The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

Good Company

Good Comapny

Jack Scout and the rest of the Ilvermorny team were of course pretty much anything that any of the students could talk about. Most of the Hogwarts girls fancied Jack's blonde hair and twangy accent, which, they had learned by a week later, was a Texas accent; Jack was from a city called Austin.

Others of the Hogwarts girls were dreamy for his Pukwudgie chaser, Eric Danes, who was apparently of Native American descent and had a long black braid down his back and deep tan skin. Word was that Eric lived on a reservation in Arizona and knew loads about the ancient American wizarding legends, as his mum was a medicine woman and was very skilled in the area of divination. Eric Danes's mum was apparently famous enough in the States that when Professor Kostos Mopsus, the Divination teacher, heard he was among the Ilvermorny team members visiting the school, he'd asked Eric to speak to his Divination class.

The boys were of course still nuts about Dawn Gleason, whose flawless skin and silvery hair were a product of the sun-kissed California coast that she called home.

It seemed that everyone knew all there was to know about the Ilvermorny students - where they came from, stats about their season back home at the school, and more - and they passed the information about in whispered conversations in doorways and corridors throughout the school. Anyone with further information than what was already known was held in the highest regard and became instantly popular until the new talk had dispersed its way through the entire student body.

Derek was therefore heralded as a near godlike figure as he was the only one that had so far managed to make close friends with any of the Ilvermorny students, even if it was only because he was the opposing team captain. Derek had spent a good deal of time with the Ilvermorny students, showing them about the castle as best he could and talking rules and whatnots with them. There was a lot of important things that had been set in place specifically for the tourney and the two teams spent absolute eons in talks about them... something that both annoyed James for the amount of his time it took up, and also excited him because it meant that he was immensely popular as one of the prime people to gather new information about the Ilvermorny lot.

"Meg Johnson is from a place called Seattle," James told Sirius one day. He'd been paired off with Meg at the last tourney meeting to get to know her, seeing as she was the Ilvermorny Seeker. It seemed to James that Meg's hair, which was huge and red and just as frizzy as cotton candy, would get in the way of trying to find the snitch if there was a wind. Although, he reckoned that the snitch might get stuck up in it there was so much of it, and maybe that was her advantage. "We were talking some about what it's like in America and it sounds a bit rough actually."

"Rough? In America?" Sirius sounded surprised. They were about halfway across the stone bridge and looking over the side into the depths of the crags, hanging around between classes, waiting for Remus and Peter, who had gone back to the dormitory to fetch a book Peter had forgotten. Sirius was sitting on one of the sills of the great stone cut outs, his back to the crags below, which made James nervous; one good wind and Sirius would go over the edge, but Sirius seemed comfortable enough with it, so he didn't say anything. "What's rough about it?"

"Well, they're not very muggle-friendly over there, I guess," James answered, "Meg called it backwards. She said that most of the people don't believe Muggles and Wizards should mingle at all, and shouldn't interfere with lives, like not even to save them. They stay separated at all times."

"That's what the Statute of Secrecey's about, dummy," Sirius said.

"No it's more extreme than all that," James said, "They don't even have half-bloods at Ilvermorny, Meg said. They're all purebloods. American wizards that aren't purebloods never know they're magical at all because they don't want to mix with muggles."