Dumbledore dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. "Oh my goodness, Vincent — I do believe no one in the entire wizarding world casts Lumos quite like you do."
"Thank you. Shall I continue?"
She said, "Small things like Lumos can be replicated by a Muggle with a torch. Then there are the Blasting Curse, the Tempest Jinx, the Confundus Charm... even the Dark Arts, the Unforgivable Curses..."
Each time she named a spell, she cast Lumos again. The back row of the classroom was being pelted with flash after flash, like grenades going off in rapid succession.
"Stop! You're doing this deliberately, Vincent!"
"Vincent!!"
"You said you were only demonstrating spells — which of those you just listed was Lumos?"
Bernadette immediately adopted an expression of complete bewilderment. "Are you saying... you want me to actually cast the Blasting Curse, the Tempest Jinx, and the Dark Arts — the Unforgivable Curses — at the students, or at you?"
"I'm very sorry, but I don't actually know how to cast Unforgivable Curses. Perhaps one of you would care to demonstrate them for the class... I don't mind being your target. A Cruciatus or two..."
She smiled pleasantly, and added, "Just like ten years ago, when some of you followed He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and cast curses on me and my parents."
"!!!"
The classroom went utterly still.
Many faces in the room showed naked horror and disbelief — seemingly stunned that she would speak that name aloud, in the open, without a flinch.
Bernadette was privately baffled. This He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named that the stories said Harry defeated — what had he actually done, to make the wizarding world still flinch from his name a full ten years after his downfall?
From the records she'd skimmed, the total count of people he had killed during his active years didn't add up to the number of pirates she'd dispatched in a single day on the open sea.
Several of the governors, eyes still not fully recovered, surged to their feet. "You — what are you saying?!"
"You're trying to slander us?!"
"We had nothing to do with You-Know-Who!"
Bernadette smiled. "I think you each know perfectly well what I mean."
With that, she turned back to the young witches and wizards watching with avid interest, and continued calmly: "Just as I substituted Lumos to demonstrate each of the other spells — Muggles can achieve the same effects faster and better using technology. Whether it's explosive force, weather, confusion, or worse."
"Therefore, whatever you truly think of Muggles in your private hearts — contempt, disdain, fear, indifference, or something else entirely — I have only one requirement in my classroom."
Her voice was unhurried. "Look at Muggles as your equals. Set aside the fact that you are wizards. Forget what your elders have told you to think. Use your own minds to understand Muggles."
"Naturally, I'm well aware that wizards, relative to the broader population, are a very small group indeed. But it is precisely my hope — through you — to make this change one step at a time."
"To shift, little by little, how more and more wizards see Muggles. Until one day, a weak, small light accumulates into a brilliance that everyone can see!"
Flash!
A blaze of light swept through the room again. The governors, who had only just recovered, were blinded once more — Dumbledore alone sat unmoved, having at some point conjured a pair of dark spectacles and settled them on his face.
Looking, it had to be said, rather distinguished.
Bang!
Bernadette drove her staff into the floorboards, channelled magic through it, and maintained the Lumos as she strode back to the lectern. "I hope that one day, Muggle Studies will endure like that light — never diminishing, shining through one generation of witches and wizards after the next!"
The words fell, and the young witches and wizards stared at Bernadette with blank, stunned faces — vaguely sensing that their professor had said quite a lot of something, while also possibly saying nothing at all.
Bernadette opened the textbook. "Very well. Please take out A History of Magic: Muggle Edition. Today, we'll start with Muggle history — we'll begin by understanding how Muggles walked step by step from the past to the present."
Fred Weasley raised his hand. "Professor, weren't we supposed to watch a film first? Back to the Future."
"Right — last week you showed other classes films."
Bernadette smiled faintly. "For reasons I cannot share with you, I have decided at the last moment: the film is cancelled."
"Whaaaat???"
A chorus of disappointed sounds rose from the room.
Then every head turned to glare at the back row.
This is all your fault!
The next stretch of time was a flat, lifeless affair. On one side, Bernadette's lesson had no real content — she was reading aloud from the book almost word for word. On the other side, a lesson structured like History of Magic — Hogwarts's acknowledged champion of boring subjects — was already the most sleep-inducing class in the school. A second history lesson, also devoted to the dry march of peoples and civilisations and invasions, immediately joined it.
The governors departed midway through, for reasons unknown — whether the repeated glare of Lumos had finally broken them, or something else.
Two hours later, when the lesson mercifully ended, the students filed out looking glassy-eyed and faintly dizzy, heads stuffed with this people and that people, this conquest and that repulsion.
At last it was over.
Seeing the last of the young witches and wizards out the door, Dumbledore walked over with a look of genuine remorse. "I'm sorry, Vincent. They are Hogwarts governors; I had no grounds to stop them exercising their right to 'assess a new professor'."
Bernadette held the old man's gaze calmly for a moment. "I understand."
Something seemed to occur to Dumbledore. "Did you and Harry have some sort of falling out last week?"
"What makes you say that?"
"Well — my guess is that you've been keeping Harry at a certain distance to avoid giving anyone reason to think you favour him. But the boy himself believes you're unhappy that he was sorted into Gryffindor."
What an absurd reason. Oh — it must be because the man and Harry weren't very well acquainted, and so had been keeping his distance out of that unfamiliarity. But she went along with Dumbledore's version.
"So your meaning is that I ought to show Harry an appropriate degree of... differential attention?"
"Oh, I never said that."
Dumbledore blinked. "Use your own judgement."
You duplicitous old man.
Still — as the man himself had written, Dumbledore was the most powerful wizard at Hogwarts, and his wisdom and scheming ran far deeper than his cheerful exterior suggested. And he possessed the terrifying ability of Legilimency. The more frequently one came into contact with him, the greater the risk of being found out. She would keep her distance.
After parting from Dumbledore, Bernadette made her way to the Hogwarts library. Madam Pince, the librarian, stepped forward to greet her. "Good afternoon, Professor Vincent. Back to read again."
"Good afternoon, Madam Pince."
She drew out the tattered book and handed it over. "Madam Pince, I'm looking for books related to what's written in this one. Do you have any suggestions?"
Madam Pince leafed through a few pages, then shook her head. "I'm afraid I never studied Chinese — I can't read what's written here..."
Chinese?
Was that what this world called Roselle's script?
"Actually, a long time ago I did try to learn it — but Chinese, rather like your homeland, is rather... mysterious and impenetrable."
Your homeland?
"Roselle's script" was the language of the man's homeland?
Of course!
Vincent did look markedly different from the people around him — his hair, his complexion, the colour of his eyes. Bernadette had seen so much of the world, and grown so accustomed to people of different nations and races living side by side, that she had never thought it strange.
"Does the library have any other books in Chinese?" Bernadette followed up. "Particularly anything connected with learning Chinese — I may need to teach the children some of it in my Muggle Studies lessons."
Madam Pince thought for a moment. "Oh, there are certainly Chinese books — left side, seventh row, middle section — there's a whole Chinese collection there. As for learning Chinese itself... I'd expect we won't have much."
"Understood. Thank you."
Bernadette made her way to the shelf Madam Pince had described. Dozens of books with Chinese characters running down their spines stood neatly in a row.
This was the first time, apart from her father's diary, that she had seen so many examples of "Roselle's script" together — except that in this world, it went by the name "Chinese," and was not one man's invented language but the common writing of an entire nation.
Then... Father, why would he know this script?
Had Roselle truly invented it himself?
Or had Father — like that man — actually come from this world?
To be continued…
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