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Fairies run the gnome racing racket, and they make it extremely easy to get into debt with them (or die) by cursing one's team of mini men or else paying out bets and winnings in fairy IOUs. They also make it extremely difficult to set up one's own stable of gnomes or successfully breed the irritating little creatures. To some, familiar with the amoral character of the Fair Folk, this might not come as a surprise, but it certainly did to Hermione Granger, who developed an addiction to the sport after completing her first two month stretch of overtime at the Ministry. It happens to the best of us, they said, so therefore it was guaranteed to happen to the pride and joy of Hogwarts.
Also, the pride of joy of Viktor Krum, who, after returning to Bulgaria and subsequently realising that every other woman in the world failed to match up to the little fourteen year old he met at the foreign school he was forced to attend, returned to England in order to fist fight Ron Weasley and all his brothers (and sister) in an Asda car park and thus win the fair maiden's affections once and for all. Hermione, as it turns out, is just like other girls at heart. Conveniently for her new passion, her famous sporting husband comes with criminal sporting connections.
“But I don't see why fairies should make it ever so difficult for newcomers to set up shop? Surely they'd want the sport to grow? Would that not bring in more revenue?” Hermione asks, while dressing in preparation to meet a ‘family’ of fairy mafia at a certain pub in Glastonbury. In order to race gnomes in peace, she has had to become a businesswoman. Luckily the Ministry has no laws pertaining to gnome racing. It's mafia v mafia, and her husband's own connections will be doing most of the negotiating, assuming Hermione resists the urge to display her superior knowledge concerning the workings of the criminal underworld.
Opposite her, a man, an ugly-hot man begins speaking as he peers into a talking mirror and perfects his bowtie. “What you don't understand, my dear Hermyneeowney, is that the Fae do not care about mortal money or renown. What they care about is upsetting people and achieving self-respect. Think of them as transdimensional clowns. You know, I once saw a muggle film-”
An incinerating glare wings its way across the room, striking Viktor in the back of the head, making his scalp itch something fierce. Like the fairly good duelist that she is, Hermione follows her withering stare up with a Reducio, turning her husband into a tiny version of himself, which she picks up to watch him walk around on the palm of her hand, looking extremely dapper, and not at all angry. Ever since the Quidditch World Cup she attended with Harry and Ron, she's been collecting miniature Krum figurines.
“You're very cute, Krumble, but don't ever imply that I do not understand something.” After kissing her tiny hubby on his dark Slavic head, loving wife places lucky husband in her legendary bag of holding, newly revitalized by a fit of bedazzling after she drank one too many firewhisky shots when Viktor won the local bingo championship. The man proceeds to fall down what feels like a bottomless pit.
🏃🏻♀️🏁🧚🏻♀️
Once she's made sure that her black dress and short silver jacket makes her look both beautiful and intimidating, and she checks that her purse is attached to her waist, Hermione sets off for her shady rendezvous. It's a lovely, sunny day, a good day for meeting with criminals in the beer garden of a tourist trap. Luckily one can get away with apparating around Glastonbury and meeting fairies at the pub because of the sheer number of hippies wandering about, which make it almost impossible for muggles to twig to a genuine witch or wizard.
“There's no safer place for wizarding kind, is what I like to say.” Declares our heroine, as she rematerlises onto a street filled with rambling Merlin cosplayers, drunken chav trolls, and drunken chav men. Naturally, the pub where negotiations are due to take place is of Mock Tudor design, and full of Americans labouring under the delusion that they are drinking where Henry VIII drank. But before Hermione can enter, she has to meet up with her criminal ‘clan’.
“Dasvidaniya.” drawls her husband's best and only friend - Yuri, Igor Karkaroff’s most competent son - where he lurks beside the door, leaning against the wall with a cigarette held between two fingers. Around his head buzzes a flock of buff fairies in black suits and shades, all eagerly breathing in second hand smoke.
“Don't you mean privet?”
“No.” Yuri looks up at the sun. Being Russian, he is even more in need of sunglasses than Hermione is.
“Viktor's in my purse, by the way.”
“I was wondering.”
“He insinuated that I do not understand the customs of the Fae.”
“...” Her interlocutor takes a deep and smoky breath, but does not fall into the trap.
Just as well, because Hermione's rival gangsters have brought Luna Lovegood with them as their secret weapon. However, her whimsy can only be matched by that of a Russian. Beside the airy-fairy woman float and sit several hard-faced fairy females of various sizes, from teeny tiny to human sized, every one of them ready to curse at a moment's notice. Fairy society is matriarchal, of course. Behind the mafia's picnic table a party of tourists loudly heehaw about King Arthur and their pastor’s theory that he hailed from the great US of A. Meanwhile, a gaggle of Japanese take snap photos of the Americans.
“Hello Hermione. Where's Viktor? I heard you'd married him. I think I was at the wedding.” Luna cocks her head.
“In my purse.”
“Oh, did you leave a snoruflump in there?”
Serious trouble. Hermione is in serious trouble already. She jabs her companion in the ribs, hoping he'll whip out dark magic or something.
“Have you heard that they discovered a new sub-species of Crumple-Horned Snorkack?” Yuri asks the eccentric girl, while smoking using a no smoking sign as the container for his tobacco. Being a pureblood, he takes no notice of Muggle laws, same as Viktor.
Luna turns in her seat like an ancient statue activated by a nosy adventure. “What? Noo. When? Where?”
With the pressing danger neutralised, Hermione and her cadre of thug fairies begin negotiations with her rivals.
The Don Fairy blinks at her, lizard-like. “You come to me, asking for gnomes, on this, the day of my daughter’s wedding?”
“Yes, precisely. I receive a discount, correct? So, for a stable of one hundred gnomes you are offering-”
🏃🏻♀️🏁🧚🏻♀️
In the end, Hermione gets her gnomes, and all it took was King Arthur coming back from the dead, America declaring war on Britain, and Yuri being cursed fifteen freaking times in a row. However, having survived his father, he can easily survive any little spells the Good Folk may throw at him. The trio stand and admire the Krum’s newly built gnome stables out in the country. In the grass outside the doors a multitude of gnomes make mischief, mostly by bonking each other on the head with leftover carrots. “Ooof!” they groan and shriek and whine. They all wear the livery of Krum Stables - the red and gold of Gryffindor shot through with Durmstrang black - and there's a good mix of mares and stallions, yearlings and older. Selective breeding has made racing gnomes powerful and sleek, if very long-legged and wiry. Thoroughbred Gnomes, because Hermione means to become the best gnome racer in the world, as her husband is the best seeker in the world.
After admiring for several minutes the beautiful, wholesome view of a herd of gnomes thrashing each other, Hermione, standing between the pair of men, claps her hands. “Let’s have us a little celebratory race. Boys, choose your gnome. I choose you, Maud!” And with that, she swishes her wand at her favourite mare, the little creature flipped head over heels, kicking furiously as it's floated through the air towards its owner.
“Gerrof!”
No discernible difference presents itself to the layman when it comes to deciding the sex of a gnome, and only the witch can tell the wriggly little beast is female. Not being experts, Viktor and Yuri simply pick whichever gnome they happen to like the look of.
The next trial comes in setting up the race participants in a semi-straight line. For this one requires a specially built run, and specially bred field mouse jockeys, also dressed in miniature racing clothes. Since everyone involved in this sport is a member of magical society, nothing is felt to be odd or out of place about this arrangement.
“Maud! Give them hell!” screams Hermione, whip in hand as her gnome charges out of the gate at a gallop, almost horizontal, her mouse jockey crouched on her back like some sort of furry growth. The other two racers likewise make a good go of it, but since they're both male, they forthwith begin setting about each other with the carrot clubs they'd sequestered about their tiny persons.