One of the best unfinished stories ever. I love the characterization of the protagonists and the original characters. It was so delightful to revisit the nursing home in this chapter! That's brilliant, after the buildup of the elderly characters, to make use of them again. Snape's paranoia and spy instincts are just beginning to come into play, and I'd so love to see more of this. I do hope that some day this story will be finished.

Oh my gosh I am so wanting to know what happened_-great story hope you can add some more one day

What sort of sterile chemistry classes do you have in America? They let us loose with poisons, concentrated acids, alkalis, alkali metals like sodium, magnesium strips, solvents etc. during chemistry “practicals” all the time during my high school days (passed 2004)...the only “commonly available” dangerous substance that we did not personally handle was hydrofluoric acid.

I was actually very hesitant to read this story; the premise sounded super interesting, but the fact that it's not been updated in almost 10 years made me wary. I decided to give it a chance anyways, and I'm glad that I did. I adore this story, and I'm very much wanting to know more about what exactly happened to Snape and Hermione.

I'm amazed Hanson thinks that giving children access to lenses was the problem. After all, most children find out when they're still in primary school, playing with ordinary magnifying glasses that you can buy in shops anywhere, that you can use them to burn holes in things - though most confine themselves to burning holes in paper, dead leaves, or, if they're feeling very daring, someone's bag or the hem of someone's skirt, rather than actually hurting anyone. Apart from anything else, it takes so long to get the fire going that your intended victim would usually notice and move before there was time to inflict much damage. Obviously the lenses the class are using here are much more powerful - but if Stone and Brown can't be trusted to behave responsibly with them, how on earth are they going to cope with experiments involving bunsen burners, or the gas taps providing the fuel for them?

The trouble with expulsion, though, is what becomes of the pupil who has been expelled. At least the Muggle population is large enough for there to be several schools within a short bus ride of home, and Pupil Referral Units for children whose behaviour is too bad for mainstream schools to cope with them, or even Juvenile Detention Centres for those who have been convicted of crimes. But you never know whether sending badly-behaved children to these will provide them with staff with the necessary training to get them back on the right track, or just put them in daily contact with children more delinquent than themselves, from whom they might pick up more bad habits.

With wizarding schools, the problem is even worse. There seems to be one magical school serving Britain and Ireland, a few more in the rest of Europe, and probably a scattering of them across the United States. So, if James and Sirius had been expelled from Hogwarts, they could have applied for places at Beauxbatons (if we assume that Beauxbatons does take male pupils even though the only named Beauxbatons characters we meet are female) or at Durmstrang, but if these schools weren't willing to take them (or James's parents considered that Durmstrang would probably make him even worse than he was already), they might have been left without access to a magical education - and the last thing the Ministry of Magic needs is untrained, underage wizards, with power they don't know how to control and a taste for Muggle-baiting, running amok in Muggle schools. And, as Dumbledore probably knew that Sirius was mentally unstable and was having problems with his family, and that school was the only thing giving any stability to his life, expulsion would be particularly risky in his case.

Perhaps a safer way of dealing with witches and wizards who have misused magic would be if there was some way to remove their magical ability and force them to live as Muggles (as happens in Diana Wynne Jones's short story, Warlock at the Wheel). Possibly this is what has happened to your characters (since Obliviating them WITHOUT removing their magical power is just asking for magical accidents to occur). But nobody would want to do that to children who might improve in time, because it would be such a waste of potential.

He's putting the pieces together - and if he's mistaken in assuming that Sirius had been one of the terrorists, everyone else had assumed the same thing for a long time. I liked the 'Star Wars' reference - while he sneers at 'bad movies', he probably hasn't actually bothered to watch any in the three years that he's been living in the Muggle world, so does he even know that 'Star Wars' as in American defence programme and as in series of films by George Lucas aren't related? Or is he wondering (given his newfound realisation that the paranormal might after all be real) whether one is a front for the other, and there might be a Jedi training school hidden somewhere in Arizona?

I love this story, and I'd like to see where it's going. I hope you get round to finishing it eventually.

A friend of mine says he learned to write with a metal-nibbed traditional pen (which I think might be charged in a similar way to quills) at calligraphy lessons, and the method he was taught was not to dip the quill in the inkwell, but to dip a brush in the ink and brush ink onto the quill.

I suppose the wizarding world is being sustainable by using quills instead of disposable plastic ballpoints (though you'd think Muggleborn or Half-Blood wizards might have persuaded them to compromise on refillable fountain-pens, or wooden pen-holders with metal nibs), but the real question is why all student essays have to be written on parchment - an expensive but long-lasting material that you might expect to be reserved for spell-books that people are likely to be still consulting in hundreds of years' time. As most students aren't likely to want to keep every essay they've ever written, it would surely be cheaper to write on paper (which can be recycled or used as firelighters). Or, I wonder, is the parchment reused by casting vanishing spells on the ink when a document is no longer needed?

Does this school have only one teacher per subject? I know Hogwarts does (implying a crushingly heavy workload per teacher, even allowing for the fact that they don't have to commute or do housework, and that, except for Hagrid becoming his brother's carer, none of them seem to have families to look after). However, most Muggle comprehensives have knocking on for a thousand pupils, which would mean they would certainly need several teachers for core subjects like English, Maths, Science, and foreign languages, that are compulsory up to age 16. This school might possibly get away with just one teacher each for subjects like Religious Studies, History, Art and so on, which might be only one hour a week up to age 14 and then optional at GCSE level, but I don't see how it could function with fewer than three or four science teachers and maths teachers, even if all of them were in front of a class all the time. Either this is an unusually small school, or Hanson's embezzlement is on a massive scale.

Yes - I totally agree with Snape about science teaching! I'm horrified when I see magazine articles arguing that the way forward is for children to be protected from the mess and risk of handling real chemicals and Bunsen burners by doing simulated experiments in virtual reality. Admittedly, the only animal dissection I remember doing in biology classes was on a pig's heart, and as the pig would have been slaughtered for food anyway, this didn't make me feel as guilty as killing a rat or frog in order to dissect it would have done. Still, when it came to science lessons in general, it was important to be learning from real life, and finding out from my own experience that my intuitive assumptions about what would happen when ice cubes melted, when drops of an alkali were gradually added to an acid, or when flaccid pieces of plant-stem were placed in water, were frequently wrong. Our science lessons usually involved writing down a description of what we were trying to find out, the experiment we were going to do to find it out, and what we predicted would happen. Then we did the experiment, and then wrote down what had actually happened, and the explanation of why this had happened.

I like the idea of Snape's name in the Muggle world being Alan, too. (Or it could always have been John, after John Nettleship...)

Please finish this!

AAAHHHHHH I WANT MORE!
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!

Please update, this is a wonderful story.

I got here from browsing Aurette's favorite, and didn't notice it was incomplete before chapter 14, which is a pity because I crave happy endings for those two, and these chapters are such a great setting! I love seeing them interract in this under average school, the struggle of those who really care for the students, even if it has to be against them and their parents and the administration. The research of lost memory is another fascinating part of your tale. Everything is a pleasure to read, with great details. Thank you very much for writing and sharing!

i miss this story so much...

This story is great so far I love it.

Questions: where is the dark mark? Is voldermort dead and it disappeared? What happened to Emma that she would be found with head trauma? Is someone watching them?

So many questions. My biggest question is whether this story is abandoned or not?
I hope not I really enjoyed reading what there is so far