Demon Cam in the Potterverse
+ Show First Post
Total: 1131
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

Cam snorts. "Well," he says, "I'm off to Africa, I think if I take it slow making clouds it'll be nice and dark by the time I get there." And up he flies.

Permalink

Dumbledore waves goodbye; the sky behaves as skies usually do.

Permalink

Cam begins the process of the eradication of the malarial mosquito, then comes back and lands in the woods near Hogwarts and flaps back under his own power.

Permalink

About three seconds after he lands it, a car-sized spider starts trying to eat his shuttle.

Permalink

...Cam flips on the external speakers. "Shoo!"

Permalink

Clicking pincer noises and continued attempts to munch windshield! It's not very munchable and eventually the spider scuttles off, disappointed.

Permalink

Cam flies a bit closer to the edge of the woods, since he's never seen a giant spider from the lawn, and then he flaps the rest of the way to the castle.

Permalink

The castle as a whole, if not its individual walls and doorways, is as he left it.

Permalink

He heads for the library, checks out some books on foreign wizard governments. Borrows an owl and subscribes to the Daily Prophet with it.

Permalink

Foreign magical governments roughly follow muggle governments but not always. They tend to cover larger areas, because their populations are spread so thin and until recently their capacity for long-range travel and communication was better. Wizarding Yugoslavia, for example, never broke up.

The effects of colonization are visible but somewhat blunted; in areas where Muggle borders borders were set recently by colonizers the magical ones match them even less. In addition to Great Britain, the US, Canadian, and Japanese magical governments are the ones most similar to their muggle governments. Least similar is the Sahara, where aguamenti and cooling charms have resulted in a magical:muggle population ratio massively higher than anywhere else.

Permalink

How interesting! What is, say, the history of magical America, since he has a decent perspective on Muggle America to compare.

Permalink

The set of British (and French and Dutch) immigrants to the North American colonies had a lower fraction of wizards than those countries' general populations, but a higher fraction of muggleborns within the wizards. On the other hand, Native American wizards had a lot of advantages over their muggle counterparts when it came to not dying of smallpox and war. The upshot is that the US has a pretty ethnically blended magical population and a density of wizards that varies by region (more in the west, fewer in the east) but averages out pretty similar to the British one. Native American magical techniques are practiced alongside and sometimes synergized with European ones.

Magical America had less of a Revolutionary War than muggle America; the magical government mostly accepted muggle American independence as a fait accompli and disentangled itself slowly. As a result magical America ended up with a Parliamentary system, but with both houses being elected rather than one of them being the Lords.

While African wizards could easily avoid getting enslaved, Black American muggleborns were sometimes born into slavery. Many escaped; the rest usually died young, killed by their own uncontrolled magic, by terrified and confused owners, or by nearby white wizards (allegedly for secrecy reasons but also for fear of slave revolts). The eventual result was a Black American magical community with closer than typical ties to the corresponding muggle community. The American magical Parliament is constantly under pressure from the International Confederation of Wizards to Do Something about magical New Orleans and its paper-thin masquerade.

(Similarly, it took a lot of effort to convince everyone of the non-existence of Paul Bunyan, a half-giant Welsh immigrant who came to America for the wide open spaces where he could breed enormous blue oxen in peace, fifteen miles from the nearest person who'd look at him funny.)

The magical side of the Civil War was . . . complicated. There was a faction that wanted a united country, a faction that wanted secession, a faction that wanted to stay out of it and let the muggles do all the dying required to decide the question, and a faction that didn't care what happened as long as southern wizards were allowed to keep killing Black muggleborns and enslaving mind-controlled muggles. (This last group was eventually forced to stop it or at least stop doing it publicly, as much for secrecy reasons as anything else.) 

Westward expansion among wizards was as mentioned slower and less violent and plague-ridden than the muggle version, though there was a major push into the Rocky Mountains driven by fear that Gold Rush migrants would encounter the local dragons if the two populations weren't carefully steered away from each other.

American magical involvement in World War I was almost nonexistent; in World War II it roughly paralleled the muggle situation, but with more of an emphasis on the European front due to Grindelwald. 

Permalink

So secretive. Is there any modern anti-secrecy movement?

Permalink

There are political parties in some countries that want to do a gradual integration, often because they're worried about muggle surveillance capabilities improving, but no country wants to be the first to try it in defiance of all the others. Also there's disagreement among the integrationists about whether to try telling a slowly increasing number of people everything, or tell everyone a slowly increasing amount of stuff by "discovering" magical species and releasing "new" inventions, or just blow the whole thing wide open all at once.

Permalink

Do these people have, like, conferences, or summits, or anything?

Permalink

There's a symposium in Vancouver in three weeks mainly focused on the US and Canada, and one in Southeast Asia a month after that. There's also the ICW Annual Meeting this summer, at which various people make speeches for or against a wide range of potential policies on this and other issues.

Permalink

Gosh, okay, cool! Can he sign up for those from here?

Permalink

Yup! He can't get a presentation slot at either symposium without a sponsor (and the Vancouver one has finalized its schedule already), but all three events allow members of the magical public and have plenty of time for mingling.

Permalink

Marvelous. He will plan to turn up in Vancouver and at the Asian one (where in Asia, does he need to supplement his mediocre Thai?) and inquire after a slot at the annual meeting.

Permalink

This year it's in Hanoi, specifically the Ever-Shifting Tower in the Hanoi equivalent of Diagon Alley. 

To speak on the main floor of the ICW you need to represent a political party, a reigning monarch, or a nonprofit organization with an annual budget of at least 20,000 guilders, which on further research proves to be about 10,000 galleons or $100,000.

Permalink

How do you form a nonprofit organization in the wizarding world?

Permalink

With parchmentwork! Madam Pince, the librarian, can tell him what forms he'd need; enterprising seventh years occasionally do it.

Permalink

Cool. He is going to form the Revelation Institute. Mission statement: end material scarcity in all available universes.

Permalink

The school owl that takes his forms off to the Ministry of Magic has no comment on this mission. Perhaps more surprisingly, the Ministry doesn't either. He is now the founder, director, and sole employee of the Revelation Institute, though he'll still need proof of income to turn that into an ICW speaking slot.

Permalink

Yes, about that, he's going to need to make another trip to Gringott's.

Total: 1131
Posts Per Page: