The experiment was a complete and utter disaster. The house elves were still cleaning up the damage several weeks later, even though the sound of revolutionary slogans no longer echoed in the halls. The Headmaster was summarily removed and was in a state of quasi-exile. Tensions between the Middle Kingdom and all the other nations of the world were worse than ever with both sides pointing to the disaster as proof of their rightness. Despite the problems, Zhu-Ge Liang, formerly the Professor of Alchemy and now the Headmaster of the Dragon Pearl, more commonly known as the Southern School, was not about to give up. He sat in his office, at home in Chang-An, moodily shuffling papers in a vain attempt to look busy.
"Are you still determined?" his wife, Jiao-Long, asked. She had come into the room without him even noticing. That was a bad sign, if his concentration was that poor. She began to rub his shoulders and he tried to relax under her ministrations.
He nodded. "More than ever. This cannot go on."
She smiled slightly. "Even now, are you such an idealist?" It had been a decade since their youngest child had gotten married and left their home for good and many more decades since he had been part of the radical student movement demanding change.
Liang sighed and stretched, his knees and back protesting the movement. "It is not idealism that drives me to do this. We do not wish to change anything at all and it is clear that whoever is in control in Muggle China wants to change everything completely. Neither system is tenable forever. We cannot occupy the same land and be so divided." The flickering candle light emphasized the lines of his face, weathered by decades of teaching and chasing after students and his own children.
Jiao-Long moved to lean against his rosewood desk, so she could face her husband, blue silk robe whispering quietly as she moved. "They will say that it has worked for our ancestors for over eight hundred years." The light shone on her long black hair, now shot with white.
Liang rubbed his temples. "If we block off change for too long, then when it comes, we will be completely unprepared. As it is, the rest of the world is threatening to boycott and block diplomatic relations."
She shrugged. "You know that the most conservative will not mind that."
He laughed, bitterly. "They need to remember that it has been almost as long since we were the most powerful nation in the world. Once, we could have withstood the scorn of the world, but no longer."
His wife slowly removed his hands from his temples and held them for a moment. Her skin was soft and white, a noble woman's in every way. Even now, he still loved her hands, long, slender and graceful. She kissed each of his knuckles, slowly and he smiled at the familiar gesture. "What will you do?"
He sighed and stroked his long beard absently. "Watch and wait. Learn more about the Muggle world. If we had been better prepared then we would have known to wait for this..." He was unsure what exactly to call it and he settled on "movement to pass."
Jiao-Long pulled at his hands gently. "Then you can come to bed now, right?"
He glanced at the clock. "How long have I been sitting here?" he asked aloud, aghast at how late it had gotten.
"Come to bed," she repeated. "It's late."
With a sigh, he got up and followed his wife to bed.
The honored Headmaster of the Southern School watched and waited. He went to international conferences on education. He met headmasters from schools all over the world and learned what they did to solve this problem. A war in Britain started, ended, restarted, and then finally ended, taking the life of a friendly acquaintance in the process. The Americans suffered internal unrest bordering on outright revolt. Bolivia and Chile almost went to war, declared war, but never fired a spell and eventually settled things peacefully. Gran Columbia fractured. The Caliphate and the Sultanate engaged in a bitter cold war that never quite turned hot before signing an even more bitter peace settlement which left nothing changed. He never let anyone besides his wife know that he was planning to repeat the failed experiment. He learned all he could about the other side. He waited for the political situation to stabilize. He watched and tried to locate the right families, the right children.
More than anything else, Zhu-Ge Liang waited. He needed someone special, someone unique, someone who could break down over eight hundred years of self-imposed isolation and he was willing to wait to find the right person.