Once the form has been filled out, Nurcan leaves the Ministry’s headquarters and is invited by Taalia to come over to a rented apartment, which is her place for the summer.

  “Oh, Nurcan! How has it been?” Taalia asks.

  “I’m a bit late to try getting a summer internship at the Ministry, but if I get it…”

  “Of course, you’ll get one; you’re the one who designed the Irad-I Cedid! We’ll even live together here for the summer if you want!”

  “Yes. Maybe you could learn dream walking from me if you’d like…”

  “Not tonight, please…”

  Maybe… maybe I could write some booklet on dream walking and dream catchers! In Turkic since I believe there are resources in French for it! Nurcan has a flash, and goes out to buy a few sheets of paper for the duo to write on. She proceeds to not only translate the section in Chadwick’s Charms about dream walking, but to add about other side effects not previously considered. Especially about subconsciously or otherwise unwillingly exchange undesired information, and how it seems to go both ways.

  At this point, however, she feels the need to get in greater depth about how dream catchers are made, and the role of each component.

  The following morning, as soon as she awakens, she reads the letter that she received at Ilvermorny on the day she left, written by a certain Catherine Théot. J’aimerais avoir plus de précisions sur chaque prédiction, sur une liste qui est précédemment apparue sur le Cri de la Gargouille, s’il vous pla?t…

  So Christine sent the list of predictions I gave her to the Cri de la Gargouille? I hope this… Catherine is still asleep! Nurcan thinks as she hastily installs her dream catcher to the ceiling. Looks like this Catherine is pretty myopic; I can kind of feel like she focuses only on what’s happening within France.

  Once her dream catcher is installed, she focuses on visualizing Catherine in her mind before casting the spell for the dream walk, aimed at the dream catcher.

  Nurcan found herself a guest at Catherine’s Muggle headquarters, on Des Rosiers Street, in Paris. She was there with other devotees of Catherine’s sect, mostly Muggles, with a handful of other Revolutionary wizards.

  “Please welcome our guest of the day, Nurcan Topkara. If you’re Muggle, and don’t deal with Ottomans, you might not know about her, but, if you’re a wizard, there’s a good chance you do!” Catherine, an elderly, home-schooled witch in her seventies, introduced Nurcan to her sect’s members. “In the wizarding world, she’s the greatest expert on the Revolution, and this is why I invited her here!”

  “For a while now, you saw the triumph of the Revolution as the ultimate sign that God had permitted 1789, but never elaborated on why, outside of some theological causes that we’ve grown weary of!” a Muggle cultist exclaimed.

  “The Revolution may very well win the War of the First Coalition. However, one of the lead causes making things harder for the First Coalition…” Nurcan got interrupted by another cultist.

  “First Coalition? Do you foresee more coalitions fighting against the Revolution?” a wizard cultist asked her.

  “Unfortunately, yes, but the second one will suffer from much of the same issues as the first! Namely that the numerous enemies of the Revolution have difficulty coordinating their actions, with each having different objectives. Whereas Britain fights France over colonies, making it unable to pull much of a weight on the continent, Prussia seems much more preoccupied with what happens on its eastern border, that is, Poland-Lithuania. Austria prefers to focus on Bavaria and Italy, but most of the smaller partners have mostly defensive motivations, with no real aims for territorial gains, only containing the spread of Revolutionary ideas among Muggles. However, the wizarding world isn’t at war…”

  “So you’re saying that Prussia fights the Revolutionaries on two fronts?” Catherine asked her.

  “Yes, and Austria doesn’t seem to trust Prussia, nor Russia, when it comes to dealing with Poland-Lithuania, who, while not openly siding with Revolutionary France, look to it. And, of course, Austria is deep in debt, both Muggle and wizarding, as a result of fighting against the Ottoman Empire only two years prior!”

  “What did Austria incur wizarding debts for?” another cultist, asked her.

  “Pre-Sistova, Austrian wizarding expenses were mostly incurred for two purposes, security on the Serbo-Croat frontier, and managing magical creatures, trolls in the Alps and dragons, but Austrian wizarding debt ballooned because of its attempts to rebuild its wizarding infrastructure and industries with French émigré wizards. But its Muggle leadership is rather inept, too!”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The Austrian wizarding economy is almost entirely dependent on dragons. Heartstrings, horns, hides, you name it, but all they can seemingly do is sell parts of Hungarian Horntails and Ukrainian Ironbellies, Catherine began thinking about what wizarding Austria could hope for.

  “Sistova?” Catherine asked her.

  “Austria gained very little from the Ottoman Empire in that treaty. But now you have a better idea of how the Revolution will win: it’s not about divine action!”

  The oneiric cultists gasped upon hearing exactly how the Revolution will win; however, she left out the specifics of each country’s Muggle war machines, but the cultists knew wizards tended to have knowledge gaps in that area.

  “If I may, Nurcan, stay away from Muggle France!” a Muggle cultist warned Nurcan. “Even though your positions are actually a mish-mash of Plain ones, and maybe the decentralization of the Girondins, as much as you understand that policy positions aren’t monolithic, after June the second, Girondins and other moderates fled to the province, if they weren’t arrested!”

  “I get it, it’s not safe for me. I think I had my fill of traveling for a while…” Nurcan sighed. “I’ll just return home!”

  “Thank you, Nurcan!” Catherine let her go on her way.

  Nurcan then left the scene, but the dream walk ended before her oneiric self was done apparating her way out of the sect’s HQ.

  The walk inside Catherine’s dream ends when it became clear to Nurcan that she had no interest in the Comité de Salut Public’s actions, presumably because Catherine was already familiar with the consequences of the War in Vendée, the levée en masse and the Tribunal Révolutionnaire’s blatant disregard for justice.

  When the walk inside Catherine’s dreams ends, Nurcan starts using some subconsciously-acquired knowledge from that dream to interpret it. For the Revolution to win the day in the long run, the Reign of Terror must end. However, it will meet a violent end as the more radical members of the CSP will get guillotined themselves. Probably because the excesses of the CSP tended to make even those in the halls of power panic. These very radicals will be stopped only by the consequences of the very policies they implement and lose control over! But maybe I could tell both Alejandra and Christine to teach dream walking to whoever they can, and, until the Reign of Terror ends, it would be the main way to communicate with Muggles without risking ourselves!

  It's then that an owl from the Ministry arrives at their apartment, telling her about how the Bab-I Humayun wants Nurcan to spend the rest of the summer instructing various employees in dream walking. And maybe even make dream catchers for those employees who could use dream walking.

  “Dream walking? What’s the meaning of this?” Taalia asks her.

  “Dream walking has its uses, especially if you want to communicate important information across long distances without fear of interception! So I could see diplomats, law enforcement personnel and Muggle liaisons using it. There are two big problems with it, though…”

  “I knew dreams held divinatory value, but never believed wizards could use magic to communicate with each other through dreams!” an astonished Taalia tells her.

  Better teach dream walking to some of these folk at the Bab-I Humayun, and maybe earn some ministerial good graces that might help me become an Imperial diviner at graduation, than to spend two months at home with my parents who still believe I’m a spy trainee! Nurcan muses.

  “With all this traveling, I feel like I have become less and less Ottoman over the past year, that maybe, especially with exotic magic such as dream walking…” Nurcan sighs.

  “I feel weirded out by how you could have seemingly become the greatest wizarding expert on the French Revolution; I would have imagined some French wizard, like, you know, the Duke of Trefle-Picques, or his half-brother!” Taalia discusses how she feels towards her roommate’s expertise on that topic.

  “French wizards tend to specialize in certain niches, yet don’t seem to individually know that much about the impacts outside of France. But I can assure you, there are people who know better than I do, but whoever could know better depends on exactly what you want to know about…”

  Nurcan runs down in her mind who knows best about what. Didier, Vincent’s half-brother, or someone in Christine’s family, would probably know more about the day-to-day life of émigrés, away from their homeland, or what could motivate them to flee, Vincent, about the consequences of Revolutionary radicalization, Catherine, about the day-to-day impacts on the Muggle populace…

  “So what do you think you obtained out of spending a year traveling the wizarding world as you did? I can assure you that Hamza and the others would have loved to travel like this…” Taalia comments on Nurcan’s travels.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you about how Beauxbatons changed, my limited time at Hogwarts, and the past six months at Ilvermorny later…”

  She seems to have a lot on her mind about how this whole school year split between Beauxbatons, Hogwarts and Ilvermorny made her a different person, beyond dream walking. While some kubbealti viziers in the Divan-I Humayun might have wanted me to compete in the Triwizard Tournament to get rid of me, possibly so that they can evade Irad-I Cedid scrutiny, maybe it was a good thing that the Goblet didn’t take me. Then again, the Muggle Nizam-I Cedid budgetary needs have exceeded the ability of corruption combat to fund them, so taxes on alcohol (zecriye), tobacco, coffee and cotton were enacted not long ago. The Muggles have truly bungled the Irad-I Cedid…

  About how she realizes Karakalem is actually the school that’s the most open to the Muggle world, and Ilvermorny, the least. But even Ilvermorny’s closure from the Muggle world can be debatable since Durmstrang seems to be just as closed.

  About how Beauxbatons produced more socially rounded people than Hogwarts or even Ilvermorny did, especially since Hogwarts tended to silo students more, at least for the first 5 years.

  And yet, Nurcan, on her first day as a contract dream walking instructor for the Bab-i Humayun, makes employees craft their own dream catchers. About what each part of a dream catcher does, and more importantly, what they are used for.