====== The Wizarding World of 199X ====== {{INLINETOC}} {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ===== Events ===== ----- ==== Stagnation and a Hidden Demon ==== With the establishment of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1689 and its enforcement in 1692, the affairs of the Muggle world gradually slipped from the attention of magical society. What began as a policy of concealment hardened over generations into a culture of disengagement. Behind their wards and glamours, magical communities preserved familiar institutions and inherited customs, increasingly content to mistake their separation from the wider world for independence from it. The two branches of humanity consequently drifted further apart, the smaller magical population dwindled as a result. Its losses only partly replenished by children born unexpectedly into non-magical families, while beyond its hidden boundaries the Muggle world grew in numbers, industrial capacity, and technological sophistication. News of its upheavals still reached wizarding society, but often stripped of context or dismissed as a distant concern. By the twentieth century, much of magical Europe understood neither the scale of the societies surrounding it nor how readily their resources might be turned toward magical ends—a blindness the Order of the Last Dawn had no intention of sharing. The Order was an ancient organization on the fringes of European magical society, its beliefs abhorrent even to most practitioners of the Dark Arts. Where others sought conquest, immortality, or racial supremacy, the Order sought renewal through the annihilation of most of mankind. To its adherents, magical and non-magical humanity alike had become a stagnant pool, sustained by institutions that preserved weakness and suppressed transformation. Whatever survived their inflicted destruction of that world would deserve to inherit what followed and the Order intended to stand among its new ruling masters. Its forbidden texts spoke of primordial powers said to have shaped creation before being imprisoned beyond the reach of ordinary magic. Their release would unravel the conditions upon which human civilization depended, a prospect the Order regarded not as a warning but as a promise. For centuries however it's ambitions exceeded its means. Scattered cults, wealthy patrons, and stolen manuscripts could sustain clandestine research and isolated atrocities but not the vast excavations, territorial access, and human sacrifices its undertaking demanded. {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ==== The Rise of a National Host ==== The collapse of Imperial Germany and the rise of National Socialism provided an opening. With occasional, discreet assistance from Gellert Grindelwald, the Order infiltrated the movement through influential patrons, trusted advisers, and obscure but indispensable officials. Grindelwald believed its discoveries might serve his own ambitions; the Order encouraged that misunderstanding. As Germany rearmed and expanded throughout the thirties, its members gained access to industrial resources, protected research sites, transport networks, and a machinery of persecution whose victims could be made to disappear into secret projects. The Nazi leadership remained responsible for its own ideology and crimes; the Order neither created those ambitions nor needed to direct every decision. It offered services and promises of power while concealing its work within military budgets, confiscation records, and restricted facilities. Excavations became strategic surveys, ancient sanctuaries became research installations, and prisoners vanished behind falsified transfer orders. By the time something began answering from beneath the oldest sites, the Order had finally acquired what centuries of secrecy had denied it: a state willing to open the doors it had found. {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ==== The Balkans Campaign ==== The Order’s first opportunity to test its accumulated research lay beneath a remote settlement in the mountainous interior of Yugoslavia. Concealed from neighboring Muggle communities by old enchantments, the village had survived successive empires by offering little hospitality and attracting less attention. Its inhabitants believed themselves the custodians of a sanctuary. The Order’s manuscripts suggested that they were instead the descendants of its original wardens, and that the protections surrounding their homes served a purpose their own traditions no longer adequately explained. Beneath the settlement stood a chamber whose construction predated any surviving account of the community above it. Its seals could not be broken by force without destroying what the Order hoped to recover. They had to be opened through the sacrifice of the population bound to their maintenance: not a prescribed number of interchangeable victims, but an entire living community, including the children born into its protection and the families who had carried its obligations elsewhere. The Order spent years assembling genealogies, tracing marriages, and identifying absent descendants. What appeared in its records as an archaeological investigation was also a census. German expansion into southeastern Europe provided the means to act upon it. Through selected intelligence assessments and reports of mineral deposits, Order intermediaries cultivated military interest in the surrounding district. They did not determine the wider campaign, whose strategic purposes existed independently of their ambitions. They ensured, however, that occupation would bring a particular valley under the authority of officers prepared to obey unusual instructions. Once the region had been secured, a special detachment closed the roads under the pretext of suppressing partisan activity. Magical collaborators dismantled the village’s outer concealments while occupation authorities supplied transport, labor, and a cordon through which no civilian could pass. Families already living abroad disappeared in separate arrests. Those brought into the valley were recorded under false names or not recorded at all. The ritual lasted through a single night. By morning, the settlement remained standing, its hearths cold and its livestock wandering untended. The chamber beneath it had opened. What the Order recovered was neither a weapon nor an imprisoned god, but an instrument of communication: a black, irregular surface in which observers saw a depth greater than the surrounding mountain could contain. Something beyond it answered questions. More importantly, it recognized the names preserved in the Order’s oldest texts and supplied others that had been lost. The surviving ritualists regarded this as confirmation of their doctrines. Their reports omitted the discrepancies. Several answers had arrived before the questions were spoken. One investigator began receiving instructions in the voice of his dead mother. Another erased his own name from every document he could find. ==== Egypt ==== ==== Office of Paranormal Defense ==== ==== Post 1945 ==== ==== The Cold War ==== {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ===== Organizations ===== ----- ==== Great Britain ==== === British Ministry of Magic === === Order of the Phoenix === === The Death Eaters === {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ==== Soviet Bloc ==== === The Directorate === === Ministry for External Security === {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ==== North America ==== === Magical Congress of the United States of America === === Confederation of the Magical Americas === === US Bureau for Magical Research and Defense === {{:colonial_pact:sarp_spacer.png?10|}} ==== 'Black Bloc' ==== === Order of the Last Dawn === === The Dark Hands === ===== Notes and Junk ===== ----- *Dracaena Lyra Malfoy