The Summer of Rage
The world has become a smaller place.
Entering a meeting of the Wizengamot to urge that the wizarding world go public, Harry Potter is assassinated in June of 2007, ten years to the day after Dumbledore died. His killer, a Muggleborn witch, tells authorities that she was not willing to accept a world in which Muggles would have been enslaved to wizards.
In the ensuing anti-Muggleborn riots, eventually called the Summer of Rage, persons unknown set off a charm bomb widely assumed to be more powerful than they’d intended. The thought that they knew how powerful it would be and set it off anyway does not bear considering.
The United Kingdom is cut off from the outside world. The islands are encircled by the ghosts of soldiers – who watch, and who wait, and who sometimes kill.
No one has left Albion’s islands since the charm bomb dropped. No one has come in, either.
Albion is uncomfortably alone.
History
When the Second War ended, with Voldemort conclusively dead, people tried to resume their normal lives. They were mostly successful, until mid-2007, but one of the people who never succeeded was Harry Potter, who was on record commenting wryly that he'd never known normal and didn't know what to make of it. In the wake of the war, and the things he'd seen, Harry began agitating for and working toward an end to the secrecy that many believed was the only protection for wizards.
It was an idea that many thought would never come to anything; people openly scoffed Potter's Folly, and the Daily Prophet, always mindful that Harry was their bread-and-butter, gleefully printed every letter arguing that Potter was deluded, wrong, insane, dangerous. Muggleborns, in particular, seemed dead-set against revealing the existence of the magical world.
But slowly the tide of popular opinion turned. Eventually, Harry had to be taken seriously.
He was granted an audience at an extraordinary session of the Wizengamot; it was felt fitting that the session be held on the tenth anniversary of Dumbledore's death. If there was a man who would support Harry and trust that what he said had merit, it was believed, it was Dumbledore.
Before the meeting could be held, Harry was dead, Ron and Hermione with him. A muggleborn witch, a member of a group that believed that the end of secrecy would mean the enslavement of muggles, assassinated the Trio as they climbed the steps to the Wizengamot entrance, setting off a chain reaction.
Riots ensued, lasting most of the summer, gradually shifting from grief over the loss of Wizarding England's most famous war hero and most notorious peacemaker, to rage over the seemingly intractable differences between the different sides on the question of wizarding secrecy. In August, as the heat and tensions increased, no one would have expected the argument to end as it did.
On August 20th, 2007, a charm bomb destroyed Hogwarts. It seemed, at first, like such a small thing, so incidental to the issues of the day. The Muggles knew nothing; Hogwarts could be repaired. School would need to be delayed, but not for long, not with magic's ability to repair things. People began to see it as the event that pointed out what fools they were being; the riots ceased, the anger calmed, and several of the most strident groups disbanded in shame.
It was the calm before the storm. It was a week after the destruction, with wizards and witches arriving at the site for the first time, that they found out what Hogwarts had been. It was not, primarily, a school, as they had believed, nor even a symbol of the power of magic, but rather a capstone placed on wild magic, holding it in place to allow scholarly magic to succeed and flourish in its place. It was not a perfect cage, but it was enough to let scholarly magic take pride of place, and to seriously damage the creatures who depended on wild magic to give them life.
After Hogwarts was destroyed, wild magic ran rampant across England. The day that the nature of the school was understood, a wall, composed of nothing, but definitely there, allowing nothing to pass through it, surrounded the two islands, isolating them completely from the rest of the world. The wild magic tended to move slowly - usually - but it became apparent that the moment you made an assumption about it, that was when it changed. The earth reacted as if to a flash flood, causing wild magic to collect in natural hollows, some of which were not hollows in the geographical sense, but in the magical sense. People began to realise that the magic did exactly as it wanted to - some began to ascribe consciousness to it - and that there was no way of predicting where it was or what it might do.
They learned that the day London was destroyed. A large concentration of wild magic found its way into the city, possibly drawn there by the massive concentration of people within such a small area. The city morphed into a maze, trapping its inhabitants, and minotaurs appeared. No one has been known to escape the labyrinth. Other major cities throughout the British Isles were also affected in bizarre and unexpected ways, or were, at the least, uncontactable.
People - Muggle and wizard alike - began to gravitate to York. A walled city, it was known to be as safe as anywhere, far from anything that might attract attention and sited in a naturally-defensible landscape. On the way, wizards realised that secrecy was destroyed - everything had to be out in the open. There was no way to prevent the Muggles from learning about an event of this magnitude. Fortunately, most of them proved not to be interested in burning their magical counterparts. The society that has evolved in the last two years is one of relative cooperation, Muggles and wizards working together, since Muggles hold the key to surviving in a world where scholarly magic doesn't work reliably and wizards have the best chance of defeating wild magic when it's found.
There are still differences - deep and intractable ones - but Harry Potter's dream has been realised.
This is where the story starts.
Things to Know
All members of the Trio are deceased in this game.
All characters need to be in York, either Inner or Outer.
For more information on the way Muggles and wizards are working together within York, check the Politics page.
