Albus Potter and the Prophesied Year

Ch 61 The Autumn of Twenty-Twenty-Six

"Just the normal precautions for the Hogwarts Express this year?" Dennis Creevey confirmed the morning of September First, twenty-twenty-six. The key department heads had gone over everything Monday August thirty-first, and Dennis was just reconfirming what they had decided the day before.

"Nothing unusual about this trip," Harry reconfirmed. "No Weasley's or Potters. My cousin Dudley has children on the train, and there are children of some of the professors on the train, but no student who has had the issues I had, or Albus, when we rode the train.

"I'm still going to ride ahead of the train in the special Auror Range Rover, but we've decided not to use the old train as a decoy. The center of the troubles in the world of the Magi is no longer Great Britain."

"You are not the only one who has had enough trouble for a lifetime," Dennis shook his head, "Although you have had it worse than any of us."

*

Ginny Potter went up to her office Tuesday morning, September first, twenty-twenty-sixth. She had just come back from bringing Minerva and Gregory over to her mother's for school. Schooling didn't really stop in the summer when you were home schooling children, but it was at a much less intense level. Ginny knew that the teaching of the children would begin in earnest this week.

Minerva was nine this past summer. Two more years and she would be off to Hogwarts.

Minerva was an excellent student, according to Molly and the other teachers at and around the New Burrow. Schooling was a combination of home schooling lessons plus a smattering of group activities. French and Elfish were learned almost by osmosis at first, by speaking the languages exclusively for periods of time. Formal instruction in the languages started at six to eight years old, depending on the student.

Eventually Lily came bounding up the stairs, almost six month old Eileen in a carrier on her back, a large bag that contained both baby clothes and nappies, plus her tablet and other work material, stuffed in.

"Hello, mum," Lily breathlessly intoned. "Do you have the Floo in the basement kitchen and your office on the sixth floor just to make us exercise?"

"You could Apparate up here," Ginny replied, smiling.

"Eileen doesn't much like the feeling of Apparating, you know that!" Lily exclaimed. "Then I'd spend a half an hour calming her down."

Lily put Eileen in the playpen, and handed her a stuffed unicorn. Eileen looked at it suspiciously, threw it away, and yelled "Uuuupt," holding her hands up. The baby wiggled over to the edge of the playpen and tried to pull herself up.

"I have an interview to write up, Eileen," Lily sighed. "I cannot spend all day holding you!"

"Uuupt," Eileen insisted, holding on with one hand as her legs wobbled.

Mitzi levitated the child out of the playpen and started to talk to her in Elfish.

"Thank you, Mitzi," Lily told the Elf. Lily proceeded to take out her tablet, and two notepads, a scrap of paper with something written on it, and two biro's, putting them on her messy desk, pushing some other things off to the side. She dug into her bag and pulled out several business cards, going through them, before reaching back into her bag and finding more business cards. She finally found the one she was looking for, and put it on the desk with a victorious expression.

"Everybody keeps asking me how the new Cannon's seekers are doing," Lily huffed. "I keep telling them that they will have to wait and see. Erica and Viktor are good together, not like Erica and James, but Erica and James grew up together almost.