Week Four - Task 11. - “Fabricated Fiction”

[Katherine Laurier]

This whole time, it has just been a fabrication–a community built out of necessity and fear. From the moment the village was founded and the community came together, to the moment they left and replaced the area with a forest, they were all just magical folk with the desire for safety that they went to the last resort: living amongst Muggles.

The village was established around a decade ago, and it seems that it was never meant to stay. Why they had to flee and why they chose this area to form a community, as well as how their systems worked in balancing magic and Muggle, you don’t know, but you are sure that everything was caused by magic. When the time came to leave, possibly back to their home, they erased all traces of their existence. Why they did it so abruptly without covering it up well despite having the magical ability to do so, that is another thing you don’t know, but perhaps they cared more about being able to go back home (or anywhere else) than covering it up for Muggles.

Task:
In at least 150 words, write about one of the following: 1) A backstory about why they stayed in the village in the first place and how they came to that decision, 2) Their life in the Muggle world pretending to be Muggles and away from their families, 3) The events leading up to their decision to leave the village and why they decided on a forest. Feel free to write this in any form, such as a letter from one of the villagers, essay, a story, a dialogue, and so on. Be creative and be as silly or as serious as you would like!

This task is worth 15 beans/sapphires. You can earn an additional 10 bonus beans for completing all Week Four tasks by Friday, October 31st, at 11:59 PM (HOL time).

[River Fenwick]

It had been quite a long time since she had migrated to this village, staying much longer than she, or anyone else in the village, ever intended to. It was a difficult feat to remain amongst the Muggles for so long, and she had almost forgotten her magical roots due to living there so long and maintaining the secret of magic around such non-magical beings. She had lost part of herself and spoke to the other witches and wizards in the community about it, finding that many of them shared that sediment. There was an increasing tension in the air from being tired of suppressing their natural magical abilities, many growing restless since she had brought the issue to light in the village. It soon became apparent that they had to change something, even if it was simply the village's location. So, one day, they all decided to leave and find somewhere else, perhaps somewhere with fewer Muggles so they could use some magic again, and placed a forest where they had once settled to give back to the area that so generously sheltered them for so long.

[Galena May]

After a lot of wandering, I found a letter. It was very difficult to open the envelope at all, until I realised that it was stuck with an Adhesive charm. "Finite!" and the envelope opened, and I could almost imagine the rustle of its opening as if a mysterious case was being "cracked" open literally. Inside was a parchment folded into four. I opened it and looked at the slanting purple writing. It promised to be a long fictional tale:

Dearest Martha!
It was time you knew the truth about who I was and who some of our neighbours were. It will take a little time to explain why we left the forest behind instead of something else, let it suffice to say that we wanted the Muggles to have more of nature and a neighborhood protected from the natural effects of deforestation. But I can explain in this letter why we settled there beside you at all.
Oh! You don't know what is a Muggle, right? Never mind.
Let me come straight to the point about ourselves, all of us that left the neighborhood and disappeared overnight without so much as a goodbye! We are sorry for our conduct. The truth is that we are what you wouldn't believe until you saw for yourself. We are magical folk, witches and wizards. But we meant you no harm. Just like you, we are human beings struggling to live and make a living and to let live, except that we have in our genes something that we call magic. It helps us manipulate a few things and in some cases even emotions and feelings. Just like any of you, we would usually use these abilities only for survival, followed by helping others. But, of course, just like you, we have the malicious ones of our kind, the villains, who are as much a threat to us, as they are to you. The most common and most feared of these villains in our kind, we call dark wizards. They use magic for harmful purposes and with malicious intent. It was them that we were escaping when we settled beside you as good old neighbors, having erased your memory of the wasteland that existed in our place and that we good-humoredly cleared up for our own sake. To erase your memories of the wasteland was a gargantuan task, which is why we had to go around visiting all of you in your homes to introduce ourselves (and perform what we call the Memory Charm or Obliviate). As we left, instead of leaving behind wasteland or nothing, we decided to leave behind a forest that you can benefit from as a good turn in return for all your hospitality and welcoming nature during the short time that we stayed. We feel very much obliged and thankful to you.
It is only imperative that we give you some context about the dark wizards. These people were using their magic to terrorize all those who opposed them and a few of our communities in particular bore the major brunt. We therefore fled our original homes and didn't know where to go. Many of our number went into hiding and camped here and there. Some of us decided to build temporary homes in the place where you now see a forest. It was hard to hide our magic and our natural instincts from you, but we succeeded. Occassionally, we cast a Cheering Charm or two, a Reparo, or an Episkey on some of you when you least noticed. But we all had good intentions at heart. Our government doesn't allow for us to show off our magic to you, so we had to keep it secret, but at present we aren't in trouble from our government because our world has been in a state of chaos and no one noticed the little magic we performed in your area, as long as we kept our children safe. The reason why we chose your neighborhood was that we were least likely to be hunted down in an area where our kind had never been. Besides, we could count on your help and your trust in us so that we could stay on for as long as we wanted. You have been the most hospitable hosts and we would forever hold you dear to our memory and our hearts. The situation has cleared up in our world, and our Aurors have successfully captured the most formidable dark wizards, and our hearts long for our original residences. We will miss you. We etched a few runes on the trees in the forest and they hold magical significance for the best for your community in appreciation of your friendship. We wish you health, abundance, and joy. We thought it for the best to leave no connection or no message about our whereabouts with you, for the sake of keeping you safe in the future from the vices of our world and also to ensure that we are no longer breaking the laws we are bound by.
Please forgive my child for dropping her plaything in the forest just before leaving. If you found it, please throw it away.

P.S. Aurors are those of our kind, that your kind would call "commandos" or perhaps elite "coppers" of the special force.

Yours lovingly,
Your used-to-be neighbor,
Matilda.

So then, that was it, the mystery, that left all of us puzzled for a month.

[Luna Ravenlong]

It feels very strange to be living in this muggle village…though I think I’m taking it better than some others due to having a set of muggle grandparents. It is nice to have some of the muggle inventions I used to see when I used to visit them-the internet and televisions-but it has also made me realise how reliant we are on magic. I think everyone is finding it a bit of a shock to realise how resourceful muggles actually are.

I know some of the other witches and wizards are finding things incredibly difficult-to have to manually cook and clean, to not be able to use magic to fix dropped plates and broken windows. I did catch myself trying to magically refill my glass of water the other day while sitting in garden before I remembered that I couldn’t. Some people have had it even worse-it was quite upsetting to have to watch old Wilfred Bodes arm heal the muggle way, after he broke it falling off a ladder trying to paint ceiling.

Still, this is probably a good lesson for all of us, that we have maybe become complacent with how easy it is to fix things magically, and we have become reckless (and dare I say lazy) in everyday tasks. This experience will probably be beneficial for all of us, as difficult as it may be.

[Adeline Morior]

After living within her own community, Ady never even considered another way. Since the law stated magickind should live in secret, it has become more and more difficult to hide and still try to develop one's abilities. The village was safe and secure within the confounds of a forest no one dared to enter other than those that lived there. There were things set in place in order to make it seem too dangerous for muggles who don't know the forest to want to enter. But Ady suppose that bravery and a need for adventure is within everyone, even muggles.

The lads that saw the magic being cast by one of her neighbors had disappeared in the wind, making a memory spell impossible after more and more people started to suspect them, and so also their lives in their home village started to seem impossible. There was nowhere to move to anymore other than to live amongst the muggles in the larger cities and away from friends and family. Disappearing within populations. All to preserve the lives of our kind. Tears formed in Ady’s eyes. Wizardkind are more powerful and yet are the ones that have to hide. It just is not fair. Packing her things and having a long look back as the village disappears from view, Ady wipes her tears and moves on.

[Cassie Williams]

Dear Amelia,

I have much news to tell you in this letter! We've had to leave our old village behind and now we're blending in with muggles in a completely different area! If you remember in my last letter, I was telling you about how we got in the crossfires of a duel over a nearby land dispute and that for some reason one of the witches involved turned on us instead - she actually made good on her threat! It all happened so quickly really, I'm still in shock I think. She ended up turning poor little Jim into a tree and setting a few houses on fire. We couldn't get Jim unstuck so in our hurried plans to escape we just turned everything else into trees to give him at least some form of company. I believe some of the younger kids may have carved some faces onto the other trees for him. His poor mother is distraught, we're all taking turns to take over meals for her.

In any case, living with muggles has indeed been a fun challenge - their ways of life are so different and quaint! I'll save those stories for my next letter though.

Yours dearly,
Maria.