December 26, 1792. Nurcan packs her baggage in front of her roommates. Once she has packed everything:

  “Adieu!”

  Christine starts crying. Alejandra might understand what’s happening to my family, and why, probably the only other one here left who knows enough about the Revolution to make any sense of it, but she doesn’t feel the same as Nurcan to me.

  Femke and Victoria, on the other hand, don’t seem to react the same way to Nurcan’s departure.

  However, just before Nurcan collects her departure paperwork from the headmaster, Alejandra comes up to her:

  “Avant de faire tes adieux, j’aimerais te dire comment j’ai su que j’étais une sorcière! J’ai causé des ballonnements à ma mère sans faire exprès!” (Before you go, I’d like to tell you how I knew I was a witch! I accidentally made my parents bloated!)

  “Quant à moi, c’était plut?t une question de prédiction basée sur des rêves!” (As for me, it was instead about dream-borne predictions!)

  “Adios!” Alejandra tells her in her native Spanish.

  After Nurcan leaves the campus, and hastily withdraws all her bezants from the Visigny branch, she goes to Instrumentum’s, along with Emmanuelle to get to Place Cachée.

  Once in Place Cachée, the two go directly to échange Scolaire Officielle’s outbound floor to file their departure paperwork. Which happens without any incident, especially when Nurcan is still complying with her orders to leave Beauxbatons by December 31.

  “Good luck…” Nurcan wishes to her before leaving échange Scolaire Officielle.

  “Thank you!”

  Might be a little rash, but all I really need out of this BUSE is an Acceptable. Then I don’t need to take History of Magic at Ilvermorny, Emmanuelle starts hyperventilating while she steps into the testing room to take the History of Magic BUSE.

  But while Emmanuelle is busy taking her exam, Nurcan checks out Maison de Portkey. Which also sells Floo powder.

  So, while the items arrayed through the shop include items common at their destinations make it look like a museum to Muggle lifestyles across the world, the owner of the Maison de Portkey asks Nurcan:

  “Bonjour, quelle est votre destination?” (Hi, what’s your destination?)

  “Washington…”

  “Washington?” the owner of the Maison de Portkey then quotes her a price for her own trip to get her to Washington. Bz10 per person.

  Which is the only destination in the United States Maison de Portkey services, and, from there, she would need to take the Floo Network to another station somewhere on the slopes of Mt. Greylock to get to Ilvermorny.

  But, until then, she sticks to the waiting area of the Maison and resumes writing about the various Revolutionary factions. About Girondins and Jacobins, and how they differ, as well as the downfall of the Feuillants and what became of them afterward.

  Many ex-Feuillants who still wanted some measure of reform joined other factions, while others, such as the Duke of Trefle-Picques, withdrew from political life altogether, especially since it became clear in the early days of the then-Assemblée Nationale Constituante that Muggles didn’t seem very open to greater cooperation with the wizarding world, Nurcan starts thinking of past interactions with the Duke of Trefle-Picques. About what he really hoped to get out of the Estates-General on behalf of the wizarding world.

  At the same time, Emmanuelle starts struggling to remember about material from as early as second year. About the ban on basilisk breeding being decided at the 1289 International Warlock Convention, based on a Sardinian subcommittee’s recommendations.

  But by far the most important portion of the exam is about Renaissance wizard hunting, and how Salem was the straw that broke the wizarding world’s back, even well after the Thirty Years War and the Deluge both hurt Central Europe’s wizarding communities.

  Even after “La Voisin”, one the last Dark Lords of the pre-Statute days, committed crimes that would rival Herpo the Foul’s, didn’t quite usher into the Statute.

  And, of course, about how Liechtenstein appeared to be, in the wizarding world, strong enough to risk war on a wizarding theater against Austria over mountain trolls when the Statute of Secrecy was ratified.

  It also seems like the evolution of Muggle relations is a major area, but relations with magical creatures aren’t covered as much.

  When Emmanuelle feels the clock ticking in on her, she’s reminded of Nurcan, and what the Ottomans wanted to exclude from the Statute:

  OK, what kind of magic would be least likely to be detected by Muggles? Emmanuelle starts looking at the options given, and starts thinking of what Nurcan was best at. Divination! The prof once said that some forms were feasible without any magic at all, and wizards didn’t seem to have a significantly better track record in divination than Muggles did! And Arithmancy is also legally considered a branch of divination to this day!

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  So Emmanuelle ticks in the box next to Divination on her copy of the test. With the clock signalling the end of the test a few seconds later. Which is graded by the proctor in a few minutes’ time.

  At that point, Nurcan finishes writing a paragraph about where the Jacobins stood on the issue of the monarchy, before leaving Maison de Portkey and returning to échange Scolaire Officielle.

  When Nurcan arrives to meet with Emmanuelle, the latter is about to receive her grade in History of Magic BUSE: Acceptable. For which she lets out a sigh of relief.

  “Dix bézants par personne pour aller à Washington en Portoloin!” (Ten bezants per person to get to Washington by Portkey!) Nurcan tells the price of getting to Washington, but she must ask about the cost in dragots of returning home once these 6 months are over.

  MACUSA might have agreed to host other survivors of the TT, at least from Beauxbatons, there sure weren’t a whole lot of takers. Several survivors just wanted to finish their studies, But at the same time, it’s not the first time I went to a foreign institution, so I know what to expect, Nurcan starts wondering about who else could follow her to Ilvermorny.

  And, when they return to Maison de Portkey, the clerk inspects the travel documents before they can even pay for their trip to Washington.

  Once the payment is made, they clutch the portkey, a handbell, until they arrive on the shores of the Potomac River, almost freezing.

  In the middle of the fog of Foggy Bottom, they try to get out of the shores, and a MACUSA DMLE employee collects them out of the fog,

  “Is this… Washington?” Emmanuelle asks as if she is under a Confundus hex.

  “Yes. State the purpose of your visit!”

  “I’m on exchange to Ilvermorny for the next six months!” Nurcan explains to the DMLE employee while she presents her travel documents, along with the order from the Bab-I Humayun in its original Turkic.

  “Me too!” Emmanuelle presents her travel documents in turn.

  “Do you have anything to declare?”

  “We don’t carry hazardous materials, only run-of-the-mill clothes, cauldrons and other school supplies!” Nurcan clamors, while she’s being searched, and Emmanuelle after that. “Maybe a few bezants that we could exchange for dragots…”

  “In that case, follow me to the Office for Magic Relations and Education!”

  The security guard then takes the pair to the MACUSA headquarters, where the Cleaning Department staffer uses magic to clean them from the traces of the fog.

  Once they arrive at the Office for Magic Relations and Education, on a different floor, they meet with the international education coordinator, a middle-aged witch whom Nurcan already saw in dreams, but Emmanuelle didn’t. Because of one of those dreams, Nurcan seems strangely familiar with the premises.

  “Bienvenue à Washington. Je suis Geneviève de Batiscan…” (Welcome to Washington. I am Geneviève de Batiscan…) Gen introduces herself in a heavy Mauricie accent, then whips out their supplies lists, with the understanding that Emmanuelle’s is subject to change.

  “Nurcan…”

  “Emmanuelle…”

  Nurcan conjures her memory of Gen appearing to her in a dream. “Gen, you travel through people’s dreams! You even appeared to me in my dreams twice!”

  Gen rolls her eyes. “Really? I traveled in your dreams?”

  “You warned me about the dangers of the Estates-General, and you told me Muggle, erm, No-Maj France was headed down the same path as the Thirteen Colonies back in 1774!” Nurcan tells Gen about the content of those dreams.

  “These were the days before Twelvetrees, where I could freely socialize with No-Majs, but everything I learned about the No-Maj French Revolution came from you!”

  “I remember you as a Quidditch beater!” Emmanuelle conjures her memories of Gen from earlier in her Quidditch career.

  “A lot of my students at Ilvermorny brought up having grown up with me being one of the best Beaters in the AQL, but I retired from pro Quidditch after the demolition of the Stadium of Washington last year!”

  “What do you teach at Ilvermorny anyway?” Emmanuelle asks.

  “Divination!”

  But the duo gets their travel documents inspected, to ensure that they are in order and, as such, they can proceed to their six-month exchange at Ilvermorny. Yet, Gen asks Nurcan for assistance:

  “This is the official letter from the Ottoman Diwan of Magic ordering me to go here for the next six months; they say Beauxbatons can no longer ensure my safety!”

  “But why couldn’t Beauxbatons ensure your safety anymore?” Gen asks Nurcan.

  “No-Maj Revolutionaries are about to radicalize, and even I, a moderate witch, might get guillotined! However, they never appeared to discriminate by magical status!”

  “I told Alejandra about how wizarding education left people poorly equipped to understand policymaking!”

  “Alejandra… wait a minute, did you travel in her dreams, too?”

  “Yes. She understood the reforms the cahiers pushed for, but obstinately refused to talk about them at school!”

  “This is nothing new to me…”

  “For your information, dream traveling can take a lot of power, so I can travel in a person’s dreams for just a few minutes at a time. In some respects, I’m just like you…” Gen refers to Nurcan.

  “How do you decide in whose dreams to travel to? Dream traveling seems to be a little intrusive, but I understand that you might have learned about Alejandra while traveling in my dreams, though…”

  “For you specifically, it was my brother having taught you French by correspondence. It’s because it’s intrusive that I don’t travel in dreams unless I have something important to tell the person in whose dreams I travel, that and me being a little underpowered!”

  When the duo’s documents are deemed in order, they leave MACUSA’s headquarters to go shop amid the fog. And the snow. They first need to get to Gringotts to exchange bezants for dragots. Hopefully I have enough dragots to buy the uniform and have some left over for 2-3 books; I don’t plan to take more than that, Emmanuelle starts to think of the cost of buying the supplies.

  Once they exchange their bezants for dragots, they first go to the town’s clothing store, E. Taylor’s.

  “Oh, you come from Beauxbatons!” Ernie tells the duo, looking at their uniforms. “You were used to the finery of your light blue silk uniforms. I hope that you’re ok with wearing uniforms of a different material that’s more appropriate for Mt. Greylock!”

  “How cold is Mt. Greylock?” Emmanuelle asks the tailor.

  “Mt. Greylock is much colder than Washington, so Ilvermorny’s robes are wool!”

  “Is it colder than Hogwarts then?” Nurcan asks the tailor.

  “Hogwarts?” Ernie gasps. “Were you at the Triwizard Tournament?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Seems like we hardly get anyone on exchange these days. But our government is seemingly willing to get survivors from the Triwizard Tournament for six months provided their home institutions allow our kids to go to them, so we might get a Durmstrang kid, too…”

  Ernie then takes measurements on both witches and he whips out two navy blue robes with a cranberry middle and collar of Native American design. And a golden Gordian knot as a clasp.

  Is it me or these uniforms feel very much like the Hogwarts ones, only blue and cranberry rather than black? And with a different school crest, obviously… Nurcan starts wondering whether any differences between Hogwarts and Ilvermorny are going to be mostly cosmetic, other than Ilvermorny being friendlier to Muggle-borns.

  “How much for the uniforms?”

  “Fourteen dragots and ninety-nine sprinks per person!”

  Once they get their new uniforms, they waste no time changing to it in the dressing cabins.