away everything?

Maybe they could get special journals enchanted to automatically apply the Order Only spell every time, so that they wouldn't have the risk. Even still, I think there's probably a lot of information being exchanged in Order Only that Alice wouldn't want the kids exposed to, like Arthur's story about that 14-year-old Muggleborn girl who was sexually assaulted (http://alt-arthur.livejournal.com/1635.html).

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I tend to get uncomfortable when magic makes something *that* easy, so I'd be happier imagining that certain tasks are easy, or that maybe gardening on a small scale is pretty simple, but that larger-scale farming, and maybe raising animals for meat, is a bit too complicated to do without having someone dedicated to it as a full-time job.

Absolutely. My point is just that there should have been wizard farmers, seamstresses, thatchers, butchers, millers, etc. enough to feed wizards before the Protectorate without Wizardom buying tinned tuna from the Muggle shops or pre-packaged curries from Marks and Spenser -- not that they couldn't have done if they'd lived close enough to shop Muggle and had a taste for the stuff. (But I think such a taste would likely have been viewed as an eccentricity -- and, at an extreme, stuff with Muggle chemical additives might have been viewed with disdain or feared as poison -- imagine Draco Malfoy being asked to drink a Coca Cola or being offered a Starburst. I know exactly which icon he'd use whilst refusing to touch either thing and demanding that you destroy that putrid stuff immediately!)


The story about the artificial gas shortage is really interesting! But why would the Ministry want an artificial food shortage? To keep people (except those high up in government) feeling dependent on the LP and/or too busy struggling to provide for themselves to be likely to rebel? If that were their strategy, historical precedent suggests it's pretty likely to backfire if they take it too far.

I hope so. I have high hopes that a number of things will backfire on the Protectorate eventually. Even if there are no false shortages, I think that people will tire of living with the economic compromises that they are coping with. But a scandal or two (or an exposure of official misinformation) wouldn't hurt if the game is going to move the populace from grumbling to more active resistance.

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

Well, if most wizards produce some of their food by having their own little magical gardens, they still wouldn't have much variety, since some stuff like chocolate, flour, etc. just doesn't generally come from gardens.

You're right, and I get the feeling from Molly's posts that they used to buy more things than are now available or affordable. She mentions that parafin and wax candles are harder to come by, and that's why she's so glad to have her neighbors' bee hives now but she's going to take Xeno's suggestion and make tallow candles (which his very poor family had to rely on when he was young).

McGonagall, too, seems to be making do in areas where she used to be able to purchase (or procure in some other way) replacements or get things fixed. Was it socks or gloves she that were so worn now that even darning spells weren't much help any longer? I'd have thought the laundry elves would have taken care of that sort of thing, but ...


... are we seeing a decline in elf magic? Is that behind the bad food? Now wouldn't that be an interesting development!

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

It can't just be closed to wizarding imports. It has to be closed to the Muggle world, too. Otherwise, I would not believe that the rest of Europe would permit the treatment of the Muggles and Muggleborns. (Remember, and this isn't pleasant, but it's true - First World nations, and Britain is certainly one, protect each other.)

They can't be getting any imports at all, or word would eventually leak out. Also, then they could smuggle people to the rest of the world.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Muggles are animals. Animals don't spread impurity.

And someone has to do the wholesale farming.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I think I wasn't clear. I'm suggesting that Wizards never imported Muggle stuff. So, yes, there would be an embargo on ALL imports, but only magical imports would make any appreciable difference to Wizard families trying to get the stuff they used to be able to buy.