another puzzle

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

Perhaps one of you pieced this together immediately. I haven't.

In the comments on alt_mcgonagall's 17 September Order Only post, Molly Weasley asks McGonagall if Lucius Malfoy asked to see "the book" during his visit to the castle. McGonagall responds: "As for the book - no, he did not. I believe we've duped him - at least this year."


Thoughts?




Aside: the question has been raised (on the previous thread) whether to start threads for each separate topic or whether this community risks developing too many simultaneous conversations. My vote is for making new posts for each separate topic (and for fresh rounds of speculation on old topics after they've lain dormant for a while). I find this helps me navigate the community if I want to find what someone said on a particular issue. For what it's worth (and in anticipation of the day when it becomes an issue for us), I also think it's helpful to keep threads from collapsing to outline by starting a new post to continue the ongoing conversation.

Comments

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

If there are Muggleborn children who have slipped the Ministry's attempt to block them from being educated (Hermione and boot being examples of the Ministry's successes), then it should be interesting to consider who these fraudulent students might be.

We haven't yet met Justin Finch-Fletchley, but he seems to have a journal (alt_justin and may turn up with a surname other than Finch-Fletchley when he does appear.) Are there other canonical Muggleborn/mixed parentage children we could name?


Some other very interesting considerations arise:

1. Fostered Muggleborn/mixed blood children would represent fascinating doubles to Harry Marvolo.
2. Such children might include kids who are not canonically Muggleborn or Mixed Blood at all; for instance, might Arthur and Molly not have been logical candidates to have fostered such a child (they were already on their way to a big family and seem to have wanted to have lots of children). So might Ginny be in this category? (Of course, the really delicious one would be Percy, but I think he's too old to have been secretly tucked into even the Weasley clan after 1981.)

[borgin.livejournal.com]

Dean Thomas? Since he's technically a half-blood, I'm curious to see where he ends up in this world. But I don't think he's at Hogwarts (or, at least, in Gryffindor) as the first-year Gryffindor boys have been named as Ron, Seamus, and Neville.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

Right. And he doesn't seem to have a journal, though that doesn't mean they can't include him without casting him.

[alt_moderator]

Just because a character doesn't have a journal doesn't mean that they won't be appearing. Just because a character has a journal doesn't mean they'll be appearing anytime soon.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

The first of those is a tantalizing promise! (More characters to come!) As regards the second, I'm happily awaiting them.

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

"So might Ginny be in this category?"

Ooh, I love it! There is the possibility that in this AU the Weasleys didn't have another child, and instead fostered one. Although, since Ginny's only one year younger than Harry, and he was already a year old when we went AU, it would have to be a pretty tight squeeze to alter the events leading to Ginny's birth. Like, Molly was probably already pregnant with her by the time the Potters were killed, and would have had to miscarry due to stress or something. Also, Voldemort would have had to take power really soon after the death of the Potters, in order for a Muggleborn baby to even need rescuing within the time period that it could have been passed off as connected to Molly's pregnancy.

So, maybe not all that plausible. But it's an awesome thought.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

One clear possibility for a fostering system is that it was a matter of replacing infants who were still-born or died very soon after birth: that would provide the best cover of all for a fraudulent addition to a family. It would count on other witches and wizards having known of the pregnancy and would allow for a midwife or St Mungo's birth -- all solid evidence of the existence of a child within a family. It would also help account for the scarcity of spaces, though I'd think it would have made them VERY scarce, indeed. (So there must have been some other cover stories. Non-identical twins, perhaps? Or a few families that lived in remote enough locations to have had no neighbours? Or faked pregnancies?)

I'm not trying to cast a dark shadow on Ginny, but if she had been still-born, that might have provided the first opportunity and sparked the program. (You turned up the tidbit that Frank and Alice Longbottom approached the first family just eight years ago, so there would have been some time after Ginny's birth.)

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

It does seem like faking pregnancy would be pretty easy for magical people. I'm sure you could do some convincing spells to give the appearance of various stages of pregnancy, and a married couple becoming pregnant is certainly not unusual enough for people to be checking your cover story too closely. And if even one St. Mungo's employee were in on the operation, the "pregnant" witch would be able to go into a room with him/her, make some baby-delivering type sounds, emerge with a baby looking tired and happy, and you would have a very tight cover story.

The scarcity of spaces in the program probably mostly has to do with the fact that there aren't that many wizarding families who can be trusted to be let in on the secret. I can imagine that it is very dangerous every time a new family is approached. Maybe Frank and Alice claim to be working alone (even disguised with polyjuice, perhaps) so that if they are ratted out, only they take the fall and the network can continue. Of course, this is why Neville hasn't heard from his parents for a long time: they are in the most constant danger of anyone, in this operation, and need to make sure that they are caught, their actions are not connected to their son.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I'm just thinking through this -- maybe over-thinking -- but I wonder if the program would really be just for infants? On the one hand, we have the magical book which registers magical people at birth. On the other hand, canon suggests that magic doesn't manifest itself until later in childhood. I think Hermione was nine, though I think she also said that that was a little bit late.

As you've said, it would be hard enough to persuade Muggle parents to give up their children even if they knew for sure that they were magical; how much harder would it be if they have no actual visible evidence about the child. I imagine some parents only buy in to the program when the child starts manifesting signs, say at six or seven or eight. At which point it's a race against time, to do something before the authorities notice and take action.

So I wonder if a program for older children exists, and how it might work, or even if it could work.

I realize I'm being really speculative, on a thread that, by contrast, has turned up some very interesting "hard" arguments. I think it might be worth doing that anyway, just to become more attuned and to watch out closely for a range of possible clues that might turn up in the game, as evidence for or against any of this.

How would a swap of older children work? Would the only openings involve a death in a wizarding family, or could there be a swap of Squib for Muggleborn, seeing that Squibs aren't going to be treated that well, either? That kind of swap would make things even more brutal for the wizarding family that was involved. I wonder if that might be why the death of the Swithins would be so remarkably hard on Alice Longbottom -- more than just the failure of an eight-year-old recruitment program.

And how would you hide the swap, in the case of an older child? Speculating wildly, a "replacement" older child might be, say, pulled out of school and homeschooled, like Ginny, or sent to a neighboring village, like Luna, to reduce the chance that the Ministry would notice.

Again, I'm theorizing way ouside the currently available evidence, but I'm just sort of generating hypotheses with the idea that as bits and pieces emerge, certain kinds of evidence might be worth watching out for.

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

"could there be a swap of Squib for Muggleborn"

Oh man, if I were in the Order, this would be the NUMBER ONE thing I'd want to make happen. For a squib, would it be better to be raised as a normal Muggle child than go to a squib camp? At least they would get to stay with the same set of parents for their entire childhoods. For a Muggleborn, obviously it would be a million times better to be raised as a pureblood wizard. Plus, this would eventually create a lot more citizens that were sympathetic to the Order and were in high-level positions. That is, of course, unless by the time they were old enough to be trusted with the secret of their parentage, they were so indoctrinated that it just made them disgusted and angry.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Longstrider, up above (http://community.livejournal.com/alt_fen/3354.html?thread=31514#t31514), raises a wonderful theory that Muggleborn children are taken and replaced by changelings, perhaps in good old faerie fashion. Combine that with the Squib-swap theory and we might have something really interesting . . . Maybe we have a complicated swap program, part voluntary and part involuntary.