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Sally-Anne Perks was well aware that a good part of her year had no idea she even existed.
Despite what most people would expect, that fact did not bother her in any way, shape, or form. Quite the opposite; being ignored meant that she was able to do her work in peace instead of getting mixed up in the pointless drama that teenagers tended to bring with them. Or rather, human tended to do that.
Her work was very important for her future, after all... should she survive that long, that is.
Sally’s parents had tried their best to exclude her from their job at the very least until she was a teenager, but after she had followed them to a case the tenth time — before she had even entered Hogwarts, at that — they had agreed that it would be better to prepare her than for her to stumble into danger with no idea how to handle it or how to defend herself.
The job as a Hunter was dangerous after all. The average life expectancy was about five to seven years after starting the job, depending on what things you focused on. Claudine and Michael Perks were some of the rare exceptions; they had almost two and a half decades of experience at this point.
Sally wanted to be just like her parents. She wanted to save people by getting rid of the monsters that threatened the continued existence of humanity.
But of course, she couldn’t admit to such a thing when asked for her dreams. Especially not here, in the midst of witches, wizards, and ghosts, as all three were sort of on the list of creatures to be hunted. It was always a more sinister version with the same name, something that was decidedly more sinister, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t any negative stigma surrounding Hunters in the community. It was more than likely that Hunters had been responsible for an equally large — if not larger — number of dead members of their community as the Witch Trials in the Early Modern Ages.
Sally was well aware that the people in Hogwarts — well, most of them — were perfectly nice people, but she and her family had heard enough about the demon-dealing kind of witches for years before Sally's older sisters got their letters.
She knew that it was even worse for her parents. After hunting witches, ghosts, and werewolves for two and a half decades, they were suddenly expected to let their daughters live among them. All three of their children had turned out to be magical beings, even if not quite the kind they had been hunting. That probably did little to help them process this, though.
Given everything, they had reacted very well — way better than other people would have expected. Probably than some non-magical people who weren't even Hunters. Nevertheless, it would be an outright lie to say that they weren’t shocked when their oldest daughter had gotten a letter from a school of witchcraft and wizardry.
But for Michael and Claudine Perks there was nothing more important than their children. They knew that their children were smart enough not to make a deal and that they hadn’t had the chance to do so either while living with them. Ergo, there had to be a natural, harmless version of witches.
It was as simple as that, once they had gotten over the shock.
They hadn’t even thought about giving up their work as Hunters; they just doubled the secrecy, while sending their children off one by one to study magic.
The Hunters couldn’t know the Perks girls were magical and the Vixen — that was the only gender-neutral term they had found so far — couldn’t know they were Hunters. Both would be almost equally disastrous.
Parts of their letters had always been written in code. Now, they simply wrote the code in invisible ink. And added a second layer of code, just to be sure. It had never hurt anyone to be cautious, at least not to their knowledge and the Perks family had been well-versed in coding for longer than they had been a family of Hunters.
If they wanted to continue their lives like this — and they most certainly did — then their secret couldn’t get out to either side under any circumstances whatsoever.
Sally could clearly see the advantages several of her subjects would offer them. Potions, Defense, and her new electives Care of Magical Creature and Ancient Runes seemed especially useful, so he did her very best — and then some — in these subjects.
Others, like Charms or Transfiguration, while not useful at first glance, had several useful spells. Plus, as a Hunter, you never knew what might happen next. The Hunter life was just unpredictable like that. It was best to be prepared for as many things as possible.
Sally relished in the fact that this would one day be her life, even if many people had warned her against it. This was the path of her choice, the path she had wanted to choose for as long as she could remember. She knew, what she was getting herself into, and she wanted that very much. She wanted to be as brave as her parents were. It was only a matter of time until she, too, was a hero. She would be a better Hunter than anyone before her.
Maybe that was a bit insane, but their lives were so much more interesting and mysterious than any other job she had heard of, with the possible exception of magizoologist which wasn't all that different of a job if you thought about it. Hunting combined the best parts of Unspeakable and Auror with the added benefit of the languages one tended to pick up over time. Sally was proud to say she was almost fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek already and could hold a conversation in Arabic as well.
Being a Hunter meant that you never had to deal with boredom and that was the one thing she despised more than the fiery pits of Hell — and she was being literal here.
Her mother assured her that that was genetic, but Sally herself wasn’t sure of that. Her parents and sisters enjoyed the breaks between cases, while she never knew what to do with herself during that time. She stared at the wall, feeling like her existence was pointless unless there was something she could study that would suitably distract her.
Perhaps her mother was talking about some other relatives; she could not remember ever meeting her extended family, so it wasn’t impossible.
And once you ruled out the impossible, whatever remained had to be the truth, no matter how odd it might seem, after all.