Albus Potter, Friends and Foes

Ch 1 Another New Year

This book will cover Albus Potter and his friends as they go through their fourth and fifth years at Hogwarts. It follows my first two Albus Potter Books.

I want to welcome a new beta, Francois. He will be joining my oldest and most faithful Beta, Diane, and the excellent Beta who joined us for the last book, Deb.

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Sunday August sixteenth, twenty-twenty, the governors were meeting in the board room, at Hogwarts; with everyone wearing the Wheezes transparent masks. Everyone was sitting down except Minerva, who was pacing, standing up at a board pointing out a map of the Hogwarts grounds.

"I'm paranoid about students' safety, and I am not going to apologize. I have had to tell parents their student was killed or injured, and it is just awful. Just awful. The worst thing you could ever go through.

"We have had reports of two young people, not from Great Britain thankfully, who caught both Covid-19 and Dragon Pox, and died. No student is going to be allowed to attend Hogwarts unless they are vaccinated against Dragon Pox.

"This map shows where we have set up quarantine tents. The older students are coming next week. All of them are going to be tested before they come, when they come, and before they leave the tents and go into the general Hogwarts population. We are going to do the same for the new students the following week. Any student who may still be infected will have to stay in quarantine until they have tested free of this illness for a week. Any student who cannot be sorted right away will be sorted after they are out of quarantine. Any questions?"

Minerva glared around the room. Almost everybody was sympathetic. Wendell Wilkes did not look happy, but he frequently did not look happy, and he did not have anything to say.

One of the board members asked, "Are there going to be Hogsmeade weekends?"

Minerva turned towards Harry. "Harry Potter knows better than I do what has been going on in Hogsmeade. I will let him explain."

Harry went up to the board and changed it so there was a map of the modest sized village of Hogsmeade displayed. "Let me talk about three groups of people," he started. "None of the people who live in Hogsmeade have tested positive for Covid-19, and they have been tested at least three times.

"We test the people who live in Hogsmeade but work elsewhere more often, but as far as we can tell they have been very good about wearing our special masks, and none of them has tested positive either. The mask material is not really much better at filtering, but our magic masks do a better job of sealing around the edges, which means they filter better.

"Then we have the people who live outside of Hogsmeade. The ones who we know well and volunteer to get tested have, with one exception, been free of this illness. We have used contact tracing to monitor all the people this one person may have come into contact with, and due to good mask discipline, they seem to have not made anyone else sick.

"Then you have a few people who do not want us to know anything about them. They have been a problem. We have forbidden them to go anywhere in Hogsmeade without a mask on, and they are not allowed to eat anywhere except the Hogs Head. That has been an awkward situation, but neither the Davis family nor their help has caught Covid-19. We are just going to forbid a few of these Magi from coming to Hogsmeade on weekends the students are going to be there, although we do not think it is going to be totally successful, and we will forbid students from going to the Hogs Head."

Jack Lewis, on the board as a Ravenclaw member, and incidentally Harry's pastor, coughed and laughed. "From my memory of the place, avoiding the Hogs Head is a good idea anyway."