Luca went back to Wampus's common room absolved of criminal liability and surrounded by Knight’s members bragging about how many students they knocked down in the riots. According to the recount, it turned out that there are more wizards in Ilvermorny than in the entire Western Hemisphere combined, but one thing was indeed a fact: Miranda sent a petrificus totalus to the Serpent’s Order leader while he argued with Slate about the deeds of his house’s member, claiming no wrongdoing on the part of Luca’s victim. That immediately erupted the dining hall in chaos, people having no idea if the person dressed in a hunchbacked witch costume from their house or not, so everyone took the ‘Offense Against Incoming Hazards’ advice seriously and started knocking the nearby people down before they could potentially knock them down until more and more youths started using protego and having no bone in the fight retreating to the walls with who could they recognize as friendly, the center left for a gathering of Wampus to the giant recognizable from afar pumpkin head of Slate, triplets charging to and fro into the crowds using fists as much as wands under the protection of their dates fulfilling the task of casting protego, and desperately resisting snakes low on morale as their leader got sneak attacked by a little girl.
Then, Luca was forced to stand on the table under everyone’s scrutiny and tell what happened to him in his own words, although the events were clear enough by this point. Everyone defended him, but when it came to people talking about the proposition of Fontaine to execute the one-handed Malin Berbat, the students fell silent. Mood down, the silence got interrupted by Luca gradually proficient in keeping it cool under attention, he spoke with conviction standing in front of his house’s members.
“Like many of you, I don’t understand my teacher’s position. He must have more information than we do, especially me coming from a no-maj society. What I want is simple: fairies have to stop suffering from people like that scum, seen as nothing but an ingredient for some useless potion! I read the entire Atlas of Magical Concoctions and remember clearly the two or three ones that include the usage of fairies’ wings are completely made for fun or practice by inept potioneering adepts because of cheap costs, it has to stop! If the change doesn’t come from indifferent to little humanoid ladies’ suffering government, only we can change it by ourselves! We have to unite and protest, we have to bring the issue to light, or torture will continue going on, accepted for no reason in the Wizarding World!” Luca had to stop, his eyes glowing with anger again, chest rising and falling violently as the crowd of almost eight-hundred little wizards and around two hundred cats overlooking the scene, curious why nobody paid them their due attention, listened with wide-open eyes as if infected by the boy’s conviction.
“Yeah! Let’s go! Luca for president!” Miranda was the first to cause trouble, followed by the rest of the house erupting in brief celebration, the smarter ones of them already thinking how to proceed to bring their now common cause to fruition.
“We should write to our parents, they can help support the change of law outside the school!” Themistocles shouted as his brothers took Luca off the table and threw him in the air, the boy hit his head straight on the scaffolding up there curled in pain as he went down, the brothers apologizing profusely to the laughter of onlookers. The Knight’s Club sprang to action, youths coming from prominent families went to grab their parchments and discuss how to best explain their intentions before sending them collectively, others transfigured their bedsheets into colourful banners trying to come up with catchy slogans and pictures of fairies bloodied by the abuse.
Luca was blown away by the enthusiastic friends willing to help him advocate for his belief, he sat down on the carpets with everybody and jointly created a rough plan of action after a lengthy debate, setting the goals and methods in stone. They decided to encompass the entire network of their acquaintances and extended family, even if the school’s public eagles were in danger of passing away from overwork delivering all that paper across the States, convince with reason their classmates across the board to join the protest, stop learning and occupy the dining hall until the demands are met. Their postulates were kept to a minimum: destruction of existing potions and ban on new ones, also inclusion of fairies on the list of intelligent creatures, even if that does stretch the definition somehow as they don’t have a language at least in the human’s comprehension.
In high spirits, the entire Wampus house missed lunch by a long shot and only went out during the dinner hour holding in their hands rolled-up parchments and pillows to sleep over, floating posters, plaques, and banners above their heads. Slate took Miranda and went up to apologize to the Serpent’s prefect in hope for them to not interfere with efforts to reach the MACUSA legislators, assuring that Fontaine’s opinion isn’t shared by his students, and they don’t want to harm a member of their house that already got his punishment under Luca’s hand. Others went up to the people they knew and distributed hastily written leaflets, the rest started sitting on the floor under the walls, ignoring the food for a start of a hunger strike.
“What are you doing again?!” Juno came in a flash to question the triplets setting up a camp using the curtains ripped off from beds and transfigured poles of wood held by a Permanent Sticking Charm right in front of the entrance between two tables.
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“Can’t you read Miss Lytras?” Leonidas innocently pointed to his bedsheets scribbled on so badly with ink they looked like multiple octopuses squirted all over them hung proudly up in the air.
“You…” she took out her wand pointing it at his nose, her eyes suspiciously resembling Luca’s from the night before as the Greek boy covered in fright.
“We are doing a protest in protection of fairies, to rescue them from unjust treatment!” Themistocles hastily saved his stupid brother.
“Can you go one day without an event?! Yesterday you were saving Granger, today fairies, what about tomorrow?! Are you addicted already?!” she seethed in the face of the most ‘brainy’ brother.
“Hey, if things need saving, we will do our part, no mountain too high to climb, no ocean too wide…” Alexander chimed in with a half-song until he got a look too and shut up.
“That is our stance, nobody can change the resolution agreed on by Knights of the Round Wampus unless by killing us all.” Themistocles remained calm but the firmness in his voice unquestionable. Juno had no choice but to watch as the dining hall in the absence of both headmaster and vice-headmaster became a playground for the protesting students persuading others to join them.
“Count me in.” Bryce the first ‘foreigner’ that came up to Luca declaring his participation in the protest drew a lot of eyes, especially since he was a Club member too and from the so-called ‘opposite side’. Despite that, his face was firm, not afraid of possible criticism.
“Welcome.” Luca didn’t know what to do except hug and pat his back.
“Now I feel bad for petrifying and leaving you there to be stepped on…” Miranda mumbled loud enough for the whole hall to hear, Bryce’s face distorted in realization as he pointed at her.
“So it WAS you laying on the floor and casting from behind somebody’s stiff ass like a machine gun, completely without looking where you aim!” Bryce was one of the chance victims on the periphery of the recent fight, and he did spot from a corner of his eye a pair of Shining-styled twins right from where the spell that hit him came from, one kind of familiar.
“It’s rude to point fingers, let bygones be bygones.” she dismissed him casually. More and more people gathered to join the protest and were coming up with useful connections to their uncles and aunties. They went back to the common rooms to prepare, but not before shaking hands with Luca and exchanging a couple words of encouragement or complaint about the current law discriminating against fairies. Juno concluded that she can’t stop the trend when teachers started joining too, even the current dean of her former house Thunderbird went up to pat them on the shoulder and sit down on the bench telling stories from his school years in between praising the current cat’s battle quidditch team as a gathering of superstars.
She decided it was her duty again to notify the headmaster as his assistant and went out, enduring hostile gazes coming her way constantly as she was Luca’s appointed prosecutor. Roche scolded her for interrupting his sleep again and said he’s too tired to care.
“Let them do whatever, the eagles are already on the way to redactors of ‘Daily Seer’ either way... We will see tomorrow if MACUSA still remembers Agilbert or will they come arrest him on the spot... I won’t stand in front of him this time, go back and watch over this circus if you want...” the headmaster’s thoughts disordered, his friend of half a century ready to execute a student of his old house made him ditch the mask of composure in front of his assistant. Helpless Juno went back to see almost four-fifths of the youths in Ilvermorny sat down in circles with Luca’s teachers of Offense, Johnson and McKinzie, discussing what common mistakes they saw their students committing in the riots and praising Miranda as a genius example for everyone. Her smug head held high mocked the onlookers that had no ‘body count’. Juno massaged her temples for a while until part of the eagles came back and students read the replies.
“My mom is a high-ranking member of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, you know, she rescues people displaced by apparition and so on. She’s with us and started a protest in Congress!” one girl shouted waving her letter, soon joined by others doing the same. Luca thought that things were going in a great direction as the night slowly fell, the green-lit dining hall stayed rowdy, eagles in hot demand as not all had an opportunity to send them yet. The discourse came to the students now sleeping in the common rooms, the majority of them from Horned Serpent’s house in a misguided half-solidarity with their member, most of them, like Bryce, would join the demonstration if it wasn’t preceded by the trial. At the hours approaching dawn when sleepiness hits the hardest, students leaned against each other or on the cushions brought, the proposal to transfigure beds met with backlash accused of tainting the spirit of the protest. They slept or laid down with closed eyes like Luca, fulfilled by the emotion of being a part of something bigger.
Nobody talked about Fontaine’s remarks in a tacit agreement, but by excluding them from the conversations, they only echoed louder in the minds of all sentient beings under the circular roof of the official Wizarding School of the United States.