The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

One Hundred Muggles and Muggle-Borns

One Hundred Muggles and Muggle-Borns

Nobody looked twice at the nice dressed man in the fine pressed suit. He walked through the center of London, looking about with a quietly disapproving stare, his lips puckered in disdain. He moved through the crowds smoothly, unnoticed, calculating.

Ahead on the sidewalk, a little boy tugged at his mother's arm, pointing up into a shop window, where a great many toys were displayed - toys with moving parts and colorful paint. "Look mother," the boy said, "Look!" And so she did, pausing to let the boy stare at the display, a smile on her face as she gently ran her fingers over the little boy's head lovingly.

The man scowled as he passed by, meeting the boy's eyes. The boy shrank away, hiding behind his mother, clutching her skirts, quieting. She turned to look what had frightened him, but the man had already moved on without pausing and was never to be suspected. But the little boy would have nightmares that night about a man with red eyes and a sneering face...

Having arrived at his destination - a red phone box - the man lifted the telephone receiver and quickly dialed a number. Nobody noticed as they walked by, but the man slowly lowered into the ground, descending beneath the streets of London in the phone box.

He emerged a moment later in the entry-way of the Ministry of Magic. The wide golden hall hummed with activity - floos that lined the walls popped and hissed as employees and visitors came and went through the grates with bright green flashes of light. Others emerged from halls that led off to the peculiar bathroom entrances that were sometimes used for employees who could not afford a direct floo line. The main entrance hall was illuminated by a great big chandelier that hung overhead, looming and magnificent, with hundreds of tear-drop shaped lights that twinkled and sparked.

"Please present your wand for inspection and registration," murmured a bored-sounding ministry official, sitting beside a gate that led into the bank of elevators. He said the words to each person that passed him. They would pause, laying their wands on a small device that looked like a scale, and a print out would pop out of it and he would rip it off and hand it over to them, then wave for the next person, repeating the process. "Thank you.... Please present your wand for inspection and registration... Thank you..."

The nice dressed man walked boldly toward this official, his posture nearly perfect, and his face as cold as it had been outdoors. His stride oozed with confidence.

"Please present your wand for inspection and registration," the official said as the man approached him.

"I don't think that will be necessary, really, do you?" the man asked.

A funny look came over the official's face and he stammered, "Not necessary, no sir... Thank you.." he waved the man on and on he went, then turned to the next person, "Registration... the... your wand... thank you..." he murmured incoherently.

"Are you quite alright there, Walt?" a witch asked.

But Walt only nodded numbly and murmured some hosh-posh about pickled herring.

Upstairs, the Minister for Magic was preparing her speech when she was interrupted by a hard rapping knock on the door. She ignored it at first, desiring to finish the sentence she was on, at least, but the knock came again and a blot of ink smeared across the page and she threw down her quill in annoyed frustration. She had told her staff to leave her be while she constructed the right words to say to address the current situation. People were positively bats over the latest attacks from the so-called Dark Lord and his followers and she, as Minister for Magic, needed to address them and calm them all down until the bloody aurors could clean up the mess. It took a great amount of concentration to write a speech telling the world there was nothing to fear when she herself hadn't slept in a week in fear of the attacks.