Entry: Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Did you know, the only sports teams this school has are the House Quidditch teams? And Quidditch is exactly what it sounds like: “Quit it”, spoken by someone with a concussion. Probably given to them by a Bludger. Seriously, that game is designed to kill its players! Nevermind that the teams are pitted head-to-head in a clear bid to create rivalry between the Houses.

So I’ve been asking around, and digging around- and just today, I finally managed to get enough people interested to get a new after-school club approved.

The Football Club is now the only student club in the entire school. Hopefully more will follow.

Most of the members are muggle-raised, of course; all the wizard-raised students had to be told what football even is. A good thirty or forty of them expressed interest in watching the first match we hold- and they all still seem to think we’ll be building teams based on each House.

Spoiler alert, we won’t. Sure, if we get enough members, we might end up organizing some regular teams and putting them head-to-head in a tournament, but the teams will still not be bound by House lines. For now, we’re just one big team playing against itself in order to have fun.

Doesn’t exactly help that we only have ten members right now, including myself.

That said, given the contents of this castle, I’d have to say it’s not a bad birthday present.

That reminds me of my last birthday, when Helia told me I’m magical. One year, and now that I’m learning magic, the first thing I do is bring non-magical stuff to Hogwarts!

Oh well. Our first game is tomorrow evening; the Ravenclaw Quidditch team has the pitch today. We’re eager to show the wizard-raised what they’re missing out on. All except for our one wizard-raised member, but Daphne Greengrass is eager to find out what she’s been missing out on instead. It’s actually surprised me with just how close of friends we’ve become; I only sought her out that first day because she was evidently friends with Harry, and I wanted to know more about the people he associated with. It quickly- so very quickly- became more than that.

She might die of shock when she finds out I’m a real Princess, though. She calls me Princess, but she means it as a joke- probably because I frequently carry myself as a proper Princess, even in this school.

Especially when Draco tries to suck up to me. It actually took me two weeks to realize that’s what he was trying to do, because he’s going about it that wrongly. He obviously thinks I’m from an unidentified but high-ranking magical family- and to him, who was raised in a cesspit of pureblood supremacy, that means both that I’m pure-blooded and that I despise muggles and muggleborn.

Which means he’s trying to get into my good graces by demonstrating how discriminatory he can be. It’s… sickening, but he’s well-meaning, I think, so I’ve been nudging him in the right direction.

Firmly.

He’s learning, I think- but it’s going to take time. A lot of time.

Daphne enjoys watching my interactions with him, even studying them. She says it’s one thing to be told how to do it in an Etiquette class, but it’s another thing entirely to see it done in front of her- and as I’ve told her, I’m always happy to help if she wants to practice.

She does. A lot.

Because of that, I’ve figured out that I’ve piqued her interest. She’s been trained from a young age, though not nearly as rigorously as myself… but she’s still an inquisitive girl to the core. Her curiosity knows no bounds, and I think she’s projecting that particular quality of herself onto me as well, but I’m not worried about it- I am also curious by nature, even if not to the same degree as she.

Entry: Wednesday, October 13, 2021

How did she do it? Even Bonbon admitted to knowing nothing of it, and she’s shown herself to be at least as capable as the entire SIS in that regard!

But… Yeah. We showed the purebloods what they were missing out on. It was-

It was sooooo much bigger than I had even dreamed of. And let’s not forget that Mom was there too! Yet I knew nothing about it. Neither did my guards, for that matter. Not until we were actually inside the little stadium.

But… after that little, er, performance… the Football Club now numbers over half the school and all four Quidditch teams have lost players. The smallest remaining Quidditch team is the Gryffindor one, now composed of seven empty slots. Even Oliver Wood, who people tell me is a Quidditch fanatic, has abandoned the death game for football!

Most of the staff are, of course, shocked. And I’d be willing to bet the Ministry of Magic hasn’t heard so much as a peep.

You see… when ten middle school students get together to start a football club, it’s rather unlikely that government representatives from around the world will come to watch, including no less than five monarchs. It’s rather unlikely that those ten middle school students will spend their very first club meeting engaging in friendly- though short- matches against no less than twelve different football teams, three of which were professionals with the rest also being formed of middle school students from the various schools around.

It’s rather unlikely that the Quidditch Pitch will suddenly become an entire football stadium packed to the gills with what had to be twenty or thirty thousand people, just because ten middle school students wanted to play football.

And of course, it’s rather unlikely that the Queen will publicly present the leader of those ten middle school students with a gift.

Next to all that, the fact that the umpire for every single one of those matches was none other than Lady Helia Jennifer of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, Duchess of Hogsmeade and Kent and Strathearn, really wasn’t all that surprising.

It wasn’t hard to figure out the why; it was decided that I’d stay at Hogwarts for my birthday, since a few magical laws would have made it so much more difficult to do anything else that it scarcely bore thinking on. And I know Mom was eager to be shown around her daughter’s school by the Deputy Headmistress; that happened after the… event, as the sun was going down.

Now, with Helia as the umpire, I’m certain she was involved in turning what was supposed to be a first club meeting into a very real royal birthday party that nobody realizes is exactly that. But how? How on earth could she orchestrate such madness, yet- and she assured me of this when I asked- she did not break the Statute of Secrecy, despite having over ten thousand non-magic-aware muggles in the crowd!

I will admit, though, it was immensely amusing to watch Daphne face a surprise etiquette exam, through the simple expedient of being directly addressed by Her Majesty the Queen, as the ‘first officer’ of our football club. I thought she managed to scrape a passing grade, but she later told me she thought she’d failed sooo badly. She practically melted in relief when I told her. Then she begged me to help her make sure she wouldn’t fail next time, because a member of the Royal Family- which she said was the only set of muggles that all British wizards feared, thanks to their Oaths of Citizenship- knew her name.

Now that was something I’d never heard before.

So I asked, of course, and she explained.

After giving me a look that said all too plainly that her latest theory as to my ancestry was just turned on its head, at least.

Simply put, the Oath of Citizenship is an oath of obedience and loyalty to the Crown that every magical swears. It’s an ‘inheritable’ oath that binds magical descendants as well, so there are entire families of wizards- like the Weasleys- that have forgotten that the Oath even exists, but which are still bound by it. It’s a very complex oath, with both self-enforcing sections and outside-enforced sections. The former is primarily to deal with not knowingly trying to harm the Royal Family, and ensuring that new muggleborn- who don’t inherit it- either take the oath or are rendered incapable of magic. It also ensures that immigrants have to take the oath as a condition of their being allowed to stay.

The latter, the parts enforced from outside, are more about compliance with the law. The magic doesn’t know the law, so that part of the Oath really just accelerates the judicial process. If the Royal Family accuses them of a crime, their magic will judge them- and if found guilty, they will lose their magic on the spot.

There’s also apparently a clause that releases someone from that Oath- or a majority of it, at any rate- in the event that they should move to another country and forfeit their British citizenship.

Anyways, Daphne said that while her father explained it to her, she herself inherited it, so she’s not familiar with the terms. When I asked Hermione, though, she explained that when Professor McGonagall had arrived to introduce the magical world to her, she’d been given a choice to either take the oath and the opportunity to learn magic together… or refuse the oath, have her magic sealed, and continue to live as she already was. She was also able to produce a written copy of the oath and, upon reviewing it, I would have to say I approve of it. The whole thing basically boils down to ‘I will not use magic to commit treason’, after all; Daphne was wrong, it’ll only cause a wizard’s magic to judge them if the Crown accuses them of a major crime punishable by death or life imprisonment, such as treason.

I sent a copy of it to Mom, of course. This is going to be important for us to know about.

On my way to the Owlery, I ran into Helia- who told me that I, as a member of the Royal Family and its line of succession, am not subject to the Oath of Citizenship, but rather to what’s called the ‘Royal Oath’- which is basically a promise to serve as a benevolent ruler. That one apparently passes down by the line of succession, including through non-magical lines, so even though the most recent person to actually take it died over six hundred years ago, I’m still bound by it. She gave me a couple copies of the text, of course- both original and translated. It’s fully self-enforcing, and just like the Oath of Citizenship, the punishment for breaking it is simply the loss of my magic.

I… can’t disagree with it either, though I’m definitely going to be careful about any possibility of friendly fire; if I make an unprovoked, unsolicited attack against a ‘law-abiding citizen’, or am so reckless in stopping a criminal that such law-abiding citizens are unduly harmed, I will lose my magic.

Not that I wasn’t already being careful about friendly fire.

That said, the presence of that Oath did make me wonder.

“So… when I attacked Professor Snape on the first Sunday, why didn’t…?”

Helia shrugged. “He’s a repentant Death Eater,” she answered. “Terrorist. He does regret what he did, and has been trying to atone for it for the last ten years, so I haven’t removed him from the school yet; he serves far too many critical roles that I wouldn’t be able to refill quickly. As far as your Royal Oath is concerned, there’s no such thing as repentance, atonement, or repatriation. Your magic noticed his dark past and decided that you could do what you wanted with him.”

She blinked. “There’s a terrorist at this school?”

She nodded. “Potions Master, Professor of Potions, Head of Slytherin House, Dark Expert. Two of those are insanely difficult to fill, especially since most people that would qualify as Dark Experts have… let’s say storied pasts. He might actually be the best man for the job- but I also put him on probation because his behavior has been a bit less than stellar these last several years.”

She snorted. “A bit less than stellar?” she asked. “So he hasn’t improved?”

She chuckled. “That was a bit of an understatement. He was much better at the start of the year than he was last year, and he’s continued to improve his behavior. I’m getting the distinct impression that Headmaster Dumbledore actually encouraged him to bully his students.”

“What.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t removed Dumbledore yet because he’s still in St. Mungo’s from when I stabbed him almost to death. That and he’s technically also a hybrid being like me- part human, part magic- which means I have to be very careful around him. He’s one of the single-digit number of people on this planet that are still capable of killing me.”

“Technically?”

She nodded. “Unlike me, he’s fully bound his magical and physical sides together, so he is actually reliant upon his body, until and unless it dies. But he’s still the single most powerful magical thing on this side of the worldwall.”

“Unlike you?”

“Yes, unlike me. I haven’t bound myself that way, so if need be, I can still abandon my physical form and become pure magic once more, though doing that will kill my body. If the worst comes to pass, that could be necessary, even if the looser connection I use deprives me of certain physical pleasures that he undoubtedly sought.”

Entry:

Author's Note

Patreon, Discord.

Sorry about cancelling the story. Will have a replacement soon. Ish. Pardon, bed is beckoning to me. Must be going.

P.S. The eventual reveal, scheduled for a few years later, was that Dumbledore is Earth's version of Discord, as an avatar of all Earthen magic... and evil. Helia was set to defeat him by spreading her protection & influence to more than half of all magic users on the planet (primarily through the distribution of Guardian Wands), seizing control of the magic that makes him up, and simply turning him off. In order to do that, though, she'd have to reassign herself as the new Magical Avatar...