Case file 11-05-A. Subject: a bookstore opening, a megaphone, and a city that finally found a children's novel worth a riot.

I've been in the tunnels a long time. I've seen a rat refuse a dropped pretzel because the pretzel "didn't center him." I thought that was peak lunacy. Then London opened a gift shop.

Here are the facts, per the Daily Caller, Deadline and the London Evening Standard. On Wednesday, the U.K.'s largest official Harry Potter store opened on Oxford Street: 21,000 square feet, two floors, Diagon Alley vibes, Butterbeer, interactive wands, the whole tourist ransom. Stars Tom Felton and Warwick Davis showed up. Fans queued for up to two hours in house scarves.

And a group of roughly a dozen to sixteen protesters stood outside with megaphones, signs reading "protect trans lives" and "stop funding trans erasure," and chalk on the sidewalk that said "Buy another author" and "Harry Potter isn't the only kids' book."

One of them shouted the quiet part at volume: "You should not be reading Harry Potter to your children and then bringing them to this store."

So let me read that back for the record. The emergency is... fiction. The threat level is... a wand aisle. The oppressor is... a woman who wrote about a boy with a scar. Down here we call that a hostage situation with a gift receipt.

Another protester, identified only as West, told Deadline the author has "blood on her hands," and when asked whether that slogan was appropriate outside a family store opening, West said: "Yes, absolutely," and hoped parents would "become aware and don't subject their children" to Harry Potter.

Subject their children. To a book. About a boarding school. With a Sorting Hat. I've seen sewer gas with more nuance.

The Standard also caught the rest of the sermon: "Go home, do something better with your time." Spoken to people who had already spent two hours waiting to buy a stuffed bear that gets sorted into Gryffindor. Brother, they already did something with their time. They chose joy. You chose chalk.

Police were on scene. Private security in high-vis vests. The store's spokesperson said they were "thrilled to open our doors," supported "peaceful expression," and looked "forward to a day full of magic." That's corporate for: the Butterbeer still costs what a mortgage payment used to.

More than 11,000 people signed a Good Law Project petition asking Mayor Sadiq Khan to cancel Oxford Street's Harry Potter Christmas lights. Because nothing says "festive spirit" like a petition to darken the street over a novelist.

And look — if your activism requires telling a six-year-old that Hogwarts is a hate crime, you didn't lose the argument. You lost the plot, the map, and the ability to tell a story from a sidewalk.

I crawled three blocks of steam pipe for this one. The tunnel rats held a vote. Unanimous. The megaphone people are free to protest. They're also free to look ridiculous telling tourists not to buy a scarf while a line of scarves walks past them into the building. That's not resistance. That's a Yelp review with a bullhorn.

Closing the file the way it opened: a city got a giant toy store, and a dozen adults told parents the danger was literacy. Somewhere under Oxford Street, a rat is reading chapter one to his kids anyway. The forbidden fruit tastes like Butterbeer.

This article is satire from The Demorat, a comedy-roast parody news site. The underlying news events are real and reported by the outlets cited; jokes, exaggerations, and any absurd quotes not attributed to a named source are made up for laughs.

The real story that inspired this