FicWad

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters, ideas, and situations created by JK Rowling and owned by her and her publishers. I own the original elements & characters. No money is being made by me, and no trademark or copyright infringement is intended.

Chapter II
Friday, July 5, 1968

"Rough night?" Marcus Williams asked Becky Weiss when she sat down for a late breakfast that seemed to consist of mostly coffee.

"Very. That poor little girl." Becky shook her head.

"Heck of a holiday yesterday, huh?"

"Holiday? Oh, that's right, you're a dualist." These were wizards who maintained they were citizens of both the Confederation and either the United States or Canada.

"I am. Don't sound like one of the OBs."

Becky glanced around, nervously.

"Oh, come on! There's no need to be paranoid!"

"This is still your first year here."

"I was a student for seven years. I never saw some big OB conspiracy running things."

"Remember, one third of all the teaching faculty have to Old Believers, active ones at that, and in actuality nearly half are. Some are even druids of some type!"

"Well, they're going to have to live with what one of their own did to that girl."

"We can't be certain it was an OB!" Becky nearly hissed.

"We'll see. If they come up with a name and can prove it, it won't be an OB, but I doubt if they'll come up with a name. Why? Because there aren't many who could do those spells that well. Anyone in North America who can do those spells and who isn't an OB can be traced in about five days. If it's an OB, especially one of the Hiddens, that girl's father will NEVER be found." The Hidden Old Believers were the strictest sect. Few sent their children to the Ysgol, unless they were from one of the enclaves in Maine or Quebec, and even 99% of them went to the secret Old Believer school in the Yukon or one of the other two small Old Believer schools in preference to going to a school with 'Outsiders'. "The Old Believers will probably figure out who did it, but won't do anything to him."

"There you are partially wrong," the Headmaster said, surprising them since they hadn't heard him approach. "If the father was a Hidden, he would have needed some very sound reasons to be in Muggle territory, let alone consorting with a Squib. If this was a Hidden, he will likely be punished, even if we never hear of how, let alone who. No, I doubt if this was a Hidden. Could the father be a member of one of the other sects, even the Strict ones? That I can easily believe, because you were correct. Unless the father holds a position in some of the secret parts of the Confederation, he is most likely an Old Believer of some sort. And I doubt if he would be publically identified, or privately punished."

"And, of course, many of those highly placed people are Old Believers," Marcus pointed out.

FitzWilliam smiled. "So we are." The Headmaster changed the subject. "Would you be willing to spend two hours a day with Miss Spellman for a while?"

"I guess, since there are so few of us, I had better."

"Well, she is one of our students now. The poor girl is very confused and still a bit scared, but she certainly knows how to handle a wand like a Second year. If there is no long-term damage to her emotionally, I believe she will be an excellent addition to our student population."

"Is that likely?"

"We have no data," Becky said. "If we give her support, she might come out of this without too much damage."

"I'll take my turn in the rotation," Marcus said.



A few minutes before 3:00, Marcus made his way to the Infirmary. "Where's our new student?" he asked Becky.

"In the bathroom. She's been there quite a while, actually."

"Is something wrong?" He received a glare for that. "You know what I mean!"

Becky relented. "She just didn't know what she looked like. She's getting to know herself and her body."

Suddenly the girl was with them. She was rather short to be a starting student and very thin, although not quite unhealthily, and very light, as her arms and legs were very long in comparison to her body. Her hair, normally more a bright red than blonde, was heavily streaked gold and white from the sun and cut into a short pageboy. She was also totally naked.

Marcus blushed, but the girl was unconcerned. "Hello," the girl said politely. "I'm told I'm Tabitha Spellman." She held out her hand.

Marcus, very red in the face, shook her hand. "I'm Marcus Williams, one of the Charms teachers," he managed to say. 'Thank God she's ten or eleven instead of sixteen!'

"Tabitha, dear," Becky said kindly, "remember what I told you about modesty?"

Tabitha's face scrunched in thought. "I do, but it still doesn't make sense. It's very warm in here, and the floor and cross-breeze feel nice and cool."

"But. . . ."

"Anyway, I was wondering if you could explain exactly what else this does," she said, putting one foot on a chair to open her legs.

"I'll be back in half an hour," Marcus said, and fled the room.



35 minutes later, Marcus cautiously stuck his hear through the Infirmary door. "It's safe," Becky said with a laugh. "Come on in."

"What was that all about, anyway?"

"Obviously, her modesty was destroyed in the overlays. It could have been worse; it could have been something as simple as chewing, or her toilet training or almost anything."

"I guess. That was a bit unnerving."

"Never seen a girl naked?"

"Women, yes; little girls, no." He grinned. "She talks like a twenty year-old. I'm glad she's not built like one!"

"I should take you to a Muggle nudist camp I know of," Becky teased.

Marcus blushed again. "I didn't think you mixed much with Muggles."

"Our clan land is nearby. They're about the only Muggles I know."

"Hello, Mister Williams."

Marcus mentally steeled himself and greeted the girl. This time she was at least wearing a thin sun dress. Her feet were still bare.

"Yes," she said seeing where he was looking, "the floor still feels nice." She looked around the room. "The room IS still warm and very bright, isn't it?" Sun was pouring in from a large set of windows. Tabitha squinted, and plucked the Sorting Hat up and plopped it on her head so she wouldn't have to squint.

"Oh! My, this is interesting!"

"Marcus, go get the Headmaster."

"No need," the Hat said. "Yes, my dear, your mind has cleared to a great degree. You're still confused and a bit frightened, but your true personality is still here after all."

"You mean. . . ."

"Yes, dear child. If someone who knew you before met you, they would not just recognize your face, but your personality. The inner you, if you will."

"Thanks," the little girl said sincerely.

"You're very welcome, my dear. Here, this is about the only real personal memory I've been able to find."

The girl smiled.

"What is it, Tabitha?" Becky asked.

"It's a teddy bear. I don't remember its name, but it's warm and friendly and as big as me, as big as I was then, anyway."

"Yes. Now, you are brave and have both a brilliant mind and encyclopedic knowledge that a senior wizard would envy, but are a bit too sly to be happy with the White Dragons. Yet I don't think you have quite the right sort of bravery yet to be a Blue. All in all, yes, a Green Dragon would suit you best."


Sunday, July 7, 1968

"Come on, kid, we're the only two people in the Green Tower." The girl's body language changed. "What's wrong with that?"

"Do you like being alone?"

Tudor Myrddin stopped and looked down at the little girl. At seventeen and over six foot three, he was almost at his full adult height, and already weighed 225 muscular pounds. He was a popular, powerful, brilliant student, a descendant of Merlin himself and a member of the third-largest and second-most liberal of the Old Believer sects. He was a very self-satisfied and secure young man, almost to the point of arrogance. He was spending the summer taking a crash correspondence course in Government -- his family expected great things from him, and he was determined to exceed those expectations.

And now he thought of this tiny, adult-talking little girl and all she'd been through. She still didn't know who she was and would never recover who she had been. Yet somehow, she kept going.

He knelt and hugged the little girl. "You're not alone. Never think that," he said softly. "Now, let me explain the Tower."

Several years before, the physical structure of the original Green Dragon Tower became unstable. While it could have been secured magically, the Governors decided to stabilize it by removing the upper half of the Tower. The remaining portion was converted into office space. A new tower was built for the Greens.

The new Green Tower complex was built along Muggle lines. Muggles could enter the ten storey block (eight floors of student rooms) and never know they weren't in a Muggle building. The students could reach the common floor and the eight residential floors via two stairwells or two elevators. The lighting looked like standard fluorescent overhead panels. The central core had showers and bathrooms. Yet it was all powered by magic. A magical construction company had built it at cost, to show how magical and Muggle construction could blend. While the wards prevented radio or television reception or the use of most electronic equipment, in buildings with lesser wards than the school, the electricity would blend perfectly with the magic.

The basement led off into the old dungeons, and had some of the magical devices needed to power the building and small meeting rooms for the students. The ground floor had the Head of House's apartment and office, the next had two common rooms large enough for the entire House. The upper floors (numbered 1 through 8) alternated between girls and boys floors. First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh years always stayed together. Third, Fourth, and Sixth years were mixed across the floors. Each House had approximately 140 students, although there was always room for more. Each floor had four internal study rooms and ten external rooms which could be for double or single occupancy, while the corners had two bedrooms and a study each, the bedrooms always doubles. There was also a floor prefect with a private room and bath across from the elevators. Each floor could therefore hold 37 students, but usually had between 18 to 24. The Ysgol hosted a number of conferences over the year, and many of the attendees were housed in the Houses, especially the Green Tower, which had the most spare room.

"Normally boys can't go on girls' floors and vice versa," Tudor went on as they entered the elevator. He pushed '5'. "If you try and get off on the wrong floor or go through a stairwell door someone else opened for you, it feels like you've hit a soft wall that you can't push through. Prefects are the exception, and I'm the head prefect next year, for the entire student body."

They got off the elevator. "Take your wand out, and when I tell you to, touch it to your door and then state your full name." Tudor touched the handle with his wand. "Prefect Tudor Albus Myrddin authorizes the sole occupant Tabitha Stephanie Spellman." He nodded to Tabitha.

She touched her wand to the door. "Tabitha Stephanie Spellman."

In the center of the door, just above a brass plate, was a small brass dragon door knocker. It opened its green eyes and asked, "What name shall I use?"

"Pardon?"

"What variation of your name would you like on you door plate, and how would you like it to look."

Tabitha shrugged. "Tabitha S. Spellman, plain lettering."

"That's probably best," Tudor agreed. "Some of the boys get silly, and some of the girls get rather . . . cute and whimsical."

Tabitha watched as Tabitha S. Spellman -- First Year appeared on the name plate.

"The door will now respond to your voice -- say 'lock' or 'unlock'."

"Unlock." The door clicked, and Tabitha opened the door. It was a small room, perhaps eighteen feet deep by twelve feet wide, although three feet on either side of the door was taken up as closet space. There was a cot, a dresser, and a deck and desk chair, which Tabitha later learned was standard furniture in every room, as was the wicker basket where she was to put her laundry. There was also an over-stuffed chair and two night stands from her trunk, with a wizarding wireless on one of the stands and a magical panel lamp on the other. One trunk was in one of the closets while the other was at the foot of the bed (the trunk with the money was in the Headmaster's treasury). Her clothes and robes were already hung in the closets or otherwise put away.

"House elves?"

"Mostly, plus some free elves."

Tabitha's eyes went wide. "Telephones?"

"Just installed two summers ago, as an experiment. They only work in the Tower. You just dial the room number. The prefects are all room twenty-four. So just dial eight twenty-four, and it's me."

"Thank you," she said, sounding a bit forlorn.

Tudor looked at the little girl. He had never been alone, let alone lonely, in his life. He had a large extended family and had many friends in all the Houses. He had also had a lot of work to do. He smiled and held out his hand. "Shall I show you around the school?"

Tabitha smiled and took his hand. "Thank you."



The three nameless intelligence agents had been joined by three more agents and an expert in the Headmaster's Office, along with Hilda Swank, the new head of the Green dragons, who had been recalled from her vacation. "Ffowc?" the Headmaster asked.

Ffowc Pwy, head of the best family of wand-wrights in the Americas, sighed. "I've never seen anything like it. The wand is an old Pwy wand, cherry and griffin hair, made around 1720. It was sold to a Muggle-born wizard in 1723. He was killed in the battle of Diahoga in 1777." This had been the great confrontation between the wizards of European descent based in the 13 American colonies and the Native shamans. The Old Believers, who were mostly separate from both groups at the time, had then stepped in and made peace between the two factions, laying the start of the North American Magical Confederation. The Colonials were then admitted to the Ysgol, while the Natives could attend either the Ysgol itself if they wanted or a new associated school called the Eagle Camp, which taught Native shamanic magic and offered optional instruction at the Ysgol. "The wand was lost. It matches the girl as perfectly as any I could have matched her with."

"Any ideas of where it might have been these last hundred and ninety years?" Swank asked, "Or is it self-evident?"

The intelligence men, all from Old Believer or Old Colonial families, looked abashed.

"Many of the old clans have collections of wands," the Headmaster admitted.

"So that family could identify the wand?"

"A few of the senior members might be able to, but almost certainly won't," the Headmaster said.

"So, we run into the stone wall of the OB's and the Old Colonial families, right?" Swank stated in a disgusted voice, knowing she was likely the only non-OB non-Colonial in the room. "Which means you will go through the motions for a while, but in reality, we have an abandoned and abused little girl to raise by ourselves. Right?"

The men, looked ashamed but said nothing. "Fine," Swank said in a resigned voice, standing, "good day to you all." She slammed the door on her way out.

"I really hate it when she's right," FitzWilliam said.

"She is partially right, though," the senior Intelligence man said. "The question now is, do we publicize all this? It may cause the father tremendous problems, but I doubt if we would be told about it. So it really wouldn't give the girl her father."

"And we can't reverse the memory replacements," a young specialist stated. "That would just damage her mind further. She seems like an intelligent girl, and if the school gives her enough emotional support she has a good chance of making it."

"Would publicity hurt or help her?" a third man mused. "She needs sympathy, but not hoards of curious people. They'll be coming out of the woodwork, claiming her as somebody's child."

"Their worst enemies', no doubt," the senior man said.

"We have a few weeks to figure this out. I've ready told Myrddin the story and to keep quiet for now. . . ."

"Myrddin? Myrddin who?" the senior man demanded, now a bit worried.

"Tudor Myrddin, and yes, THAT Myrddin family. He's the only Green dragon here this summer, and he'll be the House and Head Prefect next year."

"A Myrddin. . . ."

"Exactly. And Tudor is perhaps the most capable Myrddin I've seen in years." The most prestigious of all the Old Believer clans, heirs of Merlin, wealthy -- if Tudor Myrddin extended his protection around the girl, there would be few students in the school, outside some of the European and Old Colonial Pure-Bloods in the Reds, who would bother her on general principles.

"We will of course run down any leads we come up with, but right now, we don't have anything other than a girl of between ten and eleven, possibly born on June twenty-first of 1957 or 58, and we have a description. The father is most likely an OB, and the mother a Squib daughter of an OB family, but those are merely the likelihood, not even probabilities. Unless the mother was a fairly marginal Squib, we wouldn't have any real record of her."

The youngest of the Intelligence men looked confused, but wisely didn't say anything. His senior decided to enlighten him, as he was from a very unimportant recently-converted Open Believer family that lived in one of the magical towns. The young man was the first to move into the Deeper Sects. "Every fully-magical child born in North America is recorded in at least one of the three Books of Record. A child with powers that turned out to be not quite strong enough to train could be recorded when she was born. If not, then we wouldn't have records, and in a large enough clan or isolated enough family, no outsider would know of a Squib."

"And they do happen in every family," another acknowledged. "What?" I'm not saying this girl's mother was in my family. I do have two Squib first cousins and some more distant ones, all male. Most leave to go into the Muggle world, rather than staying unmarried in ours."

"That's true, and it's also true that most Squibs, especially, well, the furthest away from magical, are males," the Headmaster stated. "There were probably only at most sixty female Squibs of the ages capable of bearing this child in North America, if only we could trace them."

"We can, and will, try to trace them," the Senior man said. "With the resources we have, however, if we don't trace the parents by early September, we might not be able to do so for years."

The Headmaster sighed. "I can understand that."

"There are a lot of missing Muggle children out there, any one of which could be this girl, assuming the Muggles even know she's missing. We'll look in the most obvious place for her birth and her last ten years." Seeing the confused face on two of his subordinates, the Senior man explained. "There are now four books that cover the Confederation, the newest is one that covers Hawaii and some of the surrounding Pacific, and it only came into being in 1959 -- it took decades of negotiations with the Pacific Island Shamans to get permission to create one, since it records their births as well as ours, and they didn't want us knowing their information."

"What did we do?"

The man shrugged. "We let them be in charge of it. Hawaii would be the perfect place for this child to have been born, although there is a fair chance she was moved afterwards. We have the resources to do a good search in Hawaii, then if we have to continue it, we'll proceed slower into southern California and Florida." He stood, and the other Intelligence people stood with him. "We'll let you know if we find out anything."

After they left, the Headmaster muttered, "Assuming he's not the father, he might just find out who Tabitha is."