"And this is the garden." Emma Granger flung open the double doors and stood back, obvious pride in her face.
Clare walked out and gazed around her. Plants grew everywhere. That was about all she could tell. "It's very… green," she commented, feeling rather lame. "What are they all for?"
Emma shrugged. "Most of them, I've no idea. I just know they're magical. Those ones though,"—She pointed to a patch of what looked like cabbage size clover—"They're healing herbs that our Hermione asked us to grow when she heard we were starting a magical garden. She's taking healing training, you know. Youngest healer trainee in magical history." She beamed.
Clare smiled faintly back. She'd already been taken on a quick tour of the house after being keyed into the wards and had felt the difference between her old and new prison instantly. The Granger's home felt like a… well… a home, little different from the home she'd grown up in — Although there were some important differences.
She walked back into the house and glanced at the TV.
"Oh, yes," Daniel Granger had said when she'd picked up the remote and tried to turn it on. "That hasn't worked since we activated the wards a few months ago. After a few weeks, the kitchen appliances failed, and now we can't even get the electric lights to work."
Clare looked around at the numerous candles that lit the otherwise darkened room. That two non-magical parents would go so far to join the world that their daughter had suddenly found herself in… she couldn't help but feel a touch of sadness. How different her life might have been if her parents had done the same.
Emma joined her side again. "It'll be a lot brighter once we get the magical lighting set up."
She gave Emma a wistful smile. "No magical TV? I never saw one before." Emma sighed. "No, they don't have that. They have magic radio though."
"So, what do you do with your free time then?"
Emma grinned at her. "Reading, mostly. The library's getting quite big now, which is good for you, what with school and all."
Clare's heart skipped a beat. She'd been trying not to think about that. She still didn't want to believe that what Slytherin had talked about to the judge was actually going to happen until she was there. The disappointment would kill her otherwise.
They walked up the stairs again and Emma handed her a slip of parchment on which the words, 'the Granger's secret magic testing room is located next to bathroom on the second floor.' Suddenly, a door appeared where before there had been none. Clare's eyes opened wide.
"The special room for you to use your wand in without getting caught by the ministry. Normally, they wouldn't be able to track you, because you are of age, but this area is almost all muggle, so even if they can't detect what spells are being used they can tell magic is being used. It raises flags. Of age, unqualified wand use is a legal gray area. Best just to pre-empt all possible problems." Emma said, seeming to guess her question.
Clare nodded dumbly.
The last part of the house was the garage, which contained nothing but a massive machine covered in a see-through plastic sheet on a wooden pallet. The huge cardboard box it probably came in sat folded up in a corner.
"And what is that?" she asked.
"Milling machine," Emma answered. "One of Dan's new toys that we bought with the proceeds from selling the dental practise. We're planning to use it to prototype new magical stuff. It's going to be amazing how small we can make the runes with something like that."
"But," she pointed to what was obviously a computer attached to it. "If the TV doesn't work because of the house's magic, surely that won't."
Emma grinned at her. "Yes, funny that."
"What?"
"Well, the wizards we've all talked to say that electricity can't work around magic, because the magic interferes with it, and that we should just give up trying to find a way to make it work because no one's ever found a way."
"Well?"
"Well, I was reading this book on different types of magic and there's this one type called ritual magic that's mostly only used by the ministry and the older families. The description said that, 'Ritual magic is extremely sensitive to outside magics,' and, 'it is critical to perform in a zero or near zero magical environment.'"
Clare watched her expectantly.
"But old families all live in equally old and magical houses, so how do they do their rituals? Turns out they have this thing called a ritual room that mostly insulates the room from the ward's magics."
Clare's eyes widened. "And you think…"
"That all we have to do is have a ritual room built in here, stick all our electronics in it and BAM, electricity inside a magical house!"
Clare looked around the garage and bit her lip. "Can we put a TV in here?"
Later that night, Clare lay awake in her new bed in the Granger's guest room. She was certainly much better off now, but she had no illusions about Lord Slytherin. To Slytherin, she was a magical generator. A thing that protected his investment in the Grangers, nothing more. As soon as Slytherin had no more use of her, or she became inconvenient, she'd be sold on again. It would be a long time before she finally got to sleep that night, without the familiar scary sounds of the Knockturn Alley only a thin wall away.
October passed in a whirlwind of activity. The very day after Clare arrived in Crawley, a snooty representative from the muggle liaison office had turned up and, after angrily shouting about illegal wards and all the trouble they were in, had quickly backtracked when she'd checked the Granger's status as Vassals of the House of Slytherin and found that, yes, they did have the legal right to them.
The representative had then got to the point of her visit… asking Dan and Emma how they were settling in to their place on the edge of the Wizarding World, and was promptly catapulted into the nearby park when she'd attempted to use legilimency on Emma.
"They want to make sure muggle-born parents aren't meeting each other and organising, you see," Emma told a shocked Clare after they'd sent Hedwig to the probably irate representative with a note apologising for her unceremonious removal from the property, but that they took a dim view on magical attacks and that she could check all the other muggle-born parent's minds if they wished to ensure they were being good little muggles.
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