"Well, now that all that unpleasantness is out of the way," Professor Carrow said with a strained smile, "shall we resume our lesson? Brother, if you'd be a dear…?"
Amycus Carrow nodded and slipped into his sister's office through the door at the front of the class, returning moments later with a rigid figure levitated before him, clearly frozen stiff by a Full Body-Bind Curse. It took Oleandra a moment to realise that she recognised the terrified features on the body's rigid face.
"Stacey!" Oleandra hissed under her breath.
"Yaxley, a good friend of ours in the Ministry with access to all sorts of information, informed us there was a Muggle living in Hogsmeade," Alecto began. "Can you imagine that? A Muggle, in our little slice of Wizarding purity!"
Oleandra couldn't help but frown, even with her friend's immediate plight pressing in on her thoughts. Hadn't the Carrows heard of Yaxley's death? She had taken his life herself, so she knew he was no longer drawing breath.
Seeing her frown, Amycus grinned widely.
"Lucky for us, eh?" Amycus chuckled. "Otherwise, we'd have been forced to import one from London for my sister's lesson, which would have been quite a bother. Muggles are in short supply, this year…"
He muttered a Counter-Curse, and colour slowly started to return to Stacey's face.
Just how long had they kept her rigid, her mind screaming at her body to respond? Unlike Wizards, Muggles had no magic of their own, so if struck by a disabling spell there was every chance they would waste away before the spell's effects faded on their own. But if there was one advantage to lacking magic, it was that curses were far easier to lift from them, owing to the absence of ambient bodily magic that might otherwise muddle the process.
Oleandra watched with gritted teeth as Amycus deposited Stacey onto his sister's desk and Conjured ropes to secure her firmly to it.
"…help…!" Stacey rasped through parched lips as her body thawed. "Madam Rosemerta… Oleandra… anyone, please…"
"What's this?" Alecto said mockingly, lowering her head just above Stacey's lips and pressing a hand to her ear. "It sounds to me as if she's calling for help. Wouldn't you agree, Amycus?"
Amycus's lip curled in disgust. "I don't know how you can bear to be so close to a Muggle without retching, but yeah, it does sound like it to me."
Oleandra glowered at the pair of siblings she still hesitated to call professors. They most certainly still bore her a grudge for barrelling through them without a second glance in the Astronomy Tower last year.
"As you can see, despite being little more than cattle, Muggles look remarkably human," Alecto explained, patting Stacey's head. "Now, if we remove the Muggle's clothes, you'll see just how—"
Oleandra's fingers twitched.
"I'd rather you not subject us to more Muggle than necessary, Alecto," Amycus interjected, his face twisted in disgust. "I don't understand how anyone can bear to breed with those… things."
Alecto's face fell. She'd been rather looking forward to humiliating this young pretty girl in front of a classroom full of pubescent boys, but if it made her brother uncomfortable…
"We can skip the anatomy lesson, I suppose…"
She frowned as she pondered why her brother would object to her undressing a mere Muggle. They were just cattle, so it would be just like shearing a Demiguise, really. Unless… could it be that her brother saw the girl as more than an animal? His disgust was real, though…
Amycus shook her head. She'd ask him later, because she really couldn't understand.
"At any rate, as the Half-Bloods present can attest, Muggles make perfectly serviceable vessels for magical blood," she explained. "Their only redeeming virtue is that they can bear pure-blooded Wizards magical children without difficulty, almost without fail."
Unlike Muggle-Borns, who had two Muggle parents, a Wizard could be considered half-blood if there was even a trace of Muggle blood running through their veins— whether from one parent, one grandparent, or even a single ancestor at the dawn of time… though good luck to anyone attempting to trace someone's lineage that far back to prove they were not pure-blooded.
Even a child like Harry Potter, born to the pure-blooded James and the Muggle-born Lily, was considered a half-blood under these rules. As such, most of those present in the classroom could be regarded as half-bloods as well.
"The war at home has been won, but the world beyond our peaceful lands remains in chaos," Alecto continued. "We had it easy, thanks to our Muggles' tendency to congregate together like flies around a pile of Mooncalf droppings, but many foreign Ministries on the mainland and overseas must contend with Muggles scattered across vast continents."
While news from beyond the British Isles was rare, fragments of information occasionally reached the Ministry. The shattering of the Statute of Secrecy had left a profound mark on the world at large, but not necessarily always to the benefit of You-Know-Who's administration.
The United States was once again at war with itself, with no sign of either side gaining the upper hand in the short term. In Russia, Wizardkind had successfully seized power but struggled to enforce their new rules across the vast territory. In China, Wizardkind had vanished without a trace, leaving matters largely as usual for the Muggles… and Japan, far to the east, had somehow completely disappeared from the map, islands, Muggles and Wizards and all.
Most concerning for the current British Ministry, was that Wizards in France, Canada, and several African countries had defied the agreed protocol and refused to activate their respective Project: Heliopaths, instead forging a tentative alliance with the Muggles… most likely given the Order of the Round Table's influence in France and its former colonies.
"Our immediate neighbours on the Continent represent a clear and present danger to the future of our kind," Alecto said warningly, emphasising the severity of the situation by Conjuring an image of the world on the blackboard, marking several states in red chalk. "We have the upper hand for now, being the first to achieve stability after the fall of the Statute of Secrecy, but this advantage will not last. We must all do our part to press it… which is why the Ministry has decreed that the Wizarding population must begin to grow immediately… at any cost."