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Jen's life before Hogwarts almost follows that of any other British child's.

Jen Noor was born on a dreary day in May 2015. Zain Malik had left One direction, David Cameron won the election, and Jen's Mother had recently divorced and mortgaged a new house.

Together Jen and her mother lived a quiet, simple life. Jen was a quiet baby, and then child. She knew loss from an early age. Jen and her mother accompanied her grandmother in her final days in the hospital, seeing her off when she passed.

She lives in a 2 bed terraced house with a quaint garden she often likes to disappear into. She started nursery when she was 3. Her mother often struggled to socialise her - Jen preferred talking to fairies. She never had friends that weren’t imaginary.

Sometimes these friends weren't the friendliest. Jen was 6 when she saw a woman’s face flash by in the bathroom mirror as she walked past. The woman’s pale face was thin and her lips were pursed, as if displeased by her appearance.

When Jen was 6 and a 1/2, she tripped over a stick and woke up outside to find she had tripped over a stick in real life.

One night something pinched her leg when she slept.

She woke up to the pinch in the dead of night. In the corner of her bedroom a shadow lingered for too long. It grew bigger until it looked as if it would pierce the light. When the light fell over it, a dark nose emerged, with smiling cheeks and wide white eyes that glinted in the light. She squinted at it and it sped closer, its features twisting in glee.

It stopped as if barred by something invisible, standing stooped, hovering over her body. It opened its mouth over her ear, as if to say something, and then it was gone with a sharp groan back into the shadows. She lay frozen under the covers, eyes wide open until sleep took her in the early hours of the morning. The shadow man was forgotten when she woke up.

On the playground the next day, a man made of flesh stood still as a statue across the road, staring. His eyes didn’t move to follow her, but when she looked back, they were directly on her again. No one else saw him. She glared at him in defiance, and he grinned maniacally.

When she approached the metal fence, the man’s features twisted into something unnaturally happy. He rushed forward against the bars, and she rushed back.

She never saw the flesh man again. The shadows still moved in the corner but never approached. Sometimes in her peripheral a shadow flickered, but when she looked it was gone.

Years passed and Jen was 9. The black cat from the coffee shop wasn’t in its usual spot on the way to school. In lesson, a shadow in her peripheral flickered. She could almost make something out of it this time.

It was a shadow man. He was dancing. When she turned to look, she twisted and fell out of her chair. He was sitting where her classmate had been. In a blink he was gone. Said classmate was absent that day.

In the bathroom she was washing her hands. Jen looked at her reflection, and she stared back at only herself. She never saw that woman again.

She turned to dry her hands. The shadow man was standing next to her. Its head twisted unnaturally to face her. Its grin stretched its cheeks into something unholy. His limbs jerked. He could only move backwards. His mouth opened with a gasp, as if to speak, but the groan that emerged sounded as if it was from something large and deep. He wanted to open it more. She could tell. Another shadow was growing. His eyes were wide and feverishly desperate as they stayed locked on hers. Through the haze of petrification, she noticed the shadow emerged from his lower back, unfurling into a scorpion-like pincer above them. The hairs on her arms stood on end. She felt his excitement. She knew he was milliseconds away from pouncing. But he hadn’t yet.

He didn’t move. She took a few steps backwards and his eyes followed sluggishly. She scrabbled at the door behind her and slipped through the crack. It took an age to shut, as if moving through honey.

The second she realized this, the door was moving through air again. It slammed shut with a bang and she bolted for her life down the corridors, drenched like a baptized baby. She ran back into the classroom and didn’t leave her teacher’s side until her mother came to collect her and she didn’t speak until summer came around again.

She forgets the details exactly, but she knew she watched a horror movie she wasn’t old enough to see. She misses the cat.

Nothing so bizarre as this occurred again until she was 11, when the neighbour's cat attempted to maul a snowy owl, dislodging a scroll that didn't truly change her life until a wizard carrying the same correspondence did a house-call.

ــــــــــــــــــ Jen's Fiom went like this. ـــــــــــــــــــ

One morning in the garden of her small home in Nottingham, Jen lay hidden in the unkempt grass that rippled like a green ocean wave in the wind. Clouds drifted lazily, as they basked in the sun, which melted hues of gold, pink and green into the vast pool of blue.

Jen was 5, the oldest she'd ever been. No one had known it was her birthday yesterday, but her mother came home from work with a caterpillar cake and a present. Jen was also the loneliest she'd ever been, and the thought of going to school that morning left a pit in her stomach.

When her mother came looking, her heart fluttered against her chest in a staccato rhythm. The neighbour's cat leapt off the fence with a sureness in his heart that Mother, who often fed him, had some snacks for him, but all Jen could think was 'nononononono'.

Relief washed over Mother's face when she saw her, settling instead on exasperation.

"Jen! Get out of the grass, you have school!"

Jen's panic rose into a bubble in her throat. It rose, and rose, and rose, until it screamed out,

"NO!".

The neighbour's cat jumped a meter in the air, and then some, and then some more. The cat yowled in horror, floating and wriggling it's legs in the air, until at around 3 meters high, it fell.

It landed on all four's with a stiff bounce onto the springy black mesh of the trampoline, puffed up and back curved in a perfect U shape. A few moments later, it stumbled off the trampoline and flew back over the fence.

Jen had no idea cats could jump so high, and neither did Jen's mother, who was in shock. The neighbour's cat was certainly an oddball. Thus marked the moment Jen's Mother became weary of the neighbour's cat, who now had to look elsewhere for extra meals.